My wife is a doctor dealing with (part of) the endocrine system and for years she has had us avoiding heating anything up in a plastic container and avoiding food/liquids+plastic where we can. She believes that these endocrine disruptors are very likely much worse for us than we currently realize, and that the research is eventually going to show that.
I think when people act like this they get a little irrational even if they have credentials and education. For example, the concern is limiting plastic intake. the solution is to limit it at home apparently, because this is within our realm of control. It's a fallacy though.
However, if this was approached scientifically, we might ask ourselves to identify where these plastics are most likely to come from when we get in contact from them. Are these few levers in our control really having any effect compared to the levers we have no control over that probably also contribute significant plastic in our lives? That is the first question to be asked before any action IMO. It is humbling I am sure to know of a problem but also subconsciously at least know there isn't anything you can do about it. Like most other pollution I guess; you have to breathe that air at the end of the day. And your only salve is the scientific community gathering evidence of these effects so that regulation might be written to target them specifically. Individually, we are powerless.
From my understanding she feels that the mechanisms for these endocrine disrupters are there, that they act similarly to BPA, which is better understood, and that over time as research is done we will find more ways that they interact. The research is hard to do and takes a very long time, and quite a lot of it is not definitive because it is difficult with so many confounding factors, but there is a lot of it and more over time.
My wife is a researcher that has looked in to human breast milk, and blood metabolites. She has colleagues who have looked in to similar things. They all avoid plastics as much as possible.
My wife's practice is directly affected by this, the fees insurers charge her to receive money from them are crazy. Some insurers will only pay her in a debit style card that they then charge her an extra percentage fee for receiving.
I suppose this is an opinion article and click bait at that, but what a piece of useless fluff - someone with a strong personal belief (religious based as they are Catholic) that refuses to acknowledge any possible benefit.
SEEKING WORK: Remote - Phoenix, AZ / Maine / San Francisco
Three person design and development freelance team working together for 12 years (individually with 20+ years experience). We have extensive experience building applications from concept and design, through implementation and ongoing management. Our clients appreciate our ability to be efficient, predictable and responsive and we’d be happy to put you in touch with them. We have recent experience building a FinTech application using ChatGPT for financial analysis. Other relevant work includes data driven healthcare applications and dashboards, analytics pipelines, retail applications, financial apps, custom CMS, ecommerce front ends, phone apps, real estate apps and high throughput message delivery.
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We are working on a project for a client which functions as an analysis tool for stocks using LLMs. Ingesting 10ks, presentations, news, etc. and doing comparative analysis and other reports. It works great, but one of the things we have learned (and it makes sense) is that traceability of the information for financial professionals is very important - where did the facts and information come from in what the AI is producing. A hard problem to solve completely.
I worked on a similar application and eventually we shelved it. We just could not be confident enough that the numbers in the report produced are correct. There were enough instances of inaccuracies to not use it for important decision making. Which actually meant a lot of double work.
If it was me, I would be ingesting the raw filings from SEC EDGAR and using the robust xml documentation to create very accurately annotated data tables that would be fed to my LLM
A coworker presented a demo the other day of this - asking LLM (I think it was OpenAI) to extract the text from a PDF - each page of the PDF passed as an image. It was able to take a table and turn it into a hierarchical representation of the data (ie. Column with bullets under it for each row, then next column, etc.)
AWS textract now has the functionality to offer a table cell based on a query - if I’m not mistaken. I’ve seen nothing similar to this and would be very interested if there are other solutions.
We build multimodal search engine on day-to-day basis. We recently launched video documents search engine. I made a Show HN [0] post about ingesting Mutual Fund Risk/Return summary data (485BPOS, 497) and searching it with AI search. We are able to pinpoint to exact term on given page. It is fairly easy for us to ingest 10K, 10Q, 8K and other forms.
This article was written by my wife a while back. It is part of a series she wrote to help people think about Vitamin D. She's actually doing a facebook live presentation (and taking questions) on Vitamin D next month if anyone is interested [1]. She's doing consults all day today and tomorrow but I'll let her know this is here.
I would be interested to hear her responses to a number of the concerns/confusion mentioned below.
It seems like there is a lot of speculation in this area (not just this thread, but previous threads on vitamin D), and not a lot of evidence/studies to back it up.
Hey there! I'm here now and will try to respond to everything brought up. Some of the confusion stems from the complexity of the issue. There has been a lot of research on the clinical role of Vitamin D, much of it of questionable quality. On the basic science of it, there is a lot of great research, but these articles are often hard to read unless you have a PhD in biochemistry.
My kids attend a school that gives a very large amount of homework, constantly tests and expects large amounts of memorization - the school is well known for this Asian type model. They are currently in middle school and the amount of time their homework and studying takes is detrimental to everything else in their life. They definitely are leaning how to study, how to do well on tests and how to be more disciplined and organized - I can see you that happening in real time, but whether this level of stress at this age is setting them up for success later is very hard to know, I'm not surprised there is little evidence for it and I think it VERY much depends on the kid. One of my kids thrives on the repetitious math every night, it helps them learn the concepts, the other kid learns nothing from it, and just suffers through it bored by the repetition.
SEEKING WORK: Remote - Phoenix, AZ / Maine / San Francisco
Three person design and development freelance team working together for 12 years (individually with 20+ years experience). We have extensive experience building applications from concept and design, through implementation and ongoing management. Our clients appreciate our ability to be efficient, predictable and responsive and we’d be happy to put you in touch with them. We have recent experience building a FinTech application using ChatGPT for financial analysis. Other relevant work includes data driven healthcare applications and dashboards, analytics pipelines, retail applications, financial apps, custom CMS, ecommerce front ends, phone apps, real estate apps and high throughput message delivery.
Technologies and Skills: - Ruby on Rails - React - Go - MySql, Postgres, Redis, Redshift - AWS - UI Design, UX, Figma - CSS/HTML/SASS
We just changed a project we've been working on to try out the new gpt-4-turbo model and it is MUCH faster. I don't know if this is a factor of the number of people using it or not, but streaming a response for the prompts we are interested in went from 40-50 seconds to 6 seconds.
I noticed that too but I think it's because we are hitting new servers that just went online. They will probably get saturated and slower with time when other gpt-4 users start using gpt-4-turbo.
SEEKING WORK: Remote - Phoenix, AZ / Maine / San Francisco
Three person design and development freelance team working together for 12 years (individually with 20+ years experience). We have extensive experience building applications from concept and design, through implementation and ongoing management. Our clients appreciate our ability to be efficient, predictable and responsive and we’d be happy to put you in touch with them. We have recent experience building a FinTech application using ChatGPT for financial analysis. Other relevant work includes data driven healthcare applications and dashboards, analytics pipelines, retail applications, financial apps, custom CMS, ecommerce front ends, phone apps, real estate apps and high throughput message delivery.
Technologies and Skills:
- Ruby on Rails
- React
- Go
- MySql, Postgres, Redis, Redshift
- AWS
- UI Design, UX, Figma
- CSS/HTML/SASS
