You should ask them if they want you playing doctor.
I have a chronic disease, not fatal, and totally manageable. But the most annoying thing is when someone finds out and suddenly pretends to be the expert.
Of course my doctors and I investigating it for years were completely wrong! I should’ve ate more apricots!
Please just check with them if they want their limited time spent like that.
dont get why that upsets you. I have had a chronic disease my whole life and one of the people who offered help completely saved my life.
If anyone else told me to eat apricots Id be grateful for their time and attention.
I would probably eat the apricots and tell them it was fantastic, even if it had no effect.
Sorry I just have rarely seen my friends or family offer any advice.
- Back to OP, Ive always remembered Paul Stamets recommending the stamets-7 mushroom blend with research papers talking about recession. no idea if it works.
Because this often sounds like people think you haven't tried (almost) everything yet and of course they might have a solution.
I think your and parent commenter's situation and reaction are polar though. One was in the situation where they receive an unwelcome advice all too often, the other one would like more attention but never got one.
Notice than you are prepared to do something you are not really iterested in and possibly don't even need - only to give some 3rd party a satisfaction as a "thank you" for their attention.
Well, it's not a taboo (at least I've read it as if the person is just tired of it).
But generally you can just ask something like "Will it be fine with you if you I share a piece of advice?"
This works even better if you tell why you think this might be relevant at all (for example if you have some expertise or have a very similar experience yourself).
The problem is that when you are trying to accept your fate and come to peace with it, and everyone else around you is trying to give you false hope. It's hard to break free from the constant futile wishful thinking if everyone around you is doing it for you.
Sometimes you should just let people work with their doctors and come to peace with their situation.
If I was dying of cancer, and someone told me to eat apricots, I might shove the apricots down their meddling throat.
It can be bit annoying because people people think "can't hurt to try" but there's thousand unfounded things to try, little time, no way to pick and some of them could hurt. There's no harm in listening to ideas, being expected to implement them is another thing.
a) Nobody here is talking about unfounded things nor demanding anyone do anything.
b) There are not thousands of things to try. In fact in most cases there will be no options since you will need to be in a clinical trial, asking a Doctor to try something unproven and unethical or need substantial resources.
a) Well founded things are roughly the things your doctor recommends. The rest is unfounded. Some unfounded things might really be worth trying if you have time and strength. Most aren't. Yet people who know you that mean well but have very limited capacity to evaluate what is worthwhile and what is not will firmly believe that the idea they are bringing you is the one that will cure your illness and the only hurdle is convincing you to apply it. That's what gets tiring.
b) In most cases there are just a few things or no things that actually might work. But there's thousands of ideas floating around of what people say might help. Ranging from "you must eat a spoonful of this spice daily" to "there's this small lab on the other site of the planet that make this expensive substance that will cure you but what they do isn't technically legal and might kill you".
I think the point here is that the OP was asking for moonshot suggestions...and people responded. Whether the person with the illness wants to hear these suggestions or not is between them and the OP. It is a sensitive area and people are all over the place in how they want to deal with it and its important to respect that.
> I would probably eat the apricots and tell them it was fantastic, even if it had no effect.
You might for the first. Maybe the second. Probably not for the fifth. Certainly not the tenth. You may be tempted to hit the fiftieth.
If everyone around you feels the need to help, and provides the same insights, because they're not experts, then they're providing you the same repeated insights that you encountered at the beginning of your journey. A journey you may already be decades into, and having the same information shoved down your throat, day after day after day.
There is a reason that "Have you tried yoga?" is a meme in the chronic illness groups. Yes, it may provide some limited help, like most exercise. But 3652 days of hearing about it, later? Your patience might not have lasted.
first: the person who doesn't want to be reminded is probably not the person that is approaching you and actively telling you that they are approaching the end of their life.
second: speaking to them about their plight isn't the struggle; DEATH IS -- and we're all in that same boat.
Telling people that you're terminally ill doesn't necessarily mean you're desperate to avoid death. It can be that you want to make the most of the time you have left, or ask for help with doing that, or need reassurances about protecting loved ones, a legacy, getting creative or scholarly work out into the world, or need help dealing with your fears/regrets or...many other things.
I don't get this existential fear of death many people have. Entropy is a fundamental fact fo existence. I think a lot of people are fer less concerned with dying as such than they are with minimizing the suffering, loss of autonomy, or inability to prepare that often precedes it.
Same boat with having a chronic illness, not fatal, but no cure either. It gets tiring wading thru all the snake oil salesmen selling false hope. And it isn’t them directly, because my older family members will hear about it with “have you tried…”
Did you mention apricots deliberately? Apricot pits were a huge, huge alternative medicine in the 1970s under the name Laetrile. Proponents said that Laetrile would cure cancer and was being covered up. The FDA banned it, saying that it accomplished nothing other than potential cyanide poisoning. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of patients a year went to Laetrile clinics in Mexico and spent tons of money on it. Laetrile was smuggled into the US from Mexico, second only to marijuana. Enthusiasm dwindled after studies failed to find a benefit. (Just some hopefully interesting history about apricots.)
I have a friend who is an MD, and he recently asked me what I’ve been doing to manage my seborrheic dermatitis. Since dermatologists have no cure for it, we often have to resort to anecdotal treatments. Moreover, big pharma doesn’t invest in studies for treatments they can’t patent. Blind trust in medical professionals isn’t necessarily wise. Anecdotal solutions still hold significant value, in my opinion
3d printers haven’t changed that much… they’ve gotten easier to use, sure, but the materials and quality we’re printing is about the same as 10 years ago.
3d printers have changed significantly. They used to be very finicky and hard to get a decent print. Lots of tweaking and it was different for every printer.
They have evolved into true click and forget machines.
I tear apart medical and other machines to recycle parts. I do often see 3d printed parts inside commercial machines, probably because they are making so few of them and it's more economical to just print a couple specialized parts.
Most 3D printed parts have a telltale texture resulting from the layer-by-layer deposit of material. The same goes for many milled/CNCed parts bearing evidence of tool marks. Once you've seen and held enough, it's relatively easy to identify whether a given part was printed, cast, milled, lathed, etc.
I say most because there are finishing methods which can largely obscure these details and make it less obvious as to which method produced a given part.
Maybe it was 20? I just remember they took expense fluids, hard to keep, fragile.
Then month ago I was in a Micro Center, and there were dozens of very fancy printers that could take dozens of types of line feeds.
Feels like 3D printers have changed. A slicer from 10 years ago is not going to generate as good a print as one from today. And it feels like the variety of filaments from 10 years ago has greatly changed.
It's not that easy, say for example if a over excited user clicks the purchase button 20 times, ending up in 20 simultaneous orders. What is the best way to handle it? Should the user get 20 orders shipped to him, or only one? And should the user get a message that says "order already processed" or "order processed successfully"? You can have a system that works correctly 99% of the time. The devil is in the 1% of time when things go wrong.
Yeah but they're a statistical anomaly in the field.
For every example of encapsulated state, there's probably 9 more examples of global state which is called encapsulated.
And what is managed state? I can think of two examples that can effectively manage it - software transactional memory, and a good rdbms with the isolation level turned way up.
hey just got back on and the papers you shared are the main works that I was about to link. There's also a new VLA paper fro waymo https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.23262v2
In addition to the papers on end-to-end learning for robotics, it might also be worth reading about the state-of-the art in classical robotics. There's a lot of debate in the field about whether end-to-end learning and scaling will solve robotics[1]. On the E2E side, there's the bitter lesson, scaling for LLMs and other AI success cases. On the skeptical side, there's the reliability limit (has anyone seen any ML cross the 1 failure out 100,000 barrier on real data?), and the bitter-er lesson (scaling on search can be better than scaling on data and classical robotics is scaling search instead of data). Data availability is a blocker for research, but in production many use-cases are profitable with teleop so data can be collected profitably, especially with UX design to make teleop more efficient.
Navigating in stair-free commercial environments was solved in mid-2009 by classical planning + SLAM with LIDAR, and open-sourced in the ROS navstack. A LIDAR-free version using stereo cameras was also open-sourced shortly thereafter. The navstack is still maintained and integrated by Open Robotics[2] and Opennav[3]. These techniques (and in many cases forks of the OSS code) power e.g. 10,000 bear.ai robots in restaurants today, as well as some of the newer Roombas. All of this is CPU-only, and can run on a NUC.
Classical planning has also solved arm navigation quite well. The modern technology here is MoveIt! 2[4]. MoveIt! uses essentially the CAD model of the arm (which most robot manufacturers provide in the correct format) plus data about objects in the environment from sensors to plan motions. There are modules to create smoother, human-like motions as well. All of this works efficiently on CPU-only.
Lastly, LIDAR-less SLAM and mapping is also starting: https://docs.luxonis.com/software/ros/vio-slam. LIDAR costs have also fallen to the point where robot vacuums are sold with integrated LIDARs.
The main area where classical has not made as much progress is on soft objects (e.g folding towels) and on object detection. Classical point-cloud based object detection for example is based on correspondence grouping[5], but overall everyone is using at least partially neural nets for these problems.
As for end-to-end in prod without human-in-the-loop, covariant and ambi are the only cases I've seen so far. They benefit from having the ability to have a classical safety layer and a classical success detector via e.g. object weights (I'm not sure what approach they are using, I've just seen object weight elsewhere). With that they can get the much-desired data flywheel effect of self-improving systems.
I am a terrible reader and I'm really ashamed of it. I don't know how people can read that many books, I think in my lifetime I've finished at most 4 books? and two of them were technical books.
I think I suffer from aphantasia which may be related to the impossibility of getting hook to anything by reading. I've tried mangas as well and it's a bit easier, but still find hard to really enjoy.
Of course, most of the books I tried are the ones that I had to read in school, but I also tried a few recommendations from friends and the result was the same.
To build up the habit or hopefully get passionate, try to read with/for your or your relative’s kid(s). Not necessarily together with the same book, just sit beside them on the couch, park, or wherever and see what conversation follows.
Need time to read? I find the best ones are while waiting to board your flight, Uber, and other transport.
I doubt aphantasia is related. I have it, but have been a huge book reader all my life. Have you tried audiobooks? That's been my go to whenever I'm driving, cleaning, brushing teeth, etc.
Ah, I used to be that. Now I start gazillions and finish very few. I think it's related to the shift from primarily print books too primarily ebooks. And also how I've been getting into more social media after trying out Mastodon.
Censor? This is not related to tech or what HN is meant to discuss. We didn't see a flood of election or political content in the last couple weeks for this same reason
An absence of a type of content, does not imply a stance on the content. The site’s curation goals do not align with this article whatsoever.
If there’s a tech related piece to the conflict, like we saw with the pager infiltration, then that makes sense to have on the site.
