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Joined 19 days ago
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Cake day: November 7th, 2025

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  • mirshafie@europe.pubtoScience Memes@mander.xyzInsulin
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    13 minutes ago

    Nils Bejerot was a total hack. He tried to ban comic books, and later transcribed that same energy in a war on drugs that has resulted in some of the worst health outcomes for drug users in Europe. Unfortunately his ability to be confidently incorrect swayed a lot of gullible rubes, and his legacy still casts a shadow over Sweden to this day.


  • mirshafie@europe.pubtoScience Memes@mander.xyzInsulin
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    24 minutes ago

    I mean insulin is about 10x more expensive in the USA compared to other Western countries. It’s cheaper still in lower income countries. Many European countries also have a price ceiling for medication, so your monthly cost for life-saving drugs is capped.

    I don’t know exactly why a manufacturer doesn’t set up production for much cheaper generics in the USA, but for whatever reason Americans are getting price gouged like Satan doesn’t believe in tomorrow.







  • This really is a problem with expectations and hype though. And it will probably be a problem with cost as well.

    I think that LLMs are really cool. It’s way faster and more concise than traditional search engines at answering most questions nowadays. This is partly because search engines have degraded in the last 10 years, but LLMs blow them out of the water in my opinion.

    And beyond that, I think you can generate some pretty cool things with it to use as a template. I’m not a programmer but I’m making a quite massive and relatively complicated application. That wouldn’t be possible without an LLM. Sure I still have to check every line and clean up a ton of code, and of course I realize that this is all going to have to go to a substantial code review and cleanup by real programmers if I’m ever going to ship it, but the thing I’m making is genuinely already better (in terms of performance and functionality) than a lot of what’s on the market. That has to count for something.

    Despite all that, I think we’re in the same kind of bubble now as we were in the early 2000s, except bigger. The oversell of AI comes from CEOs claiming (and to the best of my judgement they appear to be actually believing) that LLMs somehow magically will transcend into AGI if they’re given enough compute. I think part of that stems from the massive (and unexpected) improvements that happened from GPT-2 to GPT-3.

    And lots of smart people (like Linus Tordvals for example) point out that really, when you think about it, what is intelligence other than a glorified auto-correct? Our brains essentially function as lossy compression. So I think for some people it is incredibly alluring to believe that if we just throw more chips on the fire a true consciousness will arise. And so, we’re investing all of our extra money and our pension funds into this thing.

    And the irony is that I and millions of others can therefore use LLMs at a steep discount. So lots of people are quickly getting accustomed to LLMs thinking that they’re always going to be free or cheap, whereas it’s paid for by the bubble money and it’s not super likely that it will get much more efficient in the near future.






  • This is unironically a huge issue, and it’s just fascinating how the psychology of pricing and valuation works.

    Semi-large company needs something. They make a budget for €100k and start looking at different alternatives. They find alternatives a) €120k, b) €80k, c) €15k. I bet you they’ll try to ask their superiors to expand their budget in order to buy the premium €120k solution, and they will not in any way consider the €15k one.

    Come to think of it, it goes beyond software as well.



  • My biggest issue with PDF it’s hard to read on screens. On top of that PDF forms are notoriously buggy, tables are almost impossible to machine-read without specialized software, and even copy-pasting can be a hassle.

    I get that print will continue to be a thing to some extent, but I don’t think that business or government documents need to be typeset with static pages. I think it’s time we move on to a much simpler standard that is made for free-flowing text.

    PDF has also been problematic as a standard format, since it referred to proprietary features up until 2023.