The Independent Variable (Page 5)

Since Trump returned to office his Administration has fired or muzzled government scientists with disfavored views on nutrition and climate change; cancelled funding for long-running surveys on food insecurity and global health; dismissed independent committees focussed on air pollution, health-care disparities, and hospital infections; and pulled support for research into vaccines.

The list of things that has devastating real world impact on millions of real Americans goes on and on and on and on. And for what?

🏥 A Battle with My Blood

health

The New Yorker

Maybe my brain is replaying my life now because I have a terminal diagnosis, and all these memories will be lost. Maybe it’s because I don’t have much time to make new ones, and some part of me is sifting through the sands.

A pretty devastating personal reflection on leukemia from Tatiana Schlossberg—and how her cousin, RFK Jr. is decimating the healthcare system and pulling funding for research into many of the drugs she has or could’ve used during her fight with cancer.

💊 Trump says he will pardon ex-Honduras president convicted of drug trafficking

international

BBC

Hernández was found guilty in March 2024 of conspiring to import cocaine into the US, and of possessing machine guns. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison.

Bombing boats from Venezuela without any (publicly released) evidence, while pardoning someone who was tried and convicted of doing the exact same thing they are accusing Venezuela of doing. How can anyone possibly reconcile these things?

⛑️ USAID shutdown has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths

international

Harvard

The dismantling of USAID, according to models from Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children,” Gawande wrote.

Four hundred thousand kids dead in less than a year. But hey, the Trump administration saved less than half a percent of its budget. Oh! And did we mention, DOGE was shut down already because it cost taxpayers more than it saved? Talk about fraud and waste…

📹 Au 8ème Jour

animation

Short of the Week

Incredible animated student short film from France. Produced in a stunning knitted stop-motion animation style to create some beautiful visuals. And if you stick around for the whole thing, it gets pretty deep.

🤖 AGI is not possible even in 10 years

ai

Medium

LeCun thinks we need completely different approaches, including what he calls “world models,” before we can talk seriously about AGI. His timeline? At least a decade, probably much longer.

I’m obviously no expert, but I’ve been saying this for years. LLM’s are not a path to AGI or any sort of intelligence. They are fancy algorithms with random outputs. They don’t think or understand—they ingest and compute.

🔬 The Undermining of the C.D.C.

🏥 A Battle with My Blood

💊 Trump says he will pardon ex-Honduras president convicted of drug trafficking

⛑️ USAID shutdown has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths

📹 Au 8ème Jour

🤖 AGI is not possible even in 10 years

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🇺🇸 DOJ deletes study showing domestic terrorists are most often right wing

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