With only two days to go before the worst month of the year starts, I can declare infrastructure week — the one that started back around Christmas — complete. All posts from the old blog, book, movie, and tv reviews included, are now hosted on micro.blog.
Google Scholar alerts are a quick if crude way to be up-to-date with literature. In addition to journal articles and conference abstracts it also looks at U.S. patent applications, and despite the impenetrable legalese something will ocasionally turn up that is at least amusing, if not informative.
Today was one such occasion: a patent for a combination of two already approved drugs to treat toxicity of CAR T-cell therapy, by the group which, admittedly, was the first to give CAR T-cells to humans and the first to treat their side effects.
I may be showing my ignorance of U.S. patent law here but, how is this a thing? These drugs are already commercially available and widely used for exactly this indication. How would they enforce this patent, and how exactly would the patent help with development and commercialization of two drugs which are already on the market?
After reading Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From I realized that not everyone makes the distinction between discoveries and inventions, Which is the first website that DuckDuckGo returned, and it is servicable, but I was flabergasted by the long list of nearly identical websites with domain names all some variant of “difference between”. This is how ChatGPT destroys Google. and this may be an example of a discovery masquerading as an invention. Nothing was created — the drugs were already there — the team merely discovered that those two drugs work in a specific indication. If this is deserving of a patent, should every drug combination be patented?
To be clear, I am not a lawyer — caveat lector — but the whole patent system needs an overhaul and making a clearer distinction between discoveries and inventions should be one of the items on the long list of things that need attention.
A lengthy overview of the implications of ML/AI to biology and drug discovery came out yesterday, and while I appreciate its enthusiasm and breadth, the answer to the question posed in the summary — What if this time is different? — is, sadly, no, probably not.
So let me see if I have this straight:
If artificial general intelligence is possible, For an explanation for how AI differs from AGI I recommend this short interview with David Deutsch. odds are that it will emerge in this decade. Determining whether that is good or bad I will leave as an excercise to the reader.
P.S. While getting the links for this post I came upon a WaPo article which came out today and devotes a single paragraph to the potential harms of AI:
Some AI ethicists fear that Big Tech’s rush to market could expose billions of people to potential harms — such as sharing inaccurate information, generating fake photos or giving students the ability to cheat on school tests — before trust and safety experts have been able to study the risks. Others in the field share OpenAI’s philosophy that releasing the tools to the public, often nominally in a “beta” phase after mitigating some predictable risks, is the only way to assess real world harms.
This is true, as things stand now. Wouldn’t it be nice if it stayed that way.
…and the scary/great thing about middle age is that you forget that you have, in fact, made a blogroll not two years ago, listing amongst others the two blogs included in your lamentation about not having a blogroll.
In other news: the old blog is now transferred to micro.
From my inbox, regarding enterprise software with enterprise price:
The Zoom link is now in the meeting workspace and you will need to copy and paste it into your web browser. Company name redacted is working on a hyperlink but that functionality is not yet available.
!?!
The great/scary thing about the internet is that for any fleeting thought I have, there is somone who has ruminated on the matter long and hard and made their ruminations available online. Gwern comes to mind, but also Gellman on statistics, and many others. Time for a blogroll?
If you are giving a pre-recorded talk at a “hybrid” scientific conference, you can count on the number of people listening to you being functionally zero. Some may take photos of your slides, your face included.
Among the few Latin phrases I listed yesterday, I’ve somehow managed to miss my favorite: Ars longa, vita brevis.
Comes to mind each time I glance at my bookshelf.
I am sure that Sofa is a fine, artisanal app, lovingly crafted by the best designers and software engineers, and I would never ever fault anyone for using it…
…but I get an allergic reaction when someone suggests I “organize my downtime”, and a strong urge to say Organize this!