A clinical trial has successfully restored hearing in five children with inherited deafness using gene therapy, specifically delivering functional copies of the OTOF gene via adeno-associated virus (AAV).
Significant improvements were observed in hearing, speech perception, and sound localization, with two children developing an appreciation for music.
Published in Nature Medicine, the study underscores the potential of this approach and advocates for larger international trials, noting the therapy's safety and effectiveness despite minor adverse events.
Gene therapy has restored hearing in children with inherited deafness by injecting an adeno-associated virus carrying functional OTOF genes into their inner ears, ensuring long-term gene expression.
The discussion explores the potential of gene editing technologies like CRISPR for radical human modifications and the ethical implications of prioritizing cosmetic genetic engineering over medical applications.
Ethical concerns are raised about using gene therapy to eradicate hereditary deafness in children, focusing on consent and controversies within the Deaf community over cochlear implants.
Piku, inspired by Dokku, facilitates git push deployments to personal servers, supporting a Heroku-like workflow for various programming languages (Python, Node, Go, Java, Clojure, Ruby).
It can deploy, manage, and scale multiple applications on both ARM and Intel architectures, compatible with any cloud provider or bare metal setup using Python, nginx, and uwsgi.
Piku is stable, actively maintained, and designed for low-end devices, hobbyists, and educational use, emphasizing minimal dependencies, simplicity, and compatibility.
The discussion highlights Piku, a minimalist tool for Git push deployments to personal servers, comparing it to Heroku, Dokku, and Kubernetes for its simplicity and ease of use.
A tutorial for Piku, praised for its clarity, is now part of the official Piku GitHub organization, with plans for further enhancements.
Users discuss various deployment setups, including systemd nspawn for sandboxing and NixOS for stability, and address concerns about dependency management, security, and Docker's overhead, favoring lightweight, customizable PaaS solutions.
A University of Oxford study published in Circulation Research indicates that sildenafil (Viagra) improves brain blood flow and function in patients at risk of vascular dementia.
The OxHARP trial, a double-blind, placebo-controlled study with 75 participants, found sildenafil enhances cerebrovascular function with fewer side effects compared to cilostazol.
These findings suggest sildenafil's potential in preventing vascular dementia, prompting the need for larger-scale trials.
A recent study suggests Viagra, initially for cardiovascular issues and erectile dysfunction (ED), may improve brain blood flow and help prevent dementia.
Users report varied side effects like headaches, nausea, and nasal congestion, which often decrease over time, and emphasize the necessity of sexual stimulation for the drug to work.
The discussion covers broader health benefits, the unpredictability of drug research, and the need for rigorous studies to confirm benefits for conditions like Alzheimer's and vascular dementia.
"Iceberger" is a game developed by @joshdata, inspired by a tweet from @GlacialMeg, allowing users to draw an iceberg and visualize its floating orientation.
The game simulates the iceberg's three-dimensional mass distribution and relative density, key factors in determining its stable orientation.
The inspiration came from Megan Thompson-Munson's request for scientists to depict icebergs in their stable orientations, highlighted by her watercolor painting.
A web tool on Hacker News lets users draw an iceberg and observe its floating behavior, sparking a discussion on user experiences and insights.
Users experiment with different shapes, such as stars and triangles, to see varied floating outcomes, sharing examples and suggestions for improvements.
The tool is praised for its educational value and simplicity, though some users express frustration over Twitter's restrictions on viewing threads without an account.
Matt Stoller's "Economic Termites Are Everywhere" examines the detrimental effects of small-scale monopolies on the economy, particularly in sectors like construction, software, and industrial gases.
Companies such as Verisign, Autodesk, and LinkedIn are cited for using their market power to inflate prices and hinder competition, highlighting the need for stronger antitrust enforcement.
Stoller advocates for legal and regulatory reforms to address these monopolistic practices and restore fair commerce and democracy.
The article critiques traditional economic metrics for failing to reflect socioeconomic disparities and rising living costs, advocating for a re-evaluation of economic understanding.
It highlights issues such as rural decay, rising essential costs, economic inequality, and the disparity between public sentiment and statistical data in reflecting economic realities.
The discussion includes critiques of U.S. economic issues like healthcare access, food deserts, and restrictive housing policies, calling for improved transparency, regulation, and stronger antitrust policies to protect consumers.
Ruxandra Teslo's Substack post critiques the backlash against Katalin Karikó, co-inventor of mRNA technology, for her criticisms of academia's political and social dynamics.
Teslo argues that academia undervalues intellectually creative "Weird Nerds" like Karikó, who often lack the interpersonal and political skills needed for academic success, suggesting the internet as a better environment for these individuals.
The post calls for a reevaluation of how human capital is valued in scientific and cultural fields, emphasizing the need for explicit pro-Weird Nerd norms to harness their potential and address academia's current crisis, including declining public trust.
The discussion examines the complexities of being a "weird nerd," focusing on the trade-offs of intense interest in specific areas and the resulting deficiencies in other aspects of life.
It challenges stereotypes linking such behavior to autism, attributing it instead to deep passion, and critiques the medicalization of personality traits and the categorization of neurodiversity.
The text highlights the role of "weird nerds" in tech innovations, the importance of teamwork, and the evolving perception of terms like "nerd" and "genius," while also addressing the challenges faced by neurodivergent individuals in professional settings.
The paper "Scalable MatMul-free Language Modeling" by Rui-Jie Zhu et al. investigates removing matrix multiplication (MatMul) operations in large language models (LLMs) to lower computational costs.
The authors show that their MatMul-free models maintain strong performance at billion-parameter scales, comparable to state-of-the-art Transformers, while significantly reducing memory usage during inference and training.
They offer a GPU-efficient implementation that cuts memory consumption by up to 61%, an optimized kernel reducing it by over 10x, and a custom FPGA hardware solution for enhanced efficiency, achieving brain-like processing power.
The paper "Scalable MatMul-Free Language Modeling" introduces a new approach to language models using ternary weights and quantization-aware training (QAT) to improve efficiency.
The method employs optimized and fused kernels with Triton, reducing overfitting and memory usage, and incorporates a linear transformer to minimize multiplications in the attention mechanism.
The implementation shows significant memory savings, is compatible with Huggingface transformers, and includes an FPGA core programmed with a custom assembler, indicating potential for future ASIC development.
The Censor Tracker 158 add-on, which helps bypass censorship in Russia, has become inaccessible in the country without prior notice or changes in settings.
Russian users attempting to access the add-on receive a message indicating that the page is not available in their region.
The developer is seeking clarification on whether this blockage is due to a request from Russian authorities or a decision made by Mozilla.
Mozilla has banned two anti-censorship add-ons in Russia, sparking controversy and dividing users on issues of censorship and platform policies.
The developer of "Runet Censorship Bypass" was not notified, and users debate whether Mozilla's actions are justified or constitute censorship themselves.
The situation highlights broader concerns about user control, ethical practices, and geopolitical pressures, with some users exploring alternative browsers like Vivaldi and Kagi's Orion.
The article by Tim Harford examines the differences between gambling and insurance, highlighting their distinct legal and cultural perceptions despite both involving financial stakes on uncertain events.
Historical context includes early insurance practices in Babylon and China, the evolution of Lloyd's of London from a coffee house to a formal insurance marketplace, and mutual aid societies in the Alps.
The economic significance of insurance is underscored by examples like crop insurance in Ghana, and the article concludes by discussing financial derivatives and their role in the 2007 financial crisis.
The article contrasts the impacts of insurance and gambling on financial security and societal well-being, emphasizing that insurance mitigates risks while gambling increases them.
Key points include the economic principles of utility, the diminishing marginal utility of money, and the ethical aspects of financial products.
The discussion also covers the complexities of the insurance industry, the necessity of regulation, and the differing societal perceptions and moral judgments between insurance and gambling.
Dagen H, or "Högertrafikomläggningen," was the day Sweden switched from left-side to right-side driving on September 3, 1967, to reduce head-on collisions.
The transition required extensive public education, new road markings, and the replacement of 350,000 traffic signs, with non-essential traffic banned during the switch.
Although the change initially reduced accidents, rates returned to normal within two years; trams were largely replaced by buses, with only a few tram lines surviving.
The discussion highlights Sweden's switch to right-hand traffic in 1967, despite significant public opposition, and its eventual benefits.
Users compare the political courage required for such decisions in the past with the challenges of implementing unpopular policies in today's media-driven environment.
The conversation also explores global driving norms, the Geneva Convention on Road Traffic, and the broader implications of standardizing practices like driving on the right and adopting English as a second official language.
Doug Brown fixed two faulty Altera USB Blaster clone devices for his Time Sleuth project, which measures HDMI input lag.
He resolved timing issues with the Waveshare USB Blaster V2 by adjusting the clock frequency and modified open-source firmware to make a cheaper Amazon clone functional on Linux.
Brown shares his modified firmware on GitHub and emphasizes the challenges and satisfaction of using open-source tools to convert nonfunctional devices into working ones.
The discussion focuses on troubleshooting a non-functional knockoff Altera USB Blaster, specifically issues with an FTDI chip.
Participants debate the merits and drawbacks of original versus cloned devices, including pricing, development costs, and the impact of cheaper clones on the market.
The thread also highlights alternative solutions, such as cheaper clones based on the Cypress FX2LP chip and open-source options.
Betula is a free, self-hosted bookmarking software designed for single users, allowing them to organize and publish bookmarks with tags, titles, and descriptions.
It supports public and private bookmarks, has a simple interface, and stores data in a single SQLite file, with IndieWeb microformats and Fediverse integration for social interaction.
Betula is easy to install and configure via a web interface, with development updates and source code available on SourceHut, Codeberg, and GitHub, and new versions released approximately every three months.
Betula is a federated bookmarking software that enables users to manage and share bookmarks, designed specifically for the independent web.
It supports tagging and ActivityPub for social features, and is praised for being self-hostable without complex dependencies.
Users discuss challenges like forgetting bookmarks and suggest solutions such as content-centered bookmarks, self-hosted tools like Wallabag, and integration with note-taking apps.
Glenn Fiedler's blog post on Más Bandwidth highlights the significance of a robust matchmaker for multiplayer games and introduces a matchmaking simulator based on real player data.
The simulator tests the matchmaker's efficiency in finding low-latency matches, aiming for ≤50ms latency, expanding to ≤100ms if necessary, and ultimately allowing any match if no ideal server is found.
The post underscores the importance of accurate latency estimation and suggests using latency maps and network accelerators, with the simulator showing promising results of matches found in an average of two seconds and 30-40ms RTT (Round-Trip Time).
The discussion examines the shift from community-driven servers to modern matchmaking in multiplayer games, which often disrupts long-term social interactions among players.
It highlights the benefits of persistent servers in games like "Squad" and "Counter-Strike" for relationship building and credits Glenn Fiedler's blog for successful netcode implementations using WebRTC and enet.
The post details a matchmaking technique involving server-authoritative netcode with client-side prediction and rollback, emphasizing low-latency connections, and discusses the challenges of balancing skill levels and latency. The source code is available on GitHub with an option to disable player shuffling.
The paper "Teams of LLM Agents can Exploit Zero-Day Vulnerabilities" by Richard Fang et al. investigates the use of large language model (LLM) agents in cybersecurity, focusing on zero-day vulnerabilities.
The authors introduce HPTSA, a system where a planning agent coordinates subagents to overcome the limitations of individual LLM agents in handling unknown vulnerabilities and long-term planning.
Benchmarking 15 real-world vulnerabilities, the study shows that the team-based approach of HPTSA significantly outperforms previous methods, enhancing performance by up to 4.5 times.
The discussion examines the strengths and weaknesses of Large Language Models (LLMs) like Claude-opus and ChatGPT in identifying zero-day vulnerabilities in code.
While LLMs can pinpoint technically correct issues, their broader relevance is debated, and specialized tools and expert knowledge are still essential for complex vulnerabilities.
Ethical and legal concerns, high costs, and practicality issues, especially for open-source projects, highlight skepticism about the added value of LLMs over existing techniques in cybersecurity.