Sorry - the older group has higher rates of dementia than the younger group when they reach the same age - so when they reach 75, they're more likely to have dementia.
I believe that there are studies that show that merely getting very sick increases your chance of dementia - essentially it ages you faster or brings chronic disease forward. If that's the case, vaccines for things like the flu - a disease you're likely to get - are probably good overall.
They also activate the immune system in generaly, which could probably go either way in terms of longevity.
In general I don't think vaccines are preventing so much as delaying dementia, but if they stop chronic infection they might be.
When the vaccine came out in the UK, they included a hard age cutoff: Above a certain age, you weren't eligible. Below that age, you were eligible.
They looked at the probability of a dementia diagnosis over the 7 years after the vaccine was introduced.
People who were born in the "can get the vaccine" group have markedly lower rates of dementia. People in the "too old" group have higher rates. It's cut and dry. The researchers didn't separate out the people who actually got the vaccine.
It's one of those studies where you don't even need to look at the p-value to see the difference between the cohorts.
There was a hard age cutoff in the UK study. Above a certain age, you weren't eligible. Below it, you were. People who were born in the "can get the vaccine" group have markedly lower rates of dementia. People in the "too old" group have higher rates. It's one of those studies where you don't even need to look at the p-value to see the difference.
Computer use is a great idea. It gets the job done when nothing else will.
If you're a person trying to get their job done at a big company, but half your job is in 1-2 proprietary tools or is stuck behind an API you can't program against, computer use can allow you, a non-techie, to do your job more efficiently.
I think it's an awesome way to circumvent gate keepers and the IT department to let people accomplish their goals.
For anyone trying to figure out how to build a society where no one wants to be a criminal, I highly recommend When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment by Mark Kleiman.
There are evidence-backed ways of reducing criminality.
One counterintuitive way of reducing crime is to increase the likelihood of being caught, to have small-but-increasing consequences for committing crimes, and to increase the swiftness of sentencing.
For example, if you are caught drinking and driving, you immediately spend 1-2 days in jail.
Long sentences are not very productive at reducing crime or at least are a very inefficient way to do so.
I think it does. Crops pull up a set amount of water. If it's concentrated, then they'll pull up a lot of heavy metals. If it's at very low levels, then they won't.
We live in a much, much cleaner world than we did 50 years ago. Legislation and environmental rules have worked. There are some areas where it could obviously be better, but also some areas where regulation is too strict (blocking housing, renewables, transit) and the system is evolving to address those.
I think the loss of local media has made it harder for misdeeds to come to light, but I don't want to throw up my hands and cede everything to commercial interests et al.
This is written for the 3 models (Sonnet, Haiku, Opus 3). While some lessons will be relevant today, others will not be useful or necessary on smarter, RL’d models like Sonnet 4.5.
> Note: This tutorial uses our smallest, fastest, and cheapest model, Claude 3 Haiku. Anthropic has two other models, Claude 3 Sonnet and Claude 3 Opus, which are more intelligent than Haiku, with Opus being the most intelligent.
Even farther off topic, but this reminds me of the time my friends and I recorded a 3 minute long wav file that ended with a quiet “this is god. Can you hear me? I’d like to talk with you,” and set it to be the error sound on a friend’s PC.
You don't say that - you instruct the LLM to read files about X, Y, and Z. Putting the context in helps the agent plan better (next step) and write correct code (final step).
If you're asking the agent to do chunks of work, this will get better results than asking it to blindly go forth and do work. Anthropic's best practices guide says as much.
If you're asking the agent to create one method that accomplishes X, this isn't useful.
Warning: A natural response to this is to instruct Claude not to do this in the CLAUDE.md file, but you’re then polluting the context and distracting it from its primary job.
If you watch its thinking, you will see references to these instructions instead of to the task at hand.
It’s akin telling an employee that they can never say certain words. They’re inevitably going to be worse at their job.