Murfalo

McCarthyism on the menu? Why, Cold War II is already being served! Hurry up, it's getting... cold : o

A few examples. Eli Lilly (Zyprexa): $36B sales vs. $1.4B fine, Pfizer (Bextra & others): $16.8B vs. $2.3B, Pfizer (Neurontin): $2.12B vs. $430M, Johnson & Johnson (Risperdal): $10.8B vs. $2.2B, Amgen (Aranesp): $7.4B vs. $762M, GlaxoSmithKline (Paxil & Wellbutrin): $9B vs. $3B

Wonder where GLP-1s will end up

Interesting hypothetical. Let me know when you've got one, can't wait

Let's play spot the conflict of interest. Three of seven authors tied to a company selling biological aging tests. One consults for Merck, GSK, etc.

There seems some promise at times but I also struggle to see the recent slew of "GLP-1s cure X", where X is seemingly any ailment known to man, as much more than the next Big Pharma gold rush where the profits dwarf any eventual regulatory fines, and taxpayers and real patients are left with the costs.

Same. I'm in the US and do not use Amazon at all. Life, and the products I buy, actually got much better. Amazon is overpriced and low quality. Pretty much everywhere else has better products, lower prices and free & fast shipping at this point (Walmart, Target, Home Depot, direct purchases, etc.). Pretty shocked at all the people defending Amazon here.

Fair, I may have tried too hard to see the other side of the argument! Sensitive topic of course, but definitely one of the clearer cases where "just put the book down" has not always an entirely available option.

Tipping points and technological lock-in aren't new (e.g., the printing press, the radio, TV, phones, the internet, etc.). I do absolutely see your distinction, though, that prior technologies may have been less capable of imposing specific belief systems compared to frontier LLMs.

That's a fair point, and a key reason why competitive open models are so important. I definitely don't want to be stuck using Google's latest and greatest LLM once companies, marketers, and PACs can pay to subtly influence responses as they choose.

We've all seen this movie before, though.

I love this line of thinking but the framing comes across to me as a bit inflammatory and uncharitable. Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas can be viewed as a virus! That is because, when viewed from an evolutionary biology perspective, ideas are the cognitive equivalent of genes (in fact, this is where the term meme comes from).

There's a whole field, evolutionary memetics, dedicated to this. Cultural values, marketing, religion, social media, education, propaganda, etc. can all be viewed quite naturally through this lense. Even the terms we use in every day language (eg, going "viral") seem to intuitively grasp this.

Is my friend a virus for recommending me their favorite book? Well, yes I guess, but that's kind of just how ideas work. Just my two cents