tooth decay

Persons with psychiatric disorders were approximately 3 to 4 times more likely than their siblings without psychiatric disorders to be either subjected to violence or to perpetrate violence […] with the sole exception of schizophrenia, which was not associated with the risk of subjection to violence.

Lantern Bioworks says they have a cure for tooth decay. Their product is a genetically modified bacterium which infects your mouth, outcompetes all the tooth-decay-causing bacteria, and doesn’t cause tooth decay itself. If it works, it could make cavities a thing of the past

Light can be reflected not only in space but also in time

Interview with Nick Bostrom “I think AI is likely to greatly increase the ability of centralised powers to keep track of what people are thinking and saying. We’ve already had, for a couple of decades, the ability to collect huge amounts of information. You can eavesdrop on people’s phone calls or social-media postings — and it turns out governments do that. But what can you do with that information? So far, not that much. You can map out the network of who is talking to whom. And then, if there is a particular individual of concern, you could assign some analyst to read through their emails. With AI technology, you could simultaneously analyse everybody’s political opinions in a sophisticated way, using sentiment analysis. You could probably form a pretty good idea of what each citizen thinks of the government or the current leader if you had access to their communications. So you could have a kind of mass manipulation, but instead of sending out one campaign message to everybody, you could have customised persuasion messages for each individual. And then, of course, you can combine that with physical surveillance systems like facial recognition, gait recognition and credit card information. If you imagine all of this information feeding into one giant model, I think you will have a pretty good idea of what each person is up to, what and who they know, but also what they are thinking and intending to do. If you have some sufficiently powerful regime in place, it might then implement these measures and then, perhaps, make itself immune to overthrow.”

Google’s new Gemini AI model is getting a mixed reception after its big debut yesterday, but users may have less confidence in the company’s tech or integrity after finding out that the most impressive demo of Gemini was pretty much faked.

Apple report finds steep increase in data breaches, ransomware […] One in four people in the US had their health data exposed in a data breach during the first nine months of 2023.

“There’s been studies that swab the bottom of shoes and something like 99% of the shoes test positive for fecal material.”

To my surprise, this not only hasn’t collapsed, but has attracted people outside the usual prediction market community — Manifold founded a dating site, manifold.love. The idea is, you bet on who would be a good match, and make (play) money if they end up having a second date or continuing on to a relationship.

The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets