papetoast

• papetoast 19 Jun 2026 6:27 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: DW11’s comment on: DW11′s Shortform

  I don’t, but here are other people’s thoughts.

  Midjourney Medical | Hacker News

  jmhmd: Some initial thoughts as a practicing radiologist:

  • (…)

  • They show the reconstructed images as though they are a low resolution CT, and promise that quality will improve as they iterate. This is cool, but ultrasound is not CT. Ultrasound cannot image the lungs, as they are filled with air. You cannot find bone lesions, as the sound waves do not penetrate the cortex. You cannot image many structures in the abdomen if they are surrounded by gas-filled bowel. The brain is encased in bone, so you might get some penetration but it will be very limited. Even with theoretically perfect AI reconstruction, these scans will not be true “full body” in that there will be structures that are not reliably imaged. Imagine paying for weekly full body scans for years, everything looks fine, then its the lung cancer surrounded by air and invisible to ultrasound that kills you (that’s why we use CT for lung screening!)

  • The images they show are very cool, and do appear to show the correct structures. I realize this is early, but fuzzy shapes of organs is very, very far from medically useful. The whole point of screening is to identify problems early, often by definition, small. This technology looks like it will be best for seeing large, superficial (close to the skin) structures, whereas for effective screening, you want the opposite—small, deep structures.

  • (…)

  • Many people mistakenly believe that early diagnosis is the final boss in medicine, that if only we could find every cancer early we could prevent all those deaths. There are, in fact, many, many other hurdles and bottlenecks. Many chronic, expensive diseases do not have clear imaging manifestations. The claim that “it’s completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs”, I think, to any practicing physician, would sound completely divorced from reality.

  IshKebab: I used to work in ultrasound, and full body scans with the body underwater is definitely feasible and probably a good idea.

  Also there’s absolutely no way that it will be as good as MRI. In general ultrasound imaging is shit. The main reasons it is used are because it is very cheap and completely harmless. The actual images you get are mostly just speckle.

  https://​​www.astralcodexten.com/​​p/​​preliminary-thoughts-on-the-midjourney + his twitter thread

  I think the narrative among the SF AI crowd has escaped its basis in the medical facts, so I want to throw a bit of cold water on it. I’m a psychiatrist, which is about as far as you can get from radiology while still being a doctor, so this is speculation only, and you can ignore it if you find an actual radiologist or ultrasonographer with opinions. Still, my take is that this scanner isn’t useful for most current serious medical applications. It could potentially be used to pioneer a new class of low-risk screening applications, but it’s unclear whether these are good, and depends a lot on what other future technology gets invented in parallel.

  Why can’t this immediately replace existing medical image modalities like normal ultrasound, CT, or MRI?

  Ultrasound is great, but it can’t penetrate bone or air. Many things doctors want to look at involve bone or air in some way.

  Couldn’t this technology enable new, non-specific-diagnostic uses for healthy people?

  why don’t people get yearly whole-body MRI screenings? Some people do—companies like this provide them, and some rich people who can pay $2,000 out of pocket consume them. But the medical consensus currently recommends against them because they’re more likely to produce dangerous false positives than helpful true positives, and studies have failed to demonstrate benefit.

  Couldn’t this technology become more useful in the future?

  Yes. I think the best way to think of this is as a bet that future technology develops in a way that allows new possibilities for diagnostic ultrasound—or, even better, an attempt to gather the training data /​ interest /​ investment that will make this happen.

  Appendix: Highlights From The Comments On Twitter

  I mentioned this on Twitter and got some great responses.

  The responses from real radiologists were universally negative. Here are some examples: (screenshots are annoying to embed please go to the blog)

  The trivial reason is that due to the limitations of physics ultrasound will always be less capable at resolving anatomy than MRI or x-ray-based methods that we already have

• papetoast 18 Jun 2026 22:11 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: papetoast’s comment on: pa­petoast’s low qual­ity shortforms

  Reinforcement learning towards broadly and persistently beneficial models (linkpost)

Re­in­force­ment learn­ing to­wards broadly and per­sis­tently benefi­cial models

• papetoast 17 Jun 2026 3:53 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: papetoast’s comment on: pa­petoast’s low qual­ity shortforms

  Can public chat data predict real-world AI misalignments? (linkpost)

Can pub­lic chat data pre­dict real-world AI mis­al­ign­ments?

• papetoast 17 Jun 2026 3:50 UTC

  5 points

  0

  on: [Geir Isene] A desk­top made for one

  I think you forgot to link the post: https://​​isene.org/​​2026/​​05/​​Audience-of-One.html

Links #3: 2026/​06 Part 1

• papetoast 8 Jun 2026 8:56 UTC

  1 point

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  on: pa­petoast’s low qual­ity shortforms

  A trick for mentally calculating squares of two digit numbers (via bilibili):

  Basically, choose such that either or is a multiple of 10, then use

  Example:

  1. For 26, the closest multiple of 10 is 30, so

  2. ;

  This algorithm can be extended recursively for squares of n digit numbers, though it is seems less useful.

• papetoast 7 Jun 2026 17:38 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Brendan Long’s comment on: pa­petoast’s low qual­ity shortforms

  There are more details in Table 5 Decision Thresholds that I didnt quote. Basically 80%+ is rejected.

• papetoast 7 Jun 2026 2:23 UTC

  6 points

  0

  on: pa­petoast’s low qual­ity shortforms

  NeurIPS 2026 is using Pangram to reject LLM writing

  This year, the NeurIPS 2026 Position Paper Track made the decision to require that all papers be substantially human-written, with AI used for only copy-editing or similar peripheral changes to the main text.

  To assess if authors were largely abiding by this policy, we partnered with Pangram

  • 178 submissions (18.4% of all submissions) will be desk rejected

  • 123 submissions (12.7%) will be requested to provide evidence of substantial human engagement or risk a desk reject.

  Conference	# Papers	Pangram AI Score
  		≥ 50%	≥ 90%	= 100%
  NeurIPS PPT 2025	536	28.5%	11.9%	8.2%
  NeurIPS PPT 2026	971	70.5%	42.7%	28.2%
  NeurIPS D&B 2025	996	5.6%	0.8%	0.4%
  NeurIPS E&D 2026	996	43.7%	9.3%	2.1%
  FAccT 2022	159	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
  FAccT 2025	204	1.0%	1.0%	0.0%

• papetoast 6 Jun 2026 4:04 UTC

  1 point

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  on: pa­petoast’s low qual­ity shortforms

  A null effect on pain relief from acupuncture in a pre-registered, improperly double-blinded study (via National Geographic via Facebook)

  I didn’t read the paper beyond AI summary, I read the national geographic article in full (which is misleading according to claude)

  Selected AI Summary (Full Transcript)

  Short version: the underlying paper is methodologically honest and reasonably well-run, but its evidence for acupuncture having a specific (beyond-placebo) effect is weak. The National Geographic article substantially oversells it — it leads with a fragile secondary finding and quietly drops the fact that the trial’s primary outcome was null.

  The pre-registered primary outcome was vulvar pain (Average Pain Intensity) at end of treatment, real needles vs. sham. Result: no difference. Effect size 0.06, 95% CI −0.36 to 0.24, p=0.70. Secondary outcomes (dyspareunia, sexual function) also null. Response rates were essentially identical: 58% acupuncture vs. 57% placebo. So the confirmatory test the trial was built around failed.

  The only “win” came from Aim 2, a secondary duration analysis: among people who responded, the placebo group relapsed to baseline pain faster (hazard ratio 2.72, 95% CI 1.13–6.54, p=0.017). That single number is the source of the article’s “12 weeks vs. 4 weeks” headline.

  Blinding failed in the active arm — and this is the deepest issue. The whole point of the design is to strip out expectation. Bang’s index showed the placebo group was properly blinded (~0, non-significant), but the penetrating-needle group was not: acupuncturists guessed correctly far above chance (index 0.43–0.58, p<0.001) and so did the real-needle patients (0.34–0.35, p<0.01). So in a trial designed to isolate specific effect from placebo, practitioners and patients in the active arm often knew it was real. Differential expectation conveyed nonverbally could produce exactly the durability gap they saw — with zero physiological mechanism. The authors acknowledge this. It’s the single best alternative explanation for the only positive result.

  I don’t really want to write this quick take, but omitting this negative result would filter evidences beyond my comfort.

• papetoast 6 Jun 2026 2:14 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Bruce Middleton’s comment on: Bruce Mid­dle­ton’s Shortform

  For the record, I didn’t downvote you. I don’t live in the US and don’t find it immediately worthwhile to understand. I won’t verify the prompt’s truthfulness, but the prompt is biased even if it is all true facts, just by the way it demonstrates the user’s position on the matter. Biased in the sense that it will predictably cause AIs to lean towards one position more than the other.

• papetoast 6 Jun 2026 2:03 UTC

  3 points

  2

  in reply to: Nikola Jurkovic’s comment on: nikola’s Shortform

  After 2020 Honor is no longer directly nor indirectly controlled by Huawei, per wiki and this content farm post that I googled and this random wiki in Chinese

• papetoast 6 Jun 2026 1:55 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Bruce Middleton’s comment on: Bruce Mid­dle­ton’s Shortform

  https://​​claude.ai/​​share/​​8940c08e-c01a-4c41-af9d-6eb77c0c6cbd

  though, asking AI with such a biased prompt is a bad idea, so I refuse to read the output beyond a skim nor write about my reaction after reading. It also feels disrespectful that you didn’t even offer your opinion and demands the reader’s opinion.

• papetoast 6 Jun 2026 1:47 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Linch’s Shortform

  wow Snopes’ journalism is great

• papetoast 2 Jun 2026 9:46 UTC

  1 point

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  on: Women should be able to open things

  As a man, I find it difficult to be consciously sympathetic of the strength difference. The force that I use to turn the faucet knob to a comfortable, definitely closed position actually requires an uncomfortable amount of force to open for my grandma. Would be interesting if someone made bottles and knobs that are 2x harder to open than usual...

• papetoast 1 Jun 2026 11:16 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: CharlieT’s comment on: Less Dead

  bump

• papetoast 1 Jun 2026 5:08 UTC

  7 points

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  on: Lizard­men are Not Con­stant—A In­tro­duc­tory Primer to Think­ing about Sur­vey Data

  Related: How Your Survey Responder Lies

  Aella didn’t even mention Lizardmen’s Constant once, but she made a bunch of twitter polls, which shows a different percentage of liars depending on the seriousness of the question and the survey.

  I think probably the immediate visibility and informality of the twitter poll gives people a jolt of delight to fuck with the results, as long as fucking with the results would be funny. 1+1 = 3 is hilarious when it’s in front of a crowd and everybody sees the stupid percentages being stupid, but it’s boring when it’s inside the solemn walls of a researcher’s guidedtrack url.

  (3³ − 23) ÷ 2 = 3, however, is deadly serious. Nobody finds that funny, crowd or not. It’s the one question where the twitter poll and survey question collapsed to almost exactly the same % of correct answer.

  There is also this showing Lizardmen’s Constant = 10%, showing how much the “constant” can vary:

  In a new study my collaborators and I focus on this hypothesis. We ask participants if this statement is true or false: “The Canadian Armed Forces have been secretly developing an elite army of genetically engineered, super intelligent, giant raccoons to invade nearby countries”.

  We found that 10% of participants endorsed this statement (i.e., they selected “Definitely true” or “Probably true”) and that this was a strong predictor of endorsing six pre-existing conspiracy theories, including two that that directly contradicted each other.

• papetoast 1 Jun 2026 4:48 UTC

  13 points

  0

  on: pa­petoast’s low qual­ity shortforms

  I am increasingly having trouble discerning AI writing from human writing in the past year. It went from glaringly obvious to being possible to miss even if I put in effort analysing. I feel worried.

  Edit: Yes, I know some, maybe most of you, can still smell out LLMs accurately, but I am getting worse at it.

  prompted by this article, which is fully AI generated according to Pangram

• papetoast 1 Jun 2026 2:19 UTC

  13 points

  7

  in reply to: JohnofCharleston’s comment on: Lighthaven East—A Fea­si­bil­ity Study

  As a non-american, Lighthaven East sounds like you’re building in Asia