The Amyloid hypothesis persisted for so long because we didn't have any obvious counterarguments since it is so hard to do studies on the brain. Which also means that it's not a bad hypothesis.
What happened is we got the tools to start studying viral associations with other diseases and ... whooops ... suddenly there are associations. The shingles and RSV vaccines seem to affect dementia while others like influenza don't.
Now people can ask questions about why those particular vaccines affect dementia while others don't. And suddenly we have falsifiable tests.
Now we can subject all hypotheses (including Amyloid) to stronger scrutiny.
There were no cointerarguments? There was a very simple counterargument: where was the causal data? If none exist why should I counter argue when you hadn't proven it to begin with.
There is a LOT of causal data. Autopsies of brains of Alzheimer's patients were rife with amyloid. People with mutations that caused amyloid got Alzheimer's earlier than others.
The hypothesis didn't come from nowhere.
To contrast, look at how much trouble medicine has had treating brain tumors. It has taken a long time to get effective treatments for various reasons. And Alzheimer's is way less direct in cause/effect.
> People with mutations in those genes got a particular type of inherited alzheimers early, this says nothing about the cause of general Alzheimers.
This is completely analogous to claiming that people with mutations in BRCA (which causes a lot of early breast cancers) says nothing about general "cancer".
That's simply flat-out wrong. Genetic mutations like BRCA affect certain subsystems and many of those subsystems are common and relevant to many different cancers outside of breast cancer or breast cancers that appear later. Lots and lots of cancer research proceeded by studying the common systems that BRCA affects. Sure, those subsystems aren't involved in every cancer, but they're involved in a solid chunk of them.
And, even better, when you find one that isn't affected by one of those subsystems that BRCA touches, that's an interesting result, too. Now you can look at what the differences are, figure out what the new subsystems are and categorize your cancer more specifically which makes successful treatment more likely.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that Alzheimer's is any different on that front.
It has nothing to do with price. I don't check luggage on domestic flights because of the enormous time lag for the airport to give me back my luggage. (There's also "United Breaks Guitars", but that's an independent problem)
If I could walk from the plane to the luggage area and my luggage was already there 90% of the time, I probably would check more things.
However, the US airports simply don't employ enough people to move the luggage around fast enough.
The is 100% correctable by employing more people. But some CEO needs another yacht, so they don't. So, I simply don't check luggage.
Proebsting's Law: Compiler Advances Double Computing Power Every 18 Years
You need to implement very few optimizations to get the vast majority of compiler improvements.
Many of the papers about this suggest that we would be better off focusing on making quality of life improvements for the programmer (like better debugger integration) rather than abstruse and esoteric compiler optimizations that make understanding the generated code increasingly difficult.
> But I also accept that that choice means there's an upper limit to how fast my compiler will.
Don't buy it.
A decent OCaml version of a C or Zig compiler would almost certainly not be 10x slower. And it would be significantly easier to parallelize without introducing bugs so it might even be quite a bit faster on big codebases.
Actually designing your programming language to be processed quickly (can definitively figure things out with local parsing, minimizing the number of files that need to be touched, etc.) is WAY more important than the low-level implementation for overall compilation speed.
And I suspect that the author would have gotten a lot further had he been using a GC language and not had to deal with all the low-level issues and debugging.
I like Zig, and I use it a lot. But it is NOT my general purpose language. I'm definitely going to reach for Python first unless I absolutely know that I'm going to be doing systems programming. Python (or anything garbage collected with solid libraries) simply is way more productive on short time scales for small codebases.
> I suspect that the author would have gotten a lot further had he been using a GC language and not had to deal with all the low-level issues
Agree, that many people are using languages out of context to what they are actually trying to do. In many cases, using a GC language would be far more productive for them. Though I do think we should distinguish between compiled and interpreted GC languages, as often there is a significant gap in performance, that can be wanted or appreciated.
> Though I do think we should distinguish between compiled and interpreted GC languages, as often there is a significant gap in performance, that can be wanted or appreciated.
Sure, that is tautologically true.
However, I maintain that the original author would have gotten much further even with a pathologically slow Python implementation. In particular, munging all the low-level stuff like linking is going to have full-on libraries that you could pass off the task to. You can then come back and do it yourself later.
For me, reaching a point that helps reinforce my motivation is BY FAR the most relevant consideration for projects. Given the original article, it seems like I'm not alone.
People viscerally feel the disdain from the monopolies giving you the "What are you gonna do? Switch to a competitor? BWHAHAHAHA! Good luck, plebe." And it makes them angry.
For all intents and purposes, every single supply chain devolves to a cabal of suppliers who have no downstream capacity. As such, even if someone downstream wanted to shake up their competition, they can't get the supply to do it. Covid didn't cause this, but it did make it obvious to even the dumbest businesspeople. Consequently, all the businesses across the chain have settled into extraction knowing that their position is unassailable.
The problem is that the general public fails to diagnose that the issue is monopolistic control, and that the solution is to keep breaking these cabals up everywhere, aggressively.
> Yes, it's nice that computers and phones are super cheap and powerful.
It was nice, but that's quickly changing now that the consumer market is being ignored by chip makers who'd rather sell to companies building data centers
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