WTF-Beta

@jon-nyc said:

They’re over 20 years old. It’s just that prescribing them for weight loss is newish. Used to be just diabetes.

Wow, I didn’t know that! I knew that expanding them to general weight loss came after their use for diabetes, but I thought the drugs themselves were truly new.

@jon-nyc said:

I strongly suspect that the risk to your health of obesity greatly exceeds the risk of this potential side effect if it is one.

Probably. Still, if someone isn’t diabetic and is just taking the drugs for weight loss, they ought to know whether it incurs an increase in this kind of risk that they wouldn’t otherwise have.

I’m probably more attuned to thinking about relative risks with medications

I would imagine!

given that I take drugs known to cause chronic kidney disease (with utter certainty, the only question is severity) and increase my skin cancer risk by 100x (not a typo).

I didn’t realize that! Are there things you can do to mitigate these risks?

@Rontuner said:

So far our son's research job is still ok - I believe lots of private funding has been able to bridge the gaps left behind by the Trumpublican regime

Hopefully your son will continue to helped both those resources.

But some of those gaps are just going to go unfilled.

@bernard thank you!

P.S. i meant to say, "not enough research to definitively establish a cause-and-effect relationship" does not mean that such a relationship doesn't exist.

OMG!

a 63-year-old man was prescribed Ozempic to manage his diabetes in 2023 and woke up four months later with loss of vision in one eye. He continued taking the medication, not knowing it had been linked to vision problems in some clinical trials and studies, and lost sight in his other eye in October 2024.

"Now legally blind, Engel has had to quit his job and give up his commercial driver’s license. He can’t see his grandkids play baseball, he said, and the couple has shelved much of their retirement travel bucket list," USA TODAY reported.

Ok, also this:

There is currently not enough research to definitively establish a cause-and-effect relationship between GLP-1s and NAION or other vision changes.

But seriously, these glp-1 drugs are so new, doctors should be more cautious about prescribing them, and any new illness or symptom in a person on a glp-1 maybe should lead to increased scrutiny of possible connections.

@RealPlayer said:

My daughter’s job will soon be ending

I'm so sorry to hear this!!

@Jodi thank you!

@Mary-Anna Oh cool!! I wonder what their song catalog looks like.

The ones in Japan are soooo comprehensive, with all kinds genres, languages etc.

thank you @mary-anna

@Piano-Dad said:

Piano*Son's job is in jeopardy.

I'm so sorry!

STEM research is collapsing along with humanities.

Yep. It's a blood bath. And there are so, so many other horrible things that are happening, that a lot of these "little side attacks" are just not on the radar for most people.

I put "little side attacks" in scare quotes because most of these will have (are already having) significant, far-reaching, long-lasting impacts that far exceed the surface level area (i.e., a completely derailed stem and humanities research engine is going to be far more destructive than most people realize.)

Well, it finally happened to me. I knew it would happen eventually. You-know-who axed a grant program I had applied to. They were supposed to announce the results at the beginning of September. As the days came and went and there was no announcement, I started to suspect this would happen.

He announced a new “pocket rescission" package on Friday. Although the announcement doesn’t name the program we applied to, apparently it’s been canceled because it’s in the “Ed funding for woke international education” category, listed here:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/2026/09/president-trump-takes-historic-action-to-eliminate-wasteful-and-harmful-spending/

I spent the better part of the summer preparing this grant application, I am (was) the project lead for this project that would have had a 6-digit figure budget (a huge and ambitious project in my field, which doesn’t need expensive equipment or labs, so project funding is generally much more modest than in stem fields, so the project we proposed was a huge deal and would have been a sizing for the research I do).

I would rather have had the project rejected than the entire program canceled because of this *sshat’s idiotic policies.

I knew we shouldn’t have applied for a federal grant under this administration. What a huge f*cking waste of time that was.

Dammit.

Red

On the subject of the cello… I believe I have written about my recent experience playing with a cellist who’s a doctoral student (cello performance) in the music school here. Like @kluurs I loved having that amazing resonance in my living room.

I’ve also played with violinists, and I really enjoy it, but there’s something that’s just so compelling about the cello.

The first time I ever played with a cellist was many years ago (maybe around 2017? Before COVID, before I had a grand). I didn’t realize how amazing the cello is as an instrument, and so I wasn’t “emotionally” prepared for having that sound right next to me. As soon as he started to play, I teared up and found to very hard to maintain composure and keep playing.

That’s the essence of music. It vibrates to the very core of your being. I think all music has the potential to do that, but maybe the cello just does it exceptionally well…

I used to love singing! When we lived in Japan, we went to karaoke all the time. Mostly pop music, but singing is singing. And for the record, karaoke in Japan is not like US karaoke, which is not something I have a very favorable impression of. In Japan, each group gets a private room with its own karaoke equipment, you can order food and drink and you reserve the room for some amount of time. So you’re just singing with your friends, no one else. And Mr. SK has a beautiful voice.

I also used to do more accompanying myself at the piano. I had a piano teacher who also taught voice and she taught me a lot of warm up activities and different techniques for bringing your voice out, and how to use your stomach to support your singing etc.

I got away from singing somehow and now my voice is out of practice and I can feel that I’ve sort of forgotten how to sing.

That’s ok, I have more than enough musical activities to keep me busy, but I can imagine that (if I ever get to retire…) I would enjoy joining a choir in the future.

Be

@Mary-Anna said:

Claire de Lune has been on the edge of being too hard for me for my entire adult life.

Ok this makes me feel better!!!

I was already thinking that this is a piece I need to "learn," and then put away for a few years and come back to. But the "come back to" part doesn't work if I don't learn it first, so that's one reason I decided to stick with it.

My piano teacher thinks I can have it ready for the final jury, but I think she's either being very nice, very overly optimistic, or just completely misunderstanding my level!

Yay! I’m glad to hear this! Keep us posted on how it goes!

My piano class at the uni is also underway. I’m working on Clair de Lune, which I still think is just on the edge of being too hard, so I also have three other pieces I’m working on as well. One of these will eventually become the piece I have to play for the final jury.

Vortex

Diggity

@Rontuner said:

Does anyone know if there are 'directives' that the AI models are following? Or are they just set free to explore and do whatever they want exploring the digital realm???

This is something I've been wondering about too (since reading about the Hugging Face incident...)

I think it's a combination of a directive (do some task) and then that task-oriented behavior getting out of hand.

This fits with the description in the article @axtremus links:

OpenAI’s agent had been conducting internet based research into health statistics in a development project by an internal OpenAI research team. When it could not access certain information, the agent attempted alternative ways until it found a work around and gained unauthorized access. It also wrote files to the internal server, which the government is waiting on OpenAI for more technical information on. The government is also investigating whether the agent gained unauthorised access to three additional government websites it interacted with.

So it's not a "go hack this site" directive, it's AI going rogue (or wild) on its own. Which is much worse, IMO.

For

@Rontuner said:

My dad used to swear by ammonia...

The site I saw that recommended rubbing alcohol also said ammonia is an option.

If you want a treatment that works for a long time, I've been using Aquapel for about a decade. If rubbed in properly, you shouldn't get any of the haze.

Thanks, I’ll look that up!