AI-hardware startup, iyO is suing Jony Ive's AI-hardware startup called io for trademark infringement, right after OpenAI bought them for $6.5 billion.
Getting a little beyond the headline, we find they had people wear blood pressure monitors and accelerometers and concluded:
> More time spent exercising or sleeping, relative to other behaviors, was associated with lower BP. An additional 5 minutes of exercise-like activity was associated with estimated reductions of –0.68 mm Hg (95% CI, –0.15, –1.21) SBP and –0.54 mm Hg (95% CI, –0.19, 0.89) DBP. Clinically meaningful improvements in SBP and DBP were estimated after 20 to 27 minutes and 10 to 15 minutes of reallocation of time in other behaviors into additional exercise. [1]
Somewhat related is Betteridge's law of headlines:
> Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no. It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not.
I like to swap out any of these maybe-headlines with the exact opposite. It may help us, or it may not.
> Just five minutes of activity a day was estimated to potentially reduce blood pressure, while replacing sedentary behaviours with 20-27 minutes of exercise per day, including uphill walking, stair-climbing, running and cycling, was also estimated to lead to a clinically meaningful reduction in blood pressure.
Sounds like 5 minutes of exercise is where it has a statistically significant measurable impact in blood pressure, but 20-27 minutes is where it's a meaningful impact.
The headline is about a study that showed increased activity was correlated with decreases in blood pressure.
So, no, it's not equally accurate to say the opposite is "equally accurate" unless we're playing pedantic games where we ignore the study and pretend it's all just meaningless words.
I did a simple test of "Chicago Velodrome", it provided something that has been closed since 2016, Google gave a better result of something that is actually around but in the Chicagoland area
"For the two in every five patients who discontinue the treatments within a year, according to a 2024 JAMA study, this means that they are likely to rebound to their original weight with less muscle and a higher body fat percentage."
The other issue is the muscle loss on being on these drugs as "Clinical data shows that 25 per cent of weight loss from Eli Lilly’s shot resulted from a reduction in lean body mass, including muscle, while 40 per cent of Novo Nordisk’s jab was due to a drop in lean body mass."
Via https://www.ft.com/content/094cbf1f-c5a8-4bb3-a43c-988bd8e2d...
Right, so we doom some portion of the population to forever take a pill from big pharma? How is that acceptable with anyone?
The goal should be to use Ozempic until you are in a better place to manage things yourself. The goal should not be to get people hooked on Ozempic for their entire lives.
Perhaps Ozempic prescriptions should come with prescribed exercise with check-in and monitoring, or something.
I guess young people don't always know this, but there are plenty of medications a lot of people take for the rest of their lives. Blood pressure and cholesterol pills are maybe the most common.
This gives a vast number of people 5-10 years longer lives, and I think this is great thing, even if some pharma executives end up getting rich.
Or insulin. I’ve been shortsighted since childhood and will need to wear glasses for the rest of my life (unless I get laser corrective surgery, I guess).
Many people in my wife’s family have thyroid gland dysfunction and have to take thyroid hormones their whole lives.
Not just young people. High blood pressure runs in our family. A cousin, despite being healthy in most indicators, developed high blood pressure at 23. She's still going in her 50s just fine but has had to take blood pressure meds for the last 27 years.
This thread has multiple people relating their personal stories of using ozempic to start building those healthy habits. Also, it doesn't just magically get rid of fat so you can eat more, its supposed to make you feel full longer (as I understand it, someone feel free to correct me on that).
Plus, even if it did magically get rid of fat temporarily, I'd rather encourage people to do something rather than simply shaming them for giving into a very human addiction.
Your biggest concern around glp-1 drugs shouldn't be the overweight people successfully slimming down, it should be people who are already a healthy enough weight who think they need to be even skinnier (something I've encountered plenty of).
> its supposed to make you feel full longer (as I understand it, someone feel free to correct me on that).
It's complicated. This is commonly reported by people taking it, but it's not the only mechanism. Also commonly reported are that it reduces hunger levels flat out across the board, makes you feel full after eating less food, and that as you get used to eating less food your stomach physically gets smaller and you can't even eat as much food at all even if you tried to force yourself to (e.g. at a big holiday meal full of delicious food where you want to eat everything so long as physically able to, well past the point of hunger).
Yes, it is within the realm of human power for every individual to not be obese.
But the fact of the matter is... a huge chunk of people don't succeed. 42% of American adults are obese. "Eat better and exercise" has not resolved the issue.
I spent a good chunk of my adult life eating well, doing cardio, lifting weights and loving it. Then I got busy with life and stopped. And it has been incredibly difficult to get back to that and gets harder as I get older. I don't think I'm some paragon of willpower - if so, I wouldn't have fallen off the wagon. But I think it would also be silly to think that if someone who has a proven track record of maintaining that for years can struggle with maintaining it for a lifetime, there's probably a lot of people who have never even had that much success who are going to have even worse of a time.
Are we going to moralize over bp meds and statins too? If people can't adapt, fuck 'em, let 'em die young?
We don't get pissed that elephants don't climb trees. What value is it to characterize people's obesity entirely as slovenness and gluttony? While there are certainly some slobs and glutton, dismissive judgmentality of everyone doesn't make sense.
For this reason, I believe your comment is lacking in empathy for people who may struggle differently than you, yet struggle all the same.
Sure of the almost 8 billion people in the world there are plenty who have successfully lost and kept off weight.
But if you want to see if there is a reproduceable lifestyle intervention that treats obesity successfully in the long term you can look here. After a few hours of searching you will probably find the same thing I and almost all obesity researchers have concluded. There isn't one.
There are two ways to lower weight. Eat less, and Ozempic. I don't think it's any of my business which one people pick. The important thing is that they become healthy.
I've realized people are very different. Some can just decide to eat less by applying a little willpower. For others, that's incredibly hard. If you're in group 1, it's easy to think everyone is and be appalled how others can't even put in that little bit of effort.
Can you provide evidence that a statistically significant portion of the population have managed to maintain weight loss in the manner you describe?
The evidence I see does not support your claim. Obesity rates have only gone up during my lifetime and the folks I know in the medical field have consistently mentioned how diet and exercise simply does not have any sort of patient compliance. The folks who successfully do it are outliers.
I will go for the harm reduction principle on this one. The molecules themselves are trivially mass produced for less than $10 a dose and are already being sourced for that cost by folks who are willing to take a bit more risk to do so. Cost seems to be about the only major side effect so far.
> doom some portion of the population to forever take a pill from big pharma
That is temporary. The effects are real. The fact that you don't think big pharma should profit handsomely for making it happen is not the only alternative. Before too long semaglutide, as one example, will be out of patent and available as a generic. It won't cost a thousand bucks a month to big pharma, it'll be practically free. Cheap enough that most insurance plans will likely subsidize it all the way to zero out-of-pocket cost just because the ROI is so good.
How my decisions will affect some company's bottom line is way behind "will this help me live a better, longer life" in my list of priorities, but I'm already on other medications that are generic for the rest of my life for other genetic defects I've been blessed with, though I'm not on Ozempic.
Why not? What would you rather be: Fat to your death, or healthy and dependent on modern technological society in yet another way? How is it any different to diabetes treatment?
I take a statin as something in my body produces high levels of cholesterol even on a low fat diet. I will always take a statin. It works well and there are few side effects.
My spouse must take a thyroid medicine every day for life.
Not taking these pills is life threatening. How is taking them not acceptable?
Grass is always greener. You don't know the counterfactual and you would have likely been disappointed in your parents had they sent you to college early as well.
I'll let other people, like the parent comment, speak to their experiences. He, at least, doesn't seem to think my grass was greener.
I do think listening to any of the professional educators who unanimously and repeatedly told my parents it would have been better to accelerate my path through school would have been a good idea.
First of all, neither do /you/ know the counterfactual and so you have no bearing on whether or not this person "would have likely been disappointed in your parents had they sent you to college early as well."
Do you have any experience with folks who went to secondary education early? Because I was miserable in high school bored out of my mind and left 1 year only and my only regret was not leaving even earlier like some of my peers did. Speaking platitudes like "the grass is always greener" may make you feel better but it doesn't line up with 25% of the profiles of students I've seen go to secondary education early (and I know a lot of them).
Genuine question, cause I don't live in the US, is starting college at 17 unusual? Over here half of the cohort finishing high school are 17, so I expect a similar proportion starting college here are 17.
Personally I had a 2 year gap between high school and university, so I went from being one of the youngest in my year to one of the oldest,which was kinda nice. Plus the time away taught me some self reliance so college was pretty easy to adjust to.
Canadian here, but I think the US follows the same age-grade mapping. Kids usually enter Kindergarten in September of the calendar year in which they turn 5, i.e. those born January-August are 5 years old and those born September-December are still 4 years old. After that, grades 1-12 follow with a majority of post-secondary-education-bound students entering a few months later.
So yes, in the modal case (advancing with the cohort) a student entering college will start at 17 years old if their birthday is late in the year.
There is a legitimate start-up that basically is outsourcing tasks to a digital personal assistant but they log all questions and their researched answers. It make take a while but they will have a moat within a few years with a really robust repository.
The problem is that this then becomes a cache invalidation problem. Many of the examples presented will be outdated in 1 year, and completely wrong in 5. How can you know which answers need to turnover and when?
That's definitely one way to do it. Our approach is not to literally run a concierge search engine, but rather build up intuitions on how humans effectively find knowledge on the Web and then build tools to make that easier.
Is that the end-game of the startup you mentioned?
How can users be sure that "results" aren't sponsored?
I imagine that whoever runs such a service would get hounded by paid placement opportunities if it takes off. A similar issue plagues browser extension devs.
It doesn't bother me in the slightest - it honestly feels a bit more polite than just barreling in with a question. I was sort of surprised when I found out just how passionately it bothers the people it does bother, though, so I've made a conscious effort to stop doing it.
I'm 100% fine with Hi. <Press enter> <Ask Question>. It's Hi <Press Enter> <Wait for a response> <Ask Question> that makes me homicidal. It makes it completely impossible for me to prioritize this discussion.
The difference is that when you press enter I get an alert. Then you take 30 seconds or 2 minutes (or more) to think through and type out your question. Now I just have to sit there waiting for your question.
If you’re going to melt my face when we are talking you should at least bring me a sandwich too. I’d hire that guy for sure. Hasn’t happened yet, but I’ll still hold out hope.
