Doing your own oil changes is not worth the hassle when considering the risk of a spill and the difficulty of legal disposal—unless you have a fancy engine that needs frequent oil changes.
Cabin air filter and wiper fluid, sure. Headlights and taillights used to be a no-brainer, but now those are often sealed LED assemblies and difficult to access as well.
What hassle? Just put the oil pan down and there's no spill risk. Disposal is extremely easy. You can walk into an autozone and give them your used oil and they take care of it for free, you don't even need to be a customer. Most cities and towns also have facilities for oil disposal.
Again it is like 5 mins of hands on work if you are taking your time.
That's a very clear vision on how to solve this kind of funding/cooperation problem outside of government and mission-focused nonprofits. And incidentally would be an existential threat to surveillance capitalism should it reach critical mass.
BTW your password-based signup flow isn't working (on iOS Safari at least).
:-) Yeah. Only SSO was working because while email would double my users, I was doing an experiment and looking for at least some signs of life. Doubling nothing would be useless.
Turns out, some new enrollments topped up their accounts and dropped off before the final step that makes it show up on the home page, so now I know it's something, and something is worth doubling.
Yeah, there were two streams that I tried so far. Interestingly, PrizeForge itself initially got $105, a $100 and a $5 enrollment. The UI was even shittier. I took one look at that $100 and knew I've got to f&*#ing go.
So, for a second experiment, I was actually running a stream for Emacs (yeah, yeah, I know, I know). They managed to raise all of $10 for themselves. The premise was to pay out a weekly prize for whoever developed something cool. Super simple.
There's so little data, but it very clearly, very, very clearly seems to say the enthusiasm is for PrizeForge to get good more than it was to use PrizeForge for something else.
And I'm going to keep expanding in various directions because there's no way I'm oriented yet, but it's not nothing. It's terrible UX, terrible everything, but just clearly enough on top of something.
I think LLMs are more like the invention of high level programming languages when all we had before was assembly. Computers will be programmable and operable in “natural language”—for all of its imprecision and mushiness.
5mg may be an order of magnitude more than needed.
I started my father [0] on ≈200ug and he was more animated and looked at photos around the house much more. Bumped him up to ≈500ug [1] the last two days, and he’s shown a nearly unbelievable improvement in lucidity and recognition.
He’s still nonverbal but babbling a lot more, and in a non-agitated way. He’ll make eye contact with us more and wiggle his eyebrows. He has not been running away from me during morning yogurt and other meals we sometimes have standing up. More responsive to music, photos, eye contact.
He actually kissed my mom today and then got teary-eyed. He hasn’t done anything like that in at least a year.
Tonight when he was tired, he wasn't unstoppably wandering. He was tired but still “there” and lucid. I was able to calmly walk him to his bedroom.
Lithium orotate might be the magic bullet. Lithium deficiency could very well be the cause of age-related neurodegeneration. It’s too early in my personal case study to draw firm conclusions, but this is looking absolutely incredible from my perspective as a caregiver. Subjectively, he seems no longer “lost” in the darkness.
If he is still stable and/or improving in a month, I will be making as much noise about this treatment as I can online and in meatspace. [2]
[0] Early onset posterior cortical atrophy and corticobasal degeneration. It presents initially as visual disturbances, hallucinations, and coordination problems rather than memory loss. Sometimes memory and speech can persist until the end.
[1] I opened up some 5mg Nutricost capsules, weighed the contents, and calculated how much of the mixture is needed for a given amount of active ingredient. Then I measure out each dose on a calibrated milligram scale. This is definitely out of reach for many people, so ideally companies can just add a small dose to multivitamins and call it a day. I’ve been taking the same dose I give my dad, and have not noticed much of anything.
[2] There are some ethical considerations in halting the disease process for those with late stage dementia. It would be inhumane to “cure” advanced AD if one has no hope of a life worth living, given one’s current capabilities and options. (For example, bed-bound in nursing homes with severe memory loss.) I’m very optimistic about lithium orotate, but I doubt it can do more than halt the neurodegeneration—which would mean rapidly hitting a low ceiling for cognitive improvements after beginning the therapy. That also means a practically life-long caregiving requirement. I didn’t want to be a caregiver for my father for the next 30+ years, but frankly I did not expect such a dramatic and immediate improvement in his condition. I expected nothing at all to happen.
> Replacement therapy with lithium orotate, which is a Li salt with reduced amyloid binding, prevents pathological changes and memory loss in AD mouse models and ageing wild-type mice.
> LiOr is proposed to cross the blood–brain barrier and enter cells more readily than Li2CO3, which will theoretically allow for reduced dosage requirements and ameliorated toxicity concerns.
The important part is this: “a Li salt with reduced amyloid binding”
If cells in the brain are being deprived of lithium due to sequestration by amyloid beta plaques, then a bioavailable form of lithium that is resistant to sequestration may treat the pathology.
> We reasoned that the electrostatic interaction of the Li ion with Aβ deposits would be a function of the ionization capacity of the salt, and that Li salts with reduced ionization might show reduced amyloid sequestration. To assess ionization directly, we measured the conductivity of 16 lithium salts. Inorganic Li salts, including the clinical standard lithium carbonate (Li2CO3, hereafter LiC), showed significantly elevated conductivity, indicative of increased ionization, relative to organic Li salts (P = 8 × 10−4; Fig. 5a and Extended Data Fig. 7a). Of the organic Li salts, lithium orotate (C5H3LiN2O4, hereafter LiO) showed the lowest conductance across a broad Li concentration range (Fig. 5a and Extended Data Fig. 7a) and was therefore selected for further comparison with the clinical standard LiC.
From my not-exactly-expert understanding: lithium is a teeny tiny cation, and it can form compounds on a whole spectrum from ionic to covalent-ish. The authors are observing that lithium orotate does not fully dissociate in water.
Sure, but the amount and form of the lithium matters. 5mg of lithium orotate (as a supplement) versus 600mg lithium carbonate (as a mood stabilizer) will have vastly different acute and chronic health effects.
I’m a newish Kagi user and I find myself using the LLM about as frequently as search itself.
Sometimes I search for things I know I am looking for. Other times I don’t know quite what I’m looking for or I know in advance that I’m not likely to find it—so I chuck it at Llama 4 Maverick and it usually gives me something useful.
I had no plans to use the LLMs until they opened it up on my tier. At this point however, it’s half the value I get out of Kagi.
The genius of capitalism is in its unique ability to harness the energy of sociopaths* to produce valuable products and services**.
If there was no freedom to amass fortunes, these people would still exist, and they would do even more damage in whatever theoretical social structure we would have.
* And to a lesser degree, the self-interest everybody naturally possesses.
** Minimizing negative externalities is the responsibility of government accountable to the people.
Cabin air filter and wiper fluid, sure. Headlights and taillights used to be a no-brainer, but now those are often sealed LED assemblies and difficult to access as well.