Readit News> It is worth noting that this study was tbh pretty poorly performed from a psychology/neuroscience perspective and the neuro community was kind of roasting their results as uninterpretable.
Do you have links or citations to people saying these claims?
It was a bluesky thread I've since lost (lame I know). This article summarizes the issues well: https://residualinsights.com/all-hype-no-bite-your-brain-on-...
Comes down to: - Self selection bias - Trial design - Dubious intepretations of neural connectivity
It is worth noting that this study was tbh pretty poorly performed from a psychology/neuroscience perspective and the neuro community was kind of roasting their results as uninterpretable.
Their trial design and interpretation of results is not properly done (i.e. they are making unfair comparison of LLM users to non-LLM users), so they can't really make the kind of claims they are making.
This would not stand up to peer review in it's current form.
I'm also saying this as someone who generally does believe these declines exist, but this is not the evidence it claims to be.
I've been putting together a no-nonsense free invoice generator, for people (like myself) that only occasionally send invoices. It's more-or-less a WYSIWYG editor, and the state is stored in the URL, so you don't have to worry about keeping track of where you stored your copy - if you've sent someone an email with the link, you've got a copy. This project was born out of the frustration of trying to generate an invoice on my phone on the go, I found all the existing solutions to be quite awful (forced signups to paid subscriptions, clunky interface etc).
Would love to hear any feedback the HN crowd has. I'm aware of a couple of alignment issues, will fix them up tonight. Also, yes, there will be a "generate PDF" button, for now if you want a pdf I'd suggest using the Print dialog to "Save as PDF".
Nice work! Would totally have used this when I was freelancing. Honestly love the serif'd fonts, would love to see everything serif'd tbh.
Also back when I had to do these (I used Wave) having a notes section was very useful to include a few things (i.e. I used to include conversion rates). Would probably be pretty easy.
I have a PhD from a reputed US university and I agree with the fixed overhead aspect of this.
There is no reason students get a third of the grant money and live in poverty (30k per year) while the university hires a football coach for ten million and builds a new building every year.
This is exactly the way this has to be handled, the universities are intentionally making this look worse than it is for public sympathy.
Again please read my post carefully. There is a valid critique of overhead rates, but simply doing it suddenly in this manner has little added economic benefit in the long run, while ruining lives and creating waste/chaos in the short run.
You can make a strong argument these institutions require reform, but such reform should be done not overnight, and not through such broad strokes.
> For those who are questioning the validity of a 59% (or higher for some other institutions) overhead rate, your concerns are worth hearing and a review could be necessary, but oh my please not like this. This was an overnight (likely illegal!) change made with no warning and no consultation.
Why should the public believe that procedures that produced 59% overhead rates in the first place can be trusted to fix those overhead rates now? Sounds like a demand for an opportunity to derail needed reform by drowning it in red tape.
Also, what would be illegal about the change? Are the overhead rates in a statute somewhere? The grants certainly aren’t individually appropriated by Congress.
1. Why should the public believe that they can fix it. Perhaps they can't, that's not entirely my point. My point is that if the government firmly believes that a change is necessary there are _simple_ ways of acheiving such a change without causing such chaos, waste, and hardship. Perhaps a phased in approach, or other mechanisms. Overnight shock therapy offers very little economic benefits while having very harsh personal and insitutional cost.
2. What is illegal about the change. The NIH overhead rate is actually negotiated directly between the institution and the NIH, following a process put into law. This is why a federal judge has blocked this order [1]. I'm far from a lawyer, but my read of this is that this is a change that would need to come through congress or a re-negotiation of the rates through the mandated process.
[1]: https://www.aamc.org/news/press-releases/aamc-lawsuit-result...
The entire academic industry is in turmoil, the uncertainty on how bad things could get is probably the worst of it as Universities are having to plan for some pretty extreme outcomes even if unlikely.
For those who are questioning the validity of a 59% (or higher for some other institutions) overhead rate, your concerns are worth hearing and a review could be necessary, but oh my please not like this. This was an overnight (likely illegal!) change made with no warning and no consultation.
If the government decided that a cap was necessary it should be phased in to allow for insitutions to adjust the operational budgets gradually rather than this shock therapy that destroys lives and WASTES research money (as labs are potentially unable to staff their ongoing projects). A phased in approach would have nearly the same long-term budget implications.
Are there too many admin staff? Likely? Is this the right way to address that? Absolutely not.
For those who are unfamiliar with how career progress works in Academia, it is so competitive that even a year or two "break" in your career likely means you are forever unable to get a job. If you're on year 12 of an academic career, attempting to get your first job after your second (probably underpaid) postdoc and suddenly there are no jobs, you can't just wait it out. You are probably just done, and out of the market forever as you will lose your connections and have a gap in your CV which in this market is enough to disqualify you.
Looking into the numbers a couple if months ago I was surprised how little it costs to stop climate change.
On the order of 100-200 trillion USD. Which is roughly 100-200% of global yearly GDP. Or 2-5% of yearly GDP until 2050. This could well be provided by printing money at all the federal reserve banks.
This investment will likely bring in a positive return on investment because it reduces the negative climate impacts.
Without such investments the downstream costs in climate change adaptation will be very expensive
There is also a good case to be made that the prices being bandied around are actually much too high [1]
TL;DR is three major factors:
1. The agencies that are doing the estimates are _very_ bad at exponential development curves (cough cough IEA estimating solar [2])
2. Unfortunately much of the developing world's economy is not growing as fast as we previously thought it would (similar thing happening with birthrates)
3. Many costs are absolute and _not_ marginal, which is just wrong IMO. We are going to need the energy either way, we should be talking about the "green premium" (as far as it exists), not how much it'll cost to generate XX TWH of energy
[1]: https://www.economist.com/interactive/briefing/2024/11/14/th...
[2]: https://www.economist.com/interactive/briefing/2024/11/14/th...
Back then, the storage is was much more 'real': it was slow, made noises, degraded noticeably because of stray magnetic fields etc, complicated mechanical parts. By the hearing alone, you may spot problems.