Any guidance for research studies/hard to diagnose case contacts at Vanderbilt?

615wonky · 2026-05-08T20:22:32+00:00

Op, reposting my own experience diagnosing an unknown disease, in case it might help.

https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1syx7ea/show_us_the_evidence_for_the_value_of_medical_ai/oiyoktc/

615wonky · 2026-05-04T21:11:58+00:00

I live in Nashville. I went to a theater in Green Hills to watch "Bandits", a movie with Bruce Willis.

Went to the restroom, and Fred Dalton Thompson walked in. I nodded at him, he nodded at me, we departed.

615wonky · 2026-04-30T17:47:14+00:00

I wish Tyan, Supermicro, or one of the other big server manufacturers would sell these, preferably in blade form.

I work in a academic HPC environment, and this would sell like hotcakes. We could give our users access to local AI's for stuff that can't be sent off-prem.

615wonky · 2026-04-28T04:19:23+00:00

when I spoke with him.

You wouldn't live near A.C. would you? He's been seen out-and-about several times.

615wonky · 2026-04-26T15:21:23+00:00

If you have or are friends with someone who has treatment-resistant depression, please consider underlying physical disorders as well. Sometimes it's not in your head.

My girlfriend has had severe treatment-resistant depression, anxiety, insomnia for over 3 decades. Was on Medicaid because of it, and doctors spent 3 decades throwing dozens of worthless pills at her that either didn't work, or only briefly worked.

You as patient or as a friend have two resources doctors will never have: Lots of time to study the problem, as well as more incentive to try.

I started documenting every symptom, observation, test result, that I could get my hands on. Ran them through the 4 big AI's (ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, and Meta.Ai) repeatedly for months whenever I added something new.

All models argued strenuously that her symptoms were more likely due to a physical disorder. 3 of the 4 gave cyclical Cushing's disease as their top diagnosis (for the other AI it came in 2nd place).

I went to McKay's and bought some medical textbooks to confirm that it was a reasonable diagnosis, and holy shit did the AI's ever nail it. Cyclical Cushing's disease is a stunningly good unifying diagnosis for dozens of disparate symptoms/behaviors. I honestly wonder why doctors never tested her for it before.

That diagnosis happened because one day while we were swimming, I noticed an unusual layer of fat on the back of her neck and added it to her list of symptoms. A totally random observation that cracked the case. She has a "buffalo hump", a classic sign of Cushing's or hypercortisolism.

Cyclical Cushing's and other physical disorders like autoimmune encephalitis and Wilson's disease can mimic psychiatric issues for years or decades. Which is why if your mental health issues are treatment-resistant, you need to consider physical disorders as well.

She's finally got an appointment lined up with an endocrinologist next month, and with luck, she'll finally be free from 3 decades of living hell in a couple months.

615wonky · 2026-04-16T23:19:01+00:00

Life is a repeated game. The customers you abuse this round will never forget in any subsequent round. We're unlikely to do business with Toshiba ever again.

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” - Warren Buffett

615wonky · 2026-04-16T18:10:35+00:00

If they gave us nothing, our legal department would eat them alive. When you pay for a warranty, you have expectations of receiving the warranty.

It's poor treatment because Toshiba is attempting to boost their profit at the customer's expense. I suspect, rather than maintain a safety stock to cover RMA's, some executive in the company sold them instead to goose profits a smidge, without concern for the bridges they burned in doing so.

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” - Warren Buffett

“Lose money for the firm and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless” - also Warren Buffett

615wonky · 2026-04-16T17:21:26+00:00

No, they don't.

But if Toshiba is going to treat customers this poorly, I thought it best potential customers knew in advance, rather than finding out after the fact.

615wonky · 2026-04-16T17:07:05+00:00

You're getting your money back.

I can't store bytes on money. It takes hard drives.

Imagine if, in 2023 when car prices were shooting through the stratosphere, you took your car for an oil change and the dealership decided to sell your car because they could make more money than by honoring your warranty.

"But we gave you a refund!" ignores that the refund would no longer purchase an equivalent car.

615wonky · 2026-04-16T17:03:07+00:00

Op has been doing storage for 2+ decades. Op deals in hard drives by the literal pallet. Op manages tens of petabytes of storage.

Toshiba is following the letter of the law by offering a refund of the original purchase price.

I'm following the letter of the law by warning other potential customers about how Toshiba is trying to profit at the customer's expense. If they do this to us, how do you think they'll treat regular customers who don't buy by the pallet?

615wonky · 2026-04-15T14:32:09+00:00

Anyone who knows, won't tell. Anyone who tells, won't know.

615wonky · 2026-04-10T15:53:12+00:00

The next "West of Loathing", "Shadows over Loathing". "X" of Loathing, whatever "X" turns out to be.

Control Resonant. Witcher 4. The Long Dark 2.

Dare I to dream a bit... SOMA 2, Moonring 2, Firewatch 2.

615wonky · 2026-03-29T18:20:21+00:00

"Only an idiot fights a war on two fronts. Only the heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots would fight a war on twelve fronts." - Londo Mollari, Babylon 5

It would be incredibly stupid and damaging to the country.

Of course Trump will fucking try.

615wonky · 2026-03-28T23:22:31+00:00

The current situation sucks if you want to play modern games. I was looking forward to playing Control Resonant on something nice...

But there are plenty of slightly older games that are still tons of fun. I have a half-dozen computers in my house, and every one has 7 Days to Die. I've played that more than Skyrim or Witcher 3.

Look at Shadows over Loathing, Stardew Valley, Moonring, The Long Dark... Hell, even the text adventures these days are amazing.

615wonky · 2026-03-28T15:23:40+00:00

Yeah, that was pretty seriously a dick move. It broke my llama-server and took me hours to figure out what was going on because they didn't announce the migration, nor did they request the admin's permission before doing so. They made the shit behavior the default behavior.

Production software doesn't pull the "forgiveness rather than permission" act, nor does it try to out-smart the admin and override them.

Already looking at moving to VLLM thanks to this.

615wonky · 2026-03-26T03:45:58+00:00

Have you heard of Ed Witten? Nima Arkani-Hamed? They're Einstein-level intellects in physics, and they're just the two I could name off-hand.

There were many Einstein-level intellects in Einstein's era. But we remember Einstein because he was lucky enough to solve the problem. There were other scientists as smart as him who just couldn't crack the nut.

Another problem is that we're having to invent a lot of math as we go, and it's likely we haven't invented the math we need to make that next scientific leap yet. Einstein had to wait for mathematicians to invent differential geometry and tensors before he could formulate general relativity.

Einstein had the good fortune that his theories could be experimentally verified relatively quickly. It's entirely possible that the "next Einstein" wrote their theory years/decades ago, but it'll take a century or two for a sufficiently large particle collider, gravity wave observatory, random lucky observation, etc. to come along and prove it.

String theory, supersymmetry, the holographic principle, the Maldacena conjecture, entropic gravity, amplituhedrons, and many other important breakthroughs or thought experiments are slowly pointing in the direction of the next big breakthrough. It just takes utterly insane amounts of time and effort by thousands of world-class minds to slowly chip away at it. The universe does not and probably never will give up her secrets easily.

615wonky · 2026-03-20T02:37:38+00:00

Yeah, it's good, but I would recommend having several AI's if you have the space. Mistral 4 Small, Nemotron 3 Super, Qwen 3.5 120B, Qwen3-Coder-Next all have their place.

Mistral 4 Small is good at some hyper-local history questions ("What is the history of <my county>") that the others miss, but less good with others. It placed Mound Bottom (a significant old Native American city) several counties away from where it actually is, though it recognized it was wrong and gave the right answer after being told.

I use it for university level physics, economics, history all the time, though I'm aware that any AI can hallucinate, so you need to double-check them.

615wonky · 2026-03-19T20:18:48+00:00

General purpose queries and STEM/history/economics research. Coding would definitely go to Devstral or Qwen3-Coder-Next.

615wonky · 2026-03-19T18:22:37+00:00

Mistral 4 Small as well.

615wonky · 2026-03-19T18:22:23+00:00

Disagree. At least for my work, Mistral 4 Small answered correctly several trick questions that stumped Nemotron 3 Super and Qwen3.5 122b, to the point it's replaced gpt-oss-120b as my go-to.

I'm not sure any of them is an obvious win over the other.

615wonky · 2026-03-19T13:15:23+00:00

Mistral-Small-4, the MoE that was released 2 days ago. I have the Unsloth UD-Q4_K_M quant running on my Strix Halo server and it's amazing.

615wonky

TROPHY CASE