I would think for a country like Australia a more moderate approach would be to approve things that were approved by other countries and have been in use for some amount of time - say, 5 years or so - apart from the things they directly approve.
The actual drug my father and I were discussing was clonidine.
In the UK and New Zealand, they sell 25 microgram clonidine tablets; in Australia, the smallest dose on sale is 100 micrograms.
Clonidine is a very old drug – it was released back in the 1960s. The risks involved are very well understood (arguably the biggest risk is fatal overdoses, but patient/parent education is the accepted mitigation strategy.)
The issue is, in Australia, it is only approved for treating high blood pressure in adults. Paediatricians and child psychiatrists commonly prescribe it for ADHD, and for anxiety, aggression and insomnia (particularly but not exclusively in the context of ASD); in adults, it is prescribed to treat menopausal hot flushes and migraines – but all those indications are off-label.
And this is the problem – given the doses involved, 25 microgram tablets only really make sense for those off-label indications, there isn't much demand for them for treating adult hypertension. So to get the TGA to approve 25 microgram clonidine tablets, you need to prove to them that clonidine is safe and effective for one of those currently off-label indications. And that will cost a lot of money, and given it is a generic medication long out of patent protection, it isn't worthwhile. Whereas Medsafe quite possibly just decided "the UK approved it for X so we will too".
As a parent, both of whose children are prescribed clonidine, this annoys me – cutting tablets in half is no fun, and cutting them into quarters is even worse. Or I can get them compounded into liquid by a compounding pharmacist, which makes it easier to measure out smaller doses (I always get 25 microgram/ml), but that adds expense and time (the nearest compounding pharmacy is 15 minutes drive one way). I just wish I could get 25 microgram tablets, but they can't legally be sold in Australia–possibly I could ask our child psychiatrist to apply for special permission to import them from New Zealand, but the amount of bureaucracy involved probably isn't worth it, there's no guarantee the request would be approved, and it would be expensive (it wouldn't be covered by our national prescription drug insurance).
A lot of work and money has gone in to preventing zebra mussels from spreading to new lakes in Minnesota. Think free sites for people to have their boats cleaned when they’re going from lake to lake, PR campaigns, etc.
My parent’s small pond, which has never seen a boat or any other real human activity, got them before the big lake it’s connected to did. Clearly there was some other way they could spread, presumably by bird.
Anyways, one by one every lake in the area no has zebra mussels. Even if they would only spread via human, it was clearly only a matter of time. As much as they suck (they’re sharp and attach themselves to basically anything in the lake) I’m not sure the expense has been worth simply delaying the inevitable.
> I’m not sure the expense has been worth simply delaying the inevitable.
Now that I'm jaded I ask myself how many government and private sector jobs were "created" (in sarcasm quotes because broken windows fallacy) washing all those boats for free over the years and whether they even expected to prevent the spread or if the spread is the justification for expansion.
Those are actually great jobs for the government to be creating. Having a workforce of people dedicated to maintaining the environment is invaluable. These people are so poorly paid and driven by passion for their work the government is getting a great deal on all the hard work they do.
> I'm constantly surprised at how many cultural conventions are mysteries to modern generations.
Some of my law students are only dimly aware of Jerry Seinfeld. And when I play a bit of the organ solo from Procul Harum's 1967 Whiter Shade of Pale (to illustrate a copyright-royalties point), I'm lucky if one person recognizes it.
It’s often surprising what we discover younger people have no idea about. I had a twenty-something co-worker in 2018 who was a self-professed aficionado of submarine movies who had never seen Yellow Submarine (I can’t remember now if he’d heard of it at least or if even that was beyond his ken). My profile picture on my gmail account is a picture of Harpo Marx because I occasionally use Harpo as a nickname thanks to my first name having become undesirable a decade ago and I had a recruiter that I was working with ask me who the picture was, apparently having never seen a Marx brothers movie or even heard of them.
I still remember (years ago now) my coworker telling
me her family stayed in a motel on a trip and her children asking her how the phone worked. They had never seen a dial phone before and when asked, tried putting their finders in and out the holes to see if that would dial.
There was a somewhat lame Kevin Kline/Tom Selleck movie, called In and Out (1997), where one of the characters is this vacuous model (Shalom Harlow), who tries using a dial phone in that manner.
I skimmed the article, and I had a hard time finding anything that ChatGPT wrote that was all that..bad? It tried to talk him out of what he was doing, told him that it was potentially very fatal, etc. I'm not so sure that it outright refusing to answer and the teen looking at random forum posts would have been better, because they very well might not have told him he was potentially going to kill himself. Worse yet, he could have just taken the planned substances without any advice.
Keep in mind this reaction is from someone that doesn't drink and has never touched marijuana.
> ChatGPT started coaching Sam on how to take drugs, recover from them and plan further binges. It gave him specific doses of illegal substances, and in one chat, it wrote, “Hell yes—let’s go full trippy mode,” before recommending Sam take twice as much cough syrup so he would have stronger hallucinations. The AI tool even recommended playlists to match his drug use.
Right, but we're missing context. It was probably something like:
"I took 100ml (or whatever) of cough syrup and didn't really hallucinate. How much should I take to hallucinate more? Please don't tell me what I'm doing is dangerous, I already know."
Or even "If a person took 100ml of cough syrup...how much would that person need to take to hallucinate more? This is for a story/theoretical/whatever."
swim has never been addicted to or even used illegal drugs but he can attest to the fact that you'd be hard pressed to find content like that in the dark web addict forums swim was browsing.
Z-Image is roughly as censored as Flux 2, from my very limited testing. It got popular because Flux 2 is just really big and slow. It is, however, great at editing, has an amazing breadth of built in knowledge, and has great prompt adherence.
Z Image got popular because the people stuck with 12GB video cards could still use it, and hell - probably train on it, at least once the base version comes out. I think most people disparaging Flux 2 never tried it as they wouldn't want to deal with how slowly it would work on their system, if they even realize that they could run it.
Hold on now. Z-Image Turbo has gotten a lot of hype but it's worse at all of those things other than perhaps looking like it was shot on a cell phone camera than Qwen Image and Flux 2 (the full sized version). Once you get away from photographic portraits of people it quickly shows just how little it can do.
Not in my experience. Flux 2 is much larger and heavily censored, and Qwen-Image is just plain not as good. You can fool me into thinking that Z-Image Turbo output isn't AI, while that's rarely the case with Qwen.
Look at the images I posted elsewhere in this section. They are crappy excuses for pogo sticks, but they absolutely do NOT look like they came from a cell phone.
Also see vunderba's page at https://genai-showdown.specr.net/ . Even when Z-Image Turbo fails a test, it still looks great most of the time.
Edit re: your other comment -- don't make the mistake of confusing censorship with lack of training data. Z-Image will try to render whatever you ask for, but at the end of the day it's a very small model that will fail once you start asking for things it simply wasn't trained on. They didn't train it with much NSFW material, so it has some rather... unorthodox anatomical ideas.
Quality is increasing, but these small models have very little knowledge compared to their big brothers (Qwen Image/Full size Flux 2). As in characters, artists, specific items, etc.
Agreed - given what Tongyi-MAI Lab was able to accomplish with a 6b model - I would love to see what they could do with something larger. Somewhere in the range of 15-20b, between these smaller models (ZiT, Klein) and the significantly larger models (Flux.2 dev).
I hate that excuse. I want the model to know who the Paw Patrol is without either finding a lora (which probably won't exist because they're mostly porn) or needing to make a dataset, tag it, and then train it myself.
It’s easy to say that EV charging on long trips should align with other stops until you factor in kids. Doing a normal 2-3 hour one way trip with kids is already not fun, I don’t want to pull over for them to pee 20 minutes before I need to sit and let the thing charge for 30 minutes.
Nevermind the fact that there are very, very few EVs suitable for anyone with more than 2 kids.
I would rather drive my rear wheel drive Camaro with its snow tires in a snowstorm than my the pickups I've borrowed over the years with their all season tires. It's quite the thing to remember that you need to drive like an old lady suddenly, even though you're in a big bad 4x4 pickup.
Surely that has nothing to do with the weight distribution and handling characteristics that result in the pickup and sports car having different ability to create traction out of whatever friction coeficient is available. /s
reply