Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice • Hacker News Board

Re: Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice

#141

Post by bruce511 » Fri, Dec 19, 2025, 3:11 AM UTC

johnwheeler wrote: post #138

bruce511 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Cancer" is a term that covers a lot of diseases. So there is a lot of research going into a lot of different things, and hence lots of announcements. "Chemotherapy" again is a loaded term covering a lot of different drugs, drug combinations, protocols and so on. So yeah, a lot of cancer treatment us "chemo" - but today's chemo is far removed from 2000 chemo. 5 year survivability has increased tremendously over the l…

My mom died of cancer and had to suffer through chemo. It was in the early 2000s, so I'm curious to know if you know anything about these new chemos and what makes them different.

My condolences for your loss. Discussing things in general terms,while having a lived experience must be painful.

There are different cancers, different stages different, different chemos, and of course different people.

Ultimately individual experiences of chemo run the whole gauntlet. At one end it can be little more than a bit of fatigue, at the other end a horrendous nightmare.

Yes, chemo has, as it's goal, a poison function. It sets out to poison you, hopefully killing the cancer first. It's never going to be the "fun" part of treatment.

I'm not a Dr, much less a medical historian. I would be ill equipped to quote specific drugs or dosages. Outcomes however are easily Googled, and those don't seem to be controversial.

I get that improved statistics don't make individual loss any easier.

Re: Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice

#142

Post by brailsafe » Fri, Dec 19, 2025, 6:37 AM UTC

xupybd wrote: post #137

brailsafe wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is search if you ask it to produce a list of links. Not in the example I mentioned. It can imagine the links, and the content of the links, and be very confident about it. It literally invented an obituary that didn't exist, gave me a link to a funeral home that 404'd, came up with "in-memoriam" references from regional newsletters that never contained her name. It's actually really scary how specifically fake i…

Yeah it does punt sometimes but often it works well. Especially on more well written about topics.

I think that's the tricky thing. I'm not saying it's not useful when it is, but you really do need a keen and skeptical eye to be able to know. The problem kind of reminds of bloom filters, such that they're useful for situations when you want to know something might exist or definitely does not exist in a set. Exact truth has some level of permissible error rate, as it does in any situation, but definitely wrong is pretty important to know about.

Re: Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice

#143

Post by teekert » Fri, Dec 19, 2025, 7:38 AM UTC

allie1 wrote: post #91

teekert wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It starts with mutations (sometimes accelerated by mutagens (smoke, alcohol, etc) or inflammation (viruses, infections, etc) or just chance (things like asbestos up the division rate by constant physical damage and thus up the probability or an error in copying). But there is much more to it. This is a nice paper for an overview: Hallmarks of Cancer (tng) [0]. It (among others) adds the very important and for years u…

Would sports also increase the rate of division? Bodybuilding for example you intentionally make micro tears in muscles to get them to repair and grow (lay person, apologies for the mistakes)

Hmm, I'm a molecular biologist, not an expert at this particularly, what I do know is that damage of muscle fiber may not be necessarily mean new cell growth and thus extra DNA replication. The growth of the muscle cell certainly does.

Exercise is good for the immune system, this helps clear cancer, helps stay away from inflammation (ie auto-immune diseases). Where as a sedentary life style a poor diet will promote this.

But indeed for some things/behaviors, the relation the cancer may be complex.

Re: Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice

#144

Post by duskdozer » Fri, Dec 19, 2025, 11:23 AM UTC

brailsafe wrote: post #135

duskdozer wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue as I see it is just straight copy/pasting its output. You want to use it as a search tool to give you pointers on things to look up and links to read? Great. Then use that as a basis to read the sources and write your own response. If you aren't familiar enough with the subject area to do that, then you also shouldn't be pasting LLM output on it.

It's not even copy/pasting in some cases. In my example, it confidentially produced "verbatim" references that don't exist anywhere, to specific pages that never mentioned this person's name or contained any of the text. Sometimes completely different people, 404 pages, huge waste of time

Yeah I agree, I've seen the hallucinated references also. Sometimes used by people in internet arguments to make their bullshit seem more legitimate. What I meant though by copy/pasting is people getting the LLM output and then just directly feeding that to the people they're conversing with, instead of looking into what it's saying or really even engaging with it in any way.