Yet sadly it is still on the market. Is there a number of deaths that are enough?
There is also this small 2016 study:
"Interference with neuronal development
Pregnancy outcome following maternal exposure to pregabalin may call for concern
ABSTRACT
Objective: To investigate pregnancy outcomes following maternal use of pregabalin.
Methods: This multicenter, observational prospective cohort study compared pregnancy outcomes in women exposed to pregabalin with those of matched controls (not exposed to any medications known to be teratogenic or to any antiepileptic drugs). Teratology Information Services systematically collected data between 2004 and 2013.
Results: Data were collected from 164 exposed pregnancies and 656 controls. A significantly higher major birth defect rate in the pregabalin group was observed after exclusion of chromosomal aberration syndromes, and when cases with exposure during first trimester of pregnancy were analyzed separately (7/116 [6.0%] vs 12/580 [2.1%]; odds ratio 3.0, 95% confidence interval 1.2–7.9, p = 0.03). The rate of live births was lower in the pregabalin group (71.9% vs 85.2%, p < 0.001), primarily due to a higher rate of both elective (9.8% vs 5.0%, p = 0.02) and medically indicated (5.5% vs 1.8%, p = 0.008) pregnancy terminations. In the Cox proportional cause specific hazards model, pregabalin exposure was not associated with a significantly higher risk of spontaneous abortion.
Conclusions: This study demonstrated a signal for increased risk of major birth defects after first trimester exposure to pregabalin. However, several limitations such as the small sample size, differences across groups in maternal conditions, and concomitant medication exposure exclude definitive conclusions, so these results call for confirmation through independent studies."
Search for '[acetaminophen/paracetamol/tylenol] study' every few years and you'll find something new. The latest seems to be strong observational evidence that it drives neurodevelopmental issues, including ADHD/autism, when taken during pregnancy. This is being pushed back against hard because this has led to Johnson & Johnson being sued by hundreds of people claiming they already knew this, setting them up to become the next big tobacco if they lose.
The link is very strong and so big pharam's defense is that it's not not tylenol, but having an issue for where tylenol might be needed, that is causing the issues. A bizarrely excellent and balanced article on the issue is available here. [1]
But we are? The article describes an extremely significant effect because dementia rates are already very high at, for instance, ~10% in the 70+ age group. So twice as likely to develop dementia is an extreme effect, as opposed to e.g. twice as likely for something that occurs at a rate of 1 in 10,000 or whatever.
The bigger question would be causality. Observational studies are generally trash, especially with dementia, because it correlates with practically everything in one way or the other. So is it the drug, or is there a common confounding variable among people who use the drug?
That's the problem that makes proving causality so hard for many drugs. Long-term effects are subject to practically endless possible confounders. Like the National Academy of Sciences is rather fond of saying, you end up with endless scenarios where there is neither enough evidence to accept nor reject a possible causality. People that want to spin things one way then claim there's no evidence, which is plainly false - as there is, but its insufficient to confidently claim causality. In the same way that there's insufficient evidence to reject causality.
One of the known side effects of this drug is Suicidal Ideation.
My late wife was taking this crap when she killed herself; see the documentary Pain Warriors for that whole saga.
I've been warning people about this drug for years. One lady told me, months after a warning to her group: "Bob, I was standing on the railing of a bridge ready to jump, when I heard your voice. I got off of the bridge and got help."
This stuff really needs to be removed from the market. I acknowledge that I've been told by a very few that it helps them. I've been told by far more how it harmed them.
See also from the Journal Cell Oct 16 2009, relating to both Gabapentin and Lyrica, because other comments here are speculating about how it works:
"... α2δ-1 is the high-affinity receptor for two commonly prescribed antiepileptic, antineuropathic pain medications, gabapentin (GBP, Neurontin) and pregabalin (Lyrica) (Gee et al., 1996). GBP and pregabalin were initially designed as hydrophobic gamma amino butyric acid (GABA) analogs that could cross the blood-brain barrier. Further studies have shown that even though they posses anticonvulsant properties, they do not bind to GABA receptors or transporters. A recent study using a knockin mouse that expresses a mutant α2δ-1 that cannot bind GBP or pregabalin has shown that α2δ-1 is the in vivo target for these drugs and that these drugs mediate their therapeutic action through binding to α2δ-1 (Field et al., 2006). GBP and pregabalin do not affect the single-channel kinetics of calcium channels and have only modest effects on neurotransmission (Dooley et al., 2007). Thus, the cellular mechanisms underlying the mode of action of these drugs are unclear. ..."
Google has already done this. Destroyed its existing assistant product -- removed key functionality, de-staffed the team, moved it all under Gemini.
I'm in a few Polestar car user groups, and people are pissed that their Android based head units can no longer do basic integration via assistant stuff that the car was initially sold to them able to do. In some cases they are blaming Polestar, in some cases connecting the dots back to Google.
It's beyond foolish. And destroys goodwill with customers. Who they seem to consider there being an infinite supply of. There is not.
Beyond that, there's the fact that stochastic "fuzzy" AIs are maybe not such a great fit when you just need to have the pod bay doors opened. Basic deterministic, symbolic, "AI" makes a lot of sense, especially once people get used to the quirks for the right way to talk to the thing.
I'm a little biased, but I do think "voicexml" probably covered far more use cases than people are willing to admit. Some documents wouldn't have been pretty, I don't think, but would be far preferable to the inability to reason about how things actually work. And, indeed, the messier the document, the more obvious that you were making it too consuming.
I have setup a raspberry PI dashboard before and run into these exact issues. They are not defensive or pre-emptive. An e-reader will probably not have the same issues, just sharing my experience.
* Browser runs out of memory or has other issue and stops refreshing.
* Wifi connection drops and browser displays an error page and stops executing your refreshes. The power-saving options on the RPIs wifi caused me quite a bit of grief before I disabled them.
* Raspberry Pi crashes with kernel errors due to cheap SD card, underpowered USB power supply, or something else.
I ran into these issues one by one over a few months and fixed each one as I ran into it. What I ended up with was:
* Browser set to run at OS startup displaying my page.
* That page having a meta refresh tag, and javascript code to reload the page periodically.
* A browser extension to automatically reload the page as well if both of those failed.
* A watchdog daemon that detects when the RPI has frozen and reboots it.
* A cron job that reboots periodically.
With all of those my dashboard would run for months without any issues or interruptions. Just sharing so others can be aware of potential issues.
There are a few open projects to support a lot of these thermal cams like the more popular Topdon or InfiRay models. PyThermalCamera [0] or Thermal-Camera-Redux [1] are good ones, I got my thermal cam working on my Linux laptop just fine.
It's trivial to write your own agents, and use other 3rd party gems in those agents. For fetching data from LinkedIn, checkout https://github.com/mdesjardins/linkedin-v2 (YMMV)
I have a few on my blog, https://blog.andrewcantino.com, but nothing comprehensive. I mostly use it to monitor Reddit/HN/Twitter/various blogs for certain keywords, and also to keep an eye on local things that I want to know about (weather, events, emergencies, etc.).
I started looking at this last night [1] since there's an open SDK available (called SDK3) [2] but it seems like keil is involved in compiling it and I'm out of my depth when it comes to embedded stuff at the moment
Ongoing read of your neighbours, roommates, co-workers etc health data from a distance including recent history is getting your hands on sensitive personal data in addition to health data. You can tell what they are doing, getting drunk or having sex etc.
actual structural steel round and square tube in 20' sections from a steel supplier isn't any more expensive than black pipe and is stronger and considerably easier to work with (no paint, less grainy). you can also make your own fittings since the right tube sizes are nesting. I do 1" square and clamps made out of 1-1/4" with 1/8" wall. that is quite a bit stronger than emt for maybe 20% additional cost.
EMT conduit isn't a great support material if you're handling human weight loads. The picture on the front page showing off the strength is visibly bending. It's kind of an awkward load profile, lower weight like an awning you're probably using ABS, higher weight you're using 1 1/4" system like steeltek or keeklamp
This is because the customers at Home Depot and Lowe's are primarily muggles. The wizards will pop in if they need something and it's convenient, but by and large they buy at wizard stores that stock the full range of fittings.
Said wizard stores sometimes have a handwritten sign taped up on the wall behind the counter dating back to the Carter administration that reads "Those in the trade will be served first"[0].
Your reward for being a wizard is having competent help at the store, and the fittings haven't been randomly distributed among the bins by a million prior muggles.
Electrician wizards similarly work with electrical supply stores, not Home Depot if they can avoid it. Carpenter wizards cross over a little more, but they generally prefer to work with lumber yards that deliver[1] and have halfway decent lumber[2].
[0] Yes, literally.
[1] I believe the box stores do to, but they charge handsomely because they don't really want to.
[2] 2x3's are crap everywhere, but the quality on anything bigger goes up immensely at a real lumberyard.
edit: I did not even see when I posted this that they had made this open source with the downloadable STL to print your own connectors. Great move on them!
True. The cheap ones are trying to guess CO2. Those are called "indoor air quality sensors".
Small CO2 sensors have been available for years, for about $50. Compare [1].
Life of this new device is only 10 years, which is short for HVAC systems. A hotel might have a thousand of these.
Older devices say "15+" years.
All these devices have a calibration problem. They drift. They try to correct by treating the lowest value they ever see as "normal" (that's about 400 ppm CO2 today, vs 300 PPM in 1950) and recalibrating. So they're not useful for observing a general increase in CO2. They're also not useful for greenhouses, where CO2 levels may drop below ambient CO2 due to photosynthesis.
Manual recalibration is possible but requires feeding in pure nitrogen and a known nitrogen/CO2 mixture.[2]
Devices which don't need that re-calibration exist.[3] They're more complicated. Also don't seem to be stocked by the usual distributors.
If you want to do code-CAD for anything substantial and you haven't yet developed a significant dependency on OpenSCAD, do your brain a favour and spend at least some time with CadQuery, Build123D or (if you prefer JS to Python) Replicad.
As impressive as NopSCADlib and BOSL2 are (and OMG they are, when you consider what they have to work with!), OpenSCAD is a one-way, declarative CSG environment that essentially only outputs mesh formats. It's really not that much better than working with three-dimensional pixels. You won't really be able to analyse, iterate over or measure your models, easily build on faces, do easy chamfers or fillets, export STEP files, make use of constraint-based designs, model assemblies, or so many other things that "CAD" means in the 21st century. All the tools that help you do this on OpenSCAD are layers and layers of task-specific hacks and clever bodges.
I totally get wanting to make models with version-controlled text files instead of GUI CAD (which can be a sort of weird battle to learn for a programmer), and I get wanting to avoid FreeCAD. I just don't really get wanting to limit oneself to such a limited concept of a 3D "model"!
The three alternative systems I mention are all based around bindings to (or in Replicad's case, cross-compilation of) OpenCASCADE, which is a bRep CAD kernel capable of much richer interactions. It is not without its faults, but arguably code-CAD spares you from some of the inscrutability that trips up FreeCAD's interactive model.
A GPU is an accessory to the real product you’re buying: a driver to interface with your software. Datacenter GPUs have drivers that are woefully inadequate for gaming.
OSX-KVM may be next. I know it contains many copies of the "pleasedontsteal" key and it used to have direct downloads for full OSX images, but that was wiped from the repo years ago (multiple forks still have it though).
No, to keep track of consumers of social work for social workers. Think EHR system for social work, for shared provider access for each person in need of care and services, and central tracking for each person of service, care, and resources available and provided.
I’m currently tracking with spreadsheets, which is less than ideal.
It's more than just a "tier of easy internet for the elderly" as that alone won't ease the suspicion that something might be going wrong.
There's demand for trustedverified handling of regular financial life interactions, bill paying, hiccups from cards being changed and regular direct debits needing resetting, etc.
Much like, Chubb (for example) remote monitor home security with liability should one of their employees start feeding "they're not home and they have valuables" infomation to thieves.
My own father was born in 1935 and he's still pretty sharp, handles his accounts etc but he still worries (quite rightly) about social engineering and scammers .. the very "ease" of something doesn't reassure, it's the fact that interactions have been double checked by a trusted party (me, I guess) that does the trick.
It's also an area that demands reputation, liability, and transparent auditing - conservatorships for the elderly, as for Britney Spears, are ripe with opportunities for graft and abuse.
I can share some really important things I’d like to see for seniors. I am leaving out some innovative ideas that go beyond these, because “first things first”.
Here are some.
Anything to help low vision (and that’s a giant problem) One periodical I get has some white text on a bright yellow background. Solution: I wrote them. Waiting …
Finding things, whether in the home or at local stores (whose inventory varies, as in “Stuff comes and goes at Trader Joe’s”) or even online (which is tough for many people since online stuff is largely bogus scams bolstered by SEO) Home and food and medicine inventory (data to be private and not fed to sellers, thank you.)
Exoskeletons. This technology is already old. What’s the hang-up? Other mobility?
Backpacks that have gyroscopes built in to stabilize people.
Fall mitigation. TBD
Finding real help nearby, trusted people, not “pay to get referrals” right now, as in “I’m in a jam”. Includes tech advice. And spares to loan.
Filtering email and websites for scams and malware.
Any sane noncommercial alternative to “social media”. (That’s a larger issue but very important in my mind, which is free of them)
That opens the matter of getting important, pertinent, personal and timely news and situational awareness rather than noise. (See above)
Creating secure family communications to bust AI-generated phony ransom calls (and more)
Simple robotics, of the “bring your slippers and reading glasses” sort. Cellphone, too. Seems it’s always charging when I need it.
Oh, and since I’m in the foothills, places to go when there’s an evacuation, power is out, and cool places to hang out.
I think these address major unmet needs. I would hate to see them enshittified.
Other ideas will improve quality of life, but first things first.
There is also this small 2016 study:
"Interference with neuronal development
Pregnancy outcome following maternal exposure to pregabalin may call for concern
ABSTRACT
Objective: To investigate pregnancy outcomes following maternal use of pregabalin.
Methods: This multicenter, observational prospective cohort study compared pregnancy outcomes in women exposed to pregabalin with those of matched controls (not exposed to any medications known to be teratogenic or to any antiepileptic drugs). Teratology Information Services systematically collected data between 2004 and 2013.
Results: Data were collected from 164 exposed pregnancies and 656 controls. A significantly higher major birth defect rate in the pregabalin group was observed after exclusion of chromosomal aberration syndromes, and when cases with exposure during first trimester of pregnancy were analyzed separately (7/116 [6.0%] vs 12/580 [2.1%]; odds ratio 3.0, 95% confidence interval 1.2–7.9, p = 0.03). The rate of live births was lower in the pregabalin group (71.9% vs 85.2%, p < 0.001), primarily due to a higher rate of both elective (9.8% vs 5.0%, p = 0.02) and medically indicated (5.5% vs 1.8%, p = 0.008) pregnancy terminations. In the Cox proportional cause specific hazards model, pregabalin exposure was not associated with a significantly higher risk of spontaneous abortion.
Conclusions: This study demonstrated a signal for increased risk of major birth defects after first trimester exposure to pregabalin. However, several limitations such as the small sample size, differences across groups in maternal conditions, and concomitant medication exposure exclude definitive conclusions, so these results call for confirmation through independent studies."
Still on the market...Why?
https://web.archive.org/web/20161029080541/https://www.neuro...