justsee

Lipid nanoparticle toxicity has long been an industry concern.

In a profile of Moderna back in 2016, Katalin Karikó (instrumental in the development of mRNA vaccines) mentioned this issue:

“I would say that mRNA is better suited for diseases where treatment for short duration is sufficiently curative, so the toxicities caused by delivery materials are less likely to occur” [1]

[1] https://www.statnews.com/2016/09/13/moderna-therapeutics-bio...

Numerous studies have found vax-derived spike persisting for months and even years after vaccination, giving rise to concerns expression of spike can continue long after the claimed 24-48 hours.

A recent study found spike protein persisting for 17 months in the cerebral arteries of stroke victims. [1]

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096758682...

Only if you enable it?

The problem with the other mainstream browsers is they're embedded with ad-tech nonsense which you can't get rid of.

It's very hard not to see the whole marketing of the legislation as an exercise in misdirection.

The media campaign was led by Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd (who see a commercial opportunity in cutting a demographic from their competitors audience for advertisers), and the government's marketing of it entirely focused on children being restricted, avoiding until the last weeks an admission it actually meant all adults would have to undertake verification processes to use social media.

The gulf between the practical effect of the legislation (all adults are impacted) and the claimed intent (only children under 16 are the focus), is so large the claims shouldn't really be accepted at face value.

Combine that with the abuse of democratic process: what would usually be weeks of public feedback was shortened to 24 hours, and after passing the lower house the government attempted to force the legislation through in the senate with no debate, finally conceding to a brief 1 hour debate before passing it in the final hours of the last sitting day of the year.

When opposition arose earlier in the week to the idea this is about a backdoor mechanism to force the government's recently rebranded myId (from myGovId), the government hastily made changes to the bill and loudly said social media companies would not be allowed to ask for government id, in physical or digital form.

But that itself was misdirection. A clause was added saying this does not apply if an alternative option is also provided.

But age assurance based on biometrics from webcams has poor accuracy, as one senator argued in the final debate. Fresh-faced youths will have no option but to go for the myID solution on their 16th birthday - which as that same senator pointed out is the age at which you can apply for a myID account.

On the topic of digital id and myID: it was also apparent that the Government seemingly feigned ignorance that this system, designed specifically for this purpose, would be the ideal and primary solution.

Yet we know just how much focus and energy has been going into designing these systems and working out how to get the public to accept them: witness this piece from 2018 [1].

It's of course fine to argue pros and cons of digital id, both philosophically, and in terms of specific implementation details, but that's not what happened here.

Everything clearly indicates the legislation was designed to sidestep any substantial debates on this topic.

What was also sidestepped was any reasonable discussion of specific implementation options. Instead we have vague details of an age assurance trial being run for many more months, with no specifics that help us understand how this legislation may work, or fail to work.

[1] https://www.aspi.org.au/report/preventing-another-australia-...

Beyond fundamental moves in any partner dance style, the complexity increases significantly.

It's not just your coordination and flexibility in placing legs, feet, arms, hands, torso in various positions at the right time, it's also leading your follower, adapting to their own abilities, tension, movement, mobility, and mood, connecting with them energetically, with the music, with the floor, and practicing dance floor awareness to avoid collisions with other dancers, adapt your moves to a rapidly shifting available dance space, and being creative and spontaneous.

mRNA vaccines are a gene therapy, and a gene therapy does not mean "must irreversibly change the genome".

Take for instance Moderna's own SEC filing discussing mRNA [1], which summarised the regulatory situation:

"Currently, mRNA is considered a gene therapy product by the FDA. Unlike certain gene therapies that irreversibly alter cell DNA and could act as a source of side effects, mRNA-based medicines are designed to not irreversibly change cell DNA; however, side effects observed in gene therapy could negatively impact the perception of mRNA medicines despite the differences in mechanism.

In addition, because no product in which mRNA is the primary active ingredient has been approved, the regulatory pathway for approval is uncertain. The number and design of the clinical trials and preclinical studies required for the approval of these types of medicines have not been established, may be different from those required for gene therapy products, or may require safety testing like gene therapy products. Moreover, the length of time necessary to complete clinical trials and to submit an application for marketing approval for a final decision by a regulatory authority varies significantly from one pharmaceutical product to the next, and may be difficult to predict."

The industry itself was quite open about mRNA being a gene therapy [2].

At some point there were clearly industry and marketing concerns, and we saw a sharp u-turn into asserting they were vaccines, and additionally that any claim they were gene therapies was the mark of an ignorant rube.

On the marketing front: probably a concern that uninformed memes formed around the "changes your DNA" fears, which at the time were unfounded.

On the regulatory front: I seem to recall some potentially more rigorous regulatory approval if they were considered gene therapies instead of vaccines.

It seems rather clear: they are a gene therapy, and because that adds uncertainty in terms of the regulatory pathways, and consumer acceptance, commercial interests worked hard to recategorise them as a more palatable 'vaccine'.

That the term 'gene therapy' is being redefined to exclude mRNA seems an exercise in commerce rather than science, given the history available to anyone who cares to look.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1682852/000168285220...

[2] https://asgct.org/publications/news/november-2020/covid-19-m...

While it's just an anecdote, it's more than just a funny tidbit as an increased risk of non-influenza respiratory virus is a possible side effect of flu vaccines.

"We identified a statistically significant increased risk of noninfluenza respiratory virus infection among TIV recipients (Table 3), including significant increases in the risk of rhinovirus and coxsackie/echovirus infection" [1]

That's one of the complications in assessing efficacy: if the benefit in flu vaccine is potentially quite modest (as determined by some long-running studies [2]), and it causes an increased risk of other noninfluenza respiratory viruses, then we need higher-quality, more detailed studies to understand what's happening.

But based on the discussion of the Cochrane review it seems unlikely. [3]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3404712/

[2] https://www.cochrane.org/news/featured-review-three-updated-...

[3] https://community.cochrane.org/news/why-have-three-long-runn...

There seems to be a few live efforts underway on Twitter:

* https://twitter.com/andrewmccalip/status/1687288889717989376

* https://twitter.com/CondMatfyz/status/1687051547337781248

I imagine over the next few weeks there'll be an explosion of efforts to replicate if it's truly that straightforward to produce for reasonably-equipped labs.

A minor autocomplete mistake from 2 years ago (quickly fixed and apologised for by the CEO [1]) is framed as a 'scandal'.

Meanwhile Mozilla is showing signs of serious, systemic internal org issues, and no problem? [2]

It's pretty clear a user / privacy-first model is central to Brave's mission, so these drive-by comments griping loudly about minor, historical issues never feel intellectually compelling.

[1] https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1269317625915400192

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36077360

Last time this was discussed on HN, someone raised the artist's approach to failure as a rich space for discovery, which was nicely put by him at this point in the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1KT8PS6Zs4&t=1619s

The first meta-analysis of water fluoridation studies – The York Review – was conducted in 2002 and found that the data on efficacy was limited and of low quality. [1]

A point to be considered here is that the institutionalised belief in water fluoridation for the half-century which preceded the York Review was apparently not grounded in much solid scientific enquiry, if any.

This review was conducted 3 years after the CDC published "Ten Great Public Health Achievements in the 20th Century", which included water fluoridation as one of these great achievements.

Another curiosity of this public health belief was the guideline that water fluoridation levels need to vary in a region based on temperature. This was because it is apparently a predictor of water consumption amounts by small children.

Colder climates were meant to have higher levels of fluoride (up to 1.2 ppm) because people apparently drink less water, and warmer climates were meant to have lower levels (0.7 ppm), because they drink more water.

It indicates that consumption is a very important factor in considering additive levels, and that all other factors are less important than climate.

This was codified in a 1957 paper "Determining optimum fluoride concentrations" (Galagan and Vermillion) [2] which includes their scientific formula:

parts per million of fluoride = 0.34 / E

"Where E is the estimated average daily water intake for children through 10 years of age in ounces per pound of body weight. It may be calculated from the estimation equation E=-0.038+0.0062 temperature, where temperature is the mean maximum temperature in degrees Fahrenheit."

This seems to reflect the kind of scientific rigour behind this belief, and perhaps the absurdity of the formula is why the US DHHS updated their guidelines in 2015 to settle on a flat 0.7 ppm regardless of climate [3].

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/4801410

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2031310/?page=1

[3] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2015/05/01/2015-10...

Pill (BOE economist) is advocating for wage price restraints, which is what the parent observed.

The parent then said it is in effect calling for price controls on labor, which is true.

Pill is then recorded as saying wages do contribute to inflation:

"He said that firms and workers are in a “pass the parcel game” that’s causing more persistent price pressures, contributing to the UK’s main inflation rate remaining stuck in double digits."

The final parent comment captures a very common line in corporate media messaging: which is that wages always need to be suppressed lest inflation rear its head, but corporate profits never should because that is market distortion and not related to inflation.

Some contradictory Maths responses, and an apology from ChatGPT:

Me:

Is Pi times 3 a rational number?

ChatGPT:

No, 3 times pi is not a rational number. 3 times pi is equal to 3π, which is an irrational number. This is because the number pi (π) is an irrational number, and when you multiply an irrational number by a rational number (in this case, 3), the result is still an irrational number. So, 3π is an irrational number because it is the product of the irrational number pi (π) and the rational number 3.

Me:

Is pi times 25 a rational number?

ChatGPT:

Yes, pi times 25 is a rational number. Pi times 25 is equal to 25π, which is a rational number. This is because the number pi (π) is an irrational number, but 25 is a rational number, and when you multiply a rational number by an irrational number, the result is a rational number. In this case, the irrationality of pi is "cancelled out" by the rational factor 25, resulting in a final product that is a rational number. So, 25π is a rational number because it is the product of the irrational number pi (π) and the rational number 25.

Me:

You have said both that "when you multiply a rational number by an irrational number, the result is a rational number" and "if you multiply a rational number with an irrational number, the product is always irrational. " Both statements cannot be true.

ChatGPT:

You are correct that both of those statements cannot be true. My previous responses were based on the assumption that you were asking about specific examples of multiplying a rational number by an irrational number, such as 3/1 times pi or 25/1 times pi. In those cases, the resulting product is either a rational number or an irrational number, depending on the specific numbers involved in the calculation. However, in general, the product of a rational number and an irrational number is always an irrational number. This is because an irrational number cannot be expressed as a simple fraction, so even if one of the factors in the product is a rational number, the result will still be irrational. For example, if you multiply the rational number 3 with the irrational number √2, the result is the irrational number 3√2. I apologize if my previous responses were unclear or contradictory. I will do my best to provide clear and accurate information in the future.

In Australia it appears they're changing public messaging on vaccination for <30 yrs due to increased risk of myocarditis and lack of notable benefits[1]:

"One of the nation’s top advisers on vaccination says it is unlikely young people under 30 will be approved for fourth doses, as Australia turns its attention to antiviral access to tackle yet another Omicron wave."

"Former ATAGI co-chair and current member Professor Allen Cheng said the increased risk of myocarditis and the lack of notable benefit from additional boosters meant it was likely the recommended vaccine schedule for younger people would remain as is. Some are approaching a year since their booster shot."

[1] https://www.smh.com.au/national/why-you-won-t-get-another-co...

Lex Fridman interviewed Penrose on this topic recently (2020) and Penrose delivered a very accessible walkthrough of his historical and current thoughts on the topic.

https://youtu.be/orMtwOz6Db0?t=2654 (Deep-link half-way through to his discussion on microtubules)

Interesting.

An increase in dementia and cancer is exactly what contrarian scientists and researchers fear as potential long-term side-effects of breakdown of spike protein in the body (amyloid plaque deposits), and dysregulation of the immune system due to mRNA treatments (host immune system not fully-functioning results in ineffective disease suppression across the board).

An emerging thesis explaining diverse pathology in post-covid / post-vax (let us call it post-spike exposure) is that breakdown of spike protein results in beta-amyloid plaque deposits in the body, which leads to Alzheimers, systemic amyloidosis, fibrogenesis.

Other mainstream research is now also converging on this idea. [1]

One of the original researchers who appears early on this discussed it in the last few days with one of the DRASTIC researchers Jay Couey: "Amyloidogenesis of the Spike Protein" [2]

Jay has an interesting 10 minute monologue just prior to the interview which is also worth viewing. [3] He summarises the industry dogma (and why it's flawed) in a succint way: "Seroprevalence to an epitope is taken as a correlate of immunity to a pathogen on which that epitope is found. And if this mechanism is part of immunity, it is a small fraction of the total immune response..."

In terms of UK all-cause mortality data, Fenton's analysis has been very interesting. Also interesting to see him suddenly cast out of respectable society once he decided something was very off with the statistical analysis going on. [4]

[1] https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-05-discovery-mechanism-m...

[2] https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1310649065?t=0h34m9s

[3] https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1310649065?t=0h23m58s

[4] http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~norman/papers/inconsistencies_va...

Revelations like this, the BMJ whistleblower claiming scientific fraud in the clinical trials, and other clear oddities are what fuels the interest of science-minded citizens.

Who cares about the fringe anti-vaxxers? Those who want to obscure legitimate concerns it would seem.

A senior editor from the British Medical Journal recently discussed this changed definition. [1]

His entire commentary is quite interesting. [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lepqvdXoA2E&t=4941s

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lepqvdXoA2E&t=4725s

It's not as settled as you seem to think.

Leading vaccine developer Nikolai Petrovsky (who's working on a traditional, protein-based vaccine) recently mentioned in an interview that if he had a pregnant wife he'd advise her to avoid both the virus and the vaccine (something only the privileged could attempt, so not a one-size-fits-all recommendation) [1]

(In a more technical interview aimed at a scientific audience, he outlines a number of issues he has with the current options. [2])

One of Petrovsky's key issues is that on pregnancy and children, the sensitivity is so high and risks so great that there is usually a much, much higher bar before vaccines are authorised for use: that's been the history of traditional, protein-based vaccines where it can take decades before they're authorised for use in pregnant women, babies, children.

Pfizer only began their pregnancy and safety trials in February this year - so only a little over 7 months ago. It is designed to observe pregnancy through to newborns reaching 6 months of age, and will complete in a year.

So we currently have no safety data in pregnancies from pre-conception via all-important and sensitive first trimester, through to full term + 6 months.

Keep in mind the WHO changed position on safety and aligned with the CDC on recommending the vaccine 3 weeks before Pfizer even started its safety trials.

None of this is to say that getting Covid isn't currently provably worse than getting a current vaccine.

It's just to say the safety data is incomplete, there are still unknowns which could change the calculation significantly considering the nature of the technology used, and we just won't fully understand the issues for some time to come.

(Also keep in mind that with mandates, the proposal is for all to receive the current options, but the alternative is not for all pregnant women to become infected. The risk calculation generally assumes wrongly here.)

[1] https://www.doctorlewis.com.au/podcast-1/2021/7/19/episode-2...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_2Rq1zoRg&t=3063s

You seem to have a few misconceptions here:

1. That only uneducated 'researchers' have concerns, and ill-formed ones. Petrovsky, as a leading vaccine developer, outlines a clear, educated position on why it's still reasonable to have concerns over the current options [1]

2. That because billions of doses have been administered, there are no serious problems. You can certainly make a very sound case that Covid side effects are worse in defence of using these current options. But they are irrefutably far less safe and effective (relatively) than any other vaccines authorised and widely used over the last few decades. Considering this it's understandable why there is still concern over overdone claims around the safety of the current options. Even in a pandemic numerous regulatory authorities have had to add additional warnings and modify use of the current options.

3. Your last cited point on Covid deaths is very wrong. You just need to look at UK statistics (and other countries) to realise there is something very, very odd about the claimed US stats from the CDC.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_2Rq1zoRg&t=3063s

This seems the most interesting aspect of the problem:

"However, the probability of winning by always switching is a logically distinct concept from the probability of winning by switching given that the player has picked door 1 and the host has opened door 3." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem#Criticism_o...

Brave's noticeably faster than Chrome (because of course it renders less stuff with the low-level content blocking) and on Apple silicon with the new arm64 build the rendering speed is officially ridiculous.

Most sites now feel like they're some hyper-optimised, next.js static site generated build even if they're not.

The web experience is not unlike that first time you switched from spinning platters to SSDs.

It really is great to see challenger browsers pushing the web forward like this.

Along with IPFS it's nice to see Tor integration, low-level content blocking, a privacy-respecting Zoom alternative (https://together.brave.com/) and integrated MetaMask for Web3.

Brave still has a small userbase (~24 million), but hopefully it creates the space / incentives for Firefox and others to play catch-up so we see a lot of these features standardised for the benefit of all users, regardless of browser preference.

Brendan Eich mentioned it was a default completion bug they got no revenue from, which was fixed:

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1270128401760743424

I'm in awe of the effort Jim Mussared (https://twitter.com/jim_mussared), Vanessa Teague (https://twitter.com/VTeagueAus) and a few others have put into identifying serious issues with the COVIDSafe app (and making sensible, well-informed recommendations).

That ticket is incredibly damning of the Australian Government.

Highly-skilled technologists and cryptographers volunteer significant amounts of time in the hope critical digital infrastructure can be improved and everything is basically dismissed.

Great response, thanks for taking the time to share your perspective, and the reminder of Stage3D development.

The rev-share licensing controversy was around the point I'd started moving away from the Adobe world.

As you illustrate, the web won and many of us in the Adobe community moved on (who weren't involved specifically in games etc).

Oh I agree with you. When I say 'candid', I mean they conveyed the sense they were sharing some internal opinion that it was entirely about Apple playing commercial games, when in retrospect I don't think that was correct – there were technical issues that made it a non-starter on mobile (battery, smooth UX as you say).

I think you're both right and wrong.

You're right from the perspective that capabilities have increased, not decreased (though that was not true for a period during the flash / HTML5 crossover). You can make anything you want – and more – in the current context, and any particular historical format or container love is anachronistic pointlessness.

But you're wrong in the sense that development paradigm represented an era where programmers and non-programmers alike could dive in to explore, conceive and create experiences in a way that is more interesting and accessible to a broader group of people than today's more modern, powerful practices.

The flash plugin itself, as a format, does not enable something different, but the editing environment and culture definitely did, so in some way the death of the container does mark an end of a particular creative era in digital society.

Perhaps only for the participants, and even then I'm not mournful, but it is an ever-so-slightly sentimental moment for those that witnessed that fusion of creativity between types who were decidedly not technologoical and those who were, fused in a shared creative endeavour.

It's true, Flash created and supported a special scene of creativity which drew in both artists and programmers in a way the felt new and unique, and seemed to last for almost a decade from ~2000 - ~2010.

Who could forget Yugo Nakamura's explorations in the early noughties, and many others which defined the early scene.

Even a decade or more ago some pretty impressive experiences were being delivered web-only. I ran a team in London where we really explored pushing the capabilities of the Flash player.

Granted we were just operating in a digital marketing context, in an environment where more involved gaming was already occurring, but we still delivered what feel like pretty decent 2d-gaming experiences, such as Professor Green and the Eco-Rangers: https://youtu.be/gUY2bVnhm44?t=85.

Back then I remember key figures from the Adobe team visiting our London office and candidly telling us the reason Flash was being blocked, esp. on mobile, was entirely due to commercial reasons by Apple, and not for technical reasons.

I believed them at that stage, but in hindsight it does appear there were serious performance, energy and security issues, but ex-Adobe engineers might want to chime in on that...

As someone who lived through that phase of web indulgence, I'm not mournful of a more indulgent time. It was a beautiful, exploratory phase, but the explosion in pointless, nonsense preloaders and custom UI represented usability ignorance and was not something to cherish.

In recent times the creativity and complexity has increased significantly in areas where it matters, such as web gaming, whereas in areas where it doesn't, such as UI interfaces to explore and understand information, it has gotten marginally or a lot better, depending on the context...

Brave is interesting because it's taking a firehose to the current ad-tech system, and anyone who's spent time working in ad-tech understands it's is a towering inferno of fraud and abuse.

Some don't like Brave's approach of an alternative, opt-in ads / rewards system because in their view everything crypto-related or ads-supported is scammy. That's an understandable perception: a significant number of crypto enthusiasts appear to be scammers pumping pyramid schemes, and we've already established the ad-tech industry is a towering inferno.

But technically I think you have to concede Brave's on-device ad relevance model is a better way (and the only conscionable one) to run an ad system that delivers relevant ads to interested users, and even directly reward them for their attention. If you think ad-supported anything is a non-starter, then you'd just never enable Brave Rewards, or use another browser (although they're entangled in the current ad-tech system so...)

What you say about 'VPN fallacy' makes little sense.

By default Brave is the most aggressive in blocking trackers, adware, and spyware compared to Firefox and Google — and this is actually a problem for Brave.

Follow their web-compat issues on Github [1] to see the kind of things they're dealing with (an example of the very problematic and kind-of-unresolvable issues that come up include the Duolingo issue [2]).

Users can disable shields on a per-site basis to deal with these things, but it's an open question as to whether this kind of friction will increase or decrease, and whether it's a barrier to larger adoption.

There is no question though that the Brave team have the most commitment to privacy compared to Firefox and, of course, Google.

Your statement that the Google spyware Brave has removed in their Chromium derivative has been replaced by some mystery sauce is based on...?

I do find it curious that whenever this little challenger brand pops up on HN there's a predictable surge of hot take / bad take commentary which aggressively tries to paint a picture of Brave as anything but a plucky challenger brand full of technologists who are expending a lot of energy on privacy, security, and moving browsers forward.

The accounts trying to shop a myth of Brave as a low-rent scam operation will inevitably find buyers for various reasons, but you'd hope technologists in the main will do their research and ignore, or even become curious as to what is driving this continued negative opinion-shaping...

I did mine, and I fell for Brave due to a desire to opt-out of the worst of ad-tech surveillance, get a faster browser, and participate in a novel attempt to bootstrap a frictionless crypto / tipping / payment economy. Not all of these novel ideas will work, but they're worth exploring.

For now Brave's been a dream, and when I accidentally use another open test browser for normal browsing, I'm taken back to a gross dystopia of a web experience.

[1] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/projects/17

[2] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/3725