__blockcipher__

> Leaders have also said they will kill Jews anywhere in the world, btw

I'm curious, is your claim that one of the current leaders of Hamas said this? If so I'd love to read the quote.

> If Israel doesn't take out Hamas, it is entirely unclear if it will be able to prevent them from carrying out more attacks in the future.

One counterargument is that taking out Hamas, if they succeed (I'm not bullish), is likely to just result in another possibly more radical group rising to power. Doubly so when we've seen something like 20,000 casualties in the last two months, overwhelmingly civilian, which is very obviously going to breed another generation that is full of hatred and vengeance.

Anyway, moving on I frankly think it should be possible for Israel to prevent another October 7 even in a universe where Hamas is still in power. They have enormous technological and economic superiority as well as the full backing of the US government. It seems like dysfunctional organizational dynamics are a problem here, because Israel had all the intel it could possibly have needed to see this attack coming and stop it, but it didn't. So personally I think looking internally rather than externally is the most likely way to secure the safety of the Israeli populace into the future.

As a random bystander I find your comments extremely hard to comprehend. It's not really the vocabulary, although it could do to be less lofty. I think part of it is sentences like this:

> Can you be curious about whether this approach as a moderator on a website frequented by some of the most powerful minds on the planet may be preventing lives from being saved?

This sounds to me, and maybe I'm wrong, like you have some sort of pre-formed opinion about what Dang et al are doing, but are choosing to cast it in the lens of "can you be curious" as a way of avoiding just directly saying what you think.

I'm curious if pressure from the US ever mounts enough to end this war. Currently we're supporting Israel just like we always have and are just making some empty statements to signal to the more left-leaning segment of the Democrat voter base. I think it's most likely this reality continues, but it does seem possible, albeit unlikely, that Democrat voter discontent gets high enough that we force an end to the war in the next two months.

Of course, even if that somewhat far-fetched scenario comes true we'll probably be up to at least 40,000 Gazans killed :/

> These are completely rejected in the Palestinian street, but unfortunately they are officially and internationally recognized by the United Nations and supported by the United States of America.

To me a smoking gun here is that Biden's administration wants the Palestinian Authority to rule Gaza "after Hamas" (as an aside, I sincerely doubt Israel will be successful in destroying Hamas, but ofc even if they do there will just be a more radical group taking its place anyway); history shows pretty well that the US only installs a power when they know they will be a vassal/puppet of US interests. There's many examples but the most recent one is when we (I'm American) propped up the bogus Afghanistan "Government" only for it to instantly collapse and be replaced again by the Taliban the moment we withdrew.

Really hope there's a path forward that gives the Palestinians real autonomy and an end to the bloodshed. In reality, I expect this conflict to continue indefinitely and us to just continue supporting the occupation, which I find heartbreaking but my rational mind is convinced is the most likely outcome.

You mean legally part of Israel from Israel’s perspective, right? AFAIK neither the west bank nor the gaza strip are recognized as legitimate territories of Israel under international law but I admittedly know very little about international law :)

> In development at least, most of the times I hear this, the "availability" is only needed for random unplanned meetings from useless managers that can't actually plan or work asynchronously.

Really? Because it's pretty routine for me to get pinged on IRC/slack/whatever by another engineer who's looking for help with something. Obviously I set the expectation that I'm not going to be able to instantly reply to every ping so some things are going to have to be async, but there's definitely a lot more than just managers that could ping me.

> it seems like the holy grail to the config files dilemma is to just hard-code desired settings in the source code

That is…not remotely the holy grail. You’re really throwing out the baby with the bathwater on that one. User-configurable settings are important for many, many applications.

In the narrow case that you’re working on, say, a monorepo for closed-source code that only runs on your own servers, maybe in source code is fine provided there’s no host-level differences that would require a config file.

But for any other circumstance…yeah you need some type of configurability.

As a shareholder I’m not at all sure of that. I’d rather take the guaranteed profit of the $10B per year. Even at Apple’s insane levels of free cash flow, $10B is still enough to really move the needle.

I suspect that they know that the average user won't actually change it back. Just like how, IIRC, Apple Maps is (or at least was as a few years ago) the most commonly used mapping software purely due to the reach of iphone's userbase

It seems that way to you because you're mired in it. But to someone who isn't, such policy doesn't have a tangible impact on their life, or more accurately it doesn't seem to.

In much the same way that the impact of overfishing doesn't feel like it impacts you.

(Not GP)

Thank you, that made it click for me!

The purpose of evidence is to provide support for a claim. However in colloquial speech we generally speak of someone having "evidence" of something when they have absolute proof.

This isn’t quite true because their racial admission bias was far stronger than that needed to make up for all the nepotism (legacy donor athlete etc) admitees.

The article says as such:

> My biggest problem with SF was simply not feeling physically safe while walking down the street or sitting in a train. SF has a pretty low violent crime rate, at least by US standards, so I wasn’t worried about getting shot or robbed or anything like that.

> Instead, the problem was that SF had (and still has today), thousands of people wandering around who are suffering from untreated substance abuse and/or severe mental illness. The vast majority of these folks were completely harmless, but a small percentage were hostile, threatening, and, in some cases, violent.

> In multiple cases over the last few years, I was followed, screamed at, and threatened in broad daylight. Thankfully, nothing physically happened to me, but it’s a really jarring experience to have this happen. Each time I reported these incidents to the police, they never responded. I got the sense that as long as no one was physically harmed, they didn’t really care. Thus, there were no mechanisms in place to control, contain, or treat this behavior.

Your comments in this thread seem to me to be heavily laden with the cognitive distortion of catastrophizing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_distortion#Magnifica...

> Catastrophizing – Giving greater weight to the worst possible outcome, however unlikely, or experiencing a situation as unbearable or impossible when it is just uncomfortable.

---

Hopefully it goes without saying that talking about elderly people falling and dying due to a supposed spam text originating from Twilio is...a bit farfetched...

"For all we know" is an expression that conveys a lack of knowledge/certainty, so they're using the phrase in a way that makes perfect sense.

> They made a bet that people wouldn't need their money back right now. It's the constant risk in fractional reserve banking.

Meh. Fractional reserve banking is not without risks, but I don't see any mention from you of the fact that SVB was holding bad assets.

> No banking investment is safe if there is a run on the bank

This isn't true. Runs can only happen when a bank has insufficient liquidity. Such as when it holds long-dated bonds that it purchased at historical rock-bottom low interest rates.

> If the bonds didn't need to be sold, they would have paid out.

This is the "you don't lose money unless you sell" fallacy. Which yes, is actually a fallacy. (Note the fallacy is useful to use, psychologically speaking, to try to manipulate panic-susceptible individuals into doing the sane thing and not panic selling every dip; that doesn't make it less of a fallacy though)

To be clear, I imagine that it’s not that the reservoir is literally “intentionally” storing different strains but just that viruses are more accurately thought of as “quasispecies swarms”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_quasispecies

This is a naturally emergent phenomena.

(Just adding some further context to what you were saying)

Here’s another example:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/

> In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism."

It should go without saying that there’s no single, universally agreed upon definition of anything, thus giving a convenient way to dismiss any inconvenient claims.

IIRC the maggots need to directly eat the dead tissue, so they are basically directly on the wound. The maggots themselves are covered with a dressing so you can't see them, but my understanding is they can be somewhat felt. On the "bright side", a lot of the times maggot dressings are used for chronically unhealing diabetic foot ulcers, and those wounds often have little sensation due to diabetic neuropathy and other issues that prevent the affected individual from being able to feel much in their extremities.

EDIT: Hmm, it seems like from the article that they have access to the dead tissue but through a porous type material, and apparently consume the dead tissue by liquefying it with enzymes first and then "drinking it", so not quite as direct as I remembered I guess.

> ...greenbottle fly larvae are grown in the lab, disinfected, and put into finely woven net pouches about the size of a teabag that are then placed on patients’ wounds for four days. The maggots work their magic through the material and the bags are removed before they turn into flies.

> As larvae feed on dead tissue in a wound, they release chemicals that break down dead tissue into a liquid that they drink, according to Chelsea and Westminster hospital, which offers larval therapy. They also take up bacteria, which are destroyed within their gut, but do not eat healthy tissue. When applied to the wound the larvae are the size of an uncooked grain of rice, and grow to around 10-12mm during treatment. They cannot bite, since they do not have teeth, and they cannot multiply.

---

Ah, I see I was thinking they are directly on the wound bed because of this video I was remembering, but the video actually shows naturally appearing maggots (aka not intentionally placed there): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxzciEVJGwY (not for faint of heart)

Maggot wound dressings are incredibly effective at debridement of necrotic tissue. There's other approaches that can be taken (using enzymes, etc), but the maggots work great. Notably maggot therapy is only indicated for wounds that have necrotic tissue.

It works because the maggots eat the necrotic tissue but not the healthy tissue, so they're extremely effective for debridement.

I had some actual notes of research papers related to maggot therapy but those are stuck on a laptop that's in the shop right now so, no sources from me today.

On the topic of wound healing more generally, check out the slides I linked to here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34482547

I've personally used these moist wound healing methods to heal all manner of wounds of mine (lacerations, abrasions, and burns) with minimal scarring (and FWIW I'm someone that scars quite readily).

It's very sad to me that proper moist wound healing is insanely cheap and effective but most people [at least in America] are brainwashed to use several ineffective strategies:

- triple antibiotic ointments like neosporin which do not outperform petroleum jelly in RCTs; all the benefit of neosporin comes from its use of white petrolatum as the carrier gel. The actual antibiotic portion doesn't help and in a small subset of people causes allergic reaction type issues.

- gauze, which dries out wounds and makes them heal worse. For 99% of everyday wounds one of either hydrocolloid or transparent film dressings is all you need, and can be changed quite infrequently (every few days at most for hydrocolloids, if used on the right wounds ie wounds that have mild to moderate amounts of exudate)

- washing wounds with soap, which needlessly retards the healing process. All you need to do is rinse a wound with normal water to get any dirt or debris out, apply aquaphor or pure petroleum jelly and cover it with a dressing. Moist wound healing makes wounds heal at least 2x as fast as dried out wounds. Notably, if a wound ever forms a scab that is a sign that you screwed up by letting the wound dry out. Properly taken care of wounds never form scabs. For the same reason, the somewhat common practice of "letting a wound breathe" by removing the bandage and leaving it uncovered (I was told to do this overnight by my mom growing up for example) should never be done. Keep the wound moist and covered during the entire wound healing process, only changing the dressing when necessary.

MWH was initially proven effective in Winter's 1962 paper "Formation of the Scab and the Rate of Epithelization of Superficial Wounds in the Skin of the Young Domestic Pig", which showed wounds healing ~twice as fast when kept moist compared to control.

The best method for healing burn wounds (also cuts, abrasions, lacerations, and the like) is outlined in these slides:

https://www.emilio-moriguchi.or.jp/disease/doc/moist_eng.pdf

^ Seriously these slides are incredible, check them out! In particular slide 42 shows the result of almost an entire finger tip being regenerated near perfectly. When I first saw the slides my jaw dropped, it seems like the type of thing that only reptiles are supposed to be able to do. Note that the finger could only be regenerated because there was a tiny part of the nail bed remaining; without that the body would have lost the genetic information to reconstruct the finger tip properly.

TL;DR: Moist wound heal by coating the wound in aquaphor (or pure petroleum jelly aka vaseline, but I prefer aquaphor due to its semi occlusive nature rather than fully occlusive as well as a couple of additional anti inflammatory compounds in aquaphor like bisabolol), then cover the wound with saran wrap, or a transparent film dressing like tegaderm, or a hydrocolloid like duoderm extra thin cgf (if using hydrocolloids you can omit the aquaphor because the hydrocolloid won't stick as well and also the natural fluid secreted by the wound fulfills the same role).

The result of this healing method is fast, low-pain, low-scarring wound healing.

An important part of the approach is to never use topical antibiotics nor soap, since those damage the body's wound healing cells more than they retard the pathogens.

---

As for maggot therapy specifically, it works for wounds with necrotic tissue. The maggots eat the dead tissue and leave the healthy tissue completely intact. So it's not necessary for burn wounds.

It was also in this weird spot where they wanted to use it for PR but simultaneously wanted to shove it beneath the floorboards so people won’t mass adopt it.

We all know how those “ethics committees” go, right? It’d immediately turn into another culture war type issue where very blatant favoritism is shown to certain charities and blatant hostility to others.

If your “less cynical” (I’d say “more naive” :P) take is true, then where’s their concurrent announcement that they’re donating .5% of sales (or at least .5* * % of revenue that was amazon-smiled since not everyone used it) to a smaller set of organizations?

The line you quoted:

> Those receiving weekly injections of semaglutide lost, on average, 14.9% of their body weight after 16 months of treatment; those who received a placebo lost 2.4% on average.

Doesn't really have anything to do with the question about lifestyle changes. That question basically centers around whether the 14.9% weight loss occurred independent of or as a result of lifestyle changes downstream from the semaglutide.

The correct answer is because it's become very taboo, particularly in academic circles, to make any statement that implies that it's not good to be fat. So articles like these always must include at least one generic quote about how being thin is not an end in itself.

Neither Rogan nor Fridman are really "right wing", but of the two Fridman is certainly not. We're talking about a guy who spearheaded the "masks 4 all" push back at the beginning of COVID. If we're assigning arbitrary labels that definitely falls on the left half of the spectrum.

> The problem is the massive leaps of logic being made by people who have (quite wrongly, based on available evidence) become convinced that the vaccines are a greater threat to healthy people than the virus is.

That may be true overall (and it may not btw, only time will tell), but it's certainly not true on a by-indvidual basis. Someone who's, say, 18 with no major health disorders is going to experience a lot more risk of adverse outcome from any of the vaccines than from SARS-CoV-2. That's partially a function of the incredible SARS-CoV-2 outcomes in the "not old" age range but also because vaccination is also a fundamentally different intervention than exposure to the entire SARS-CoV-2 virus. If we're talking about the mRNA vaccines (Pfizer/moderna/etc), those are basically spike protein mRNA suspended in lipid nanoparticles. It makes your cells express the spike protein, not the whole SARS-CoV-2 virus. So metaphorically speaking you're getting pure spike protein antigen, and different peoples' genetic predispositions/etc are going to play out differently in that scenario as opposed to contact with the normal virus.

...Like those of the people in the case report we're looking at.