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pitpatagain

375 karma · joined October 28, 2024

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pitpatagain··on "Anna, Lindsey Halligan Here." My Signal exchange with the interim U.S. attorney
Prosecutors talk about cases all the time. But they specifically don't talk about matters occurring before a grand jury because it's illegal for them to do so. Grand jury secrecy means they are supposed to never disclose what happened inside the grand jury room even after the case has concluded.

It is not illegal for witnesses to disclose things from their own testimony. But in this conversation, Halligan is directly commenting on things disclosed by other parties thus making indirect disclosures of her own by implication.

It's incredibly risky ground to be treading, that she is doing for no apparent reason, having reached out to a reporter who wasn't even actively reporting on the case. It's pretty wtf.

pitpatagain··on "Anna, Lindsey Halligan Here." My Signal exchange with the interim U.S. attorney
It's not that there's a single money shot message, it's that the conversation throughout is just stuff that no normal prosecutor would ever say anything but "no comment" about in regard to an active case.

The prosecutor is not supposed to be disclosing information from the grand jury, and then spends a shockingly long signal thread talking on record with a journalist that constantly implicitly discusses/confirms information they aren't supposed to be talking about at all.

It doesn't reach the same level as the Hegseth Signal leak, but it's really bizarre stuff.

pitpatagain··on [dead]
Yes, having this many crashes over a period in which they only drove 7000 miles is noticeably worse than human driving.
pitpatagain··on The health benefits of sunlight may outweigh the risk of skin cancer
People didn't used to expose themselves to as much direct sun and covered themselves with a lot more clothes. Traditional clothing in arid sunny areas typically covers everything, look at people in the middle east today.

I live in a very sunny desert area and it's kind of funny when people assume people from here would be "more tanned". We stay in the shade, the sun will kill you! Anyone working outside is wearing wide brimmed hats and typically has all of their skin covered with clothing even in the heat, people typically have their faces covered with cloth as well.

Spending time outside with minimal clothing in direct midday sun is a modern weird behavior.

pitpatagain··on Tesla is trying to hide 3 Robotaxi accidents
They reported 3 accidents up to July 25 on a fleet of, at the time, 12 cars, doing barely any miles. No data is yet reported for August. The requirement is to report within 5 days, why are the reports happening now? It's actually quite shocking they had 3 to report so quickly of any severity with such a tiny program in Austin.

The NHTSA has an active probe into Tesla for not following the reporting guidelines for their level 2 systems: https://apnews.com/article/tesla-crashes-self-driving-robota...

Specifically that they haven't been reporting on time, months instead of the required days.

"If they had been more impactful accidents there would be more public information." does not track with Tesla's history of reporting thus far.

You can make excuses all you want for them but late reports + redacting information other companies do not reads loud and clear as "trying to hide something" to me, not "legit autonomous vehicle company that wants to establish reliability and safety to the public".

pitpatagain··on Tesla is trying to hide 3 Robotaxi accidents
Change it to "Tesla is trying to hide the details of 3 Robotaxi accidents" then.

They have reported that accidents happened, and redacted all of what actually happened. It's very clear what the complaint is in the article despite how hung up on the headline you are.

pitpatagain··on Tesla is trying to hide 3 Robotaxi accidents
Read the table of examples in the article. Other companies report crashes with significant detail visible to the public that Tesla is redacting.

Compare Waymo report:

"On [XXX] at 10:31 PM PT a Waymo Autonomous Vehicle ("Waymo AV") operating in San Francisco, California was in a collision involving a scooterist on [XXX] at [XXX].

The Waymo AV was stopped at the curb facing north on [XXX] for a passenger drop-off when the passenger in the Waymo AV opened the rear right door. As the rear right door was being opened by the passenger, a scooter ....

Waymo is reporting this crash under Request No. 2 of Standing General Order 2021-01. Waymo may supplement or correct its reporting with additional information as it may become available."

Tesla reports is:

"[REDACTED, MAY CONTAIN CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS INFORMATION]"

Tesla has consistently tried to have it both ways saying they are "not autonomous" and therefore don't have to report, but also then claiming in other contexts that they are driving huge numbers of "autonomous" miles.

So now they finally do a handful of reports and it's all REDACTED? They are finally doing barely what's required but also not being forthcoming at all.

pitpatagain··on Tesla is trying to hide 3 Robotaxi accidents
It's already clear that there is no possible timeline in which they actually remove safety drivers by the end of the year, it's such a joke.

The weird thing is that between the extremely underwhelming tiny supervised test they run in Austin and the nonsensical permitting games they want to play in California, they don't really seem like a company that actually wants to launch a robotaxi.

pitpatagain··on Tesla is trying to hide 3 Robotaxi accidents
"As it does with its ADAS crash reporting, Tesla is hiding most details about the crashes. Unlike its competitors, which openly release narrative information about the incidents, Tesla is redacting all the narrative for all its crash reporting to NHTSA"
pitpatagain··on Denmark close to wiping out cancer-causing HPV strains after vaccine roll-out
It's not just the past empirical observed rate, it's the type of virus it is/other things that we know about it.

On top of being structurally a dsDNA virus which doesn't change much, HPV is subject to "purifying selection": because of the way it is built and the mechanism it uses to interact with host cells, it is very difficult for it to have productive mutations that don't immediately die out. It's highly constrained in a way that eg influenza, COVID, HIV, are not.

Some pathogens are just easier to deal with than others:

We have been curing syphilis since 1943 with just penicillin. It doesn't develop resistance because it doesn't have horizontal gene transfer and the mechanism it has that penicillin targets is too critical and conserved, it just can't mutate away from it.

Polio mutates quickly, but is extremely constrained, almost all mutations are defective, and the capsid structure is highly conserved. That vaccine has been in use since 1955 without losing effectiveness or introducing new variants.

The biology of HPV says it will be more like those cases, and since the introduction of the vaccine in 2006, that's what studies have been finding empirically.

To emphasize the difference in meaning of "strain" for HPV: There are 200+ HPV genotypes that have been numbered this way, but they are all of ancient origin. There are observed shifts in prevalence of different genotypes, but not newly evolved genotypes.

We also only care about targeting oncogenic strains. If we open up selective pressure for non-oncogenic strains to be more relatively successful and take over, great.

pitpatagain··on Denmark close to wiping out cancer-causing HPV strains after vaccine roll-out
The study is linked early in the article and is fairly dense, the article summarized it well and is a lot more readable.

16/18 are the most carcinogenic strains, they have been close to eradicated in Denmark. "Denmark close to wiping out leading cancer-causing HPV strains after vaccine roll-out" is the full headline and 100% accurate.

Those were the only two high risk strains covered by the vaccine used in the time frame studied. The study covers the first cohort of girls given the 2008 version of the vaccine when they recently reached age to start screening. It is expected to not see other strains affected in this study, even though current vaccines are broader. The total number of high risk HPV cases in the study went down post-vaccination.

The notion of numbered strains of HPV is about diverging lineages going back hundreds of thousands of years in a highly conserved, slowly mutating virus. They are not comparable to things like seasonal COVID or flu strains.

pitpatagain··on Denmark close to wiping out cancer-causing HPV strains after vaccine roll-out
Also after some research about rate of change: It's extremely slow.

HPV is a double-stranded DNA virus with very high replication fidelity. The emergence of types like 16 and 18 happened hundreds of thousands of years ago.

I did know it was quite slow but not just how slow. Very long term vaccine efficacy is expected.

pitpatagain··on Denmark close to wiping out cancer-causing HPV strains after vaccine roll-out
The total prevalence of all high-risk cases went down in the study, from 46% in the pre-vaccine era to 32% post vaccine.

16/18 were chosen because they are highly carcinogenic and cause the most cancer, they are the two most aggressive high risk types. They cause 70% of all the cancer but are much less than 70% of the cases of high risk strains.

It takes real mental gymnastics to downplay how positive this vaccine is.

pitpatagain··on Denmark close to wiping out cancer-causing HPV strains after vaccine roll-out
That's because other strains weren't covered by the original vaccines: Strains 16 and 18 were the high risk strains covered in the 2008 roll-out, the roll-out to young girls of the broader vaccine covering other high risk strains didn't start until 2017.

“In 2017, one of the first birth cohorts of women in Denmark who were HPV-vaccinated as teenage girls in 2008 reached the screening age of 23 years,” Nonboe explained."

It will take several more years to see the effects on other strains. It seems to have been wildly successful so far.

pitpatagain··on Denmark close to wiping out cancer-causing HPV strains after vaccine roll-out
https://www.hpvworld.com/articles/the-frequency-of-hpv-infec...

It's incredibly prevalent, but most people clear it within a couple years, and won't even know that they had it. The time to clear it is just variable and depends on your body's immune response, the longer you go without clearing it the higher the cancer risk.

pitpatagain··on Denmark close to wiping out cancer-causing HPV strains after vaccine roll-out
The protection from the vaccines lasts (probably) a lifetime, and HPV is quite widespread because it is: very easily communicable, and infections linger for potentially long periods of time without any obvious symptoms

Something like 80% of people are sexually active at all will be infected with HPV at some point. You may not have been sexually active, but your future partners may have been. I personally have a friend who went through stage 4 cancer contracted from her (now ex) husband.

So, of course not literally everyone needs to take it, assess your own risks, but it's quite an easy, highly effective vaccine: don't overthink it.

pitpatagain··on Bluesky Issues Warning to Any Users Celebrating Charlie Kirk Assassination
> But also because he’s not an elected politician but more of an everyday activist

Wait, assassinating elected politicians is... better? Interesting take.

pitpatagain··on Axial twist theory
That's the proposer of visual map-based theory, a different explanation for the same things axial twist theory tries to explain. Axial twist is much more recent.
pitpatagain··on New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care
Americans move significantly less today than they did in the mid 20th century, not more: https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/03/14/why-might-ameri...
pitpatagain··on The Timmy Trap
Ah ok, you meant the second thing.

I don't think the Plato's Cave analogy is confusing, I think it's completely wrong. It's "not in the article" in the sense that it is literally not conceptually what the article is about and it's also not really what Plato's Cave is about either, just taking superficial bits of it and slotting things into it, making it doubly wrong.

pitpatagain··on The Timmy Trap
I can't decide how to read your last sentence.

That reflection seems totally off to me: fluent, and flavored with elements of the article, but also not really what the article is about and a pretty weird/tortured use of the elements of the allegory of the cave, like it doesn't seem anything like Plato's Cave to me. Ironically demonstrates the actual main gist of the article if you ask me.

But maybe you meant that you think that summary is good and not textually similar to that post so demonstrating something more sophisticated than "shortening".

pitpatagain··on Ozempic shows anti-aging effects in trial
Or that's who you notice. My husband takes ozempic for type 2 diabetes and it completely fixed his blood sugar while causing very moderate weight loss.

What the people in this study have causes abnormal visceral fat accumulation in the belly and back and itself causes disturbing changes in body shape and appearance, does not respond or normal weight loss, and hasn't had real treatment options. That ozempic has beneficial effects for it in an RCT is actually awesome, it's the framing given by the headline that is bad.

pitpatagain··on Ozempic shows anti-aging effects in trial
This is specifically a study on people with HIV-associated lipohypertrophy, which is associated with accelerated aging. Not clear what this would mean for people generally.
pitpatagain··on FDA has approved Yeztugo, a drug that provides protection against HIV infection
> Maybe the lack of occult infections with shorter acting drugs makes everyone confident that they won’t happen with longer acting drugs?

Previous experience is definitely part of it. It's not just Truvada, this isn't the first long acting injectable prep. Cabotegravir (integrate inhibitor) was approved 4 years ago for this use and is given every two months, so there's already information from how that was studied, approved and what's happened with several years of actual use.

pitpatagain··on FDA has approved Yeztugo, a drug that provides protection against HIV infection
I want to emphasize that the parent comment of all this is straight up incorrect on the mechanism of action of this drug class.

"This means that before it can work the virus has already infected the cell and added its RNA to the host cells DNA permanently." is not correct, capsid inhibitors interfere before both reverse transcription and nuclear import.

Both of the drugs in Truvada, which was has had 13 years of use in the wild since approval and is very successful, are NRTIs, they work at the reverse transcription step, they are literally later in the cycle than the new drug (but before nuclear import also) and work just fine as prep.

So the whole premise for why this drug in particular shouldn't work in theory is flawed.

To your questions about how the lenacapavir trials were run and why they rule out occult infection (which is the term for what you're describing): I'd like to find more details on the study honestly. But do I think the multiple studies that convinced the FDA to give approval just completely overlook this well known concept/possibility? Not really?

pitpatagain··on FDA has approved Yeztugo, a drug that provides protection against HIV infection
Yes, my phrasing was responding to the way the parent stated it as "90% more effective, and also it's easier to take". As you say: It's 90% more effective precisely because it's easier, not and also. Behavioral factors matter an enormous amount for the real world success of many types of drugs!
pitpatagain··on FDA has approved Yeztugo, a drug that provides protection against HIV infection
This is incredibly misinformed, the drug has been specifically studied as prep, and this is in fact not at all what happens, despite your theories about the drug's mechanism of action. It does prevent infection.
pitpatagain··on The first 100% effective HIV prevention drug is approved and going global
Prep has been studied for IV drug users. It works, enough that it is recommended, but is much less effective. IV drug use is a massively more efficient transmission route than any type of sexual contact.
pitpatagain··on FDA has approved Yeztugo, a drug that provides protection against HIV infection
I think it's pretty clear that being easier to take and not mess up is the reason for the difference in statistical effectiveness. The reason for lower numbers for effectiveness of daily oral Truvada prep is primarily measuring differences in adherence.
pitpatagain··on Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds
I cook basically all my meals but also have no fear of "unnatural" ingredients (I have a shaker of msg right next to the stove, I have cooked mac and cheese with sodium citrate, etc) and no, this ingredient list is not like normal home cooked meals.

Some of it is typical flavoring stuff, onion powder, etc, that could easily show up on a list of spices in a home dish.

But a big part of the list is the stuff you see in highly engineered food product only: maltodextrin, dextrose monohydrate, yellow 5, disodium guanylate, disodium inosinate, sodium phosphate, etc.

No "home cooked meal of home grown fruits and vegetables" has a similar ingredient list to this.

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