I’m fine with automation if we can have fully automated luxury communism!

China is likely to get AI before the US does. Innovation here is slowing down.

I’m a big fan and longtime reader of Derek Lowe. He called attention to suppression of grant funding for hypotheses that challenged the amyloid hypothesis, and the shockingly partisan and dogmatic behavior of journal referees and NIH advisors in the field. I’ve been following his coverage ever since he started reporting disappointing readouts from clinical trials on the anti-amyloid mABs.

His concern that this class of therapy is “pathological science” (think cold fusion, or EmDrive, or string theory - not outright quackery, but hypotheses that are endlessly tweaked to justify the latest failures) are valid.

However, the newest mABs really do seem to have a small but statistically significant effect on slowing disease progression. Enough to justify the risks of brain swelling? Or the cost? Probably not. But I think Derek has perhaps swung too far in the opposite direction. It’s too early to call time on this therapeutic target. If it’s marginally but truly effective, we should try to figure out why, and keep tweaking the drugs to see if they can be improved.

Donepezil was a dead end, but it’s too early to say if Aduhelm is too.

So tired of hearing that the right is a champion of free speech.

the pie is getting smaller but the oligarchs are getting bigger slices.

the Classicists and the classists!

usually when politicians use Signal it’s because they don’t want their messages FOIA’d or audited. I can’t really imagine Vance or Hegseth worrying about that, though, which makes me wonder if it’s just horrible opsec, if they can’t be bothered to use a SCIF or what?

Isn’t jfx still actually using HTML and CSS, though? like it’s cool that the UI logic is in Java, but doesn’t using CSS mean you still need to lug a rendering engine around, even if not a whole browser?

you’re right, apparently. from Wikipedia:

The U.S. Army defines assault rifles as “short, compact, selective-fire weapons that fire a cartridge intermediate in power between submachine gun and rifle cartridges.”

AR-15 is semi-auto rather than selective fire, so it’s not an assault rifle. I had mistakenly conflated assault rifles with “assault weapons,” which is a separate (and more vague and contested) term.

you can still buy an M-16 or AK-47, but it has to be transferrable (grandfathered in before FOPA) and you need extra paperwork.

you can buy an AR-15 in any gun store. they even make a “JR-15,” for kids. no, I’m not kidding.

Java (and Object Pascal, I’m assuming) have very old-looking UIs. Discord’s gonna have trouble attracting users if their client looks like a billing system from 2005. Also, what do you do about the web client? Implement the UI once in HTML/CSS/JS, and again in JForms?

So if you’re picking one UI to make cross-platform, and you need a web client, do you pick JForms and make it work on the web? or React and make it work on desktop?

that they’re willing to let some of their kids die rather than get a vaccine they think might turn them trans or autistic shows how much they value the lives of trans and autistic people.

j00 r t3h f1r57 p3r50n 1v3 s33n 70 u53 1337 5p33k n s00 l0ng, h4xx0r!

perhaps followed by a Butlerian jihad against OpenAI and Tesla.

uh I just picked lemmy.ml pretty randomly when I moved from Reddit, though I specifically picked it over lemmygrad because I’d heard lemmygrad was full of tankies. personally, I’m a left libertarian. I’m not auth at all.

I think you might be overestimating how much a user’s home lemmy indicates their ideology.

I really hope RFK Jr keeps drinking raw milk.

I’m switching to DeepSeek-R1, personally. locally hosted, so I won’t be affected when the US bans it. plus I can remove the CCP’s political sensitivity filters.

it feels weird for me to be rooting for PRC to pull ahead of the US on AI, but the idea of Trump and Musk getting their hands on a potential superintelligence down the line is terrifying.

I’ve heard that some people have difficulty with hypotheticals in general. not just on political issues, like it’s a surprisingly common cognitive issue.

I don’t get it. Reddit’s so much more egregious than digg was - why haven’t more users jumped ship? the soul of the platform was broken with the API change, yet most users stayed, and the ones who did leave haven’t shown up here.

was Lemmy just not ready?

https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/ca-gov-gavin-newsom-completely-aligns

He agreed with all of Charlie Kirk’s (of TPUSA) views on trans people, when he recently hosted him on his podcast.