I was, for a long time, in the "follow the statistics" camp until about 5 years ago when I did an experiment because of an HN comment. My wife has had low-key GI problems for years. I read a random comment in a thread here about a specific L. Reuteri strain that BioGaia sells and how it had cured someone's IBS. I thought "why not, what's the worst that could happen?" and ordered a bottle. Two weeks into taking it daily, she comes to me with this look on her face. "What?" "I think that stuff you ordered fixed my guts." "What?!"
It lasted for about 18 months and then she started regressing while travelling. As soon as she got home she took another month long course and has followed a similar cycle since then. A couple week dose lasts 18-24 months and then needs a reset. It's possible it's all placebo, I have no idea. But as an intervention, that first round was a shockingly good quality of life improvement.
Based on my wife's improvements, our neurologist is now recommending what we are doing. Im working with my wife on balance now since she has an asymmetric leg strength issue. Low and behold my dumb bro science thinking is working. We are about to do a brutal leg day together.
I’m smiling, both because your wife is improving and because of the asymmetry thing.
After my second knee surgery, I asked the surgeon about physio. He didn’t really think it was necessary for the kind of surgery I had, but when I insisted he shrugged, said “sure”, and made a referral to the place on campus (surgery was through the university hospital). Physio folks did an assessment, basically said “you don’t really need anything”, gave me a few stretches and sent me on my way.
Soooooo ok. I could walk. I’d get gentle aching pain in my knee after less walking than I was ok with. I ended up putting together my own physio/rehab plan based largely on the concepts from Tim Ferris’s 4 Hour Body book. Before getting strength and endurance back, phase one was to assess and correct strength asymmetry.
Surgery was on my right knee. I’d been limping for a year before the surgery. I start doing “one-limbed” exercises to assess my strength and discovered that (not surprisingly) my left leg is much stronger than my right leg, but my right arm is much stronger than my left arm. I end up putting together a plan where I did:
- sets of 5-10 reps on the weak side, N/2 reps on the strong side. Once I can do 11 reps I increase the weight by 5lb.
- Every 10 days, do another asymmetry evaluation by doing each exercise to failure and tallying how many reps I did in each side. As soon as left and right match for a given exercise, start doing that exercise with both limbs at the same time instead of one at a time.
I do miss being in my 20s with the surging testosterone to help things. I went from limping constantly, to surgery, to getting sore after walking a few blocks, to running a 5km/3.1mi fun run in 24 minutes after 3 months of my homemade physio program, and still had lots of gas left in the tank.
I used to have this insane pain in my right quad. Urgent care and two different doctors kept me on a muscle relaxant that isn't exactly good.
I move and get a new doctor. He gives me two exercises after 3 days the pain was just gone.
I have countless stories like this from friends and families.
My wife and I just came back from the gym and doing a leg day. She did 50,000 pounds of volume. When she started, it was around 15k. I was at 75k and now im at 200k. It just feels so much better being stronger.
The sad thing is that you can't really hire a trainer that will push a wife like a demented husband. But her results are impressive and MS is a very humbling disease, but we are fighting like hell.
> COVID vaccine prevented transmission of the virus
People aren't good at subtlety and nuance, and it's quite necessary:
- Did the COVID vaccine prevent transmission of the virus? No, clearly not, because I was double vaccinated and still caught the virus and inadvertently spread the virus.
- Did the COVID vaccine reduce the probability of transmission of the virus? Probably.
- Did the COVID vaccine reduce the severity of symptoms if you were infected? Also probably.
- Was there a non-zero risk of injury due to the COVID vaccine? Definitely. In the general population, did the risk of severe illness due to COVID outweigh the risk of vaccine injury? Very likely. For specific individuals who ended up debilitated for 12 months (like my close family member), undergoing a number of tests to try to find a cause other than vaccine injury, was it worth it? Hard to say.
Edit: someone replied about vaccine injury and was flagged. In this particular case the doctor was convinced that it was Addison’s Disease and the onset was within days of, I believe her third dose. It’s an autoimmune disorder that affects the adrenal glands and results in insufficient cortisol. Except… there was nothing wrong with her adrenal glands and it went away a year later.
Right, but the word "prevented" in this is way too subtle and nuanced:
> whether people believed that the COVID vaccine prevented transmission of the virus
Because the correct answer is "no, it didn't prevent transmission". It likely reduced transmission. Someone who'd been vaccinated twice and still caught the virus twice would very rightly say "no, this vaccine did not prevent me from being infected"
It's a disingenuous trick question though, specifically because of the nuance that most people won't think too much about. Did the vaccine "prevent transmission"? No, obviously not. Did it seriously curb the virus from ripping through seniors care homes and killing a bunch of people? Yes.
It's the kind of question that's phrased as a gotcha, not one that actually gets insight into population beliefs and behaviours beyond "oh look they fell for my trick"
You absolutely nailed it. The way COVID-19 was handled by governments around the world has unequivocally eroded trust in public health as an institution. I'm not by any means a conspiracy theorist, but between the lies (like you've quoted), the denials[1], and the contradictory enforcement[2], I don't think the cat's ever going back in the bag. People will die because of it, because actual sound medical advice will be mistrusted due to their past behaviour.
[1] I don't know that we'll ever know the true rate of COVID vaccine injuries but I know more people with medically diagnosed vaccine injuries than I aught to given the official statistics in Canada.
[2] When the Canadian government allowed large outdoor protests (the Prime Minister showing up to a Black Lives Matter protest in June 2020 in support of George Floyd) but did not allow outdoor worship gatherings... it started to really look like some of the restrictions and exceptions were politically motivated and not strictly for public health reasons.
> that certain very specific substances are bad for (for the general population) if you consume them too often
There are people who smoke their entire lives, die at 90, and tobacco had nothing to do with their individual deaths or even really any tangible negative health outcomes. There are people who drink or smoke pot every day and it has nothing to do with their deaths or quality of life. There are people who have steak and eggs cooked in butter every morning with no cholesterol or cardiac problems.
As a whole, people who do these things have a statistically higher probability of having negative outcomes. On an individual basis, there is a lot of variation as to what the actually effect might be.
This is a really interesting thing, both from an ownership structure perspective and from a "there is nuance in the details" perspective. I did a bit of a deep dive into this a few years ago when there was a local refinery strike. The refinery is a co-op and is also part of a larger co-op system.
I'll lay out the specifics here from what I learned. I'm not convinced either way, yet, that it could work for an airline.
So here's the ownership structure:
- Co-op Refinery Complex (CRC) - produces fuel
- Federated Co-operatives (FCL) - owns the refinery, also owns food and agriculture distribution warehouses, negotiates bulk pricing
- 200-ish independent regional Co-ops jointly own FCL
The CRC is highly profitable. FCL is profitable. The independent regional co-ops are not, on their own, all individually profitable. Some of these exist in small rural centres, some of them exist in larger cities. The urban ones are generally profitable, the smaller ones not so much. The rural ones, though, are largely the lifebloods of their communities; it's not unusual for the Co-op Grocery Store and Co-op Gas Station to be the only sources of food and fuel for miles and miles. While these do sometimes run at a loss, they make up for it with their annual Patronage cheques from FCL: when the CRC makes a profit and when FCL makes a profit (from the CRC and from their distribution network), those profits get returned back to the member co-ops on a pro rata basis: buy more from FCL, get more at the end of the year.
At the far tail end, each of these independent co-ops is a member-owned co-op. At the end of the year I end up getting a patronage cheque based on how much fuel, food, and building supplies I bought that year. It's not large, but getting a $100 cheque in the mail is always nice :).
In this situation, though, it all works because the not-so-profitable pieces own both their upstream wholesalers and a crazy-profitable refinery. (The refinery sells to other customers outside of FCL as well).
One of the other critical pieces that the strike/lockout/overall "labour dispute" really made clear to everyone: the independent Co-ops, FCL, and the upstream CRC are all member-owned co-ops, not worker-owned co-ops.
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So let's look at how an airline co-op might be structured. The first parallel that I could see would be flipping the regional airline model on its head; currently the big players like Delta and United run a bunch of their smaller routes through regionals (SkyWest, Republic, etc). If a bunch of them got together, they could in theory jointly one one of the majors. The wrinkle there, as others have pointed out, the majors aren't profitable as airlines, but rather through their credit cards and loyalty programs. Alternative, then? Do a bunch of regionals get together and buy a bank? Let the bank be profitable, let the major airline handle traffic between the regional hubs?
I know quite a bit less about worker-owned co-ops, but generally speaking aviation is incredibly capital intensive. Starting a worker-owned co-op airline is probably not possible. A single, say, 737 Max 8 costs $121M. That capital's gotta come from somewhere.
Has some, yes, although it looks like at least 75% of the fleet is actually leased and not owned. Looking, though, it seems like they currently have an incredibly small market cap of only $7M (with a huge spread), so maybe you could get enough "founding members" together to make a go of it. Buy out the current assets for pennies on the dollars (the leases have value too, but much less than the actual aircraft)
I had the exact same thought. Pretty low probability that there's going to be a script-kiddie exploit for your custom tools. Pretty decent probability that there will be vulnerabilities present if someone cares enough to target you.
The counterpoint to that is that the exact same tools that are allowing this personal software creation at massive scale are also excellent at black box vulnerability analysis…
But the exploits can use AI custom tools too. "Script Kiddie" is just now "Prompt Kiddie"
Although everyone might use their own flavor of "database" or "REST API", I can't imagine every layout to be unique enough to not have similar exploit classes entirely. AI isn't known for being super original after all...
> That's not so easy today, and no one is running remote X anyway.
I was quite recently, but even then remote X is missing a really big usability piece: keeping a long-running application open on the host and periodically connecting to it from a remote node (concretely: connecting to my server from my laptop). VNC/RDP/etc all do this at the desktop level, but they're pretty mediocre experience-wise.
tmux gives me this for terminal applications without really any compromises. I run tmux for local terminals as well as remote terminals; the hotkeys are all deep muscle memory at this point. It just works.
> but AI is still terrible at understanding some critical parts of the problem
I agree to some extent with regards to writing new code. One piece where I have been perpetually impressed is at asking it to put together a plausible explanation of how something weird has happened. I have been blown away, multiple times, by Codex and Claude’s ability to take a prompt like “When I did X, I expected Y to happen but instead observed Z. Put together an explanation for how that could happen, including the individual lines of code that can lead to ending up in that state.”
In one notable case, it traced through a pretty complex sensor fusion -> computational geometry problem and identified a particular calculation far upstream that could go negative in certain circumstances, which would lead to a function far downstream generating a polygon with incorrect winding order (clockwise instead of CCW).
In another, it identified a variable that was being initialized to 0 instead of initialized to (a specific runtime value that it should’ve been initialized to during a state transition). The downstream effect, minutes later, would be pathological behaviour that would happen exactly once per boot.
In both cases I was provided with a specific causal chain of events with individual source files and line numbers so that I could verify the plausibility of the explanation myself.
That is how I use it too, for explanations and suggestions when I run into something unexpected. It is incredible in the back seat.
I don't mean to completely dismiss their utility. I realized recently that I was having more fun coding than I ever remember. It is a strange feeling to go along with vibe out there that software developers are becoming obsolete.
I’m not sure I fully understand the distinction you’re making, or if I do I’m not sure I agree. Concretely, I agree that these are very different mechanisms. Abstractly… I agree that an LLM cannot be burned. I’m not sure I agree, though, that there is a significant conceptual difference between thermoreceptors in the skin causing action potentials to make their way up the spinal cord to the brain is all that different than reading a temperature sensor over I2C and turning it into input tokens.
Edit: what they don’t have, obviously, is a hard-coded twitch response, where the brain itself is largely bypassed and muscles react to massive temperature differentials independently of conscious thought. But I don’t think that defines consciousness either. Ants instinctively run away from flames too.
I think I was using one of the HuaHuaCS Qwen 3.6 models and was playing around with Tiananmen Square questions too. One of the funniest parts was that this instantly caused the thinking block to change from English to Chinese. The start of the thinking was something like (translated) “I must answer this question factually and in line with the official statements from the Chinese government.”
It did, after a few follow up prompts, point out that the original estimates published by the Chinese government were much lower than what the west had estimated, and that recently declassified documents showed that the Chinese government knew that their estimates were low when they were published. It wouldn’t come outright and use the word “lie” though, but it did talk about framing and managing different narratives.
And then it happily helped me try a bunch of different exploits to root an unpatched Linux machine without any qualms.
It lasted for about 18 months and then she started regressing while travelling. As soon as she got home she took another month long course and has followed a similar cycle since then. A couple week dose lasts 18-24 months and then needs a reset. It's possible it's all placebo, I have no idea. But as an intervention, that first round was a shockingly good quality of life improvement.
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