AnyOldName3
@AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
- Comment on Cuba Libre 🇨🇺 1 day ago:
From the Wikipedia page, it seems like a fairly normal cancer vaccine. The thing limiting these in North America and Europe is that you can’t legally do drug trials on people until you’ve tried all the approved medicines for that condition first, as trial drugs might do nothing and might cause side effects, and the placebo control group would literally not be getting any treatment. By the time cancer patients have tried all the existing treatments, they’re usually either already dead, or already cancer-free, so the only trial participants left are already nearly dead, and likely to keel over immediately no matter how good the trial drug. That means things that drug companies have known will work for over a decade still aren’t available, and once they are, they’ll need to be unreasonably expensive just to break even.
Either this one has finally got over these kinds of hurdle after years of effort, or Cuba’s been doing trials that wouldn’t be legal elsewhere. Even if they have, it’s not necessarily a criticism - if a trade embargo stops you accessing lots of medicines, then you need to get through fewer of them before you’ve tried everything available and can start trial drugs. Once it’s fully approved, it won’t need to be expensive, as the research costs can be offset against the cost savings from treating patients, as everything’s state-funded.
- Comment on Valve hikes Steam Deck prices by more than 40%, blaming rising costs 6 days ago:
It’s a fairly common sentiment that ‘good billionaires’ like Newell will demonstrate that seeking profit by making things people want to buy is more profitable than ruining things people were already buying so margins are higher, thereby making the bad billionaires want to copy them, and then capitalism will start working for the common people, and that therefore seizing the means of production is unnecessary as long as they praise gaben. Pointing out that he’s still accumulating the value of other people’s labour as quickly as he can and he’s just less short-sighted about it, rather than aiming to do good, can be helpful.
- Comment on Palantir has ‘unlimited access’ to patient data, investigation reveals 3 weeks ago:
Ah, but the Palantir man on the radio said that the NHS remains the legal data controller, so everything is fine and we can ignore the fact that all this means is that if Palantir do anything illegal with the data it’ll be the NHS that’s liable for letting them see it, so they can do what they want and if there’s any backlash, it’ll be the taxpayer who pays compensation.
- Comment on Finally, we have the blueprints! 3 weeks ago:
They only need space for the ones temporarily removed for maintenance. Once they’re deployed, they’re free to leave the room.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
In Britain, no one would think roommates slept in the same room. The possible words for that would be ones like spouse or sibling and anyone else sharing a bedroom outside of an army barracks or youth hostel would be super weird.
- Comment on Palantir under fire for X 'manifesto' from co-founder Alex Karp 5 weeks ago:
Ah, but the Palantir man on the radio said that the NHS remains the legal data controller, so everything is fine and we can ignore the fact that all this means is that if Palantir do anything illegal with the data it’ll be the NHS that’s liable for letting them see it, so they can do what they want and if there’s any backlash, it’ll be the taxpayer who pays compensation.
- Comment on Future 1 month ago:
That’s a proprietary software problem rather than a being connected to the internet problem. One of the send-a-notification-when-it’s-done devices I set up took about as much effort as setting the right time on a phone alarm about ten times because the device’s firmware was open source with no companies’ bullshit involved, so all I had to do was navigate to the right page in Home Assistant and pick the right phone from a dropdown and the right even for the notification to trigger on from a dropdown. That’s not wildly different from picking the right time from a dropdown on a phone.
- Comment on Future 1 month ago:
Again, that’s specific to it being proprietary software. I’ve got some devices in my home that are connected to the local network (but not the internet), and have configured Home Assistant (which I’ve got running on an old desktop PC) to send a notification to my phone when it detects that those devices report that they’re finished with what they do. That’ll keep working until I turn off the Home Assistant server or replace the devices.
- Comment on Future 1 month ago:
That’s more effort per wash instead of being something that only needs setting up one and then will work forever. Also, it’s common for post-90s appliances to include sensors and vary the cycle time based on how dirty the water gets. Except for the data privacy and security concerns, which are mainly because it’s proprietary software rather than inherent in Internet-connected devices, there’s no advantage to using your phone timer over getting a notification.
- Comment on Fuel is so expensive I can't afford the school run — what can I do? 1 month ago:
It’s expected that parents drive their children to primary school, or at least to a nearby carpark within walking distance. If you don’t live within easy walking distance of a primary school, you just have to have a car or no children.
- Comment on Fuel is so expensive I can't afford the school run — what can I do? 1 month ago:
Primary schools tend not to be fed by busses, and lots of children need to go to primary school rather than high school.
- Comment on 2 months ago:
I’m baffled that I didn’t already know that lootboxes were created by the husband of the woman that the Pulp hit Common People was most likely written about.
- Comment on Priorities people 2 months ago:
The context: the UK ended slavery within the empire by taking out a huge loan to buy all the slaves in the empire, then freeing them. The loan wasn’t fully paid off until recently, so UK taxpayers were effectively paying for money that had been given to slave owners. However, it quickly and decisively put a stop to slavery in a lot of the world without much fuss or objection, when it otherwise could have triggered wars.
- Comment on Gaysadilla 2 months ago:
Cultural appropriation is something like McDonald’s advertising a new Indian burger and it’s just a beefburger with some chillies in it, i.e. someone’s attempting to gain from a bastardised caracature of the culture that wouldn’t be something someone from that culture would participate in. Right wing pundits intentionally misrepresented it as things like eating a traditional dish from another culture to make it sound stupid so people would dismiss it, and then people who’d only heard the misrepresentation but wanted to do the right thing or at least appear to be doing the right thing started acting like it was immoral to participate in any culture you weren’t born into.
- Comment on Steam :: About the New York Attorney General lawsuit against Valve 2 months ago:
I think it’s possible that loot boxes (and real-world equivalents like trading cards) don’t violate existing anti-child-gambling laws, but if so, that’s a flaw in those laws that needs to be fixed rather than an indication that they’re totally fine and should be allowed to exist in their current form. They cost money and give an unpredictable reward where different options have different perceived value, so they’re quite clearly gambling to anyone who defines it based on its characteristics rather than an individual territory’s specific legalese.
- Comment on I just want juice, is that so much to ask? 2 months ago:
They stock things they make more profit on. If the margins on sugar water are much higher, then they don’t need to sell as much to make it worth stocking it instead of juice. If the margins are higher because consumers are unaware they’re being sold a cheaper-to-manufacture product for the same price because the packaging is deceptive to anyone who hasn’t been told they have to look or is in too much of a rush to have time to look, then shops end up full of sugar water that few consumers actually want.
- Comment on I just want juice, is that so much to ask? 2 months ago:
Pre-mixed 100% juice drinks are readily available (depending on where you live). You don’t have to buy several juices and mix them yourself if you’re thirsty when walking past a shop as long as the shop stocks them.
- Comment on I just want juice, is that so much to ask? 2 months ago:
Or perhaps we shouldn’t create a society where buying juice requires having and using a skill.
- Comment on I just want juice, is that so much to ask? 2 months ago:
You can cut strong juice with other juice instead of with water and HFCS. Mixing passion fruit and orange juice at a level where it still mostly tastes of passion fruit makes something nice and not so expensive that it has to be sold at a different price to other orange juice.
- Comment on Yay, milkshakes! 2 months ago:
They don’t take all of it, so if they’re doing what they’re supposed to, nearly all the crabs will be returned to the ocean within a few days and eventually be fine again. Some do die, though, and even if they don’t, they’re worse for wear after the process, and some companies have been accused of taking all the blood and then selling the dead crabs as fishing bait. There’s an artificial alternative available, but regulators aren’t all convinced it’s as effective, so it isn’t used universally yet.
- Comment on Man posts his incorrect opinion online 3 months ago:
I reckon it depends on how warm someone’s home is and how good their circulation is. If I don’t have shoes on indoors, then for half the year it feels like my feet have been stabbed because they get so cold (slippers are not enough), but I don’t wear the same shoes indoors as outdoors. I suspect that if we set the heating higher and the house wasn’t constructed in a way that makes the floor always much colder than a few inches above the floor, this wouldn’t be a problem.
- Comment on Game companies see share prices plummet following the launch of Google's very limited virtual world generator, Project Genie 3 months ago:
Investors managed to pour billions into making the metaverse bubble, even though that was just video games being invented a second time by people so uninterested in them that they hadn’t noticed they’d already been around for decades. There’s no reason to think that investors know what they are beyond something on a computer, so obviously they’d see something else on the computer as a viable competitor.
- Comment on PSA 3 months ago:
It had some Kings, they’d just become feral ghouls. It was effectively one guy’s Elvis fan club, so having any identifiable members decades later would be a surprise.
- Comment on Do people eat this? 4 months ago:
With energy prices in the UK being what they are, it’s only raw potatoes that are cheaper than bread. At least toast toasts quickly, so isn’t that energy-intensive compared with boiling a pan of water.
- Comment on That's a whole lotta hydrogen! 4 months ago:
But this guy says it, and he’s defined himself to be the sole authority, so that matters more than any number of biologists.
Every argument they come up with has been refuted in past threads, and they just dismiss anything they disagree with as irrelevant, but treating tenuous sources like a supposed screenshot of Imane Khalif’s SRY test originating from an obscure site that’s never been republished by a mainstream one, even if they’d been calling for her to be barred from future tournaments based on no evidence so would love to vindicate their stance with test results.
It’s not worth your time to engage with them in good faith.
- Comment on That's a whole lotta hydrogen! 4 months ago:
This is far from the second time. They show up a lot.
- Comment on Childhood trauma 😩 4 months ago:
It never went away. They just figured out how to make it subtle so it could be active all the time instead of just when the computer wasn’t working properly. Do you really feel like you’re using trauma-free software day-to-day?
- Comment on Should speakers hum when they're connected to a stereo, but the volume of is turned all the way down? 4 months ago:
If the ferrite is filtering a hum you can hear, it’s also filtering parts of your music that you can hear because a ferrite just dampens a frequency range and can’t tell what is and isn’t supposed to be there.
- Comment on Get on that grindset 4 months ago:
And the context was a sentence that was correct if you used OED sense 1, or MW sense 1, but you decided to parse it as MW sense 2b and then complain that the sentence was incorrect.
- Comment on Will the government be able to put 2 & 2 together 4 months ago:
Obviously they’ll have a carve-out for businesses that apply for a VPN licence and have the other end of the VPN remain in the country. Not because they listen to the public saying that VPNs have legitimate uses, but because the megacorp they consult with before drafting the law says it’s the only legitimate use-case and has a VPN product they can sell to small businesses that can’t afford to wait for their self-hosted VPN to be certified by the one overworked civil servant who has sole responsibility for approving every VPN licence.