HedonicEscal8r

This is a guest post. Tao has been quite consistent in his stance.

Why object to my comment and not Ikey's?

Usefulness and efficiency should serve all humans, rather than privileging the feelings of elites accustomed to receiving accolades for their intellectual capabilities.

The author made a stupid argument and the choice of comparison is part of that stupidity.

vibewar

If you read the article, you'd know the author is in favor of tech innovation.

I think the author is understandably frustrated about seeing a lot of fanfare for sexy prototypes years or decades from the market, when he struggles every day with flaws in his actual mobility devices that could be improved in months if the manufacturers cared enough to do it.

The author is misguided in blaming the crab chair engineers for this state of affairs. The crab chair engineers aren't responsible for the myriad socioeconomic inefficiencies that make wheelchairs suck today. If they didn't work on crab chairs, they'd work on some other artsy project, and we still wouldn't have better wheelchairs. But everyone in this thread needs to chill out and stop being so personally offended that this writer is holding back human progress by not ass-kissing the crab chair.

You try to sit down on a chair and it walks away, leaving you to fall on your butt. Laugh track plays.

Pretty weird to blame "this demographic" for a single disabled guy writing a mildly critical article!

This is false, it's only B12 you need to supplement (and meat-eaters also get B12 through supplements, just indirectly).

Most people are not deficient in vitamins and minerals - the benefits of supplementing are highly exaggerated. Evidence is not good.

I had sex I didn't like, which means it must be objectively bad. Boom, rationalists owned.

AI safety advocates do not typically demand to be given personal political power, only for a set of preferred policies to be enacted, like anyone advocating for any political cause.

"Immunity" = "immune system activity." "Anti-tumor immunity" = "immune system activity against tumors."

Essentially none. Creatine supplementation is a good idea for most people, especially vegans/vegetarians.

No, it's actually very easy to consistently make wrong predictions. You're imagining a scenario where the incorrect and correct options are symmetric in some way, such as predicting whether a stock will go up or down.

Is that supposed be a lot? That article states that all US data centers combined consume 450 million gallons a day, equivalent to 90 towns, which does not sound like very much.

I appreciate the wordplay in the title.

As a young person, I have no idea what you guys are talking about, and recommend not overgeneralizing from anecdotes.

> Anarchist

> Name is John Law

Makes sense.

mRNA vaccines are being studied for pancreatic cancer. To quote a post I wrote in April:

> First, the personalized mRNA vaccine autogene cevumeran, developed by BioNTech and Genentech, just reported 6-year follow-up results from their Phase 1 clinical trial. 16 patients were treated, 8 were responders (showed signs of immune reaction to vaccine), 8 were non-responders.

> 7/8 responders (87.5%) survived 6 years after surgery, 2/8 nonresponders survived (25%).

> AACR meeting notes https://www.aacr.org/blog/2026/04/20/live-updates-from-the-a...

> The most important result in this small trial is that vaccine response is strongly correlated with better outcomes. But for context, the trial was restricted to patients with operable pancreatic cancer. Patients diagnosed with stage 1 or 2 pancreatic cancer have a 5-year survival rate of 12%. Patients who get their pancreatic cancer surgically removed have a 5-year post-surgery survival rate of 20%. This makes the overall 6-year post-surgery survival rate of 56% among the 16 trial patients pretty impressive. Keep in mind that the trial patients may have been healthier than average for other reasons, and small n is small n, so we shouldn't be too hasty until we see Phase 2 and 3 data.

> Source on survival rates https://www.pancreaticcancer.org.uk/information/just-diagnos...

Still early, unfortunately, so it will be a while before we see more updates.

It can be disappointing to see that even a successful drug, like this one, is "only" extending life expectancy from 6.7 months to 13.2. But this is what the first steps towards a cure look like.

Childhood leukemia used to be overwhelmingly fatal, and early chemotherapy trials also only managed a couple months of remission. Researchers were even criticized for subjecting patients to harsh side effects to no apparent benefit. But thanks to that research, most patients are now cured; per capita death rates from childhood leukemia are down 14x from the 1950s, mostly driven by improved treatment.

Daraxonrasib is an incredible invention on a technical level, and a meaningful step forwards in the treatment of many cancers. We'll need a couple more equally incredible inventions to be able to cure pancreatic cancer.

The phrase is, "don't get high on your own supply."

Tax law is not arbitrarily complicated, and unexpected edge cases are settled by human judges, not by mathematical proofs.

This is not quite correct. An mRNA vaccine that creates healthy antigens will fail because it won't do anything, not because it will trigger autoimmune issues. Your cells are already covered in normal antigens, and your immune system already knows to not attack them. It is true that it is difficult to find the right antigens to target, but the reasons for that are more complicated.

You're confusing me with u/addisonl. Please check usernames before accusing people of trying to "silence the other side."

To quote a blog post I wrote on why we can be confident sun exposure causes cancer: "Green et al. (2011) conducted a 10-year study (n=1621) in Nambour, a town in Queensland, Australia. Participants were randomly assigned to daily or discretionary sunscreen application. After 10 years, 11 melanomas were found in the daily group and 22 in the discretionary group."

But you should read the full post for more context on why we have much better data than randomized controlled trials, and why correlation studies on this subject are nearly useless due to the impossibility of finding reliable proxy variables: https://hedonicescalator.substack.com/p/contra-byrnes-on-uv-...

Saying "some of the ingredients in US sunscreens are themselves associated with cancer" is meaningless without more specificity. As the meme goes, this HackerNews comment is known to the state of California to cause cancer: the bar for something to be "associated with cancer" is incredibly low. Are there any particular chemicals or chemical classes you were worried about?

And I will remind you that, in contrast, we are 100% sure that sunlight causes cancer. We know exactly what kinds of DNA damage it creates (chiefly cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers, which I discuss in my blog post) and we can find cancer-causing mutations in melanoma samples directly downstream of that damage (C->T mutations, for example, ones that disable the key p53 tumor suppressor gene). We know how this shit works! Are there some sunscreen formulas that might be dangerous? Possibly, I don't have them all memorized, but the solution is to find a different brand... not to instead expose yourself to one of the best-studied carcinogens around.

If only this complaint was being posted by an organization ideologically opposed to copyright itself!

The piracy organizations are playing 4D chess while everyone else is playing checkers. The irony of this entire situation - AI companies being legally required to shred books due to kafkaesque copyright laws, then used as a marketing tactic by Anna's Archive - is a work of art.

I support Anna's Archive, by the way. Information wants to be free.

u/danjl was originally asking about "this class of drugs", which is more reasonably interpreted as referring to personalized mRNA vaccines rather than the much broader concept of (personalized or not) immunotherapy.

The comment is wrong because it's stupid. Just because we've known that personalized immunotherapy was a promising idea for a long time, and have been trying it with the limited tools we had (CAR T being the poster child, and while an incredible advancement for blood cancers and many other diseases, it is notoriously dangerous and expensive), does not mean we had the technology to accomplish it. Today's results are only possible because of recent advancements in multiple fields, and to respond with "they've tried immunotherapy for decades" is profoundly ignorant. You may as well say, "scientists have been trying to cure cancer for years."

Yes, but OP said that in response to a comment attributing melanoma to sun exposure, in a conversation where nobody had brought up SCC or BCC. It's still a misleading comment, in my opinion.