A comment with an article citing published medical literature on risks associated with this type of vaccine was flagged and hidden. Why? I don't know the author nor am I a medical doctor to understand the topic at depth, so it's a genuine question. Was it misleading? If so, how? That's what the comment was asking, actually, if there were counter-points to the text, which was favorable to live vaccines (e.g. shingles) but critical of those developed with other methods. Is there no merit to that? I genuinely don't know, and since it seems impossible to discuss the topic, it's hard to say.
I sometimes vouch for incorrectly flagged posts. You got me curious, so I took a look. What I found was a blog from an anonymous conspiracist vaccine opponent claiming to be a doctor. He's a decent writer but in my estimation a loon.
So I'm fine with it being flagged and decline to vouch for it.
For the HPV section specifically, there were at least two major omissions.
First, in his table showing autoimmune adverse effects, he has chosen to crop out the next column in the table containing the control conditions - which show very similar rates of adverse effects to the vaccine condition.
Secondly, when discussing negative efficacy in the case of existing persistent infection, he only quotes the data from one of three studies that the linked report covers. The linked report indeed covers the negative efficacy in study 013 as an area of concern. However, study 015 (which had roughly twice the number of total participants as study 013) showed no real evidence of negative efficacy. When all 3 studies are pooled together, the point estimate still says negative efficacy, (at ~-12%), however the error bars are quite wide.
Why this is tragic, is because these two omissions do actually point to failures in public communication about the vaccine. For example, the control condition in the Merck trials were a mix of saline injections (this is the traditional placebo), as well as injections with just the adjuvant (AAHS). This is less standard, and raises legitimate questions about why Merck used an adjuvant as the control, instead of just saline. There a cynical/conspiratorial angle to this question, which I think would be directionally correct.
The second omission is because I think there is a reasonable question of "are there extra risks associated with getting the HPV vaccine while having an active persistence infection", even when taking into account the different and larger study populations within the original trial data. Once again, I think the idea that both companies and public health agencies don't want to deal with a vaccine that requires testing before hand is true. I also believe that on a population level, even if there was a modest increase in risk in that specific subgroup, it makes sense to implement broad vaccination campaigns.
That said, I think the unwillingness of public health agencies to engage with this tricky area of communication and education creates these types of opening for anti-vaccine messaging. If you want a sense of "conspiracy" - here's a random review study - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8706722/
Notice that when reporting results, the groupings for HPV status at enrollment time are "naive" and "irrespective" - the "test positive" grouping isn't broken out.
In this house we believe
Love is love
Black Lives Matter
Science is real
Feminism is for everyone
No human is illegal
Kindness is everything
Signaling your alignment to the public-facing opinions of your social betters is the modern ersatz religion for atheists. The television is the temple, the pundits the priests. Apostates and heretics are not welcome here. Now, my child, you would not want your words to inadvertently cause the faithful to stray. Would you? Just think of what the late night comedians would say if they could hear you cast doubt on their sponsor Pfizer? Perhaps you would rather join our hate session on the pagans in flyover country?
FYI: NetGuard is an open source rootless firewall for vanilla Android which also allows per-app network access control, for those unable or unwilling to go with other OSs. Works by leveraging Android VPN to block instead of tunneling packets.
In Brazil there is a similar problem, but it's not as widely discussed. Here, police investigations revealed that a website sold access for less than $4 to the nation-wide surveillance system, which included live feed of public safety cameras and person search by tax identifier. It was also shown that criminal organizations used it to locate their targets. Access was through the open internet, with leaked credentials, the federal government's system requires no VPN for access.
That's not a good answer, unless you just want cable. YouTube, Netflix, etc won't work. Buying hardware is paying extra which is already a deterrent, but anyway just shifts the problem to that piece of hardware - is the stick vetted to not do any harm? Other solutions are often impractical or overly complex for non-technical people. I haven't seen any good answers to date. I guess your TV just shouldn't spy on everything you watch? Seems like a reasonable expectation.
My TCL/Roku TV recently started showing popups during streams with services like YouTubeTV and PlutoTV, that basically say, "Click here to watch this same program on the Roku Network". I poked around the settings on the TV, and sure enough, there were some new "smart" settings added and enabled by default. I disabled the settings, and the popups stopped. But it's only a matter of time before something else appears.
Because with a stick, I can easily decide to chuck it and replace with another. Over and over again. Hard to do with a TV. Even if I had the money, disposing of one is a royal pain.
For now. They’re about to undergo a CEO change, again. Who knows what will happen in the future, particularly if the shareholders expect the perceived value provided by enshittification.
John Ternus, SVP of Hardware Engineering, is considered the front runner for CEO right now. The board wants a more product oriented CEO this time. Things could change but makes me optimistic.
I do the same thing. My PC is hooked up via HDMI to a receiver which goes to the TV via HDMI. I use VNC on my phone to remote control it. It works well. The phone’s touch screen functions as a mouse and you can pull up the phone’s on screen keyboard to type. My wife is extremely non technical and does fine with it. Usually we just use the browser to watch ad-blocked YouTube or unofficial sports streams.
We just switched to a laptops and USB-HDMI cable that always dangles near our TV. Someone wants to see F1, sports or a movie, they just plug it and watch like it's a big computer screen. If 9yo can do it, anyone can do it.
Of course they have a choice. Just don't do it. All you said are predictions of what may or may not happen in the future. The opposite could be true - the audience at large may get sick of AI tools being pushed on them and prefer the browser that doesn't. No one knows. But even if you are right, supporting an hypothetical API that extensions and websites may or may not use and pushing opt-out AI tooling in the browser itself are very different things.
Sure, these features may never catch on... but if they do, consider the risk to Firefox: an underdog with dwindling market share that is now years behind capabilities taken for granted in other browsers. On the other hand, if these features don't pan out, they could always be deprecated with little hit to marketshare.
Strategically I think Mozilla cannot take that risk, especially as it can get feature parity for relatively low cost by embracing open-source / open-weights models.
As an aside, a local on-device AI is greatly preferable from a privacy perspective, even though some harder tasks may need to be sent to hosted frontier models. I expect the industry to converge on a hybrid local/remote model, largely because it lets them offload inference to the users' device.
There's not much I could do about a hosted LLM, but at least for the local model it would be nice to have one from a company not reliant on monetizing my data.
Interesting read, thanks. The related article shows that even more robust anonymization techniques may still be insufficient (in the case of the taxi rides, spatial-temporal analysis could still lead to de-anonymization). More reason to reduce data collection. Unfortunately the trend is the opposite for governments all around the world.
This seems to be more about political power and government overreach than money. The narrative seems to be focused solely on concentration of the later, lately.
I expect economical and political power to get along well. You normally acquire both organically; except in some cases, suddently acquiring much of one will buy some of the other.
Any setups without Claude Code? I use CoPilot agent heavily on VSCode, from time to time I have independent grunt work that could be parallelized to two or three agents, but I haven't seen a decent setup for that with CoPilot or some other VSCode extension that I could use my CoPilot subscription with.
You can use Rover (disclaimer, I am one of the cofounders) which is an open source tool that you can use to parallelize the work of coding agents that in addition to Claude also works with Gemini, Codex and Qwen https://github.com/endorhq/rover/
We did just that back then and it worked great, we used it in many projects after that.
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