> The FDA is partially to blame for this situation: ...
> The cost of performing a New Drug Application starts in the mid hundreds of millions of dollars range and can extend into the billions for some drugs.
> So nobody could feasibly introduce it to the market here without investing $500 million or more up front. At that price, your only viable option is to stick a big price tag on it and try to milk that money back from insurers.
It's interesting that you seem so passionate about this because you're totally incorrect. The cost of a NDA for a novel prescription drug requiring clinical data (the most expensive application) is ~$4.5mil. In fact, the estimated TOTAL revenue to the FDA from ALL PD application fees in FY 2025 is ~$1.3billion (or, just under 300 novel prescription drugs). So, obviously, FDA fees can't be as much as you're claiming.
What you're actually describing is the total cost of the entire drug development pipeline (research, design, lab costs, chemical costs, application costs, marketing costs, etc.) to develop a brand new, novel drug. And it's only ~$200m, increasing to $500m if you include dead ends / failures in the process, and ~$900m if you include both failures and capital costs--yep, that's right the capital costs alone are almost as much as the entire rest of the drug development pipeline.
any commercial rtos shop where QNX may be appropriate is either using 1. some wacky expensive proprietary rtos that you've never heard of, 2. freertos or 3. real-time linux depending on what they need. asking what makes QNX a compelling rtos when freertos exists, is widely supported and used, and has an MIT license is a very valid question.
further, no one in embedded actually cares what RTOS you used. they are all similar enough that you won't get stuck if it's a brand new RTOS
QNX is heavily used in industries where functional safety or particular high assurance models are required.
Sure FreeRTOS has a SafeRTOS mode, but its not sufficiently functional for a modern ADAS stack or complex robotics systems. QNX is used in all major automotive companies around the world for a reason, and a crucial part of NVIDIA's DriveOS stack.
QNX is in a space with few competitors. FreeRTOS or ThreadX are designed to provide microcontrollers with scheduling and memory management functionality. They don't depend on fancy things like MMUs or provide frameworks for networking or file systems out for the box. The flipside is that you can compile them down to maybe 30kB of machine code.
QNX is designed for more powerful and featureful hardware to drive a software stack with true process isolation and generally provide the bells and whistles of general purpose OS on top of a hard realtime core. It can run complex GUIs without sacrificing its real time capabilities. Not many competitors live in that particular space.
Without Oxford comma: "We invited JFK, the stripper and Stalin." [three distinct items in the list]
With Oxford comma: "We invited JFK, the stripper, and Stalin."[two named items in the list with an appositive affirming that we're talking about JFK the stripper and not the former president]
Yes, changing the order and the number of items (plural strippers in original to singular stripper in yours) changes the meaning. That is unsurprising.
Same here--same for some members of my immediate family as well. Had a few days in a row where I got virtually no sleep and wasn't tired, either. Haven't had any symptoms and am in a low-risk area though.
Unfortunate, for sure. The NYT has no real reason to post his name (as far as I'm aware--the tone of the article could affect that conclusion), so I'm not really sure why they'd dig their heels in here.
Though, he really does post a lot of personal and identifying information on his blog--literally any motivated party could find his name very easily. I thought "maybe he doesn't want his real name to link to his blog if a patient googles it"--but, it already does that. In fact, it's a suggested search in google!
Ultimately though, in some respect, I do think Scott's trying to have his cake and eat it too a bit here. I think when he starts trying to influence certain events in the real world; eg. like his Signal Boosting for Hsu to give an example within the last week, where he takes umbrage against the Grad student organization at MSU to drum up support in defense of Prof. Hsu--whether or not you agree with Hsu or you agree with the graduate students at MSU, Scott is decidedly an outsider attempting to exert his influence. People have mentioned that these sorts of actions legitimize the "fair play" of the NYT revealing his real identity, and I'm having a hard time finding umbrage with that statement.
I don't think the NYT should post his full name but I also do think Scott has been playing fast and loose; both with revelatory facts about his identity and by putting himself in situations where there are legitimate reasons for blog-outsiders to inquire about his real identity. Hopefully there will be an amicable end to this conflict.
>I thought "maybe he doesn't want his real name to link to his blog if a patient googles it"--but, it already does that. In fact, it's a suggested search in google!
That's not true. I just searched his real name and I get results about him but none of them are SSC-related at least on the first pages. Maybe your customized results lead to that or maybe you are including Scott Alexander or SSC in the search - either way most patients googling him wouldn't see SSC at all.
If I click on the first google image result from a search for his real name in an "incognito" window, I see plenty of stuff about SSC and rationalists https://i.imgur.com/0hWxzp3.png
An image of EY is hardly something that will alert your average patient. They'll just think it's an irrelevant result like a bunch of the other stuff that shows up. I do admit, if you are already familiar with the rationalist community, you will figure it out based on that. Anyway, that takes more leaps than the top result being an article from the NYT about SSC.
On 'All' I at least get 0 rationalist results or autocompletes with his name. I do get them if I google Scott Alexander <LastName> but he doesn't feature Alexander in the professional results and I doubt patients know that's his middle name.
Patients don't know his middle name. Very few people know each others' middle names unless they are looking at official documents on someone.
If you just google Scott $LASTNAME, there is only one reference to his writings as Scott Alexander, and it is not linkable to the blog, doesn't call him Scott Alexander, and is merely praise of prediction markets being quoted by Robin Hanson. Given there are a few others out there who share his first name and last name, who come up in the search results (some graphic designer for example), this is plausibly not even him. It won't raise any eyebrows at all if a patient googles him.
One thing that's more concerning is the number of people intentionally doxxing him on Twitter today. I'm reporting comments there, and Twitter seems to not come up in Google searches, but a search for Scott's real name on Twitter right now returns results where people are saying some pretty nasty things about him.
>>I thought "maybe he doesn't want his real name to link to his blog if a patient googles it"--but, it already does that. In fact, it's a suggested search in google!
>That's not true. I just searched his real name and I get results about him but none of them are SSC-related at least on the first pages. Maybe your customized results lead to that or maybe you are including Scott Alexander or SSC in the search - either way most patients googling him wouldn't see SSC at all.
I get slatestarcodex as the fourth google autocomplete suggestion when I search "Scott RealLastName" but I don't get SSC in the first page of results. And the third autocomplete suggestion is Alexander. Incognito mode of course.
Scott was not "taking umbrage against the Grad student organization at MSU", he was merely defending academic freedom. Hsu ended up resigning from an administrative and politically-sensitive position at the university while still being free to pursue his (somewhat contentious) research interests, and that may well have been the right call. I'm not sure Scott would have any reason to object to that choice.
> People have mentioned that these sorts of actions legitimize the "fair play" of the NYT revealing his real identity, and I'm having a hard time finding umbrage with that statement.
I don't see how these things legitimize each other at all, unless you're advocating or favoring personal harassment as a legitimate political strategy.
No, I don't think harassment in any form is acceptable.
I do think the case of Hsu is worth using as an example here: an intra-university conflict; a group of grad students is petitioning for a professor that they believe is actively harmful to the institution to step down as director of research. Now, I don't think it really matters what you or I think about any of this--whether or not we agree with the students or the prof is immaterial. This is an issue for the university, the students at the university, the professor, and any professional relations the professor has within his field of academia.
If I'm a student at the school, and I'm pro-grad student faction, I'd probably be rightly annoyed and mighty curious at a pseudonymous blogger so fervently involving himself. Why the pseudonym? Why the support? It would behoove me to look into this person, seeing as, from my perspective, he is signal boosting an erroneous cause via his immensely popular website.
If I'm a professor at the school, and I'm pro-prof faction, I'd probably be rightly bewildered and mighty curious at a pseudonymous blogger so fervently involving himself. Why the pseudonym? Why the support? It would behoove me to look into this person, seeing as, from my perspective, he is signal boosting, albeit for a good cause, via his immensely popular website, with no apparent reason to do so, seeing as how he doesn't seem to be a geneticist or faculty. It would definitely give me pause, to say the least.
I can think of things even in my personal life or business where, if an outsider were involving himself trying to "signal boost" a resolution (even if in my favor), I think I'd very rightly want to know the motivations and identity of said person.
The above examples don't illustrate that he should be identified, rather, that he's presenting people with a compelling reason to want him identified. I don't think he should be ID'd, but if a campus paper wrote an OP-ed about it, I'd have a hard time faulting them.
I don't think anyone should harass anyone else, which I think is somewhat what Scott has been doing (perhaps for a righteous cause) with this affair (as, by nature, signal boosting pro-prof draws some fire upon the grad student faction in question), so his response here rings a little bit hollow to me. But, to be crystal clear, even if I think Scott is using his platform to ever so slightly browbeat institutions via his followers (in the most mild sense & with the best of intentions), I still think the NYT is very much clearly in the wrong.
I feel you're using a lot of noncentral meanings of terms here - "harassing" a "group" by drawing attention to something they're doing, publically, to another person, which severely impacts that person's life in a comparison with revealing somebody's identity in order to enable harassment of their private life.
I note that it's "the same" side in both situations that you're comparing, who thinks imposing personal consequences for civil, public speech is a legitimate substitute for debate. What Scott is doing is very dissimilar from what that group of students was doing, but what they were doing is very similar to what the NYT is trying to do.
> I'm not really sure why they'd dig their heels in here.
I was wondering the same thing, until other HN comments mentioned both his support of Hsu and tirade against paywalls. His support of Hsu seemed to be based on a mutual respect and started off looking like support for academic freedom, but comments on that post did reveal a lot of questionable positions on Hsu’s part with no update from Scott himself.
The anti-paywall article however was much more likely to get the attention of the NYT, because he was viscerally against them and NYT is one of the big paywall sites—it’s their entire business model now and they might feel the need to push back on the criticism. Frankly, I thought Scott’s anti-paywall position wasn’t very rational or well-argued, but I didn’t really have time to follow that comment thread. But in the end, I think he might have attracted the Eye of Sauron on his relatively peaceful little kingdom.
> So I never saw any indication that this was malicious on Apple’s part.
They intentionally slowed down all iPhones in the face of more user-friendly options to fix an issue a minuscule percentage of people had. I think you can choose to view this as a solution, but I'm leery of anyone who thinks this was an appropriate solution.
> They determined this happened because aged batteries were not capable of delivering peak current anymore and the CPU was “browning out” under heavy load.
This is kinda true but ultimately more misleading than insightful. It makes it sound like it's just the batteries' fault and nothing can be done. Aged batteries are perfectly capable of delivering all the peak power necessary for operation. The only time it's possibly an issue for the LiCo oxides the iPhone uses is at a low SoC after a relaxation period (which is amplified if the battery itself is physically cold). So, in a perfect storm of events you'll have a phone that will die from 10% SoC.
But then your SoC isn't really at 10%, innit? Your SoH is actually lower, so your SoC needs to diminish faster to accurately map to your reduced capacity. SoC isn't a mystery either. Because this issue is prevalent after a relaxation period on the LiCo batteries, you can get pretty accurate SoCs from simply reading OCV. Remember, OCV:SOH mapping is only difficult for non-Cobalt Lithium chemistries, and even then often only in the middle range. Reductions in SoH speed up passage along the OCV:SOC curve, not chop the ends off--and the ends are the most prominent.
> A phone that is moderately slower is still more valuable than one that randomly crashes.
There are other things Apple could have done. Like, actually accurately report the SoC. Or reduce screen brightness at lower SoCs. Further, it's not "randomly crashing"--it's shutting off at low charge% (but higher than people would expect).
I don't know if it was malicious, but if not, it's a surprisingly stupid fix from an otherwise brilliant engineering team, and it seems the judge agreed.
> Firstly, they only slowed down older phones to prevent them from crashing as they had less and less reliable battery draw
I see this posted a lot and I honestly just don't buy it.
Processor power draw for most high-priority OS tasks (eg: keyboard input) are virtually zilch compared to keeping the screen lit for that much longer.
Everything says this happens to older phones, not phones with high usage. If you get the battery replaced--will Apple speed up the phone again? If I am on my iPhone 24/7 and constantly discharge down to 5% SOC, how come Apple doesn't slow down my phone more than someone with scarce use?
Even unreliable power draw makes no sense. You may be not able to predict the SOC from the OCV of the cell as accurately as SOH diminishes than when it's 100%, but cell phones largely use lithium cobalt oxides which have well-defined OCV:SOC curves! There should be no need to guess how close to a low SOC you are--you can just read the OCV.
I definitely don’t know as much about batteries as you clearly do but yes, the phone will return to normal clock speed after a battery change. It keeps being reported as “older phones” but it’s really more like older batteries.
Your point about unsafe pointer handling in Rust is specifically what dissuaded us from using it in an upcoming project. It really feels bad prepending all of the code that you actually care about being safe with `unsafe`.
`unsafe` before a block simply means "the following code has been manually checked for memory safety, because the compiler is unable to automatically do so". Before a function it means "this can only be called from an unsafe block, because the compiler cannot enforce the preconditions it requires to ensure memory safety". What alternative term would make you feel less bad?
It kinda depends on what exactly they mean. Is it true that if you had zero glucose available in your bloodstream at all
your brain would be unable to function? Yes. Is it true that if nothing you ate contained any glucose your brain would starve? No. There's a process called gluconeogenesis which produces more than enough glucose for your brain to function no matter how few carbs you eat.
> The cost of performing a New Drug Application starts in the mid hundreds of millions of dollars range and can extend into the billions for some drugs.
> So nobody could feasibly introduce it to the market here without investing $500 million or more up front. At that price, your only viable option is to stick a big price tag on it and try to milk that money back from insurers.
It's interesting that you seem so passionate about this because you're totally incorrect. The cost of a NDA for a novel prescription drug requiring clinical data (the most expensive application) is ~$4.5mil. In fact, the estimated TOTAL revenue to the FDA from ALL PD application fees in FY 2025 is ~$1.3billion (or, just under 300 novel prescription drugs). So, obviously, FDA fees can't be as much as you're claiming.
What you're actually describing is the total cost of the entire drug development pipeline (research, design, lab costs, chemical costs, application costs, marketing costs, etc.) to develop a brand new, novel drug. And it's only ~$200m, increasing to $500m if you include dead ends / failures in the process, and ~$900m if you include both failures and capital costs--yep, that's right the capital costs alone are almost as much as the entire rest of the drug development pipeline.
See: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
And that's for novel Prescription Drugs.
> They required a complete New Drug Application before they would let anyone bring it to market, even though it's over the counter in other countries.
No. In that case they would pay the FDA OMUFA fees, not the FDA PDUFA fees, which are ten to fifty times cheaper than the PDUFA fees.
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