While there's a lot of justified cynicism about antibiotic overuse and resistance, in the case of TB, the main driver of resistance isn't misuse, overuse, or noncompliance. It has to do with several factors: the nature of the infection; the transmissibility of disease; incomplete efficacy of gold standard treatments; and the disproportionate prevalence of disease in developing countries where public health and sanitation standards are lower. In other words, when it comes to TB, it's not because people are casually being prescribed and taking the newest antibiotics, or that farmers are using them prophylactically in livestock. Antibiotics for TB--specifically, the ones for drug-resistant TB--are not some walk in the park. A person does not simply get these handed to them like candy.

The last great recession was due to precisely this sort of spending pattern plus a collapse in payment. Banks may be healthy, for now, but they can't keep lending forever with no recover. This is not a good sign.

While the photo was taken by her assistant, the fact is that it was Franklin's expertise in X-ray crystallography that resulted in a superior level of image quality. Her contribution is deservedly significant because if she had not used such techniques to precisely control the humidity of the imaging chamber, the images Gosling took would not have had the resolution they did.

To say that it was Gosling's photo, thus implying that he--of anyone at Kings College--should have received some measure of credit for the discovery, is a misrepresentation in the sense that a lab assistant whose responsibility is to operate machinery is not necessarily the one who devised the method or protocol of operation, nor the technological innovation that enables the research. No one who has worked in the applied sciences can deny this truth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

What is this obsession with pedophilia? I'm really getting rather suspicious of MAGA. I suspect your average Catholic priest or Southern Baptist youth pastor thinks about nude children less than most MAGA individuals.

It's 2025. We've known for a couple of decades that Win32/Win64 and Windows and its main ecosystem only work because various hacks into the kernel to make it all run more smoothly. Even the video driver architecture basically has built in restarts when buffers blow up.

It's a shitty proprietary operating system which somehow, every time they try to clean it up, it gets worse under and on top of the hood. I stopped using Windows for my own personal devices four years ago, and will not go back. Ubuntu, Debian and MacOS offer cleaner UIs, and even if the software libraries are a bit smaller, at least I'm not a prisoner to endless ads.

Christ I had to set up a Win11 laptop yesterday, and between setting up the OS and Edge I had to turn down "offers" and additional tracking functionality around seven or eight times. Actually more, because then I set up a non-privileged user profile, and had to do it all again. And that was Win11 Pro. I can only imagine how much worse the Home editions are.

There's no speculation that increases CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere lead to the more heat being trapped. We've known that since the late 19th century.

If you want to use AI, fine. But if I don't want to use it, don't force it on me. Don't put it in my OS and make me have to jump through hoops to avoid it. Don't put it in my applications and have it automatically steal all of my original work to use as training data.

A reasonable person would understand that when these companies take these kinds of actions and put the onus on the end user to opt out, that this is highly suggestive of unethical motives. Normalization through market saturation and removal of choice is a core tenet of the enshittification playbook. And if you, as the consumer, don't fight against this, you will quickly find yourself paying money for what used to be free; putting up with planned obsolescence; not being able to buy durable or reliable products; and becoming inured to vendor lock-in, intrusive advertising, and privacy violations.

The question is not whether generative AI technology is "useful," "trustworthy," "ethical," or "valuable." There are valid use cases, and to argue against that is a losing proposition. Rather, the issue is about the behavior and motives of the entities that have commodified them. Conversely, people defending the use of AI because of its utility are missing the point: you do not need to attack those who choose to avoid it (and in doing so, implicitly defend the unethical behavior of the companies that are pushing it on everyone) as the price for being able to benefit from it.

It just goes to show you, there's none more gullible than the paranoid.

When I want to point out to the kind of morons who post on the Internet, I'll tuck this post away.

Yup, the sad truth is that if you really want to save children, you need to ban parents.

Aside from the obvious privacy issues, the concern I have is that this product seems to be positioned as a medical device, but lacks any information about how it is measuring what it purports to measure. What studies support the analyses it claims to perform, and how are its methodologies validated?

It's deeply deceptive to sell a product that claims to track health-related data without disclosing how accurate or meaningful it is. Not only is such marketing exploiting the uneducated public and leading them to believe in snake oil, it also creates confusion, sows distrust of legitimate medical devices and therapies, and may actually lead consumers to make incorrect decisions about seeking medical advice. For instance, one can reasonably envision that someone who buys this product could believe that it could justify less frequent colonoscopies. That could be a fatal error.

One of the most fascinating aspects of H2O is the sheer number of forms it can take under different conditions.

The problem was that you were part of that chain of obligations to, and the guy above you could grab your wife, or in the case of James II of England (James VI of Scotland), he could grab you.

China's population decline, as standards of living increase, will largely take care of the problem. China, like every nation that is now on the other side of the economic growth-population growth curve, will have to figure out how to deal with the next half century. But nothing is going to make factories less automated, and between population decline and foreign tariffs, they are only going to push automation further to fill the gap.

Which will not prevent automation. Look at the history of technological advancement, from the Paleolithic to today. Each major innovation has disrupted labor in some form or another, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, in a proximal sense, but in the long run societies adapt. You cannot block innovation, and if you do, you simply surrender the field to the nation that is willing to throw out the status quo.