It's reasonably predictable that a fundie judge would rule this way; 'fetal personhood'/assorted pearl-clutching about early stage embryos and fertilized eggs has been a very popular tactic for anti-abortionists for some time time now; but actually taking a position that basically makes it impossible to do IVF legally seems like it could be risky overreach for them.

IVF is notably popular even among people who are allegedly "pro life". This is particularly dramatically visible in the fact that, technically, the Catholic Church's position is that IVF is super bad; but the laity are basically in favor of it and its not something that the Church is typically willing to actually try to argue with people about: they'll deny communion to politicians for not being against abortion hard enough; but(while they won't deny their position on IVF, it's all there in writing) you basically never hear about it; unless someone proposes that it should be readily available to the unmarried or homosexuals: as a mechanism for married heterosexuals with fertility issues it's just too popular. Protestant denominations aren't even necessarily against it; and the ones that are tend to take a pretty similar position in practice: they shut the hell up about it unless it's being used by someone they don't approve of.

This judge gets to score his points(albeit in a ruling that was practically written to be overturned on establishment clause grounds by a higher court); but I can't see "Nope, you can't get IVF anymore" going over well even among the pious pro-lifers.

You don't even need to wait for that scenario to arise: successful uterine implant rate of fertilized eggs is well below 100% even in young, healthy, women under typical conditions; with various 'spontaneous abortion' and miscarriage events further along also pretty common.

IVF makes the failures a lot more visible, since people are watching closely and attempts are expensive; but human reproduction simply can't be done(on average; obviously there's someone who has managed to implant and carry to term all eggs ever fertilized) without significant attrition of fertilized eggs and embryos of various stages(with spontaneous losses more common early; but continuing right up to full terms stillbirths).

A sympathetic observer would probably try to argue something about intention: that it's somehow different to deliberately toss the excess after an IVF round is finished than it is to know that what you are doing is probably going to result in a bunch of failures to implant or early stage spontaneous abortions; but you won't actually be making the choice on those.

I'm not sure that's really viable: in a variety of circumstances we recognize that doing something in the full knowledge of the bad outcomes it is likely to have is seriously morally problematic(typically not quite as bad as outright murder, instead it's "reckless negligence" or "depraved indifference" or something). Whether you are talking IVF or natural attempted reproduction is only really morally defensible if the destruction of some fertilized eggs and early stage embryos is either simply not an issue, or vaguely unfortunate but so much less important than getting the child you are interested in as to basically not matter.

I assume that (barring some of the really fly-by-night ones who focus on being gone by the time anyone goes to investigate; rather than just being technically legal) do sport some variation on the "Not Intended to Diagnose, Treat, Cure or Prevent Any Disease" quack-Miranda you see on every "dietary supplement".

It seems likely that the FDA is concerned(probably not entirely unreasonably) that the 'it's not a medical device; it's just for quantified wellness!" tech guys, mostly harmless when selling new numbers to obsess over to the basically healthy, are going to cause some real trouble if their technically-not-illegal marketing claims sway anyone whose life does, in fact, depend on accurate blood glucose numbers and responding to them appropriately.

It wouldn't be surprising if, as a cultural thing, cautious FDA validation wonks don't really much like the people selling lightweight lifestyle hypochondria at tech gadget prices; but they don't have regulatory authority and if it's just mostly-healthy people fretting over numbers that normally take care of themselves it's a pretty low priority. If actual diabetics get into it, though, (as you could see them wanting to; noninvasive is definitely a compelling sales pitch) any shortcomings are going to turn into bad outcomes fairly quickly.

I'm not sure what the grant landscape looks like for optical CGMs, or related technology, specifically; but I don't think that the FDA does much medical research funding. Lots of food safety and some laboratory standards and development for the sort of wide-scale testing that food safety requires; but for drugs and medical devices they are mostly just in charge of judging clinical trials and postmarket reporting; not running their own.

The Feds as a whole do a fairly substantial amount; but FDA research money is largely for food safety related stuff. Not entirely, I had a quick poke through taggs.hss.gov and there were some FDA grants and cooperative agreements for 'prospective' and "phase 2" trials of a few directly medical things(didn't see blood glucose, might have missed it, I'm not a huge federal database wonk); but one of the other HHS divisions is probably a more likely bet(CDC has a slightly epidemiological bent; but enough interest in public health stuff that diabetes is probably on the menu. HRSA looks more closely focused on capacity to handle specific difficult patient populations; but you might be able to sell low-invasiveness CGM improvements as a major boon to telehealth-based diabetes management. NIH is probably the best bet if you want to do some straight medical R&D.

Thereâ(TM)s probably some pure organization problem: not all the equipment is going to even be from the same vendor, so coordination of different alarm sounds for different purposes or severity is going to be a challenge; and then thereâ(TM)s the asymmetrical incentives: everyone knows that alarm fatigue is bad, in a vague theoretical way, and that we should be minimizing noise to avoid distracted mistakes; but being the guy who signed off on disabling the cardiac anomaly beeper because itâ(TM)s mostly nonsense is real awkward when it turns out that this time it was a real event and now the dead patientâ(TM)s family is suing.

Itâ(TM)s certainly possible that some genuinely useless alarms have snuck through; but my suspicion would be that most of the noise is competing alarms that are poor UX in context; but just meaningful enough to be defensible in isolation.

Is this study actually telling us anything about the sounds, or just about response to novel sounds vs. overwhelmingly habituated ones?

I donâ(TM)t doubt that novel musical tones got better response that that-spurious-out-of-range-alarm-thatâ(TM)s-never-worth-checking; but would that remain the case if you started hammering people with spurious musical alarms?

This guy can do whatever he wants, of course, he doesn't work for them anymore and the license allows forking; but it seems like a bizarrely small dispute to take such action over(unless it's just the proximate cause and there were longer-running togetherness problems).

Both parties agreed that there was a bug; corporate said that the affected code was in use by some customers and wanted to issue a CVE; devs apparently wanted to treat it as a just-a-bug-that-has-security-implications-but-doesn't-need-a-CVE-for-reasons; and that is the corpo oppression that shows that nginx is no longer in the public interest?

I could see if it were the other way around, and F5 was demanding silence and secrecy in order to downplay their vulnerability numbers; but how could warning whoever is using the experimental feature that they'd better take mitigation steps until it is fixed be a problem? If it's really that experimental almost nobody will care, and a few people will be helped. Is there something I'm missing?

It's not a huge surprise that the general response to Altman's scheme would be that it's grandiose puffery(even aside from his "I will create the machine god, but in a responsible way" vibes; leaving a price estimate of 5-7 trillion creates the impression that you've not really nailed the details down if the window of uncertainty is quite large relative to both the low and high values; and stupefying large in absolute terms); it seems a bit more interesting that Nvidia would be publicly pushing for a markedly smaller figure when they are one of the ones who would seem to stand to benefit.

Disagreement between Altman and Huang over whether 'AI' is the emerging superintelligence or just a tool for churning out 'content' real fast, with correspondingly different estimates for how much people will actually want to spend on it? Nvidia perturbed because they think that Altman's plan involves trying to expand fab capacity enough to making taking his pick of second-tier fabless designers, rather than paying Nvidia a premium, the preferred strategy? Fundamentally greater optimism on Nvidia's side; with assumptions that improved efficiency will actually deliver as much 'AI' as the market wants for $2 trillion or so without huge shakeups in the supply chain; while Altman thinks that only maximum brute force will deliver what the problem requires?

Basically all the hypervisors support PCIe passthrough(except the 'desktop' ones, neither vmware workstation nor win10/11 hyper-v do); though there's a risk of...complications...because doing that relies on the platform's IOMMU and PCIe ACS support to both exist and not just be a buggy stub that's enough to tick some checkboxes.

Had to do some of that a little while back; and found that getting anyone to confirm the presence or absence of PCIe ACS was like pulling teeth; and that there were PCIe peripherals that outright weren't passthrough capable, ones that were; and the fun ones that claimed to be and brought the system down hard if you believed their lies and actually tried it.

Part of it is.

Digital signature support is pretty widespread across productivity software. Where the fun begins is managing the signing keys.

Docusign isn't really selling the signature feature(indeed, to be worth using, they pretty much have to use the standardized options mentioned in the various standards that give e-signatures legal force); they're selling abstracting the key management away from you; and the service of offering a 'free' barebones setup that the people you send forms to can use to sign them regardless of whether or not they are set up properly in terms of software, signing keys, etc. That's why accounts that can send stuff out for signature are $$(with stuff that has full workflow integration for hooking into ERP systems and stuff being $$$); but it's free to create a basic login if someone sends you something requesting a signature.

It's hard to hold out too much hope for them, or at least their margins, longterm; since the signatures are standardized, productivity software vendors already support them, and (aside from people who are looking to offer basically the same thing as Docusign, like Adobe's offering they push with Acrobat) the people trying to set themselves up as big players in authentication(eg. facebook and google serving as logins for a variety of 3rd party websites; Apple having IDs tied very closely to their users on all Apple devices; MS' AAD-related stuff on the corporate side and MS accounts on the consumer side); would find it relatively simple; were they interested; to generate a signing key tied to their accounts and offer that as another feature.

"Which is not to say there isn't a gradient of "fake"; obviously some are more manipulated ( or fabricated ) than others. Doesn't change the underlying point, however."

That's arguably why it deserves to be classified as 'malarkey'. He's responding to accusations that his just-hallucinate-in-details-the-optics-can't-gather system is faking by making the (true) statement that all photos are fake in order to change the subject from whether all photos are fake in the same way and to the same degree(which is obviously untrue; and presumably why he doesn't really want to mount a defense there).

A lot of the best deception is achieved when you can avoid telling outright lies, with the accompanying risk of being called on them, and focus on misleading truths instead.

Arguably it depends on whether you are expecting sudo to act as a rigid security barrier that you can use to create accounts if intermediate privilege; or whether you are treating it mostly as a tool for people you'd give root to reduce the amount of stuff they actually run as root.

It's pretty tricky to use it as a security barrier, even when it works perfectly, because so many of the tools that you'd potentially want to use sudo to grant access to are not really designed to restrict the user: once you have a package manager running as root you can use it to do basically anything by installing a package that imposes the changes you want; all kinds of utilities can just pop a shell or be used to edit files; etc. Even if sudo itself is free of holes; you'd really need a whole set of deliberately constrained utilities in order to prevent it from being used for privilege escalation. At that point it probably makes more sense to rethink the security model from the other direction; and focus on reducing the number of operations that are root-only in favor of ones that can be delegated to groups.

Where it's much more useful is allowing someone who is basically trusted as root to not just log in as root and run giant chunks of software that don't need(and probably shouldn't be trusted with) high privileges with high privileges just because they logged in as root and so everything they do is running as root.

That's what amazes me.

Maybe I'm just old; but "Signature Authority List" is supposed to mean what it says(possibly blue pen if you really are old; cryptographic if you aren't); it doesn't mean "verbal authorization in a video chat that may or may not even be being recorded somewhere with retention policies set".

I'd be more sympathetic if this were one of the low-value ones where someone impersonates the CEO and tells a random executive assistant or other fairly low-on-the-food-chain employee to make a relatively petty cash transfer to the scammers: you have to feel bad for the person who doesn't want to hassle the big boss, even if they have doubts; but someone with approval authority in the multiple millions is someone whose job description(implicitly or explicitly) is to be slightly prickly about actually approving things.

I'm curious whether the backend for hosting this is disproportionately complex(either following a design from when 19GB of data was still something of some note; or perhaps quite literally a configuration that has been brought forward for a couple of decades with only minimal changes, I'd assume that it's not still running on literally the same FTP servers it started on); whether it was someone's passion project and they are retiring/died; or whether the bean counters are looking so carefully and squeezing so tight that university IT isn't being allowed to throw a pittance at preserving a piece of history that they can't cross charge to another cost center.

Coming from working on much more recent systems it's a little hard to wrap my head around; we have Legal browbeating people and having us enforce retention policies specifically to keep vastly larger amounts of data from just being inadvertently retained because it's actively a hassle to go through and weed things out; and while storing it doesn't cost nothing it often compares favorably to the cost of determining who can give the OK to delete it and hassling them.

I can only assume that, given its age, this system has a lot more infrastructure complexity(possibly understood best by people who are leaving or gone) per GB; so it's not really about the disk space, or the brutal bandwidth load imposed by the tiny OS/2 enthusiast community; but about a comparatively fiddly backend.

Either that or someone in bean counting is being astonishingly petty.

Aside from the potential effect on upgrades of "the lost decade"(or decades, sources differ) that started in the early 90s; it actually seems like a reasonably common pattern: technology buildouts that are impressive and functional for their time have a habit of becoming entrenched and(through some combination of relative adequacy vs. rev.1 of the new stuff and incumbents with investments they don't want to write off) remaining stickier longer than one would like.

We certainly saw a similar thing in the US with, say, wireline telco: you may not have loved the monopoly prices; but aggressive coverage levels were a national policy, reliability was high, and Bell Labs was doing all sorts of neat stuff. That all proved to be...unhelpful...when it came to cellular adoption at either reasonable prices or with reasonable handset features: stateside a Blackberry was the future; everyone else was dealing with carrier-locked BREW garbage and paying per-SMS(and paying more for WAP, except that that sucked so much that most people couldn't be bothered); while over in Europe pay-per-SMS was much less of a thing; and Symbian-type arguably-smartphones were reasonably common; and Japan had i-mode and all the handsets built around its still-a-weird-proprietary-mess-but-way-the-hell-better-than-WAP capabilities.

Of course, that ended up being the same phenomenon again, in its turn: US carrier-based services(SMS, MMS, WAP, etc.) were expensive or hot garbage or both; which made the US market ripe for rapid adoption of 'contemporary' style smartphones that do support cellular standards; but are fundamentally oriented around doing as much as possible over TCP/IP with the carrier just acting as a pipe; because only Blackberries were even remotely non-garbage as more telco-oriented 'smart' phones. In Europe and Japan the old style didn't last forever; but the relative quality and sophistication of pre-"It's all just TCP/IP on a small computer; right?" style designs actually gave the iphones and androids a run for their money. In some cases (like ability to do contactless payments in certain subway systems and things from your phone) the new gear remained a regression in certain respects for years afterwards.