(Which isn’t to say I think the system as it is is good, just that there is a good)

The part of this that could totally be true is that a clinical application somewhere along the way "independently" "reinvented" it. There's a hilarious collection of peer-reviewed journal articles out there inventing a "new" method of calculating the sizes of shapes and areas under the curve. The method involves adding up really small rectangles. (I think a top comment already mentioned the Tai article [2])

[1] source: my doctoral advisor was a really really old theoretical neuroscientist who trained as an electrical engineer and mathematician. If you want a more concrete example, the work of Bard Ermentrout on neural criticality starting in the 70's or 80's. He read a lot of physics textbooks.

[2] https://science.slashdot.org/story/10/12/06/0416250/medical-...

I don’t think this is really an issue of censorship to a lot of people (though that may be how it shakes out in the government) but rather of control over their digital environment and sanity.

EDIT: I don’t think this is what I’m remembering, but it has concrete numbers somewhat lower than I thought (48% of teens think social media harms people their age, but only 14% think it harms them personally) https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/22/teens-social...

Capitalism works when a market works; capitalism fails when a market fails. Healthcare is a great example, because there’s an obvious and inherent imbalance in demand vs supply. Firefighting is another great example. These also have externalities to the community as a whole that everyone gets, even when you don’t pay/need the service; so it makes sense to make everyone pay (taxes). Even if you never have a child, even if you send your kids to private school, you live in a society that could only exist because of a (formerly, relatively) high standard of public education. So everyone pays for schools.

The idea of government bureaucrats lining their pockets is also (formerly, relatively) ridiculous: who would get into US government bureaucracy to make money? They are all (formerly, relatively) doing it almost uniformly because they believe in the mission, because they would almost all make more money going private.

(YMMV: this was my experience as of three or four months ago)

Have you played at all with thought-to-voice? Intuitively I’d think EEG readout would be more reliable for spoken rather than typed words, especially if you’re not controlling for keyboard fluency.

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9491465/#:~:text=PM...

It’s maybe a nit-pick, since most JS is run sandboxed, so it’s sort of equivalent. But it was explicitly what GP asked for. Would it be more accurate to say Electron is secure, not JS?

That was never possible before. Historically, conversations didn’t leave records, and when they did, they were trivially burned. There was no sense that the police should have access to the records because there were no records.

The technical and ethical problems of this “common sense” are far from obvious to most whose primary exposure to and mode of thinking about policing and technology is what we see on TV.

But even ignoring that, the gulf between zero days and plain-text LLM prompt injection is miles wide.

Zero days require intensive research to find, and expertise to exploit.

LLM prompt injections obviously exist a priori, and exploiting them requires only the ability to write.

This also is ignoring that ideally business logic is implemented as a combination of smaller, stabler components that can be independently unit tested.

Maybe to answer my own question, LLM developers have one, potentially two advantages over third-party tooling developers: 1) virtually unlimited tokens, zero rate limiting with which to play around with tooling dev. 2) the opportunity to train the network on their own tooling.

The first advantage is theoretically mitigated by insane VC funding, but will probably always be a problem for OSS.

I’m probably overlooking news that the second advantage is where Anthropic is winning right now; I don’t have intuition for where this advantage will change with time.

But the second point seems even less likely to be true: why will Claude code and Gemini cli always be superior? Other than advantageous token prices (which the people willing to pay the aforementioned premium shouldn’t even care about), what do they inherently have over third-party tooling?

So that being said, I'm mostly going to offer citations for "vaping is not great for your lungs." And that being said, I'm just going to offer citations for "specific parts of vaping are not good for your lungs." But my broader argument is that putting stuff in your lungs is going to be bad for your lungs, and these are just the most obvious ones we've found so far. Unfortunately I won't be able to find a citation for that argument.

So, first, the most recent: a study showing disposable vapes had incredibly high level of toxic metal emissions [1]. The non-disposable Juul et al variously have some concerning levels, but the insane numbers are on disposables, which are largely (entirely?) illegal in the US, at least. Still, they're not illegal everywhere, they were used heavily for several years in the US, and several of the top Google results were redditors complaining about the stupid ban and talking about how to get around it. All of this combines to lung damage down the line, and several of the toxic metals are outright carcinogenic, so lung cancer as well.

A more particular example: popcorn lung is a terrifying name, but pretty restricted risk, given the causing chemical is only in certain flavors, and those have supposedly stopped using it [2]. But again, an example of weird chemicals in your lungs cause weird things, and it'll be decades til we figure out all of them.

And finally, a study showing that vaping plus smoking leads to a four-fold higher risk of lung cancer over smoking alone (yes, they adjusted for age, gender, race, location of residence, prevalent comorbidities, and pack-years of smoking) [3].

[0] I was hoping to make a glib point about even high enough pollen concentration being bad for your lungs, but in fact a recent study suggests that allergies reduce risk of lung cancer! I'm chalking that up to allergies being your body's way of keeping non-air particulates from your lungs, but who knows. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/medicine/articles/10.33...

[1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acscentsci.5c00641

[2] Not a lot of research on popcorn lung, seemingly. Note that the name is related to its etiology, not its symptoms. https://www.summahealth.org/flourish/entries/2025/03/a-warm-...

[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39210964/

Of course this is all moot because vaping will be revealed to be the current #1 cause of lung cancer in the coming decades, by a long shot. No citation necessary.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/lung-cancer/risk-factors/index.html

[2] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/lung-cancer/causes/

[3] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...

[4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6777859/

They’re not really making any claims about how quickly the AI can solve relative to the validation, which is what P vs NP is about.