Hacker News: greygoo222

New comment by greygoo222 in "Prove you are a robot: CAPTCHAs for agents"

greygoo222 — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 03:28:18 +0000

Can confirm.

The people behind the website asked a voice agent to program it, and the STT parsed "agent" as "asian."

New comment by greygoo222 in "Notes from the SF peptide scene"

greygoo222 — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 23:20:10 +0000

If someone wants to take Ozempic for cosmetic reasons, that's their business. I am almost certain you personally indulge in riskier activities than using Ozempic, or... modafinil? You know people still use research chemicals, testosterone, and modafinil, right?

New comment by greygoo222 in "R3 Bio pitched “brainless clones” to serve the role of backup human bodies"

greygoo222 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:03:17 +0000

Depends on how they work. Many genes that are active during early development are entirely silenced throughout adulthood, or otherwise have no effect.

New comment by greygoo222 in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

greygoo222 — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 20:51:42 +0000

Quite a biased source, no? This doesn't provide evidence that these differences are biological. Boys are much more likely to exercise than girls due to social norms: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10478357/.

New comment by greygoo222 in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

greygoo222 — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 19:45:20 +0000

You can debate what policies are the most fair without calling trans women "men."

New comment by greygoo222 in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

greygoo222 — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 19:40:03 +0000

Transition changes biology. We don't yet have the technology to fully reverse the effects of male puberty, so there can be reasonable debate about trans women who transitioned after puberty, but early transitioners have no meaningful advantage. Their bodies, in an athletic context, are female.

This is also true for many cisgender intersex women with XY chromosomes. Someone with androgen insensitivity can have XY chromosomes, yet be capable of giving birth. Drawing the line at having a Y chromosome makes no sense.

New comment by greygoo222 in "The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure"

greygoo222 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 22:33:10 +0000

You don't understand how the technology in question works, and you're just making shit up because you don't want to admit to being wrong.

What are you alleging here anyways? That all the scientists quoted and photographed in the article discussing their part in making the vaccine are in on the game? That the Australian made the story up wholesale? Come on.

New comment by greygoo222 in "The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure"

greygoo222 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 07:18:18 +0000

He is not using an LLM in some new and exciting way. The process of making a personalized mRNA vaccine looks something like this:

1. Collect and sequence patient's normal and tumor genomes 2. Predict immunogenic neoantigens from genome 3. Generate optimized mRNA sequence from neoantigens 4. Create vaccine from sequence

modulo some variations, which I wrote off the top of my head because I understand this technology.

Steps 1 and 4 are done by contracted labs. Steps 2 and 3 are doable through open-source computational tools and a little engineering. What does ChatGPT do here? ChatGPT explains the process, finds labs that will do 1 and 4 for pay, finds published algorithms and data for steps 2 and 3. It's barely more complicated than what ChatGPT would do to help a student with their homework.

Legal documents, on the other hand? Have you ever tried to get an LLM to do your taxes? It's not easy.

New comment by greygoo222 in "The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure"

greygoo222 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 07:09:16 +0000

Have you ever tried writing a long, complicated document with an LLM? The last 20% takes 99% of the work.

New comment by greygoo222 in "Tech boss uses AI and ChatGPT to create cancer vaccine for his dying dog"

greygoo222 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 05:26:47 +0000

ChatGPT did not make the treatment. ChatGPT summarized literature explaining how to make similar treatments, and then specialized tools were used to make the treatment. It is perfectly reasonable that ChatGPT can summarize literature and not make compliant 100 page legal documents.

The principle behind personalized mRNA vaccines is simple enough, and it's perfectly plausible that someone with money and lab access can create an effective treatment not offered through conventional means. It would be plausible even for a human patient right now, with mRNA vaccines still hung up in clinical trials. For a dog? Of course.

New comment by greygoo222 in "The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure"

greygoo222 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 05:20:36 +0000

The LLM did not design the drug. The LLM summarized some papers on how to design similar drugs, and then a dozen specialized tools were used in an established pipeline to design the drug. You people need to read the article and read the background before writing nonsense based on your assumptions.

Here's a previous comment of mine talking about personalized mRNA vaccines with useful citations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47210284

New comment by greygoo222 in "The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure"

greygoo222 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 05:16:12 +0000

It's not a radical medical breakthrough, it's applying a technique already documented in the literature and years into human clinical trials. The LLM is just doing literature summary and planning. The most notable AI innovations here are in protein folding and binder prediction.

New comment by greygoo222 in "The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure"

greygoo222 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 05:13:33 +0000

The LLM didn't oneshot the mRNA treatment, it merely suggested the idea. Most of the steps in the process were done with specialized tools. And no novel treatments were invented wholesale, it's more applying a documented process with existing open-source tools that's just too personalized and expensive to be offered by any vet.

I find this story perfectly plausible.

New comment by greygoo222 in "Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn"

greygoo222 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 16:51:04 +0000

Pollution is not in the "top 5 leading causes of death" unless you count all deaths caused by diseases that are exacerbated by pollution as caused by pollution.

New comment by greygoo222 in "Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn"

greygoo222 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 16:42:12 +0000

As someone who is sensitive to noise, rural areas bother me far more than urban ones. Traffic is low-frequency and only rarely annoying, but the few times I have lived in rural areas or gone camping, I have been woken up repeatedly by the horrific screeching of birds. Louder, shriller, less predictable than any city noise.

There are birds in cities too, and they are annoying, but they are thankfully drowned out by the cars.

New comment by greygoo222 in "Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn"

greygoo222 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 16:34:15 +0000

Your problem is that you were happy as a child and unhappy as an adult. That's a personal problem, and has little to do with rural or urban living. As other commenters have pointed out, you can most likely afford to buy a farm if you really want that lifestyle. I suspect you don't, because it sucks major ass to have to do manual labor all day, to eat almost entirely the same things and see the same people for decades on end, and to choke off your access to most of the joy and beauty in the world.

New comment by greygoo222 in "New farm bill would condemn pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates"

greygoo222 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 16:28:09 +0000

What is monstrous is the confusion of the natural with the just.

New comment by greygoo222 in "The optimal age to freeze eggs is 19"

greygoo222 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 21:52:32 +0000

If you had kids earlier, you wouldn't get more time with the specific person you love that is your son, you'd get more time with a different son. No doubt you'd love your counterfactual son too. But you shouldn't feel bad for having done any wrong by your real kid. This is the only timeline he could exist in.

Bit of a thorny philosophical argument, maybe, but reasonable in this case.

New comment by greygoo222 in "New farm bill would condemn pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates"

greygoo222 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 21:46:25 +0000

It's not gymnastics, you just have no background on this topic.

Species are not moral subjects. Individuals are.

Killing an individual animal that could live a worthwhile life for longer is an individually bad act. Insofar as this happens in the process of species going extinct, that's bad. But it's also the default state of nature. Does replacing a forest with a city cause net harm to non-human animals? That's not clear. It might even be net good.

Does that mean we should destroy wilderness on purpose to prevent wild animal suffering? Not yet, we don't have the technology to mitigate knock-on effects, and it should be done a way that does not harm individuals. But I can't get behind viewing biome destruction as some kind of atrocity against the animals within them, at least not as a whole. (Some species have better lives than others).

New comment by greygoo222 in "New farm bill would condemn pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates"

greygoo222 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 21:32:03 +0000

I'm not angry, just disdainful. Some abstract philosophical positions are unworthy of respect.