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I actually got off my arse and did some productive programming over the Christmas break. Spent too long vegetating in front of the computer watching YouTube vids or playing games.

I think "reasonable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Whatever price they charge it will be to maximize to Moderna's profits - i.e. they'll price it slightly lower than what insurers / national health systems would be stung for what 44% of melanoma patients needing a second round of expensive chemo would cost them but not so high that no one will cover the treatment. So I guess the price is "reasonable", in that it'll be cheaper than the alternative but it's not like Moderna will be charitable or fair about it.

It's still an amazing breakthrough though.

I was browsing LinkedIn before Christmas and a person popped up in my feed who spent the entire pandemic over on Twitter posting misinformation. This POS dressed up the misinfo as if it were science & statistics even though it was obviously distorted and cherry picked nonsense. He had hundreds of thousands of followers so I think it is reasonable to assume people died as a result of his garbage.

In the UK there is a law called the Cancer Act which was enacted in the 30s to ban advertising or selling of quack cures for cancer and give some means to prosecute offenders. I really wish that act were modernised to ban advertisement or promotion of quackery for any disability, chronic / terminal condition or contagious disease.

I wish. My kids are coeliac i.e., the presence of gluten in food causes the body to attack its own gut.

I'd love if there were a vaccine that they could take once, or even every several months that would let them eat what they wanted. It would have to be something that either turns off the errant immune response altogether or teaches the body to tolerate / ignore gluten proteins.

The article suggests the vaccine prevents the recurrence of a specific cancer by 44% vs conventional treatment alone. So let's be pessimists and say it only prevents recurrence by 22%. Should we eat our words that still 1/5th of people who'd otherwise die or suffer horribly from a recurring cancer now don't?

I think I would be more skeptical of the eventual price of this treatment and less about its effectiveness.

In a monolithic system where this happens, your only choice as a user is to walk away entirely. e.g. in Twitter it used to have moderation against the worst people and now it doesn't and you can choose to stay or go. At least in a federated system if you don't like the server you're on you can find another and can even migrate your account to that other server.

There would be little point being federated if instances couldn't choose how they set policies or moderate content. It doesn't stop an instance being 8kun if it wants but it doesn't mean the others have to accept that.

Carmakers did this to copy Tesla, not realising that Tesla did it to save themselves a few bucks and to hell with the person who suffer a degraded or unsafe driving experience as a result. Witness how Tesla even removed indicator stalks, making it all but impossible for people to safely and legally navigate a roundabout. Who cares if someone crashes, because it's all about the bottom line.

Some US news websites still geoblock European visitors rather than fix their site to not track the ever loving fuck out of visitors who say no. So imagine what they're doing to their domestic visitors.

I'm not sure. Might be a great thing, but Facebook might equally be the equivalent of a whale landing in a small pond, killing everything else in the process.

Apparently there was some kind of gps geo fencing going on - that the software detected the train went into an uncertified repair yard and bricked the thing. So I assume the hackers just purged that info, or unset the flags that denoted the brick condition so as far as the train software was concerned it was operating normally.

It's an interesting hack but there is a safety aspect to this too. A train is a complex machine that could go catastrophically wrong and kill a bunch of people. It's not quite Boeing 737 levels of safety criticality but neither is it something that should be taken lightly with regards to service procedure or parts procurement. So the manufacturer were being dicks to brick the train. But the train operator using an unauthorised repairer who might not have access to, let alone follow the correct servicing procedures or parts is not good either.

Technical excuse I meant.