sov's comments

> The FDA is partially to blame for this situation: ...

> The cost of performing a New Drug Application starts in the mid hundreds of millions of dollars range and can extend into the billions for some drugs.

> So nobody could feasibly introduce it to the market here without investing $500 million or more up front. At that price, your only viable option is to stick a big price tag on it and try to milk that money back from insurers.

It's interesting that you seem so passionate about this because you're totally incorrect. The cost of a NDA for a novel prescription drug requiring clinical data (the most expensive application) is ~$4.5mil. In fact, the estimated TOTAL revenue to the FDA from ALL PD application fees in FY 2025 is ~$1.3billion (or, just under 300 novel prescription drugs). So, obviously, FDA fees can't be as much as you're claiming.

What you're actually describing is the total cost of the entire drug development pipeline (research, design, lab costs, chemical costs, application costs, marketing costs, etc.) to develop a brand new, novel drug. And it's only ~$200m, increasing to $500m if you include dead ends / failures in the process, and ~$900m if you include both failures and capital costs--yep, that's right the capital costs alone are almost as much as the entire rest of the drug development pipeline.

See: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

And that's for novel Prescription Drugs.

> They required a complete New Drug Application before they would let anyone bring it to market, even though it's over the counter in other countries.

No. In that case they would pay the FDA OMUFA fees, not the FDA PDUFA fees, which are ten to fifty times cheaper than the PDUFA fees.

any commercial rtos shop where QNX may be appropriate is either using 1. some wacky expensive proprietary rtos that you've never heard of, 2. freertos or 3. real-time linux depending on what they need. asking what makes QNX a compelling rtos when freertos exists, is widely supported and used, and has an MIT license is a very valid question.

further, no one in embedded actually cares what RTOS you used. they are all similar enough that you won't get stuck if it's a brand new RTOS

Without Oxford comma: "We invited JFK, the stripper and Stalin." [three distinct items in the list]

With Oxford comma: "We invited JFK, the stripper, and Stalin."[two named items in the list with an appositive affirming that we're talking about JFK the stripper and not the former president]

There are two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things and off by one errors.

Same here--same for some members of my immediate family as well. Had a few days in a row where I got virtually no sleep and wasn't tired, either. Haven't had any symptoms and am in a low-risk area though.

No, I don't think harassment in any form is acceptable.

I do think the case of Hsu is worth using as an example here: an intra-university conflict; a group of grad students is petitioning for a professor that they believe is actively harmful to the institution to step down as director of research. Now, I don't think it really matters what you or I think about any of this--whether or not we agree with the students or the prof is immaterial. This is an issue for the university, the students at the university, the professor, and any professional relations the professor has within his field of academia.

If I'm a student at the school, and I'm pro-grad student faction, I'd probably be rightly annoyed and mighty curious at a pseudonymous blogger so fervently involving himself. Why the pseudonym? Why the support? It would behoove me to look into this person, seeing as, from my perspective, he is signal boosting an erroneous cause via his immensely popular website.

If I'm a professor at the school, and I'm pro-prof faction, I'd probably be rightly bewildered and mighty curious at a pseudonymous blogger so fervently involving himself. Why the pseudonym? Why the support? It would behoove me to look into this person, seeing as, from my perspective, he is signal boosting, albeit for a good cause, via his immensely popular website, with no apparent reason to do so, seeing as how he doesn't seem to be a geneticist or faculty. It would definitely give me pause, to say the least.

I can think of things even in my personal life or business where, if an outsider were involving himself trying to "signal boost" a resolution (even if in my favor), I think I'd very rightly want to know the motivations and identity of said person.

The above examples don't illustrate that he should be identified, rather, that he's presenting people with a compelling reason to want him identified. I don't think he should be ID'd, but if a campus paper wrote an OP-ed about it, I'd have a hard time faulting them.

I don't think anyone should harass anyone else, which I think is somewhat what Scott has been doing (perhaps for a righteous cause) with this affair (as, by nature, signal boosting pro-prof draws some fire upon the grad student faction in question), so his response here rings a little bit hollow to me. But, to be crystal clear, even if I think Scott is using his platform to ever so slightly browbeat institutions via his followers (in the most mild sense & with the best of intentions), I still think the NYT is very much clearly in the wrong.

Unfortunate, for sure. The NYT has no real reason to post his name (as far as I'm aware--the tone of the article could affect that conclusion), so I'm not really sure why they'd dig their heels in here.

Though, he really does post a lot of personal and identifying information on his blog--literally any motivated party could find his name very easily. I thought "maybe he doesn't want his real name to link to his blog if a patient googles it"--but, it already does that. In fact, it's a suggested search in google!

Ultimately though, in some respect, I do think Scott's trying to have his cake and eat it too a bit here. I think when he starts trying to influence certain events in the real world; eg. like his Signal Boosting for Hsu to give an example within the last week, where he takes umbrage against the Grad student organization at MSU to drum up support in defense of Prof. Hsu--whether or not you agree with Hsu or you agree with the graduate students at MSU, Scott is decidedly an outsider attempting to exert his influence. People have mentioned that these sorts of actions legitimize the "fair play" of the NYT revealing his real identity, and I'm having a hard time finding umbrage with that statement.

I don't think the NYT should post his full name but I also do think Scott has been playing fast and loose; both with revelatory facts about his identity and by putting himself in situations where there are legitimate reasons for blog-outsiders to inquire about his real identity. Hopefully there will be an amicable end to this conflict.

> So I never saw any indication that this was malicious on Apple’s part.

They intentionally slowed down all iPhones in the face of more user-friendly options to fix an issue a minuscule percentage of people had. I think you can choose to view this as a solution, but I'm leery of anyone who thinks this was an appropriate solution.

> They determined this happened because aged batteries were not capable of delivering peak current anymore and the CPU was “browning out” under heavy load.

This is kinda true but ultimately more misleading than insightful. It makes it sound like it's just the batteries' fault and nothing can be done. Aged batteries are perfectly capable of delivering all the peak power necessary for operation. The only time it's possibly an issue for the LiCo oxides the iPhone uses is at a low SoC after a relaxation period (which is amplified if the battery itself is physically cold). So, in a perfect storm of events you'll have a phone that will die from 10% SoC.

But then your SoC isn't really at 10%, innit? Your SoH is actually lower, so your SoC needs to diminish faster to accurately map to your reduced capacity. SoC isn't a mystery either. Because this issue is prevalent after a relaxation period on the LiCo batteries, you can get pretty accurate SoCs from simply reading OCV. Remember, OCV:SOH mapping is only difficult for non-Cobalt Lithium chemistries, and even then often only in the middle range. Reductions in SoH speed up passage along the OCV:SOC curve, not chop the ends off--and the ends are the most prominent.

> A phone that is moderately slower is still more valuable than one that randomly crashes.

There are other things Apple could have done. Like, actually accurately report the SoC. Or reduce screen brightness at lower SoCs. Further, it's not "randomly crashing"--it's shutting off at low charge% (but higher than people would expect).

I don't know if it was malicious, but if not, it's a surprisingly stupid fix from an otherwise brilliant engineering team, and it seems the judge agreed.

> Firstly, they only slowed down older phones to prevent them from crashing as they had less and less reliable battery draw

I see this posted a lot and I honestly just don't buy it.

Processor power draw for most high-priority OS tasks (eg: keyboard input) are virtually zilch compared to keeping the screen lit for that much longer.

Everything says this happens to older phones, not phones with high usage. If you get the battery replaced--will Apple speed up the phone again? If I am on my iPhone 24/7 and constantly discharge down to 5% SOC, how come Apple doesn't slow down my phone more than someone with scarce use?

Even unreliable power draw makes no sense. You may be not able to predict the SOC from the OCV of the cell as accurately as SOH diminishes than when it's 100%, but cell phones largely use lithium cobalt oxides which have well-defined OCV:SOC curves! There should be no need to guess how close to a low SOC you are--you can just read the OCV.

Your point about unsafe pointer handling in Rust is specifically what dissuaded us from using it in an upcoming project. It really feels bad prepending all of the code that you actually care about being safe with `unsafe`.

> Is this actually true?

It kinda depends on what exactly they mean. Is it true that if you had zero glucose available in your bloodstream at all your brain would be unable to function? Yes. Is it true that if nothing you ate contained any glucose your brain would starve? No. There's a process called gluconeogenesis which produces more than enough glucose for your brain to function no matter how few carbs you eat.

Literally all of vsyu's posts are submission links to either confluent or buzzsprout talking about Apache Kafka. No comments, just banal advertisement.

They've been used a lot in the past--most notably, for me, in Diablo II back in the early 2000's. I remember writing a bunch of D2JSP code back in the day and getting my account "flagged"--basically stuck forever to play against pickit users and autolockers.

Friends were able to join my game, but not I theirs, and the "available games" list was way smaller.

> Removing the filler "uh" the sentence becomes "Like their purpose." Which could be semantically understood as "[I/He/They] Like (or enjoy) their (whale's song) purpose." A semantically ambiguous sentence is just that, ambiguous. This sentence can have multiple meanings.

Your argument supporting your prior assertion that "the sentence has meaningless grammar/syntax" is that... if you remove part if it, the sentence ceases to make sense?

Their sentence isn't semantically ambiguous. You may not understand the meaning of their sentence, but your experience is not everyone's experience. The word "uh" in the quoted sentence serves a particular purpose--it's an emphasis of the ridiculousness about how little we know with respect to the animals. Moreover, it's a very concise way of communicating that emphasis.

> However, "Like, uh, their purpose." is grammatically and semantically meaningless

How can something be grammatically meaningless? Further, because you're not able to understand the semantic meaning of a phrase does not mean it has no semantic meaning. I don't understand German--is German semantically meaningless?

> I am all for using a more casual voice

> I am against colloquial, spoken styles slipping into written word

Are these not contrary to one another?

> The problem isn't that we don't know how to make more powerful batteries right now, the problem is safety.

No, this isn't the problem. The problems are weight, volume, energy density and cost, and the fact that there's no single catch-all battery solution w.r.t. dis/charge rates, capacity, and the aforementioned values. Safety, while very important and somewhat costly (engineers time--mechanical and certificates), is something the big battery companies understand very well.

> The more powerful your battery, generally the more dangerous/flammable/explosive it is when it fail

There's a concept called single-cell isolation that basically obviates this.

Honestly, I'm a little disappointed with this article. Plagiarism detectors themselves are neither a crutch nor a problem--they're simply a tool. People's use of them as the grand arbiter on plagiarism as though they were stone tablets delivered to them from Mount Sinai is the problem.

I thought that, despite the title, that's what the author was talking about for the majority of this article, but then they mention things like...

> Only if a text is somehow off, and online searching does not help, should software systems be consulted.

Sorry, what? The only reason text would sound weird is if it's been specifically mangled to defeat plagiarism software (which makes plagiarism software already useful). There's practically no way you, as a student marker, busy professor, or someone reviewing hundreds of academic proposals has the time to slowly wade through each paper you get by googling choice sentences manually--something the plagiarism checker software can do just fine. I'm more-so confused, by the pair of statements that 1) "Software cannot determine plagiarism [...] That decision must be taken by a person" but also 2) "Only if a text is somehow off, and online searching does not help, should software systems be consulted". Isn't the author's whole point that plagiarism software false flags all the time? Isn't this, then, just "hey this sentence sounds funny, time to fail this student on some plagiarism."

If their argument, however, is that you should use plagiarism software for curatable results, then this seems like the opposite order of what should be done. Why waste all your time fruitlessly finessing Google if the software will straight up just find the OG source for you? You're not going to have read every single piece of writing conceivably connected to the essay/etc. you're reviewing (unless it's a field you know much about and also so narrow that you'd never consider using plagiarism software in the first place), so you're bound to be missing actual plagiarism all the time.

I've been a member of the sub since its inception, and I've long defended Scott's analyses, but, as a longtime reader and (former) participant in the CW threads, I think he's grossly missed the mark here in the first section. I think if you read the first part of this article really closely, that should be obvious.

"I will be honest and admit I rarely read the thread myself." - Scott

"For all its awfulness..." - werttrew

"...practically ever criticism of the CW thread I have ever read is true..." - yrrosimyarin

"Very little was solved" -rwkasten

"I think the CW thread is obviously a huge lump of positive utility for a large number of people, because otherwise they wouldn’t spend so much time on it" - darwin2500

"...it does have a lot of full-time opinionated idiots squabbling, and is inarguably filled with irrationality, bad takes, contrarianism, and Boo Outgroup posturing. I agree with many of [the criticisms] of overtly racist and stupid posts in there." -c_o_r_b_a

I, too, once held a positive opinion on the thread, and so would anyone, having only the knowledge of its maxims and a bleary-eyed take on a small sample of posts. But once you dig deeper, you get what ought to be obvious from the above quotes. There are indeed many honest, well meaning, well informed people that post. They end up getting absolutely pulverized under the millstone of "power users".

The issue with the thread was never that an surveyable proportion of readers would split between left and right.

The issue was that the power users--the ones who post all the time in seemingly every thread--create an environment that drives away the the best posters.

The issue was that a single person clicking "I consider myself left-wing" on a survey (especially when they know the context of the survey is to show relatively even R/L split and the political milieu of the sub is hard R) is very different than their sheer contribution to the social "overton window" of the thread. Those "left wing" posters are the "I believe abortion should be legal, but also I will post my pro-HBD takes forever, at every opportunity". That is, it doesn't really matter what they clicked, because their contribution to the aesthetic of the thread is not accurately represented by the survey.

The issue was that actual factual experts get drowned in a sea of whataboutism and people who think they know better because they have a study to the contrary (did no one else read Beware the Man Of One Study or Epistemic Learned Helplessness!?).

The issue is that there are so few actual left wing posters that they get called out explicitly, by name to answer for "the left" when "they" do something that the forum deems necessary of an explanation (seriously, darwin2500 has the patience of a saint).

The issue is that people who harass (as above), argue in bad faith or seriously contribute to a negative environment don't catch bans except for extreme cases. To the moderators' credit, I've seen some really bad stuff get posters banned, but to speak of the general thread's failure, many of those posts are sitting on a well-into-the-positive amount of upvotes.

Personally, I'm not sad to see the thread go. It was detritus, and it impelled many quality contributors to leave. My favorite poster on the sub (who pretty much never posts there now) wrote a fantastic bit explaining the sub ~6 months ago.

"The experience can be a little jarring because you’ll have some insightful, genuinely depth hub worth comment upvoted and then another highly upvoted comments next to it will be how we should bring back eugenics and how we should limit immigration to people from high IQ countries in Europe and East Asia" - u/yodatsracist as per below

https://www.reddit.com/r/DepthHub/comments/98jco5/uintervers...

And, to be clear, none of this was explicitly Scott's fault (and, to wit, anyone who harassed him personally/professionally is an utter idiot). It was simply Moloch acting on the machinery of the sub.

I don't think this is the case. I played on a B/C-tier Overwatch team as the main DPS (mostly Tracer) for several months and I can tell you there is a stark difference in snap-reflex between non-caffeinated and caffeinated states, regardless of sleep amount. There were many other things I did to improve my reflexes and rote mechanical skill in general, but none made as much an obvious difference as caffeine.

I don't know anyone who uses fiancee in a gendered way; all my engaged friends refer to their future husband/wife as their fiancee (though, granted, I'm probably not as old as many here who are already wed so I might just be out of the loop). Google's definition of fiancee seems to offer both wife-to-be and husband-to-be as synonyms as well, so I'm not really sure the parent's sneer is really valid in this case.