skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Eastern District of Texas strikes down Food and Drug Administration’s final rule regulating laboratory developed tests in ~health

    skybrian
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    From the article: ... ... ... It's odd that there are no mainstream newspapers covering this. I guess lab tests are too niche?

    From the article:

    In the never-ending saga over the battle to regulate laboratory-developed tests (LDTs), the Eastern District of Texas took the wind out of FDA’s sails on Monday, vacating FDA’s Final Rule that intended to regulate LDTs as medical devices similar to in vitro diagnostic (IVD) tests, which are commercially manufactured and undergo pre-market review by FDA.1 Clinical laboratories can halt their plans, for now, to comply with the Final Rule’s May 6, 2025, deadline to implement certain features of FDA’s medical device quality system regulations.

    ...

    Clinical laboratories will see the ruling as a major victory for the laboratory industry. The district court’s ruling also comes as one of the first major checks on FDA’s power in the post-Chevron world following last year’s Supreme Court decision in Loper Bright.

    ...

    Explaining the storied history of LDT regulation, the district court found no question that Congress had considered the unique regulatory issues raised by clinical laboratories and the tests that they develop and perform, and that Congress chose to regulate these tests as “services” under CLIA. This contrasts with the authority Congress granted FDA to regulate “devices,” which the district court concluded under the FDCA to mean “articles in commerce,” not “services” performed by doctors and laboratories.

    ...

    While it is possible that FDA could appeal the decision, we do not expect the current Administration to do so. Experts had already predicted that President Trump was likely to order FDA to repeal, or not enforce, the Final Rule, as HHS under the first Trump Administration had revoked FDA’s guidance document claiming authority to regulate LDTs as devices.

    It's odd that there are no mainstream newspapers covering this. I guess lab tests are too niche?

    2 votes

  3. Comment on Liberal projected to win Wisconsin Supreme Court race in blow to Donald Trump in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Thanks for sharing! I wonder what might be done to improve this? Allowing people to vote without an ID is sort of the easy way out if they also need an ID for other things. Like, okay, let them to...

    Thanks for sharing! I wonder what might be done to improve this?

    Allowing people to vote without an ID is sort of the easy way out if they also need an ID for other things. Like, okay, let them to vote, but that's hardly anything compared to actually helping them? Voting doesn't improve their lives directly.

    The crazy thing is that the prison system certainly knows who people are, so just making sure everyone who gets out of prison has an ID should be just be standard. And from what you say, it sounds like they sort of do have a way, but it's incomplete.

    It also sounds like there are people who don't have ID's because, due to life circumstances, they have a hard time hanging onto anything? Nowadays, once you're in the system and they have your photo in the computer, they should be able to identify you more easily when getting a replacement.

    7 votes

  4. Comment on Liberal projected to win Wisconsin Supreme Court race in blow to Donald Trump in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I guess the somewhat surprising part is that there are people who didn’t already need an ID for something else besides voting. An ID is needed not only to drive, but to fly on a plane, when...

    I guess the somewhat surprising part is that there are people who didn’t already need an ID for something else besides voting. An ID is needed not only to drive, but to fly on a plane, when opening a bank account, to buy alcohol, on the first day of most jobs, and probably other things I’m forgetting. I imagine that most people would get one by the time they become an adult, because living without an ID is harder than getting one.

    This is why I think there should be more stories about what life is like for such people. I’m out of touch with it and I don’t think relying on imagination is enough.

    5 votes

  5. Comment on Liberal projected to win Wisconsin Supreme Court race in blow to Donald Trump in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I was going to say that it’s nice to know that elections aren’t so easily bought, but it’s not that clear-cut an example because plenty of money was spent by the other side, and they won.

    I was going to say that it’s nice to know that elections aren’t so easily bought, but it’s not that clear-cut an example because plenty of money was spent by the other side, and they won.

    3 votes

  6. Comment on Liberal projected to win Wisconsin Supreme Court race in blow to Donald Trump in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Could you share details? I know nothing about the difficulties of getting an ID.

    Could you share details? I know nothing about the difficulties of getting an ID.

    2 votes

  7. Comment on Liberal projected to win Wisconsin Supreme Court race in blow to Donald Trump in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: ... ... ...

    From the article:

    Musk and groups affiliated with him invested more than $20 million in the race. The top Trump adviser and leader of Tesla and SpaceX handed out cash prizes to generate interest in the race. At a rally Sunday in Green Bay, Wisconsin, he cast the election as one that could chart the course of Western civilization because of what it could mean for Trump’s agenda.

    But Musk’s spending and hyperbolic framing weren’t enough to win the most expensive court race in U.S. history. The contest cost more than $100 million, nearly doubling the past record and putting it in line with top Senate races.

    ...

    Crawford’s victory came a week after a Democrat won a special election for GOP-tilting Pennsylvania state Senate seat, boosting liberals’ hopes of ending Republicans’ narrow control of Congress next year. On Tuesday, Republicans in Florida won two special elections for House seats, according to Associated Press projections, but they significantly underperformed Trump’s showing in the districts in November.

    ...

    Two years ago, Wisconsin set a national spending record of $56 million for a state Supreme Court race. This year’s race has obliterated that record, costing more than $100 million so far, according to WisPolitics.com.

    Crawford benefited from large donations to the state Democratic Party from liberal billionaires — $1.5 million from Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D), $1 million from financier George Soros and $250,000 from LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.

    ...

    As in other parts of the country, liberals have fared well in these lower-turnout elections in Wisconsin. They won the 2018, 2020 and 2023 elections by double digits. The liberal candidate lost the 2019 race by a slim margin.

    Conservatives tried to drive up turnout by identifying Trump supporters who don’t typically vote in court elections. Trump won Wisconsin in 2016 and 2024 by getting infrequent voters to the polls, and Schimel’s campaign is banking on a similar strategy with the help of Musk. Tuesday tested whether such voters can be persuaded to show up for an election where Trump is not on the ballot.

    Wisconsin voters also voted Tuesday to amend the state constitution to require photo identification to vote. The Associated Press called the vote on that issue less than an hour after polls closed because of lopsided support for the measure. A state law has required voters for years to present ID at the polls; supporters of the ballot measure said adding the requirement to the state constitution will protect the policy from court challenges.

    13 votes

  9. Comment on US scientists are using machine learning to find new treatments among thousands of old medicines in ~health

    skybrian
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    From the article:

    From the article:

    In labs around the world, scientists are using A.I. to search among existing medicines for treatments that work for rare diseases. Drug repurposing, as it’s called, is not new, but the use of machine learning is speeding up the process — and could expand the treatment possibilities for people with rare diseases and few options.

    Thanks to versions of the technology developed by Dr. Fajgenbaum’s team at the University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere, drugs are being quickly repurposed for conditions including rare and aggressive cancers, fatal inflammatory disorders and complex neurological conditions. And often, they’re working.

    The handful of success stories so far have led researchers to ask the question: How many other cures are hiding in plain sight?

    There is a “treasure trove of medicine that could be used for so many other diseases. We just didn’t have a systematic way of looking at it,” said Donald C. Lo, the former head of therapeutic development at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences and a scientific lead at Remedi4All, a group focused on drug repurposing. “It’s essentially almost silly not to try this, because these drugs are already approved. You can already buy them at the pharmacy.”

    5 votes

  11. Comment on Is COBOL holding you hostage with math? in ~comp

    skybrian
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    Java has a BigDecimal class. But since it doesn't have operator overloading, the code using it will look pretty ugly. But you wouldn't normally use this directly. It's common practice in most...

    Java has a BigDecimal class. But since it doesn't have operator overloading, the code using it will look pretty ugly.

    But you wouldn't normally use this directly. It's common practice in most languages to have some kind of custom Money type that specifically represents an amount of money. It should have methods implementing whatever operations you need with correct rounding.

    For this sort of port, there would need to be a Money type that has operations that work exactly like COBOL.

    8 votes

  12. Comment on Starliner’s flight to the space station was far wilder than most of us thought in ~space

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

    From the article:

    Starliner was designed to fly four people to the International Space Station for six-month stays in orbit. But for this initial test flight, there were just two people, which meant less body heat. Wilmore estimated that it was about 50° Fahrenheit in the cabin.

    ...

    Wilmore: "It was definitely low 50s, if not cooler. When you're hustling and bustling, and doing things, all the tests we were doing after launch, we didn't notice it until we slowed down. We purposely didn't take sleeping bags. I was just going to bungee myself to the bulkhead. I had a sweatshirt and some sweatpants, and I thought, I'm going to be fine. No, it was frigid. And I even got inside my space suit, put the boots on and everything, gloves, the whole thing. And it was still cold."

    ...

    [A]s Starliner got to within a few hundred meters of the station, a second thruster failed. The condition of being "single fault" tolerant means that the vehicle could sustain just one more thruster failure before being at risk of losing full control of Starliner's movement. This would necessitate a mandatory abort of the docking attempt.

    Wilmore: "We're single fault tolerant, and I'm thinking, 'Wow, we're supposed to leave the space station.' Because I know the flight rules. I did not know that the flight directors were already in discussions about waiving the flight rule, because we've lost two thrusters. We didn't know why. They just dropped."

    ...

    Wilmore: "[...] And we lose two of the bottom thrusters. We've lost a port thruster. And now we're zero-fault tolerant. We're already past the point where we were supposed to leave, and now we're zero-fault tolerant and I'm manual control. And, oh my, the control is sluggish. Compared to the first day, it is not the same spacecraft. Am I able to maintain control? I am. But it is not the same."

    ...

    Wilmore: "And this is the part I'm sure you haven't heard. We lost the fourth thruster. Now we've lost 6DOF control. We can't maneuver forward. I still have control, supposedly, on all the other axes. But I'm thinking, the F-18 is a fly-by-wire. You put control into the stick, and the throttle, and it sends the signal to the computer. The computer goes, 'Okay, he wants to do that, let's throw that out aileron a bit. Let's throw that stabilizer a bit. Let's pull the rudder there.' And it's going to maintain balanced flight. I have not even had a reason to think, how does Starliner do this, to maintain a balance?"

    ...

    After Starliner lost four of its 28 reaction control system thrusters, Van Cise and this team in Houston decided the best chance for success was resetting the failed thrusters. This is, effectively, a fancy way of turning off your computer and rebooting it to try to fix the problem.

    ...

    [W]hen he thought the spacecraft was temporarily stable enough, Wilmore called down to Mission Control, "Hands off." Almost immediately, flight controllers sent a signal to override Starliner's flight computer, and to fire the thrusters that had been turned off. Two of the four thrusters came back online.

    ...

    Wilmore: "Now we're back to single-fault tolerant. But then we lose a fifth jet. What if we'd have lost that fifth jet while those other four were still down? I have no idea what would've happened. [...]"

    23 votes

  14. Comment on US FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: …

    From the article:

    A prominent computer scientist who has spent 20 years publishing academic papers on cryptography, privacy, and cybersecurity has gone incommunicado, had his professor profile, email account, and phone number removed by his employer, Indiana University, and had his homes raided by the FBI. No one knows why.

    Xiaofeng Wang has a long list of prestigious titles. He was the associate dean for research at Indiana University's Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, a fellow at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a tenured professor at Indiana University at Bloomington. According to his employer, he has served as principal investigator on research projects totaling nearly $23 million over his 21 years there.

    …

    As reported by the Bloomingtonian and later the Herald-Times in Bloomington, a small fleet of unmarked cars driven by government agents descended on the Bloomington home of Wang and Ma on Friday. They spent most of the day going in and out of the house and occasionally transferred boxes from their vehicles. TV station WTHR, meanwhile, reported that a second home owned by Wang and Ma and located in Carmel, Indiana, was also searched. The station said that both a resident and an attorney for the resident were on scene during at least part of the search.

    8 votes

  16. Comment on US President Donald Trump revokes legal status of 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans in ~society

    skybrian
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    Judge blocks Trump from ending deportation protection for Venezuelans …

    Judge blocks Trump from ending deportation protection for Venezuelans

    The order prevents the Department of Homeland Security from allowing temporary protected status to expire on April 7 for approximately 350,000 Venezuelans and gives recipients time to proceed with a legal challenge.

    …

    It’s not only Venezuelans being targeted by the Trump administration. The Department of Homeland Security is also scaling back a Biden-era extension of temporary protected status for Haitian migrants that puts roughly 520,000 at risk of deportation as early as August — though that is also facing legal challenges. Last week, Haitians were added to the existing case being heard by Chen. The judge’s Monday order only applies to Venezuelans, but the lawyers are expected to similarly press for a temporary block as the case proceeds.

    4 votes

  17. Comment on Do you have games that you play (almost) exclusively? in ~games

    skybrian
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    Ozymandias is the only game I’m currently playing. I got all the achievements, which means I won as at “scholar” difficulty (or harder) as each nation on each map. Then I bought the expansion maps...

    Ozymandias is the only game I’m currently playing. I got all the achievements, which means I won as at “scholar” difficulty (or harder) as each nation on each map. Then I bought the expansion maps and I’m going through them.

    Why? I like the pacing (games take a couple hours) and I guess I don’t feel like searching for a new game. I considered buying Civilization 7, but it has mixed reviews, and Civ is a much longer, badly paced game.

    1 vote

  18. Comment on How do you find new movies to watch? in ~movies

    skybrian
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    It’s somewhat surprising to me that rogerebert.com is still one of the better places to go for movie reviews, even though the new reviews are written by other people. It reminds me of “tribute”...

    It’s somewhat surprising to me that rogerebert.com is still one of the better places to go for movie reviews, even though the new reviews are written by other people. It reminds me of “tribute” jazz performances where relatively unknown musicians trade on the names of famous musicians who died long ago. I guess it’s hard for critics to make a name for themselves?

    3 votes

  20. Comment on Joe Edelman: "Is anything worth maximizing?", a talk about how tech platforms optimize for metrics in ~tech

    skybrian
    (edited )
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    It seems like they are arguing for more intrusive data collection because the data about user behavior that companies have is superficial. It doesn’t tell them what users really want. There are...

    It seems like they are arguing for more intrusive data collection because the data about user behavior that companies have is superficial. It doesn’t tell them what users really want.

    There are other approaches. How about making it easier to for users to explicitly say what they’re looking for? That is, better search and better customization. Or how about giving users better information about the choices available?

    I’m thinking in particular about how useless app stores are at recommending new apps. I always have to do an external search to find good reviews and then search for an app by name. But app stores have lots of information about apps that they don’t allow you to search on.

    If a company cannot really understand its users, it can’t be in charge of deciding what to do next. Users have to be in charge.

    8 votes