skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Moderna won’t run phase III vaccine trials as skepticism grows in US in ~health

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...]

    From the article:

    Moderna is scaling down its investments in vaccine development as the U.S. market grows increasingly hostile to immunizations, CEO Stéphane Bancel told Bloomberg News at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

    “You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market,” Bancel told Bloomberg, noting that high-level headwinds have made the vaccine market “much smaller.” In particular, the CEO pointed to regulatory roadblocks and diminishing support from health authorities as key problems for Moderna and the vaccine space more broadly.

    Moving forward, Bancel told Bloomberg that Moderna will no longer put money into late-stage vaccine studies, though it remains unclear if the CEO was speaking of all vaccines or just those for infectious diseases.

    [...]

    Bancel joins Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla in criticizing Kennedy and his “anti-science” policies. Also at Davos, Bourla earlier this week referred to HHS’ vaccine policies as “almost like a religion.”

    Moderna, which has weathered successive quarters of declining earnings, has been heavily affected by these policy headwinds. In May, the company withdrew the approval application for its combination vaccine for flu and COVID-19. Weeks later, Moderna lost a government bird flu contract potentially worth more than $760 million after HHS terminated the project.

    In the months that followed, Moderna implemented a number of measures to slow its cash burn. These include a 10% workforce reduction in July and the discontinuation of three mRNA vaccines in November.

    13 votes

  3. Comment on Why Nigerians are choosing chatbots to give them advice and therapy in ~health.mental

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...]

    From the article:

    AI platforms offering first-line mental health support have proliferated over the past year, with early trials in the US showing mixed results. In Nigeria, where AI has been embraced in many sectors and industries, a growing number of people turn to chatbots for virtual therapy.

    Nigeria’s health system, including its mental health provision, has long been underfunded. Between 2015 and 2025, Nigeria has consistently spent less than 5% of its budget to healthcare, with 4.2% allocated for 2026, far less than the 15% target that African Union member states agreed to as part of the 2001 Abuja Declaration. It is not known how many people in Nigeria live with mental health conditions but, with only 262 psychiatrists in a country of 240 million people, most do not get adequate treatment.

    The shortages have been exacerbated by the Trump administration dismantling USAID, which has badly hit services in Nigeria, especially at the primary level, having a devastating effect on patients in communities already struggling with HIV/Aids, tuberculosis and other health challenges. More than 90% of Nigerians have no health insurance, and now face uncertainty over access to services and feelings of helplessness over rising costs.

    Private healthcare is expensive; one therapy session can cost between 50,000 naira (£27) – the equivalent of a week’s worth of groceries. Cultural stigma remains strong; many Nigerians still associate mental illness with spiritual weakness or witchcraft.

    Commercial and nonprofit AI initiatives are starting to fill this vacuum. HerSafeSpace is an organisation that offers free and instant legal and emotional assistance to victims of technology-facilitated gender-based violence in five west and central African countries. Its Chat Kemi service is available in local and international languages.

    “These services don’t replace therapy,” says its founder, Abideen Olasupo. Instead, the chatbot uses a referral system to direct users and specific cases to mental health, legal or psychosocial professionals or organisations, should the need arise.

    “Our major objective is to support young girls, who are particularly vulnerable to gender-based violence, especially online,” he says.

    [...]

    The technology used by these apps follows scripts written by licensed Nigerian psychologists and therapists who deliver care to users.

    3 votes

  5. Comment on Border czar Tom Homan says Minnesota immigration surge is ending in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    President Donald Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, declared an end to Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota following widespread protests against immigration raids that led to the fatal shootings by officers of two American citizens.

    [...]

    His announcement comes two weeks after Trump officials removed Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino from the area, where he had been clashing with demonstrators upset over the surge and the aggressive tactics of some immigration officers. Trump dispatched Homan to negotiate an exit strategy with state and Minneapolis officials, and Homan said hundreds of officers are preparing to withdraw in the coming days.

    [...]

    The city of Minneapolis, which demanded immigration enforcement personnel leave from the start, celebrated the announcement that the operation would soon end. Homan had earlier this month promised to withdraw 700 of the 3,000 officers, but local officials said that was not enough.

    [...]

    Homan said federal agents have already begun leaving Minneapolis and will continue scaling back their presence into next week.

    8 votes

  7. Comment on Google's quarterly report on adversarial use of AI for Q4 2025 in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: ...

    From the article:

    Google DeepMind and GTIG have identified an increase in model extraction attempts or "distillation attacks" [...] we observed and mitigated frequent model extraction attacks from private sector entities all over the world [...].

    [...] This quarterly report highlights how threat actors from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), Iran, the People's Republic of China (PRC), and Russia operationalized AI in late 2025 and improves our understanding of how adversarial misuse of generative AI shows up in campaigns we disrupt in the wild. GTIG has not yet observed APT or information operations (IO) actors achieving breakthrough capabilities that fundamentally alter the threat landscape.

    ...

    State-sponsored actors continue to misuse Gemini to enhance all stages of their operations, from reconnaissance and phishing lure creation to command-and-control (C2 or C&C) development and data exfiltration. We have also observed activity demonstrating an interest in using agentic AI capabilities to support campaigns, such as prompting Gemini with an expert cybersecurity persona, or attempting to create an AI-integrated code auditing capability.

    5 votes

  9. Comment on The AI vampire in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I've never seen it do this "generate the wrong answer over and over" behavior with current models. (I did see that when I was experimenting a couple of years ago.) But I'm writing a fairly...

    I've never seen it do this "generate the wrong answer over and over" behavior with current models. (I did see that when I was experimenting a couple of years ago.) But I'm writing a fairly standard web app. I suspect performance varies a lot depending on what you're doing. And whether you get a productivity boost probably varies a lot as well?

    3 votes

  10. Comment on How The New York Times uses a custom AI tool to track the “manosphere” in ~life.men

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    It seems like a good thing, but a side effect is that the New York Times becomes more influenced by media that they wouldn’t otherwise watch. That is, these AI tools are a way to pay more...

    It seems like a good thing, but a side effect is that the New York Times becomes more influenced by media that they wouldn’t otherwise watch. That is, these AI tools are a way to pay more attention to certain people. But who else should they be paying attention to?

    Anyone looking to influence the media more should probably take having an AI tool devoted to them as a sign of success.

    8 votes

  11. Comment on The AI vampire in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Agentic software building is genuinely addictive. The better you get at it, the more you want to use it. It’s simultaneously satisfying, frustrating, and exhilarating. It doles out dopamine and adrenaline shots like they’re on a fire sale.

    [...]

    And that’s where the problem gets into full swing. Because other people are listening!

    [...]

    We’re all setting unrealistic standards for everyone else.

    Maybe me worst of all. I have 40 years of experience, I’ve led large teams, I read fast, and I have essentially unlimited time, energy, and now tokens for experimenting. I am completely unrepresentative of the average developer.

    But I’m still standing up and telling everyone “do it this way!” I even co-wrote a book about it.

    [...]

    I don’t think there’s a damn thing we can do to stop the train. But we can certainly control the culture, since the culture is us. I plan to practice what I preach, and dial my hours back. That’s going to mean saying No to a lot of people who want to chat with me (sorry!), and also dialing back some of my ambitions, even if it means losing some footraces. I don’t care. I will fight the vampire.

    [...]

    If you have joined an AI-native startup, the founders and investors are using the VC system to extract value from you, today, with the glimmer of hope for big returns for you all later.

    Most of these ideas will fail.

    I know this because they are literally telling me their plans like villains at the end of an old movie, since with Gas Town I have mastered the illusion of knowing what I’m doing. Truth is, nobody, least of all me, knows what they’re doing right now. But I look like I do, so everyone is coming to show me their almost uniformly terrible ideas.

    [...]

    Enterprises see the oncoming horde and think, oh jeez, we need to hustle. And they’re not exactly wrong. Which means this lovely dystopian picture is making its way slowly but surely into enterprise, at the big company where you work.

    [...]

    My friends who were grumbling back in 2001 needed some help with this, and I gave it to them. One day I walked up to the whiteboard during a particularly heated grumble-session, and I wrote a ratio on the board: $/hr (dollars divided by hours).

    [...]

    I said to everyone, Amazon pays you a flat salary, no bonuses, and you work a certain number of hours per week. From that, you can calculate that you make a certain number of dollars per hour.

    I told the grumbler group, you can’t control the numerator of this ratio. But you have significant control over the denominator. I pointed at the /hr for dramatic effect.

    [...]

    As for my part, I went ahead and dialed that denominator down, and lived life a bit while I was at Amazon, because fuck extraction.

    [...]

    That old formula is also my proposed solution for the AI Vampire, a quarter century later.

    Someone else might control the numerator. But you control the denominator.

    [...]

    You need to push back. You need to tell your CEO, your boss, your HR, your leadership, about the AI vampire. Point them at this post. Send them to me. I’m their age and can look them in the eye and be like yo. Don’t be a fool.

    [...]

    I regret the unrealistic standards that I’m contributing to setting. I don’t believe most people can work like I’ve been working. I’m not sure how long I can work how I’ve been working.

    I’m convinced that 3 to 4 hours is going to be the sweet spot for the new workday. Give people unlimited tokens, but only let people stare at reports and make decisions for short stretches. Assume that exhaustion is the norm. Building things with AI takes a lot of human energy.

    6 votes

  13. Comment on US Food and Drug Administration declines to review Moderna's mRNA flu shot in ~health

    skybrian
    Link
    Prasad overruled FDA staff to reject Moderna’s flu vaccine application

    Prasad overruled FDA staff to reject Moderna’s flu vaccine application

    Three agency officials familiar with the matter told STAT that the team of career scientists was ready to review Moderna’s application, and that David Kaslow, the head of the vaccine office, wrote a detailed memo explaining why the FDA should embark on the review.

    2 votes

  14. Comment on How The New York Times uses a custom AI tool to track the “manosphere” in ~life.men

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    In July 2025, the Justice Department announced it would not make any additional files public from its investigation into child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The backlash against the decision was swift — and came from some unexpected corners of the internet.

    A chorus of right-wing commentators and influencers openly criticized President Donald Trump and his administration for failing to follow through on their campaign promise to release the federal documents. Political podcasters who had embraced Trump during his reelection campaign were up in arms, with social media figures like Joe Rogan and Andrew Schulz publicly pressuring the administration to reverse course.

    The New York Times tracked this growing discontent across the GOP base closely for months, culminating with the near-unanimous passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act by Congress last November. An AI-generated report, delivered directly to the email inboxes of journalists, was an essential tool in the Times’ coverage. It was also one of the first signals that conservative media was turning against the administration, according to Zach Seward, editorial director for AI initiatives at the Times. (Seward was once an associate editor at Nieman Lab.)

    [...]

    Built in-house and known internally as the “Manosphere Report,” the tool uses large language models (LLMs) to transcribe and summarize new episodes of dozens of podcasts.

    [...]

    “In order to adequately cover this administration — among many other sources — it seemed crucial to have an eye on influencers, largely conservative young male influencers,” Seward told me. “It turned out there were enough specific requests and enough broad interest [in the newsroom] that it made sense to automate sending that out.”

    Launched a year ago, the Manosphere Report now follows about 80 podcasts hand-selected by reporters at the Times on desks covering politics, public health, and internet culture. That includes right-wing podcasts like The Ben Shapiro Show, Red Scare with “Dimes Square” shock jocks Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan, and The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show, a successor to Rush Limbaugh’s talk radio show. It also keeps tabs on Huberman Lab, a podcast hosted by Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman that has been criticized for spreading health misinformation. Seward notes the report also includes some liberal-leaning shows, like MeidasTouch, an anti-Trump podcast with a largely male audience.

    When one of the shows publishes a new episode, the tool automatically downloads it, transcribes it, and summarizes the transcript. Every 24 hours the tool collates those summaries and generates a meta-summary with shared talking points and other notable daily trends. The final report is automatically emailed to journalists each morning at 8 a.m. ET. The Times is exploring how to use this workflow to launch similar AI-generated summary reports for other beats.

    [...]

    The Times is not the first newsroom to turn to LLMs to parse through the mountains of audio and video material on the internet that journalists are expected to consume to keep on top of their beats. Local news outlets across the country have been using LLMs to keep tabs on school board and town hall meeting livestreams through email summaries. Last year, my colleague Neel covered “Roganbot,” a tool created by AI consulting lab Verso to generate searchable transcripts of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Among several features, the tool suggests potentially controversial or false statements to fact-check.

    [...]

    Seward said that the Manosphere Report was an outgrowth of one of those existing tools, called Cheatsheet.

    [...]

    As with the Manosphere Report, Cheatsheet is rooted in a philosophy that creating new text and images for publication is not the most effective use case for generative AI in a newsroom like the Times. Rather, Seward sees the technology as a way to amplify the newsroom’s existing investigative power.

    13 votes

  16. Comment on Illness is rampant among children trapped in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s massive jail in Texas in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Amid growing calls from lawmakers and human rights groups to shut down the sprawling Dilley Immigration Processing Center in southern Texas, an analysis shows the number of people incarcerated at the notorious immigration jail for children and families has nearly tripled in recent months.

    Texas lawmakers and attorneys for immigrant families say a growing number of children at the facility are suffering in dangerous and inhumane conditions. People incarcerated at Dilley were quarantined after at least two became sick with measles last week. In another recent case, an 18-month-old girl was hospitalized with a life-threatening lung infection after spending two months in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the migrant jail. The girl was reportedly returned to Dilley after spending 10 days at the hospital and denied prescribed medication, according to a federal lawsuit. She was only freed after lawyers filed an emergency petition demanding her release.

    As the nation’s main large immigration jail designed to hold families — though the Trump administration is racing to build more — families are transferred from across the country to a remote part of Texas as they wait weeks or months to see an immigration judge. Recent federal data show that the average daily population exploded from an average of 500 people a day in October to around 1,330 a day in late January, according to Detention Reports, a new tool that maps data on 237 immigration jails nationwide.

    [...]

    ICE does not release the number of children held in its custody, including at Dilley. However, the facility requires at least one parent be held along with each child. Adult women vastly outnumber adult men in the latest data. Kocher estimates that about 800 children are held there on any given day, and a ProPublica investigation estimates Dilley was holding about 750 families as of early February.

    [...]

    The Dilley facility garnered national attention after the incarceration of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, whose arrest in Minnesota and transfer to Texas became a national symbol of the Trump administration’s brutality. Like other children held in confinement, Ramos reportedly fell ill while detained. The two were released on February 1 after lawmakers and attorneys intervened, with U.S. District Judge Fred Biery issuing an almost poetic yet scathing rebuke of the Trump administration in his ruling freeing the father and son.

    Children held inside Dilley organized protests in solidarity with Liam Conejo Ramos as the case hit the headlines. Immigration attorney Eric Lee posted a viral video in mid-January recording the sound of hundreds of children shouting for freedom from behind the prison walls. Meanwhile, journalists, families incarcerated at Dilley, and their attorneys have reported inedible food, undrinkable water being mixed with baby formula, and medical neglect of children with severe illnesses.

    “Medical professionals have repeatedly documented how any amount of detention has long-term negative consequences for children,” said Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at Detention Watch Network, in an email. “Families should be able to navigate their immigration cases in community, never behind bars in ICE detention where conditions [are] abysmal and abusive.”

    [...]

    Since Trump returned to office, the daily average number of children incarcerated with adults fighting deportation orders has grown at least sixfold, according to The Marshall Project. That growth is part of a general explosion of the incarceration of immigrants as the Trump administration systemically dismantles legal avenues for bonding out of immigration jail, fights review of removal orders to maximize deportations, and moves to revoke legal status and protections for hundreds of thousands of refugees and asylum seekers.

    3 votes

  18. Comment on Airspace closure in the Texas border city of El Paso followed spat over drone-related tests and party balloon shoot-down, sources say in ~transport

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    The unexpected but brief airspace closure in the Texas border city of El Paso stemmed from disagreements between the Federal Aviation Administration and Pentagon officials over drone-related tests, multiple sources close to the matter told CBS News.

    The Pentagon had undertaken extensive planning on the use of military technology near Fort Bliss, a military base that abuts the El Paso International Airport, to practice taking down drones.

    Two sources identified the technology as a high-energy laser.

    Meetings were scheduled over safety impacts, but Pentagon officials wanted to test the technology sooner, stating that U.S. Code 130i requirements governing the protection of certain facilities from unmanned aircraft had been met.

    FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford on Tuesday night decided to close the airspace — without alerting White House, Pentagon or Homeland Security officials, sources said.

    Bedford told officials the airspace restrictions would be in place to ensure safety until issues with the War Department could be resolved.

    [...]

    The critical bulletin issued to pilots and airlines not to fly below 18,000 feet was initially set for 10 days, a duration for a full grounding not used since the 9/11 terror attacks. The FAA notice warned violators risked being shot down.

    Earlier this week, the anti-drone technology was launched near the southern border to shoot down what appeared to be foreign drones. The flying material turned out to be a party balloon, sources said. One balloon was shot down, several sources said.

    [...]

    Sources familiar with the discussions said Pentagon and Department of Transportation officials had been coordinating on the military drone tests for months, and the FAA had been assured that there was no threat to commercial air travel.

    Two airline sources said airline officials were told the decision to halt flights in and out of the El Paso Airport appeared to stem from drone activity and U.S. government efforts to counteract it.

    The airlines were under the impression that the airspace closure was put into place out of an abundance of caution because the FAA could not predict where U.S. government drones might be flying. The drones have been operating outside of their normal flight paths. The airlines were also aware of the apparent impasse between the FAA and Pentagon officials over the issue because the Pentagon has been using Fort Bliss for anti-cartel drone operations without sharing information with the FAA, the sources said

    9 votes

  20. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link
    My personal link-archiving site is coming along well. I figured out what I’m going to do as an alternative to Tilde’s groups. These are just tags that begin with a tilde. So now I get to define my...

    My personal link-archiving site is coming along well. I figured out what I’m going to do as an alternative to Tilde’s groups. These are just tags that begin with a tilde. So now I get to define my own categories like ~research, ~opinion, and ~dev (software development).

    I also spent some time figuring out how to do auto-tagging. We (the coding agent and I) can define Taggers, which are rules for when to auto-add a tag. In some cases the rules are very simple such as domain name matches, so any link to GitHub gets a ~dev tag. But we’re working on keyword matches using a naive Bayes approach, which should work better for ~health. I have an admin page that does naive-Bayes “training” for a tag, gathering statistics about what words appear in tagged versus untagged Links.

    Pretty soon I’ll be ready to start importing all my old links from Tildes.

    3 votes