True it’s all kind of hand wavy at the end of the day for a lot of this performance review stuff.
This just seems to be especially hand-wavy, with an additional whiff of ideological litmus testing thrown on, which could go sideways in more problematic ways than “this year I reduced the frontend bundle size by 25%”
Yup. It's the same reason nested CSS was added. It doesn't really add any new functionality. Just makes your CSS neater (or way messier when misused). it's syntactic sugar really
> The availability of COVID-19 vaccination was not associated with a change in incidence of medically attended abnormal uterine bleeding in our population of over 79,000 female patients of reproductive age. Additionally, among 2,717 patients with abnormal uterine bleeding diagnoses in the period following COVID-19 vaccine availability, receipt of the vaccine was not associated with greater bleeding severity.
> That's why FDA's OBPV did the follow-up review of those 96 child deaths and concluded >10 were causal from vaccine myocarditis.
We don't actually know who at the OBPV did the review (Prasad only referred to the results coming from "the team") and the causal ranking they used included any case where causality was subjectively rated between "certain" and "possible/likely".
We also know that two orders of magnitude more children died from covid than that, and we have strong studies suggesting that myocarditis from covid is both more common and more severe than the observed cases tied to the covid vaccines, two inconvenient stances that Prasad waves away as insufficiently studied, even as he bases his entire position on a subjective review of something by someone, and doesn't bother filling in those blanks.
> If the conclusion was fake or flimsy, this blows up in their face and RFK looks like a clown
He beclowns himself all the time. He himself walked back the Tylenol claim after convincing Trump to talk about it so publicly and standing by him while he did it. Clearly he's not bothered by it.
We have no information about how highly motivated anti-vaxxers in positions of power over the FDA arrived at this conclusion except "the team has performed an initial analysis"[1]. That's literally it. Your claim that "FDA career scientists" conducted the follow-up can't even be based on this flimsy a statement. Moreover, these deaths have already been investigated by FDA career scientists and found these conclusions unwarranted.
Prasad spends the rest of the memo politically grandstanding (including claiming it was the FDA commissioner that was the hero here, forcing this issue, not FDA career scientists) and dismissing any objections to very obvious arguments against his claim (that have been made and published multiple times over the past five years) without any evidence, while providing no evidence of his own, in a memo addressing FDA career scientists.
Seriously, everyone should go read his memo. It's basically just a shitty antivax substack post, yet will apparently be FDA policy going forward. Another win for meritocracy.
> The detailed FDA analysis still isn't public. That's exactly why we should demand it instead of dismissing the claim.
The only "claim" here just sounds more official because RFKjr got a bunch of his best antivax buddies to be in charge of the FDA (same with the ACIP). There's no way to even consider it without evidence, so there's nothing to dismiss. Come back when you have something real.
The NYT shouldn't get a free pass for publishing a half-baked internal draft memo that even says "initial analysis" and then framing it as settled science. That's how you create panic and confusion, not transparency. Leaking unfinished work and splashing it on the front page is reckless. This should not be allowed.
Calling everyone "anti-vaxxers" is lazy. Most people I know who are skeptical of the covid shots (including plenty of doctors and scientists) are fully vaccinated against measles, polio, tetanus, etc. They just don't trust a product that skipped the usual 5–10 year safety window and got pushed with emergency authorization. That's not "anti-vax", that’s pattern recognition.
The memo is short on data and long on rhetoric, sure. That's exactly why we need the actual underlying review released in full.
You sound really invested in keeping those covid shots on the childhood schedule. Got a big Pfizer position in the 401k? Kidding, obviously. But the "anyone who asks questions is an anti-vaxxer" reflex is exactly why people stopped trusting the institutions in the first place. I respect every real skeptic, on any side. Asking questions is what moves science forward. Blind trust is stagnation.
> If you add in the 1000$ that treasury plans to invest starting next year, that is $1250
This is largely separate from your point, which is good, but the $250 is for kids that won't get the $1000. The $1000 only goes to kids born between 2025 and 2028.
Real quick, the $1000 530A account, if you put in just $1/day, $30/mo, on top of that account, then you get out ~$12,000 at the end of 30 years (assuming 5% interest rate). Which, yeah, that's enough to start a very small business (lawncare, blacksmithing, etc).
The stock market is at ~9.5% returns historically, inflation is likely at ~3% historically, so assume a little higher at 6.5% and that $1000 with a dollar a day increase is then ~$14,800, inflation adjusted.
If you go up to ~$100/mo at 6.5%, then you get ~$42,000, which is an honest start to a small business or college tuition.
The little extra per month really adds up here!
I may not like the administration for a lot of things, but this is one thing that I can really get behind.
The OG claim wasn't a claim that they're more effective. It's that it could reduce inequality. By definition it's true. This is simple to prove. If I say, confiscate the wealth of anyone with more than a pot to piss in, and burn it in a fire. Then we would all be equal.
> Rather: WHATWG was founded because the companies developing browsers (in particular Google) believed that what the W3C was working on for XHTML 2.0 was too academic, and went into a different direction than their (i.e. in particular Google's) vision for the web.
Mozilla, Opera and Apple. Google didn't have a browser then, hadn't even made the main hires who would start developing Chrome yet and hixie was still at Opera.
> The amount of goal post shifting is so amusing to see
Can you be specific about the goal posts being shifted? Like the specific comments you're referring to here. Maybe I'm just falling for the bait, but non specific claims like this seem designed just to annoy while having nothing specific to converse about.
I got to the end of your comment and counting all the claims you discounted, the only goal post I see left is that people aren't using a sufficiently excited tone while sifting fact from hype? A lot of us follow this work pretty closely and don't feel the need to start every post with "there is no need for excitement to abate, still exciting! but...".
> I am not saying any of this means we get AGI or something or even if we continue to see improvements. We can still appreciate things. It doesn't need to be a binary.
You'll note, however, that the hype guys happily include statements like "Vibe proving is here" in their posts with no nuance, all binary. Why not call them out?
Well there's a comment here saying "I won't consider it 'true' AI until it solves all millenium problems"... That goalpost seems to be defining AI as not only human level but as superhuman level (e.g. 1 in a million level intellect or harder)
Except nobody ever actually considered the "turing test" to be anything other than a curiosity in the early days of a certain branch of philosophy.
If the turing test is a goal, then we passed it 60 years ago and AGI has been here since the LISP days. If the turing test is not a goal (which is the correct interpretation), nobody should care what a random nobody thinks about an LLM "passing" it.
"LLMs pass the turing test so they are intelligent (or whatever)" is not a valid argument full stop, because "the turing test" was never a real thing ever meant to actually tell the difference between human intelligence and artificial intelligence, and was never formalized, and never evaluated for its ability to do so. The entire point of the turing test was to be part of a conversation about thinking machines in a world where that was an interesting proposition.
The only people who ever took the turing test as a "goal" were the misinformed public. Again, that interpretation of the turing test has been passed by things like ELIZA and markov chain based IRC bots.
Is your argument that Terence Tao says it was a consequence from a known result and he categorizes it as low hanging fruit, but to you it feels like one of those things that's only obvious in retrospect after it's explained to you, and without "evidence" of Tao's claim, you're going to go with your vibes?
lol, yes, annual tech perf reviews. Known for clear and quantifiable metrics that are in no way based on squishy realities.
reply