timr

> Additionally Ebola (Zaire) has previously been shown to be potentially spread via aerosols.

…between inoculated pigs and monkeys, in a lab. Pigs infected with this strain, quite notably, do not become hemorrhagic, and as the article notes, manifest as a respiratory illness. So it isn’t fair to point at it and draw conclusions about humans.

Moreover, from the article:

”We have also never observed transmission of EBOV from infected to naive macaques, including in an experiment employing the same cage setting as in the current study, where three NHPs intramuscularly inoculated with EBOV did not transmit the virus to one naive NHP for 28 days, the duration of the protocol.”

They’re literally telling you that the thing you’re fear-mongering about was tested for, and not found to exist.

> the CDC and associated institutions resolutely claim this is not possible, yet also insist on full respirator PPE.

…for people working with late stage infections, in close quarters. Usually with many such cases. This is a case where “better safe than sorry” applies.

> What I find devoid of responsibility is the argument you made originally--that making choices as a consumer informed by anything external to the direct value you're paying for is pointless/inexplicable/self-sabotaging/whatever.

That isn't what I wrote. There are tons of valid reasons to avoid a product, other than the "direct value you're paying for". I don't pay for lots of products because I don't like the past corporate behavior, for example. I'm disinclined to use a particular AI lab's products because they seem to be on a mission to scare the crap out of everyone, and usher in an AI regulatory state. I don't support that, so I don't use the product.

What I said was that it's spitting in the wind to do what you're doing, because it's based on personal dislike of a single man. You don't like Musk, for political reasons, and because of that you've ruled out a product line.

To date, SpaceX has done nothing that bothers me, other than have a bug that they fixed immediately. So I use the product. Musk's political associations are irrelevant to me.

Anyway, you do you. Hopefully you now understand my "bizarre take".

So, your argument is that his grandfather wrote something, once, so therefore we can't use Grok? Is that about right?

Man, politics are a hell of a drug. Guilt-by-association tu quoque logic is just fine when it's someone you don't like.

> I find your position so completely devoid of any inkling of personal or social responsibility that it takes quite some empathy to muster up a reply that's not wildly uncivil.

Oh stop. Other people believe different things than you. If you cannot see how using a coding agent is not "devoid of personal or social responsibility", then you really need to step away from the keyboard.

I prefer Codex' integration with VSCode, and the variety of different ways of using it, but the code it was barfing out was just abysmal.

I mean, sure. If people tell me that they're avoiding Grok because of that bug, I sorta get it. I think it's silly (again: they're all hoovering up my data), but at least it's a rational basis related to the actual product.

But let's be real: Musk exists as a polarizing political character, and his association with Grok just breaks some people's brains. A fair number of those people don't want to admit it, and just latch on to any rationalization other than politics.

Anthropic could make the same mistake tomorrow, and I guarantee that we wouldn't be hearing about it in a week, let alone months from now.

> I noticed you glossed over Elon getting caught biasing his AI service to say he's the best blowjob-giver, the main reason I would never use Grok.

I "glossed over" all of your political comments.

"Bizarre" only in the sense that you're purposely trying not to understand.

Literally every commodity product is in a crowded space, and easily substituted. If it's a good product (Grok Build objectively is one of the very best in the space), it's a good product, and it's self-defeating to avoid it because you hate a guy for political reasons.

Just as it would be nonsensical to avoid shopping at WalMart, Target, or any of a million other places. Because I guarantee they're all associated with people you won't like.

> yet we're talking about alternative services that are all very similar.

Yes, that's what "commodity" means, and why I used the word.

> There are other reasons to not use Elon Musk's AI beyond politics, though this month he's investing $200 million to sway the Texas midterms back to an awful politician, far closer to home than what Xi Jinping might be doing.

It's amusing that you can't even help yourself from mentioning politics when you're trying to deny that it disproportionately impacts your thinking. Literally, "there are other reasons to not use it...but I'll spend the rest of my comment listing a bunch of reasons I don't like Elon."

I've heard all of it before. I'm telling you that it doesn't sway me, any more than telling me I should stop buying things at WalMart, use energy, or any of a million other things I do on a daily basis that probably, very likely, in some direct or indirect way, benefit someone I don't like.

You do you, but if I eliminated every product or service that was associated with a "bad person", I'd be living in a cave in the wilderness, crapping in a hole and eating berries.

I'm just eliminating one less than you are.

> so half of the profit made on your dollar spend winds up benefiting him personally

No, it doesn't. Aside from the face-slappingly obvious fact that SpaceX is losing a half a billion dollars a quarter, that's not how corporate revenue works. Unless the corporate profits are paid out in dividends, you don't just get to hoover them up as a shareholder.

It was a bug, and was immediately corrected. The other harnesses have bugs too. You just don't know about them.

Frankly, the people who keep bringing this up are mostly engaged in motivated reasoning. I don't trust any company, and any product where I have to send my code to a third party to make it work is a devil's bargain. I don't trust any of the major labs, but it is what it is.

The only way forward is local models, but we're not there yet.

Yeah, OK. You’re making excuses for letting politics eat your life. Enjoy yourself, I guess.

Setting aside the actual legitimacy of whatever complaints you have about Musk, you aren’t “supporting” him by using Grok, any more than you’re “supporting Xi Jinping” by using DeepSeek, or “supporting Jeff Bezos” by using Amazon, or “supporting the CEO of Exxon” by using energy. Or “supporting” any of a million other people you probably don’t like simply by existing in the world as a consumer. What you’re actually doing is called spitting in the wind.

Major conglomerate providers of commodities are not controlled, or even operated to the benefit of, any single person. Musk is the operating officer of a corporation of many thousands of individuals. He has shares in that company, but so do millions of other people. It would be far more rational if you could point to some specific “evil” thing SpaceX is doing as a company that you oppose, but you can’t even do that. It’s all gotta be about one guy who you don’t like.

Shrug. All I can say is that my experience was that I was regularly hitting Codex’ limits, and I don’t with Grok. So much of this depends on your style, language and other more subjective factors.

Codex has been really doling out the resets lately, which is fine, but I don’t consider that “real” usage limits.

I am trying all of them. At this time, for me, Grok hits the sweet spot of quality, speed, cost and ease of use.

I’m absolutely “hot money” when it comes to coding models. These things are commodities.

Sure, you can let politics dominate everything you do. Or you can realize that SpaceX is a massive (public) company with thousands of employees, and millions of shareholders, all of whom have their own opinions and goals, just like any other corporation.

Competition is good. Excluding a leading player in the market because you don’t like Elon Musk is…something.

Those are the exceptions, not the rule. But also, you're wrong: most polyps would not become cancerous -- only 5%-10% ever do. As a preventative intervention on otherwise healthy people, colonoscopy is one of the most effective things we do, and it's not that effective [1].

You've also included vaccines (which I explicitly mentioned) and "taxes" (which are not medical interventions), so you've completely missed the point.

[1] The NordICC trial found an impact of 0.03% on risk of death from colorectal cancer, which was insignificant. It did find an 18% risk reduction for getting colorectal cancer, but this didn't translate into a survival benefit.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2208375

You’re blaming it on lack preventative care, but the truth is that there is very little preventative care that is shown to be effective at anything more than burning money. The few things that are effective (e.g. vaccines) are largely inexpensive, and don’t require “insurance” as we know it.

Most of the things that are predictable and lead to long-term bad outcomes are behavioral (i.e. diet and exercise; smoking cessation; quitting drugs), and therefore both largely unaffected by medical care, and heavily confounded with socioeconomic status. Your doctor cannot make you eat better and exercise and quit smoking.

In the developed world, if you don’t die at birth or succumb to diseases of lifestyle (diabetes, heart disease, addiction) or accidents, you basically then die of cancer. The lifestyle diseases cannot be prevented by a doctor, and we have essentially no ability to prevent cancer. It’s all just acute treatment.

North Americans in particular hate to hear this, because they have an almost religious faith in doctors based on decades of bad TV. Honestly, though, doctors are pretty impotent when it comes to prevention of illness, and it is ironically this desire for treatment that is helping to balloon costs.

Again, the parsimonious conclusion is that you are exaggerating, and wrong.

I don't know about "shorter", but basically, the cold days are decreasing faster than the hot days are increasing.

This is still a problem! But the people who run around screaming about heat waves causing mass casualty today are simply not credible commentators. Far more people die of cold than heat in any given year, so a reduction in cold days will tend to net out to a gain in human life, not a loss.

Yeah, I know. I didn't expect these to be popular comments. There's a hardcore contingent of people who have an absolutely unshakeable conviction of apocalypse that borders on religious faith, coupled with next to zero understanding of the actual data. To these types, simply telling them what the IPCC reports say, verbatim (what I've done here), is tantamount to heresy.

It does bug me a little that their knee-jerk response is always insults and censorship (of course my comment was flagged...no wrongthink allowed here, even if it does come from the IPCC!) but every time they do that, it shows normal thinkers that there's a reasonable center ground, and the doom-and-gloom crowd isn't even remotely being rational.

...but then again, that's probably why their first impulse is censorship.

> Crazy that you think even these graphs, which do not include the last six years, are just fine.

Did I say those words?

This is the latest assessment report, AR6, published 2021-2023. It's the latest IPCC data available. The next one won't come out until after 2029.

The fact that you don't understand this indicates that you don't really know the details of what you're talking about.

Arguing that the IPCC report is "downplaying the impact" because of corruption -- which is what you seem to be doing, without evidence -- is an implausible assertion.

The far more likely conclusion is that you're wrong.

Oops. Links got truncated. Here:

Figure 11-9:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-11/figure...

Figure 11-2:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-11/figure...

Chapter 11:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/chapter-11/

> People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen. Yeah, people have been "predicting" it, but the fact is that this is currently mostly hyperbole, driven by bad reporting and activist exaggeration.

What is happening, right now, is that winters are mostly getting warmer. Summers are getting hotter in certain places, but not at nearly the rate that cold days are decreasing -- and the evidence is weaker on a global scale. From the IPCC 6AR report, figure 11-9 shows it clearly:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-11/figure...

Figure 11-2 shows it another way:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-11/figure...

Even the IPCC report only gets to the "virtually certain" evidence level by combining the two claims:

> The frequency and intensity of hot extremes (including heatwaves) have increased, and those of cold extremes have decreased on the global scale since 1950 (virtually certain).

That's because, when you actually look at the data, it is abundantly clear that the increase in hot extremes are far less common than the decrease in cold extremes. Of course, when you take the ratio of the two, this looks worse, because the denominator is getting smaller.

Chapter 11 is worth reading. You will be shocked how many of the widely reported memes about extreme weather and climate are just not supported by good data:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/chapter-11/

I recommend in particular going through the figures, and looking at how many of them are model predictions (nearly all), versus plots of historical data. Setting aside the debates about model quality, etc., surely we can all agree that predictions are not evidence?

Hurricane season in Hawaii is June through November. August and September have always been peak months. It's completely normal to have hurricanes at this time of year.

https://www.weather.gov/hfo/faq

https://energy.ecoflow.com/us/blog/when-is-it-hurricane-seas...

https://manoa.hawaii.edu/dps/hurricane/

> I don't engage with people who aren't willing to be honest with what the data supports.

OK, whatever. But what was I dishonest about? Cite the figures. Should be pretty easy.

...oh, and by the way:

> You acknowledge that the downstream consequences of El Niño effects is amplified heatwaves, presumably.

In some places, sure. In others (i.e. the western pacific), it leads to regional cooling.

Let's at least get our facts straight.

You need to bring evidence, not press releases.

Your first link says that more people died this year, relative to predictions for this year, because of a single heat wave. This has ~nothing to do with the discussion at hand, and is a classic example of the sort of hyperbole I am talking about.

The second link says that heat events kill people in the UK. Fine. It links to a single paper claiming that:

> half of the heat-related deaths in Europe in the summer of 2022 have been attributed to anthropogenic climate change (Beck et al., 2024).

Regardless of the quality of the cited paper, this is a far cry from evidence of a trend.

> It's extremely hypocritical of you to accuse me of exaggerating when your own presentation of facts is selective and not-representative of what we are seeing globally.

You're literally exaggerating, right now. I quoted the latest IPCC report and told you factually what it says. You linked to a press release and a UK climate portal page that don't support what you're insuinating.

> Your linked figure confirms that 2018 was cooler than things are today.

So? what does that have to do with the question at hand? An 8 year change is irrelevant in the world of climate science. It's statistical noise in a system where cycles run for decades. Weather, not climate.

> The chapter 11 temperature over view is concerning for the consequences:

...and then you quote the part that says exactly what I explained to you, as some kind of counter-argument?

You will note that the part you quoted is, again, combining the types of extremes. They're not talking about just hot days.

I honestly do not understand this need to fatalize data. You don't have a counterargument (because what I said was factually true) so your only rebuttal is to wave your hands and say that it's all scary.

We can be honest -- the world is getting warmer -- and admit when the people predicting imminent death and destruction are exaggerating. This is good!

> Uhhh right... but all the other hard parts are being solved too, correct? LLMs are clearly going to solve a part that, 10 years ago, one would've assumed would be one of the highest and last barriers to go down.

No.

No, the barriers I'm talking about aren't coming down. Not quickly anyway.

No, nobody assumed this was the "highest and last barrier". That's the point you keep missing.

LLMs are not "solving" the rate-limiting step here. It only looks that way if you don't know what's involved.

I generally agree -- the actual risk is from serious/state actors, and for those, the barriers are not high.

I'm just saying that people are focused on the wrong problem because they've got LLM-brain.