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yepyeppers

17 karma · joined August 19, 2026

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yepyeppers··on Get your Windows license refund
That’s not how OEM pricing works. Depending on the retail price and volume Microsoft will lower license cost close to $0. No large manufacturer is paying $140 to license Windows for a notebook selling $200. That’s the full retail price for a consumer building their own PC. That said usable Windows notebooks are usually a bit more than that these days. And just the RAM alone to run usable Windows 11 is pushing $70 now.
yepyeppers··on Get your Windows license refund
That’s a narrow view to suggest it’s just Microsoft’s Copilot that’s pushing NPU’s on PCs. You need some NPU or GPU for system requirements not just for Copilot but for any local models including Gemini Nano in Chrome, open models, models running on Linux without Windows at all. Intel and AMD are both making chips with NPU’s on the die just like they have made them with integrated GPUs.

AI isn’t going away any more than graphics acceleration is. You can deliberately buy a low-power board or notebook that doesn’t have those capabilities if you want. It will save you money too.

yepyeppers··on FDA approves first in class targeted therapy for metastatic pancreatic cancer
If you look at what practitioners and informed epidemiologists are saying the incidentaloma problem for any type of screening is huge and underestimated with no clear solution. It’s not only about finding and invasively testing benign masses, which can cause actual serious health problems (the associated anxiety and stress alone can actually kill, not to mention the cost and painful or damaging biopsies). But many true positive cancerous or malignant conditions can progress so slowly relative to the patient’s overall health that they do not shorten the patient’s life and/or the treatment may be worse than the “disease” that was detected. Hence why so many types of screenings that actually work can do positive harm for certain populations.

And once you find something with a screening you can’t unfind it. The patient or at least their doctor now has that knowledge and has to live with it and actively decide what to do about it.

yepyeppers··on FDA approves first in class targeted therapy for metastatic pancreatic cancer
> The HPV vaccine will almost entirely wipe out cervical cancer: not by curing it, but preventing it entirely.

That only underlines my point. The HPV vaccine was in not really a product of cancer research, in terms of the cancer itself. It’s purely a multivalent viral vaccine with the munificent effect of preventing several cancers and nasty genital warts as an additional motivator. It has saved many thousands of lives that would have been lost with the best available cancer treatments and avoided their costly and excruciating effects.

It’s too early to write off cervical cancer, besides HPV-negative ones, there are evolving strains not covered and a huge pool of viral reserves worldwide and among the unvaccinated in the USA. A universal mandate won’t happen and coverage isn’t high enough to eradicate it.

Prevention is important for almost all cancers. There will likely be other vaccines in the future targeting carcinogenic infections but most cancers don’t have a simple infectious cause. Cancer is a family of nasty diseases that has time and again defied all pronouncements of impending universal cures.

yepyeppers··on “It works better in the app”
old.reddit was the only tolerable interface but it is now login-walled too. God forbid you post any comments that deviate even slightly from the Reddit consensus or you will soon find yourself IP-blocked. That’s barely an exaggeration.
yepyeppers··on FDA approves first in class targeted therapy for metastatic pancreatic cancer
We do. There’s something like half a billion dollars spent on pancreatic cancer research annually in the United States alone. It’s a giant money pit and that’s created an enormous body of research, increased understanding of the biology of the cancer and just how insidious it is, and funded the careers of thousands of scientists, technicians, academics and administrators, but very little of all this translates into better treatment outcomes. There’s no evidence than just pouring more money into cancer research is going to give us a miracle cure. There are competing priorities starved for funding to that we know can use meaningful help. Not incidentally some of those include financial aid, medical care and quality of life assistance for the actual patients and their families, as well as prevention.
yepyeppers··on FDA approves first in class targeted therapy for metastatic pancreatic cancer
That’s a generalization, pancreatic cancer is often extremely lethal, depending on the type and case the survival rate can be as or more grim than glioma. Bowel and urinary cancers including kidney cancer are often very treatable and survivable when discovered due to symptoms. I don’t think it’s helpful to group all abdominal cancers as being uniquely or especially bad or late discovered. Likewise for the particularly aggressive or advanced cancers these types of announcements and trials rarely translate to major changes in prognosis. More typical if there is any positive result it looks like additional weeks or at best months of aggressive treatments rather than significant ”cure” rates.
yepyeppers··on Study reveals UnitedHealth's profit margins four times what it claimed [pdf]
This is contrary to GAAP and operationally false. An insurer takes on the risks including the health of the insured pool and cost changes during the covered period. An insurance BROKER or AGENCY only books commissions as revenue, but an INSURER books premium as revenue. Similarly a stock BROKER or AGENT is only acting as an agent and isn’t a party to the actual transaction they execute. Similarly for platforms, auctioneers, or other agents.
yepyeppers··on Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence
There’s also the fact that Swartz was physically trespassing and attaching unauthorized machines into networking closets to run scraping on a university network to exfiltrate the scrapes to the public, versus just scraping public facing web from the public web to train a model. That’s a little different and while the feds were heavy-handed against Swartz these computer crime laws were well known and it was less heavy handed than the hacker crackdowns of the 90s if you want to look at precedents.
yepyeppers··on Casio F-B100W-1A
You didn’t know about 300 million Americans?