Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Yesterday, the best news which has ever come out during my lifetime, did. There's going to finally be an HIV cure. It's a ways down the road, but this all but guarantees it.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-08-treatment-based-gene-safely-effectively.html

Here's the original paper explaining what was done in detail. Again, it's going to be a few more years before this is on the shelf, but there's finally hope for the end of HIV.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41434-023-00410-4

Here's one of the two papers where the technology germinated about a decade ago. Note that the last paper was SIV instead of HIV, but it's such a good model, it almost always translates to humans.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.2647

Here's the other one. If you don't like reading original source materials like this, or want to read the first announcement with the details on the good news, I'll sum up...

https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.2623

This is a gene therapy which inactivates HIV/SIV by entering the virus itself and editing the genome. This is cool in and of itself, but it is meaningful because it does a thing called "draining the viral reservoir". This is what makes it a cure and not just a treatment.

The reason why you can only suppress, and not eradicate viruses, is because they will go into a dormant state and hang out for years and then re-deploy, and you're back where you started.

This is why, as amazing as antivirals are, you're generally stuck taking them forever.

This is also why Sovaldi is such a big deal: it actually *cures* Hepatitis C, which previously was only treatable. You take it (along with other things) for twelve weeks, and at the end you are free of the virus. This is a first. No other cures for viruses exist.

And now there's a method to drain the viral reservoir and inactivate HIV. And this isn't just the best news of my lifetime, but it also paves the way for therapies to cure Hep B, and any number of others.

I am so excited, so happy, so hopeful.

✨💖✨

A longshot cry for help from statisticians/ philosophers of stats:

I vividly remember reading a paragraph quoted from some famous frequentist statistician (I'd like to say Fisher, but I'm not entirely sure) about how we should only use statistical analysis on a data when we don't have other information to go on. And there's a story about the probability of him forgetting to put stamp on his letter is different to a stranger than to himself.

I cannot for the life of me remember where I saw that. Anyone happens to know? 🙏

Quoting Greg Kroah-Hartman:
"After Android, Debian is by far the largest Linux user, and the Debian
kernel developers do an awesome job of tracking the stable kernel
releases which have been documented to fix 99% of known security issues _BEFORE_ they are known (data produced by Google security team for 2 years straight)."

99% is probably a little over optimistic (there's certainly some fixes which land in stable trees after they are publicly known), but his core argument is spot-on.

"There’s no justifiable reason for the NYPD and other police forces’ decision to encrypt radio communications. It’s time to buck this anti-transparency trend." https://freedom.press/news/police-dodge-journalists-by-encrypting-radio/

@Loukas

http://hipcrime.blogspot.com/2012/04/what-if-collapse-happened-and-nobody.html

“The major flaw of Signal for privacy is that it works by using your phone number. This can be problematic if you prefer not to share your phone number for certain communications. If you want to keep your phone number secret, I would recommend using a different messaging app. However, this is the only scenario in which I would recommend something else than Signal.”

https://mastodon.social/@mshelton/110906286481415983

🚨BREAKING NEWS: Documents obtained by The Lever show that a Trump-appointed judge’s anti-abortion ruling yesterday followed payments to his wife from the anti-abortion group leading the case.

The ruling limits women’s access to mifepristone. https://www.levernews.com/trump-judges-anti-abortion-ruling-followed-payments-from-group-leading-case/

We need your support!

We desperately need to grow our donations or consider cutting costs (like sunsetting non-essential services) to remain sustainable.

Besides Pixelfed, we also run https://fedidb.org, https://fediverse.info and https://activitypub.network

Donations can be made via:
Patreon - https://patreon.com/dansup (preferred)
PayPal - https://paypal.me/dansup (preferred)

Spread the word! #pixelfed

The correct answer to the question "Who is the single largest owner of US debt?" is...🥁 🥁 🥁 ...Your MOM!

Just kidding, it's actually the US government itself. Don't feel bad if you thought it was China, I did too for a long time, and I got a frickin' degree in economics. Just goes to show you the power of propaganda to totally distort the truth.

https://www.thebalancemoney.com/who-owns-the-u-s-national-debt-3306124

The 2024 AEJMC Emerging Scholars Program will award $3,500 research and teaching #grants to up to four #research or #teaching proposals to encourage innovative and timely projects in #journalism and #masscommunication. Deadline for submitting proposals is October 1, 4:59 p.m. Eastern Time. Applicants must be #AEJMC members for their proposal to be considered. https://www.aejmc.org/home/scholarship/calls/

It occurred to me today that the social value of the open-source work I do in my free time has probably been an order of magnitude more useful to the world than everything I've ever done as a paid employee. Needing to seek a wage almost certainly makes me a less productive member of society than I would otherwise be.

Trump supporters post names and addresses of Georgia grand jurors online

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/names-addresses-grand-jurors-georgia-trump-indictment-posted-online-rcna100239

"I don't believe this is encrypted so I think we’re OK," a Marion, Kansas police officer said during a raid on the Marion County Record newsroom.

This event underscores the need for media orgs to protect devices and data, and how encryption can help. https://freedom.press/training/blog/marion-record-police-raid/

Amazon to customers -- and antitrust officials: Up yours.

This kind of arrogance has worked for a long time for big tech. Let's hope the regulators and law enforcement come down on this kind of thing, hard.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/08/amazon-adds-extra-seller-fee-despite-intensifying-ftc-scrutiny/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

One of the ways in which the web is like an ecosystem is that a synthetic text spill in one part of it can leak into others. Here, someone has posted ChatGPT output (unclear to what end) and the Google indexed it.

I learned of this particular #GoogleFail via BlueSky user aviendha69's post:

https://bsky.app/profile/aviendha69.bsky.social/post/3k4yxz2zz7f2v

... and verified that I could find the same results. (For now, anyway. Sometimes things things get patched.)

The taxpayers of Marion, Kansas, (as well as the city''s insurance carrier) could be on the hook for millions after their flagrantly illegal raids on a newspaper and its owner. Here's some evidence that the county is regretting its participation in the operation: https://www.kshb.com/news/local-news/marion-county-attorney-withdraws-search-warrant-against-kansas-newspaper-returns-items

Currently the archetypical AI art user is apparently some techbro who believes AI will help them art without having to learn any arting, and the assumption is they're the only people who would be interested in such a tool. But they aren't -- let me tell you a story about the glory days of webcomics, early 2000s, and a joke going around the webcomic community at that time:

6/?

@AnneleiseHall nope, disagree.

She might suck a bit less than the higher profile ghouls, but she's using the same philanthropy scam they do. She's still holding on to an obscene amount of resources stolen from actual workers.

No one deserves, earns or needs a billion dollars.
All billionaires are systemic failures.

A Swiss mountain peak fell apart, sending 3.5 million cubic feet of rock into the valley below. Scientists warn climate change could make more mountains crumble. The collapse was caused by thawing permafrost, a layer of frozen ground that holds the mountain together. #ClimateChange #Permafrost #MountainCollapse https://www.businessinsider.com/mountains-switzerland-collapsing-from-permafrost-melt-2023-8