David Andersen

Kennedy Cancels Nearly $500 Million in mRNA Vaccine Contracts That kind of shot was first used during the Covid-19 pandemic, but the health secretary has been sharply critical of the technology.

This is so harmful. Scientists are developing mRNA-based cancer vaccines that could save so many lives.

Farewell to coffee for two weeks. See you on the other side.

(Backpacking trip)

I will suggest this.

And then run.

A fun reminder that a loss of 60,000 jobs in and around academia is ~50% more than all coal mining jobs in the entire country.

8 months: continuing progress but slower as I approach where I was pre-injury. Climbed 10b,c,c,d,11a at the gym today and all felt very reasonable. Can still find a few moves that display bicep weakness; surgeon says that could take a full year to recover. Back to lifting. Happy with progress.

Thinking of training a classifier to distinguish my wife and my daughter's clothing. this is ridiculous. As chief laundry officer, I am stymied in achieving my mission.

(13yo is now as tall as Prof. Dr. Spouse.)

We might need your help. My wife says it's going in zucchini bread. I'm threatening to turn it into zucchini pancakes if she doesn't come through with the bread. 😀

Uhoh. If you don't hear from me for a while, the zucchinis probably took over.

"He's a piece of shit, but let's get the political science stuff out of the way," Steven told me when I asked if he thought support of Tesla could be considered apolitical. "Elon Musk has platformed white supremacists and antisemites on X. He got rid of all the moderation. He put back accounts that were clearly neo-Nazis. He's changed algorithms to promote that type of hate. Him and DOGE did massive cuts in the government, including our civil services. He's cut cancer research. Did I mention he was a giant piece of shit?" "He's cut our aid to Africa, which Will result, without exaggeration, in millions of women and children and innocent people dying. Millions," he said. "I'm not a big fan of people who give the Hitler salute. I mean, I'm kind of fussy like that. He gave it twice at Trump's inauguration," he continued. "He's a Nazi. And he cheats at video games. You have another question?"

lol at this response to a “man on the street” interview with protestors at the Tesla diner

Firing the BLS Commissioner because you don't like the data is a dark day.

Congratulations - hope it's a fun next batch of years!

A substack push notification containing the phrase “a filthy jew”

I’ve tolerated the Substack app because writers I value publish there, & its daily notifications for people I don’t follow are tedious but ignorable. Today it pushed me straight hate speech. I hope settings>notifications>preferences>marketing>”suggested content” is the way to turn this off but oy

(Noting that I have a bunch of computers running 24x7 so my power use profile is more ToU billing-friendly than many people's is likely to be.)

Electric power switch to Time-of-Use (ToU) billing continues to win: Saved approximately $50 from the switch over the last month. Some of that is solar+battery, but also some habit changes, like I'm starting laundry at 9pm more often now and using dishwasher delay to avoid peak. Seems like a win-win

Being in tech and having a single modicum of critical thinking is just screaming "this isn't what LLMs are designed for" over and over as people shove a bunch of word predictors into critical decision making processes because some glorified used car salesmen told them it would fix all their problems

If you're interested in live webcams from Japan, give @japan-cambot.bsky.social a follow.

Despite living here, I use webcams a lot to check current conditions in locations I'll be visiting and photographing in. Plus, I just like 'visiting' places virtually from time to time.

The go race checker is a good example of the benefit of fast compilation and testing in the same domain, but tbh I prefer the static approach in _most_ cases. It can, however, be a PITA to work through for fine-grained parallelism.

Using types in more creative ways to constrain improper use of interfaces / eliminate potential errors. Rust's use of typing to prevent concurrent unlocked access to a data structure is probably the classic example, but there are nice cases of, e.g., using them to constrain state transitions

Sauces day 2: macaroni and cheese, made with sauce Mornay. Techniques taught: making a roux, using the roux to make bechamel (and adding cheese to get to Mornay), and cooking pasta. Added some powdered shallot to the Mornay at the end and it's delicious.

n.b. of course that despite me liking it, Rust itself isn't good enough for all of this - for interface specs you start craving dependent types and/or static verification. And then things get even slower and harder to write in certain ways with the current state of things.

all! i want it all! ;)

(of course, Rust is also, uh, not winning in the compilation speed department.) I would like the ability to be even more formal than rust on demand combined with the compilation speed of go and the high-level ease of use of python. I'm a simple person with simple needs. :-)

I've been using and teaching in golang since 2011 and I really like it for distributed systems. But it only scratches part of that itch - it's great for fast compilation and it is better than Python in many ways, but it also isn't as amenable to pushing types harder like Rust is.

Doing system-wide python changes is harder than doing the same in C++, which is still worse than it would be with Rust, and that's probably worse than it would be in, say, Verus, if we had big existing verus codebases.

So maybe we just need a much better python. *grins*

While that's largely about the ecosystem around the language, it still benefits from the language/compiler: Really fast compilation and test execution lets you iterate a lot faster and identify conflicts between developers faster. Being able to statically identify potential breakages is really good

The "group of N concurrent developers" part is more interesting and I have fewer ideas for the language itself. It's clear that making testing super fast and easy is part of this, and I'll point to Google's ability to do company-wide global code changes as another example.

I'd say the thing that we don't really have in most popular languages is a way of strengthening interfaces semantically as opposed to just syntactically, be that contracts or formal specifications, etc. But usable/programmer-friendly formal specs are still A Hard Thing.

We've been headed towards the first in a lot of ways already but legacy crap holds us back - the obvious stuff is things like namespaces (however you want to call them), making it harder to be dumb with global effects, increased emphasis on functional-ish approaches with fewer side effects, etc.

There are kind of two aspects to this? One is "a new program or modification enters an existing codebase" and one is "A group of N programmers concurrently develop a new codebase", and the latter is, I think, more of what you're asking about?

Sigh. Meringue. Edit burrito.

Running a cooking class for the 13 year old sure produces a lot of dishes but it does come with some perks too.

(Merengue from the leftover egg whites from making hollandaise this morning)