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It looks like the shingles vaccine has positive effects that prevent dementia. (Well, that's in the title.)

This study was possible due to a "natural experiment" where one country gave people from a very specific birth date the vaccine (so people born right before and right after that date were very similar, except for the vaccine).

It's not clear why this is the case. It might be that the virus the vaccine supresses plays a role in dementia development, or it might be that the vaccine causes an immune response that has other indirect positive impacts.


I found the intro very confusing, tbh.

Particularly the "no increased risk of all-cause mortality". I mean, if we assume the vaccines worked, we'd certainly expect a decreased risk of all-case mortality (because "all-case mortality" certainly includes "covid mortality"). Reading "no increase" seems to imply "it doesn't change anything". Yeah, technically, the sentence does not say that ("no increase" can mean "no decrease" or "no change").

You have to read further below to get what should be the real message on all-cause-mortality: "Vaccinated individuals had [...] a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality". I think that should've been in the first 1-2 sentences.


Frame it as the safety of the vaccine, not the efficacy of it. If it was about efficacy, it would lead with the 25% lower risk because of COVID safety. But, these days, there are people who think vaccines are dangerous just because, so saying that taking the vaccine or not has equal mortality puts that to rest (or at least does for those who find science real).

The reduction in all-cause mortality was independent of covid deaths.

Which seems to suggest that there was big differences between the groups other than the vaccination.

This of course does not change that the vaccine seems mostly safe, but it definitely calls in to question whether the protection against covid death was vaccine-mediated or due to some other difference between the groups.

Therefore this paper is moderately strong evidence for the vaccine being safe, but quite weak evidence for the vaccine being efficacious.


The vaccinnated group was 1 year older on average, and had mode cardiovascular risk factors.

Covid has long term health consequences, and these are proportional to the severity of the acute infection.

People who died of a stroke of a heart infarction 6 months down the line were not counted as "covid death", even though covid is known to increase their incidence in the next year.


Another factor that may play a role: the people who chose not to take the vaccine may be prone to taking bad decisions more broadly, leading to a higher mortality rate.

If true, that means the groups are different in many other aspects other than the vaccine.

The study does not control for the differences. No causality can be inferred.


I mean, it's plausibly something around trust in medical authorities which correlates with both vaccine and other treatment refusal.

Covid hospitalizations where half in the vaccinated group (as % of pop) than unvaccinated. That's extremely desirable when you're in a situation where you have do dedicate whole wings (and then some) of hospitals to a singular disease.

Sure, it's not a silver bullet but it's at least stainless steel.


I am speaking about what the paper shows.

There are other sources of evidence for efficacy. This paper is not a very strong source of evidence for efficacy due to some obvious uncontrolled difference between groups.


I wouldn't bother critiquing methodology without current, masters-level experience in the domain. I make incorrect assumptions when I'm even narrowly outside my own lane, and end up asking questions that clearly demonstrate e.g. my inability to parse fig. 4a.

I wouldn't bother commenting if I were hallucinating figures. There is no figure 4a.

If you look at figure 4 in the supplemental material you also see, per your expertise, that covid vaccine protects against traumatic injury. However even adjusting for the protective effect against traumatic injury there is still quite a large protective effect against all-cause mortality. So the beneficial effect of the vaccine is not solely caused by its protective effect against traumatic injury.

Or it could be, bold proposition I know, that there is a difference between the groups that both protects against traumatic injury and protects against all-cause mortality, independently of the vaccine.


OP's point was more 'How would you measure unvaccinated people that lived because vaccinated people weren't filling the ER, so there were beds/staff to spare'?

That unvaxed outcome would need to go in the 'vaxed lives saved' column somehow, or else it looks like 'outcomes were the same either way' because the lives saved from vaccination spill over into the non-vaxed group because the vaccine prevented the healthcare system from melting down.


I don’t think it’s possible to know anything conclusive about the safety for a few decades and a generation or two of affected kids can be observed. Given that finding harm would embarrass important aristocrats, I don’t think that evidence would ever be found in the foreseeable future. That mRNA and lipid nano particles were never found to be safe until the exact moment of crisis is awfully convenient for its investors.

I say decades because of the study below. Certainly, the authors could have published it for engagement bait or malice or some reason.

https://www.gavinpublishers.com/article/view/detection-of-pf...


Where do you get decades? That study says 200 days.

I interpret this as the comment saying "we won't know how this affected things until decades from now." Which can likely be attributed to existing vaccine skepticism and is unlikely to result in them changing their opinion in the next ever.

What I think a lot of people who are anti-vax miss is the risk of the vaccine compared to the risk of COVID. They feel like they're being asked something risky in a vacuum, when in fact, they're being asked for something with (as best as we can tell) limited risk against a backdrop of a dangerous virus that killed millions and caused a global pandemic.

Even if they could demonstrably prove the vaccine created a higher risk of outcomes for people who took it, the risk compared to getting COVID is de minimus, and the likelihood of getting COVID is high. I would be surprised if there was a significant population of people who had avoided it at this point.


> What I think a lot of people who are anti-vax miss is the risk of the vaccine compared to the risk of COVID

Why do people still frame this as either/or? How many people out there didn't get covid after they got some number of shots?

The only real scenario is covid with n shots, where n >= 0. In other words, when you got covid, how many shots had you gotten.

(Not anti vax myself, though generally avoid whatever drugs I reasonably can)


We know that the vaccines lower your risk of bad outcomes if you get covid.

Many people have never had Covid.

You really aren’t going to know how this MRNA in egg and sperm cells are going to affect offspring until you have offspring to observe. Effects like wolbachia could take multiple generations to observe.

mRNA can't cause wolbachia. Wolbachia is a bacterium that actually lives inside cells and gets transmitted through eggs to offspring. it's a persistent organism that reproduces. There's not a way for mRNA to grow bacteria.

mRNA is just a molecule that breaks down, and the mRNA in these vaccines is extremely fragile and temporary. Once injected it enters whatever cells are nearby (muscle cells)and ribosomes read it to produce the inert spike protein. The mRNA itself is gone within hours. Your cells have enzymes specifically designed to break down RNA because cells naturally produce and dispose of mRNA constantly as part of normal function.

The mRNA in vaccines never enters the cell nucleus where DNA is stored, so it can't integrate into your genome or affect reproductive cells in that way. And it doesn't replicate itself either.

And millions of babies have been born to vaccinated parents by now. If the effects you are talking about were even possible they would definitely have shown up by now.


I’m not suggesting comirnanty is wolbachia. If there is reproductive harm, or reproductive harm passed on to children, then we will not know for a long time.

I believe that you’re well read on the CDC’s messaging on this topic. I’d like to bring to your attention that glyphosate was scientifically shown to pose no harm, but that key paper was retracted 25 years later. Pfizer is making over $10B/yr on comirnanty and at one point it was over $50B. Would you lie for that kind of money? Could you imagine someone who would?


Yes, but imagine how much money hospitals can make if they can convince idiots to skip affordable preventable medicine and instead pay tens of thousands for hospital stays.

The money arguments are a double edged sword.


Hospitals were paid much more for the Covid patients that died than those who lived. There’s some very strong circumstantial evidence about this driving treatment protocols.

Right, okay, according to who? Because this doesn't make any sense with how insurance works.

For any given reality, someone will benefit.

I too despise the existence of a profit motive in public health, the sane (not perfect) alternative is to nationalize medicine, not to ban it because the profit motive makes it suspect.

I'd like to bring to your attention that many people on the internet have made claims which were later retracted, thus your comment is unreliable.


Obviously there are confounding variables besides vaccination status, but I find it pretty compelling that the decrease in COVID mortality among the vaccinated group was significantly larger than the decrease in all-cause mortality of that group. This suggests whatever the difference was between the two groups, besides vaccination, either had a much larger impact on COVID than other causes of death or that the vaccine had some positive impact.

One example of the former explanation I could imagine is that people who got vaccinated against COVID were probably also more likely to take other preventative measures, like wearing a mask or avoiding larger crowds of people. Those precautions would be more likely to be effective against a contagious disease like COVID but less likely to protect them against some other causes of death like heart disease.

I'm not sure how likely I find that as an explanation compared to the alternative that the vaccines provide at least some level of protection. My observation was that widespread measures specifically meant to defend against COVID, like masking and social distancing, largely went away well before the end of the time period covered by this study, at least in the US.

Amusingly, I suspect the anti-vax contingent would likely be bothered by data suggesting anything the COVID vaccinated group was doing differently protected against COVID, since their position seems to largely be that not only is the COVID vaccine useless, but so are any other measures meant to reduce the spread.


I think that's mostly fair, but given that we can't randomly assign vaccine administration this sort of study is the best we're gonna get.

Like, the major takeaway is that the vaccine is safe, I think that we've already established that it works to reduce Covid hospitalisations.


> but quite weak evidence for the vaccine being efficacious

That’s directly contradicted by the results of the study. E.g.,

“Vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 (weighted hazard ratio [wHR], 0.26 [95% CI, 0.22-0.30]) and a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality (wHR, 0.75 [95% CI, 0.75-0.76])…”

It’s pretty clear a lot of unvaccinated people who died of covid would be alive today had they gotten vaccinated.

(I would point out the current yearly vaccine they are putting out is potentially a different story since covid is changing and so is the vaccine. I’d talk to my dr about whether to get that or not.)


The simple explanation is that the causal agent for the excees of the non-covid deaths is the same SARS-CoV2 virus, but death comes later and not at the acute phase of the disease.

If the vaccine was randomly administered among the study population, I'd buy this as the simple explanation.

Not sure it follows so cleanly with the actual study setup


There is plenty of evidence beside this study.

There was a study that showed that cancer patients who receive a MRNA COVID vaccine live longer. This could also be for extrinsic reasons, but IIRC the study considered the reason to be a pronounced immune response that also attacked cancer cells.

So there's a chance that the vaccine provokes a general immune response that's protective against a number of mortality-causing issues.


A 25% reduction is huge, even if you account for the fact that people who get vaccines tend to be more health conscious to begin with, when you consider that outside of the very sick and very old Covid has a mortality rate under 1%.

1 out of 100 when billions are getting it is gonna be a large number. Mortality rate has gone down substantially since the vaccines.

I like to ask people who talk about a 1% mortality rate if they'd go to a football game in a stadium with 100k seats if 1k of those seats randomly had a small bomb attached.

> Covid has a mortality rate under 1%.

I hate it when blanket statements like this creep in.

Which Covid? The initial version was definitely more deadly than later versions.

What about future covids? Are you willing to guarantee every version of covid from here on out will be less deadly? It is the general case to be true, but it is not some sort of law.


Yes, but they incorrectly called it all-cause mortality under Findings. "Mortality" on it's own would be fine. "Mortality from other causes" would be better.

It's a term of art. The audience for this paper would understand, rather like many denizens of HN know what TDD is.

The paper doesn't even use it consistently. At first it uses "all-cause mortality" to mean "all causes except COVID", and then in the results section it uses the same phrase to mean "all causes including COVID". The whole purpose of terms of art is to increase the specificity of language, but they're not doing that here. Their usage of the term is confusing.

Edit: I'm wrong. I could have sworn it said that the groups had similar all-cause mortality, but it doesn't.


Where do you see them using "all-cause mortality" to mean "all causes except COVID" in the beginning? I skimmed over all uses of the term before the "Results" chapter, none of them seem to exclude COVID deaths?

A common pattern you'd find in reliable research papers is that authors tend to understate their findings, which in practice strengthens the impact of their conclusions.

The problem is that 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality is too big to be explained solely by the vaccine. The reduction is similar when excluding deaths due to COVID-19, and is probably driven by people who got the vaccine being different in some ways that the observational study isn’t controlling for.

Yeah, but there's a plausible explanation for this: Likely, people who get vaccinated also are more likely to do other things to improve their health.

If you don't get the covid vaccine you probably do other risky things. Not get other vaccines, don't see the doctor about various issues...

Could it mean that lots of Covid deaths are being attributed to other things?

Not getting the vaccine is statisically correlated with distrust in traditional medicine, and suceptibility to giving undue attention and credit to unfounded and unsound practices.

This is a general problem in many technical fields.

People in a technical field, learn to "chunk" complex phrases. Their natural communication style becomes complex. Which makes them hard to understand to those outside of the field. If they want to be understood, the solution isn't to try to educate the world. It is to educate themselves. To learn how to write simply and directly.

Depending on the readability test used, the section up to "Introduction" - which is supposed to be readable - is somewhere between advanced high school and university. See https://www.online-utility.org/english/readability_test_and_... or other free tools to test it. That's bad. The percentage of Americans who can read this text is below the percentage who could read, say, a plain language version written in Spanish. We should expect people to misunderstand. We should not expect this paper to convince.


Papers like this are designed to fit into the conventions that allow knowledge to compound. Not that the conventions are perfect at doing this.

I would suggest that rather than changing this convention in a big way, there needs to be good pathways for communicating the most important takeaways to the general public. Unfortunately, there's kind of a chasm between academia and popular science.


With all due respect, I disagree.

You are providing the standard excuse. It is our job to advance knowledge. It is someone else's job to communicate it to a broader audience. It's just too bad that nobody is stepping up and doing that other job.

I don't buy it. In my experience, most scientific papers can easily be rewritten into simpler language. The act of trying to do so often catches mistakes - thereby immediately improving how well we are advancing knowledge. The resulting paper is easier to read. This makes it more likely to become better known. Both within its subfield, and in a broader audience.

The habit of doing this makes us better communicators. Which also helps academics in various other parts of their job. Including teaching the next generation.

Furthermore, easier to read papers are easier for science popularizers to understand. Which makes it more likely that the work will be popularized.

Yes, it is tempting for academics to deflect responsibility for their role in being understandable. But it is a mistake for them to do so. Their ability to communicate in an understandable way is their responsibility. The few that take up that responsibility benefit themselves.


I'm not saying it's someone else's job to communicate to a lay audience. Simply that a research paper doesn't have to be a self-contained device for doing that and accurately describing the research to people who already have a lot of background knowledge on the topic and methods.

I guess I will say that I have thought for a long time that serializing research into linear documents seems archaic at this point.


It would be nice if academics would move to BOTH publishing the technical write up, AND a more understandable write up of their interpretation of the result (in more detail than the one liner which is in all abstracts.)

The technical writeup is necessary. It's what spells out what they specifically claim to have done, and the specific results. "Specific" being highly technical and fundamental in the scientific community understanding the paper correctly. In particular, the in-depth statistics of many such papers is simply too complex for most of the population to understand, and that's fine. The technical write-up uses terms of art which do not mean what civilians read in them. (And while it's hard to do studies larger than this one, this is all the more essential in smaller studies.)

The interpretation would be useful because it's just plain dangerous to let your PR department write that. Even if they consult you. And it is interesting to focus on what the scientists themselves think they achieved. Both what they deliberately went for, and any ancillary result they think they notice. In this case in particular, they are very focused on this safety aspect, and they seem to not want to give too much attention to the efficacy aspect (which they probably did not plan for and is then suspect.)


Eh, it's an important point. "It made COVID things much better, and it didn't make other unrelated things worse."

Looking at Table 2 and as the name suggests, COVID is included in "all-cause" mortality. Your statement does not follow because it could have made COVID outcomes better yet "all-other" causes worse for a neutral "no increase in all-cause". If you look at Table 2, you can see that the vaccinated group is less mortality in all diseases. That being said, as much as I think this is over-stated, this is very much a correlation thing because we all know that unvaccinated individuals live their lives differently compared to vaccinated individuals. Even accounting for similar statistics, the one group is prone to higher death rates not because they are unvaccinated but because of the reason they are unvaccinated.

Read again.

> After standardizing the characteristics of vaccinated individuals to those of unvaccinated individuals, we observed a 25% lower standardized incidence of all-cause death in vaccinated individuals compared with unvaccinated ones…

> Vaccinated individuals had a lower risk of death compared with unvaccinated individuals regardless of the cause of death.

> All-cause mortality was lower within 6 months following COVID-19 vaccination, regardless of the dose administered, compared with the control periods...


You should read my statement again.

If COVID vaccines reduces COVID deaths by 100% and increase everything else by 0.01%, you will still have a reduction in "all-cause" mortality yet your chances of dying by anything else has increased. I already said Table 2 does not show this is happening and in fact vaccinated individuals have better outcomes across the board. However, people are drawing this conclusion (even though they are correct) incorrectly without looking at the data.


> If COVID vaccines reduces COVID deaths by 100% and increase everything else by 0.01%…

But you already agreed this is not the case, in your comment:

> If you look at Table 2, you can see that the vaccinated group is less mortality in all diseases.


GP is saying that indicates there is some other factor involved in reducing all-cause mortality, since it is probably reasonable to believe the mRNA vaccines were not improving mortality rates of other diseases, and that therefore the sampling of these populations is not random.

See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46164643


> It is probably reasonable to believe the mRNA vaccines were not improving mortality rates of other diseases,

By now, this is not a reasonable belief. We know that COVID can cause cardiovascular damage, kidney injury, diabetes, neurological problems, and systemic inflammation, all of which increase mortality risk from other causes. It only makes sense that preventing or reducing the severity of COVID infection prevents those downstream complications and reduces all-cause mortality.


It's interesting that they leave things at 18-59. Do they later stratify into 18-28, 29-38, 39-48, 48-58?

Looks like they do, yes.

> A stronger association was observed among individuals aged 18 to 29 years, although the underlying reasons remain unclear and warrant further investigation.


> "no increased risk of all-cause mortality"

My take is not quite as charitable as most of the comments, although my objection only barely applies to this particular paper. Biomedical research has long tradition of a very specific type of analysis: hypothesis testing. Roughly speaking, you make a hypothesis and test your data for compatibility with the hypothesis. In this paper, the authors are comparing two hypotheses: (a) there is an increased risk of all-cause mortality or (b) the increase in risk is zero or negative [0]. And the statement you’re quoting from the conclusion section sure sounds like it’s saying that the authors found that the data was consistent with (b) but not with (a).

Researchers love this. There are lots of papers with fancy-named tests with which one can do this analysis. Regulators often demand it.

And it produces papers that are correct in a fairly literal sense but miss the point entirely. For example, “we found no evidence that vaccines increase the risk of autism”. I, too, can look under my bed or study four people and find no evidence of anything at all about vaccines and autism, and I would be more or less justified in making that claim.

And because of this, you need to read papers very carefully to see what you can actually conclude. “No evidence” means a lot more in a large (“high powered”) study than in a small, weak study.

The right way to do this is something like “we looked at such-and-such data and found, with 95% confidence, that the increase in risk of X is <= 0.2%” or even that “the change in risk is <= -25%” (check out that minus sign!). If I look under my bed, I will find evidence that the increased absolute of autism caused by vaccines is <= 100%, and I didn’t need to study anything to confirm that :)

Fortunately, this particular paper has the silly throwaway starting you’re complaining about in a few places but is otherwise mostly on the right track. Quoting from the Results section:

> Vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 (weighted hazard ratio [wHR], 0.26 [95% CI, 0.22-0.30]) and a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality (wHR, 0.75 [95% CI, 0.75-0.76]), with a similar association observed when excluding severe COVID-19 death. Sensitivity analysis revealed that vaccinated individuals consistently had a lower risk of death, regardless of the cause.

IMO that should have been the headline. The latter sentence there is giving some indication that the result is robust and that the researchers didn’t flub it or get unlucky in quality of their data.

P.S. The fact that the vaccines seemed to reduce the risk is death from causes other than severe covid is interesting. I wonder how much is reducing death from complications of COVID other than “severe covid”, how much is behavioral changes (vaccinated whole socializing more and leaving their houses more), and how much is bizarre off-target effects of the mRNA vaccines. Here’s an example of a surprising off-target benefit that no one understands well:

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mrna-vaccines-and-...

[0] I think. I didn’t reread it enough times to rule out the other common test: is the data consistent with the hypothesis that the risk didn’t change at all, which is also sadly common. But I’m moderately sure I’m right in the context of this paper.


Because this whole paper is bullshit and is a bias confirmation report

It assesses persons "who were alive on November 1, 2021"

That tantamount to saying "for people alive January 1st 1950, the Second World War was not a significant cause of mortality"

Can you see how ridiculous that sounds?


No, because the same conditional is applied to both participant groups. Its good to specify a time frame.

While you are being downvoted, this is actually an astute observation. However, your point is working against you in this case. If the vaccine was actually deadly, the unvaccinated individuals who survived the pandemic would be having better health outcomes. This is not what they found. If they included the pandemic in this study, the deaths by COVID would be much worse in the unvaccinated group.

> That tantamount to saying "for people alive January 1st 1950, the Second World War was not a significant cause of mortality"

That’s a nonsense comparison because the thing they are studying is the vaccine, not COVID itself. The vaccine was available at minimum, what, end of 2020? Exposure being defined as first dose May-October 2021 does not seem unreasonable at all (and probably not arbitrarily chosen right - it’s probably something to do with the availability of data)


It's a good observation, but I expect that even considering only people alive in 1950, survivors of the Hiroshima bombing or concentration camps (or a few other events), still have long term problems that increase mortality.

[flagged]


I honestly wonder if it's better to flag and downvote into oblivion rather than to engage in good faith. The sibling didn't seem like they were trolling, just misguided, and shutting down discussion doesn't allow for any reflection.

I suppose the problem is that it was unlikely to be productive.


Counterpoint: XML is a horrible format.

Why? Answer this question: how can you use XML in a way that does not create horrible security vulnerabilities?

I know the answer, but it is extremely nontrivial, and highly dependent on which programming language, library, and sometimes even which library function you use. The fact that there's no easy way to use XML without creating a security footgun is reason enough to avoid it.


I myself know only two "security vulnerabilities":

1. The entity bomb. An entity that expands to another, which expands to another, and so on so that the final result is enormous. This is an issue of the implementation: if it expands the entities eagerly then the bomb will work. But it it first examines them and checks how much space they require it can safely reject the document if it exceeds some configurable limit. As far as I know this has been fixed in all XML processors.

2. An entity can resolve to a local or remote file. First, this is a feature. Imagine a large collection of bibliographic records, each in a separate file. A publication can provide its list of references as a list of entities that refer to these files using entities. (There is an RFC that uses this as an example.) And, of course, we need both local and remote entities.

But, of course, if your XML comes from an untrusted source and you read it with this feature enabled this can lead to obvious disasters. Yet it is not a vulnerability of XML. Again, as far as I know all XML processors can disable access to local or remote entities.


You can say the same thing about HTML forms (see CORS et. al.), innerHTML, rendering user-submitted data, SQL, JSON, etc. That does not mean that you remove HTML forms or SQL databases.

If you removed support for anything that has/could have security vulnerabilities you would remove everything.


That's not any different than JSON, though. Injection, insecure deserialization , etc. can all exist in that format as well.

There's plenty of reasons to criticize XML, and plenty more to criticize XSLT. But security being the one you call out feels at least moderately disingenuous. It's a criticism of the library, not the standard or the format.


There's an extremely large difference in that a JSON deserialization vulnerability is almost always a bug in the library. JSON is not an inherently insecure format.

XML is so complex that a 100% bug-free compliant library is inherently insecure, and the vulnerability is a "user is holding it wrong" siutation, they should have disabled specific XML features etc. That means XML is an inherently much more insecure format.

There's a reason there's name for vulnerabilities like XML External Entity (XXE) injection [1] and they're named after XML, and not "bug in lib/software X". JSON and most other data formats don't have that.

[1] https://portswigger.net/web-security/xxe


XML has a relatively small specification. For some time I used to "print" web pages into PDF (or XPS) and I remember that XML 1.0 specification was three times shorter than that of YAML (it was YAML 2, I think, I don't quite remember). And XML included a) serialization itself, b) simple grammar specification in the form of DTD, c) things like internal references from one element to another, d) basic support for other notations, so that you could add, say, LaTeX math notation and formally define that this element's content is in this notation. I do not think (b), (c) or (d) were part of YAML or any other similar format.


Do those points not apply verbatim to HTML?

Let alone JavaScript…


Oh, great, they found another way to power energy-hungry chatbots with inefficient fossil fuels.


While true, it is completely unrelated in this context.


This comes up on a regular basis in the discussion around hydrogen, sometimes it's also known as turquoise hydrogen. The claims made here are very misleading, let me quickly explain why.

The idea here is that you make hydrogen from fossil methane by splitting it into hydrogen and carbon. Now, the claim is that you now have "clean" or "climate neutral" hydrogen. But it's made from fossil gas, and there's carbon. If you would now bury that carbon or do something else that guarantees that carbon never ends up in the atmosphere, ok, you might claim that. (Still with caveats: your fossil gas production has upstream emissions you need to account for.)

But that is not economically feasible. So the idea is: sell that carbon as a co-product. But now, that carbon will in almost all cases eventually still end up as CO2 emissions. But these pitches never talk about that. Claiming that hydrogen is "climate neutral" is, then, more an accounting trick. If you are honest, you would have to do something like associate half of the eventual emissions to it.

I wrote about it in more detail before: https://industrydecarbonization.com/news/the-problem-with-tu...


It's actually relatively simple.

Adding dependencies comes with advantages and downsides. You need to strike a balance between them. External libraries can help implement things that you better don't implement yourself, so the answer is certainly not "no dependencies". But there are downsides and risks, and the risks grow with the number of dependencies.

In the world of NPM, people think those simple truths don't apply to them and the downsides and risks of dependencies can be ignored. Then you end up with thousands of transitive dependencies.

They're wrong and learn it the hard way now.


You can't put this all on the users. The JS/node/npm projects have been mismanaged since the start.

node should have shipped "batteries included" after the left-pad incident. There was a boneheaded attachment to small stdlib, which you could put down to youthful innocence, except that it's been almost 10 years.

The TC39 committee which controls the design of JS stdlib and the node maintainers basically both act like the other one doesn't exist.

NPM was never designed with security in mind. It's a dirty hack that somehow became the most popular package manager.

The dependency hell is a reflection of the massive egos of the people involved in the multiple organizations. Python doesn't have this problem because it's all centralized under one org with a single vision.


you can't just blame it on the platform. if the users had half a brain they'd come settle on an external "standard" library, a bit like C++ Boost. but no, everyone wants to pad their cv with a thousand packages.


This does not appear to be particularly surprising (?).

I think it is widely recognized that exercise and an active lifestyle can lower the risk of type 2 diabetes.

Remembering my cannabis consumption days, being under the influence of cannabis is not exactly a state that encourages an "active lifestyle".


Depends on your circles. Marijuana use is super prevalent amongst climbers (even while climbing, for better or worse) and it's a very active lifestyle. Same for surfers in my area. I don't think it's a given that people who smoke are less active.


Jui Jitsu also has a reputation for being a smoker friendly activity


For the people wondering why this does not show up as revoked in their browser: I believe the way the current revocation systems work is that browsers compile centralized lists of revoked certificates, but they do not contain all revoked certs, but only ones that indicate some form of security issue.

Certificates can be revoked with various revocation reasons, however, it looks this one has no specific revocation reason listed in the CRL. For a certificate that was revoked with a reason of "Key Compromise", things would be different, and most browsers would probably reject it.


Firefox / CRLite includes all revocations. The issue with this particular certificate is that the CRLite backend is behind on ingesting both of the CT logs that it appears in (Digicert wyvern2025h2 [1] and Let's Encrypt oak2025h2). So from CRLite's perspective the certificate doesn't exist yet.

In the very near future, CAs are going to start embedding signed CT timestamps from "static CT" logs [2]. Once that happens, the CRLite backend will be aware of certificates within minutes of issuance.

[1] The wyvern2025h2 shard had an outage last week, which is also part of the problem here https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/ct-policy/c/XpmIf....

[2] https://github.com/C2SP/C2SP/blob/main/static-ct-api.md


Actually, the story in this case is a bit more complicated than I initially thought: https://github.com/mozilla/crlite/issues/367.


What would be the point of accepting a certificate that was revoked for non-security reasons?

Might as well not even revoke it…

If a CA issues a certificate to the wrong entity, they won’t have knowledge of a key compromise as there is no such thing in this case — they only know that they issued something wrong…


I believe I remember reading that chrome has a seperate system for revoking CA certificates, where they have to do a manual rollout, but propagation time is pretty fast.


[citation needed]



The citation is that that is Hanno Böck.


They started shipping installers with de-facto-malware, but at a time when they were already on a downward slope. It was many years after "sourceforge was the default place to host FOSS".


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