> The US is starting to talk about (finally) opening up some new nukes.
At the cost of shutting down solar/wind development. The policy change was a net negative for future capacity, and nukes alone won’t cover but a fraction of predicted AI power requirements.
Hardware isn’t improving exponentially anymore, especially not on the flops/watt metric.
That’s part of what motivated the transition to bfloat16 and even smaller minifloat formats, but you can only quantize so far before you’re just GEMMing noise.
> While I'm not familiar with sysco as I'm not in the US, these are just chain-y generic and cheap eateries that are frequented by families/people that just want something predictable and cheap?
Chain restaurants of the sort supplied by Sysco in the United States encompass everything from cheap fast food and diners to “fast-casual” to mid-range “sit down” restaurants. Even upscale steakhouses will source things like side dishes (particularly potatoes) from them.
It’s going to suck when that single point of failure supply chain breaks down, but capitalism is antithetical to resiliency, so.
My shop just moved back to Julia for digital signal processing and it’s accelerated development considerably over our old but mature internal C++ ecosystem.
Mine did the same for image processing but coming from python/numpy/numba. We initially looked at using Rust or C++ but I'm glad we chose to stick it out with Julia despite some initial setbacks. Numerical code flows and read so nicely in Julia. It's also awesome seeing the core language continuously improve so much.
> These kinds of blithe comparisons to the seriousness of gender-affirming care no small part of why trust on this issue has waned so fast.
No, let’s be real, this isn’t a dominant narrative in public discourse outside this thread. You’re irritated that you can’t simply assert a de novo principle of pediatric ethics that bans gender-affirming care without absurd collateral damage.
This isn't a de novo principle. It's pretty basic evidence based medicine: if a treatment has negative side effects, there needs to be significant evidence of positive outcomes to justify this treatment.
What "absurd collateral damage" have the UK, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, or Norway encountered when they banned endocrine interventions for treating gender dysphoric youth?
Talking with you is very difficult when you continue to conflate various claims and stances that are logically distinct.
OP said:
>>> How is it 'disgusting' to try to let someone live as they were born?
Asserting this as an ethical principle leads to absurdities. That’s all that occurred here.
> What "absurd collateral damage" have the UK, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, or Norway encountered when they banned endocrine interventions for treating gender dysphoric youth?
This is irrelevant to the point at hand (nobody here was discussing European medical policy), but this is not accurate. It’s strange, because you’ve correctly summarized what occurred elsewhere.
> Danish guidelines published in 2023 recommend the use of puberty blockers on transgender patients at either Tanner stage two or three, as a means of buying time for patients to consider their gender more fully before making a decision.[119]
> In 2020, Finland revised its guidelines to prioritise psychotherapy over medical transition.[120] However, these guidelines are a recommendation, not a mandate.[121][122] The Council for Choices in Health Care allows the use of puberty blockers in transgender children after a case-by-case assessment if there are no medical contraindications.[123][124]
> In 2023, the Norwegian Healthcare Investigation Board, an independent non-governmental organization, issued a non-binding report finding "there is insufficient evidence for the use of puberty blockers and cross sex hormone treatments in young people" and recommending changing to a cautious approach.[148][149] The Norwegian Healthcare Investigation Board is not responsible for setting healthcare policy, and the Directorate, which is, has not implemented the recommendations, though they have said they are considering them.[148][146][125] Misinformation that Norway had banned gender affirming care proliferated on social media.[146]
Misinformation, by the way, that you continue to peddle in.
> While European health authorities aren’t instituting bans on treatment, currently minors in six European countries—Norway, U.K. Sweden, Denmark, France and Finland—can access puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones only if they meet strict eligibility requirements, usually in the context of a tightly controlled research setting. (Italics in the original)
Read through your quotes carefully:
> The Council for Choices in Health Care allows the use of puberty blockers in transgender children after a case-by-case assessment if there are no medical contraindications.
And how many of such cases were granted? This could be a de facto ban, if no such cases are granted.
> issued a non-binding report finding "there is insufficient evidence for the use of puberty blockers and cross sex hormone treatments in young people" and recommending changing to a cautious approach.
Again, how many new patients are being put on blockers after this recommendation?
You're trying to spin this false narrative that patients with gender dysphoria are still being prescribed puberty blockers as normal treatment for GD. This is not the case. Even though the legislatures in these countries haven't banned the treatment, effectively nobody is getting puberty blockers for childhood GD in these countries.
Actions speak louder than words. You can split hairs about how "recommending" the discontinuation of puberty blocks is not ban. But at the end of the day, what unambiguously true is that the vast majority of patients who are prescribed blockers in the US would not be prescribed blockers in these countries. If you have actual stats on the number of new patients prescribed blockers in these countries in 2025, by all means share it.
The most comprehensive “Singal does bad journalism” montages come from the left-wing media outlets and leftist bloggers that he’s targeted over the years. The typical HN commenter is going to immediately gloss those accounts as partisan hyperbole. And why not? It’s purely academic for some of them, and internally worldview-challenging for others.
But if you really are honestly curious and unbiased, M. K. Anderson wrote a well-researched article for Protean in 2022.
> For example his claim that Singal's writing "endangers trans lives" is hyperbolic and unsupported.
Partially due to Singal’s sensationalist journalism, trans people in the United States are about to lose access to some forms of healthcare—treatments that will remain accessible to cis people, like hormone replacement therapy.
So I think history has vindicated this particular claim. I don’t expect you to agree, however.
I am honored that you made an account just to respond to this! Welcome to HN.
Couldn't it be possible that chemically altering minors isn't be best course of treatment? The UK, Finland, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway have all stopped routine prescription of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria on the grounds that their efficacy is not clear but the negative side effects are. It's extremely hard to claim the science is settled at this point.
The allegations of harm seem to come from an a priori conclusion that these treatments are beneficial.
I welcome any novel, high-quality scientific research on better treatments for gender dysphoric children.
But, in the States at least, there is no longer any funding for that. They cut all of it by grepping the NIH and NSF databases for “gender”, more or less.
What there soon will be in the States, assuming SCOTUS overturns the Colorado ban this term, is a renaissance of conversion therapy. If you abuse the child hard enough and long enough, they’ll have bigger problems than gender dysphoria or—coming up in the next wave of manufactured outrage—same-sex attraction.
Hard to say that the “just asking questions” club has the child’s best interests at heart.
Somewhat unique among studies on pediatric gender affirming hormone therapy, this study had a control group that wasn't prescribed blockers. The group on blockers fared no better than the control group. This is the study that primarily motivated Finland to stop routine prescription of puberty blockers to children, with half a dozen or so other European countries following suit after their reviews of the evidence.
Researchers in the US have typically balked at the idea of including a control group in their studies on blockers, arguing that it's unethical to withhold live-saving medicine from patients. This, conveniently, lets authors frame null results as positive, by claiming that gender dysphoria patient would have fared even worse without blockers. This is what Johanna Olson-Kennedy did in her latest study: she observed no change in the patients' outcomes, and claimed that this indicates that blockers are beneficial because they prevented the patients from getting even worse. But without a control group in her study, this is statement is just speculation.
The retreat from gender affirming care is motivated by the absence of good evidence in favor of their usage. And it's hardly a US-specific phenomenon. It's uniquely politicized in the US, I'll grant that, but this shift in stance on altering children's endocrine systems is happening in plenty of other countries too, so I'm not so convinced this is solely borne out by this latest President.
And again, I find the attempts to equate anti-gay conversion therapy aimed at suppressing homosexual desire with exploring ways to become more comfortable in one's natural body. It's fundamentally different to[ tell a boy attracted to other boys that his feelings are wrong than it is to tell a boy identifying as a girl on account of his same sex attractions, "boys can like other boys, not only girls can like boys". The former is telling someone to reject a part of themselves, the latter is expanding's one's concept of gender to include one's natural state of being.
I’m not interested paying to read your study. The bulk of your comment is a non sequitur that conflates “novel, high-quality scientific research” with a single N=58 study that may very well be high-quality, but in any case does not propose a novel course of treatment. It has always been the case that many gender dysphoric children do not receive puberty blockers.
You conflate the European change in medical policy, which still permits the use of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria, with American legislative bans that do not permit that. “Not routinely prescribed” is logically distinct from “never prescribed.”
Finally, you misrepresent conversion therapy. “Exploring ways to become more comfortable in one's natural body” is simply an inaccurate description of both conversion therapy as practiced in the past and “gender exploration therapy” as practiced today.
> Proponents of gender-exploratory therapy acknowledge that some consider it a form of conversion practice, paradoxically resenting the suggestion while opposing bans on conversion practices on account that it would prohibit their approach. As for critiques of gender-exploratory therapy, they are presented as evidence of trans health care’s ideological capture. Yet a close comparison of gender-exploratory therapy and conversion practices reveals many conceptual and narrative similarities. How proponents talk about gender-exploratory therapy is nearly identical to how individuals offering conversion practices targeting sexual orientation frame their own work. Despite the language of exploration, gender-exploratory therapy shares more with interrogation, if not inquisition.
Well, anyway. I cannot quote the entire article here.
> You conflate the European change in medical policy, which still permits the use of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria, with American legislative bans that do not permit that.
No, it largely does not. Most European countries at this point, if they do permit blockers at all, only permit it as part of a clinical study, not as routine treatment for gender dysphoria. This excludes all but a slim minority of (if any) patients. Pointing out that it's still legal as part of experimental trials is a nuance that doesn't affect the
>99% of patients that aren't part of a trial, and thus cannot be prescribed these substances.
Your linked publication doesn't actually interview patients who've worked with clinicians or otherwise try and dig into real-world evidence about what this clinical practice does. It's just one author postulating her opinions as fact, with no effort to back up her claims with evidence.
> But if you really are honestly curious and unbiased, M. K. Anderson wrote a well-researched article for Protean in 2022.
Wow. I've read that article and if you think that was unbiased or even-handed...
There is a tech blogger who I really don't like and this blogger happened upon a comment where I said I really didn't like anything they had written, and happened to ask, "Why?" And my answer was how deeply incurious they were, and how incurious they invited their readers to be. This blogger never acknowledge the potential they might be wrong. Even as a nodding feint to fallibility as something we simply expect of people writing about any complex topic.
I explicitly said it and every other example of the genre was biased, so I don’t know why you’re claiming otherwise. Thanks for confirming my priors on HN users.
The best I can figure is that too many people’s salaries depend on the matrix multiplier made of sand somehow manifesting a soul any day now.
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