@saethlin@hachyderm.io

Ben Kimock @saethlin@hachyderm.io · May 15, 2026

Replying to @wallabra@bark.lgbt

@wallabra@bark.lgbt @eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place @neckspike@indiepocalypse.social There are air filters that remove virus-sized particles. They are available as a consumer product, and they aren't even the finest filters available. And they've been available for a long time.

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Ben Kimock @saethlin@hachyderm.io · May 03, 2026

Replying to @jyn@tech.lgbt

@jyn@tech.lgbt It's also easy to maintain exponential growth when you are small in absolute terms. (solar growth based on the graphs in the Ember report has only been accelerating for the past 6 or 7 years) I wonder how long the exponential will keep going. It's incredibly stable especially compared to the wild fluctuations in other energy sources, and the technology *is* different.

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Ben Kimock @saethlin@hachyderm.io · May 03, 2026

Replying to @saethlin@hachyderm.io

Shingles vaccination seems to reduce dementia: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)01256-5 As best I understand it the theory here is that the improvement is from having a more effective immune response to virus reactivation. So there should be an even greater benefit for those who cannot have reactivation at all because they were vaccinated against chicken pox. HPV vaccination reduces rates of a handful of cancers: https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/JCO.2024.42.16_suppl.10507 Again, as best I understand it the theory is that part of the HPV replication strategy is to hack up the infected cell's DNA to make it replicate more. Hack too much and you become a wart. Really go ham and you get a malignant tumor. And vaccination probably has a generalized anti-cancer effect: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41819102/ There was a lot of hype about mRNA vaccines after the effectiveness of Moderna's vaccine against SARS-COV-2, but I don't think I've heard any of this incredible news outside of TWiV, a niche virology podcast.

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Ben Kimock @saethlin@hachyderm.io · May 03, 2026

Replying to @saethlin@hachyderm.io

If you haven't already seen the 2026 Ember report, you should at least look at the figures: https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-review-2026/ I remember hearing *so much* about how we will need a mixture of different renewable sources, and maybe that's true. But only solar is being adopted at an accelerating rate. Solar and wind have been cheaper than fossil fuels for about a decade now. I wonder if we will remember 2025-2026 as the start of the big solar energy adoption.

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Ben Kimock @saethlin@hachyderm.io · May 03, 2026

Replying to @saethlin@hachyderm.io

This post is about https://douglasbrunt-author.com/mysterious-case-of-rudolf-diesel You should read it. Rudolf Diesel thought that his engine would bring power to the masses. And his engine had clear advantages over the competing technologies which were coal and gasoline. Diesel engines burn fuel with less exhaust than coal without the flammability of gasoline. And they don't need those fiddly spark plugs. And yet Rudolf Diesel almost completely failed to commercialize the technology. Sure there are diesel engines in use today. But think it would be hard to predict the shape of the adoption curve of gasoline and diesel based on seeing the early engines at trade shows. Or even the first models for sale on the market.

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Ben Kimock @saethlin@hachyderm.io · May 03, 2026

I've been thinking a bit more about technology the past few weeks, so I'm going to post a few ideas here, and maybe people will have interesting responses.

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Ben Kimock @saethlin@hachyderm.io · Apr 11, 2026

I sort of had a neutral opinion of Dario Amodei until I started listening to a recent interview. Ed Zitron is so right, clearly nobody is doing the most basic math here.

Dario says Anthropomorphic is growing 10x (or more!) every year. So... In 2-3 years, they would have more revenue than any other company in the world. And in another year would exceed the GDP of the USA. But the revenue has to come from somewhere. Dario says that Claude Code has gone from a 5-10% efficiency improvement for coding at launch to 15-20% now. But his best developers use it for all their work, never writing code by hand. In the USA, the mean software dev makes $138k. You can feasibly spend that much on tokens. And Dario's entire justification for that coding efficiency improvement seems to be vibes and the simple logic that his people are using Claude and shipping new versions of Claude that people are paying ever more for so its greatness must be the reason for the revenue growth.

I don't really know what to call this. Delusional? Headass? A CEO should be able to articulate a good financial argument for buying their product but Dario's seems to be vibes and circular reasoning.

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Ben Kimock @saethlin@hachyderm.io · Mar 31, 2026

Replying to @Mara@hachyderm.io

@Mara This is the best conference venue I've been to by a fair margin. The outdoor space is also really nice, I remember eating lunch one day with a few people on a ledge.

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Ben Kimock @saethlin@hachyderm.io · Mar 26, 2026

Replying to @danluu@mastodon.social

@danluu You should email daniel@microbe.tv and maybe you'll be featured on the next TWiV clinical update: https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/?s=clinical%20update

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Ben Kimock @saethlin@hachyderm.io · Dec 30, 2025

As an open-source maintainer, "seeing this too" comments on bugs that provide no new information are one of the most irritating community interactions I have.

I don't know why they are so annoying, probably some interesting psychological reason.

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Ben Kimock @saethlin@hachyderm.io · Dec 12, 2025

I love that the designers of the Cava app put the login button at the top of the screen so that the on-screen keyboard cannot cover it up. But I'm so used to it being hidden behind the keyboard that I take the extra actions to dismiss the keyboard before tapping it anyway.

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Ben Kimock @saethlin@hachyderm.io · Oct 15, 2023

Replying to @mdstevens0612@mas.to

@mdstevens0612@mas.to Not even that long ago! TF2 was big recently, right? All the wacky community servers were such a joy.

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Ben Kimock @saethlin@hachyderm.io · Nov 23, 2022

Replying to @hacks4pancakes@infosec.exchange

@hacks4pancakes@infosec.exchange I seem to have skipped straight to stage 4 infosec. Did I miss out?

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