In Israel this is done naturally by feeding children Bamba, a puffed peanut snack, at a very early age. Research shows significantly decreased levels of peanut allergy.
Bambas are recommended in the U.S. as well, but our kid entered anaphylaxis after eating just 5 bambas his first time, at about 6 months of age. It's certainly possible to have a peanut allergy despite early exposure. Recommendation in the U.S. is now for pregnant women to eat peanuts to expose the fetus in utero, but even this doesn't always work.
Kid is desensitized now after a year of oral immunotherapy, so add us to the chorus of voices saying "It works", but it can strike early and severely despite the parents' best efforts.
It's not just about early exposure to allergens, it's also early exposure to pathogens. There's a growing body of research that constant disinfection of hands and surfaces is what really caused the allergy outbreak. Humans need to prime their immune systems with exposure to pathogenic bacteria at an early age so that it can learn to fight them and not other substances which leads to allergies.
People mention this quite often to me because my toddler is on oral immunotherapy for peanuts, and there’s a small but important distinction here. It’s extra important when relatives start to think it’s okay to be casually leaving peanut products lying around within the toddler’s reach. (It’s not)
The general consensus among allergists is that early exposure reduces the chances of developing the allergy in the first place, but people on oral immunotherapy are still allergic, they just have a high tolerance and can still have anaphylactic reactions. Some will outgrow the allergy, but for peanuts most don’t and the data doesn’t yet exist for whether peanut oral immunotherapy increases the likelihood of outgrowing the allergy.
There are some early studies out [1] that indicate remission is possible with OIT. (For laypeople, "desensitization" ~= can tolerate some peanut exposure without a reaction, but still needs to carry an epipen and remain on the maintenance dose for life, while "remission" ~= no longer has a peanut allergy). The numbers were 71% desensitization and 21% remission for OIT vs. 2% both for a placebo. It was heavily dependent on age, with 71% of 1-year-olds, 35% of 2-year-olds, and 19% of 3-year-olds achieving remission.
Data will be scant at this time, because the full treatment takes a long time and needs to be adhered to closely. It's 30 weeks of OIT, followed by 2 years of a maintenance dose, followed by a 6-month hiatus to verify whether the maintenance dose can be stopped while still achieving remission, so data necessarily lags the start of any clinical trials by 3+ years.
I thought there was a study that suggested the weapon of first resort should be breastfeeding mothers eating the allergen-triggering foods so the kids get exposed to them indirectly.
Makes me wonder if there is something we should be doing with baby formula.
Yeah, we hadn't heard of this when our son was born, but the allergist mentioned it. When our daughter was born, we gave her something like this at his recommendation. The ones we got were some puffs that have a whole pile of allergens in tiny doses. Causation vs correlation and all that, and a small sample size, but our daughter doesn't have any issues with any allergies.
The economist Emily Oster wrote an excellent series of books about pregnancy anf early kid years, where she dives into details about various studies, whether they are causal, etc. It's one of the best practiacl explainations of reading research I've encountered targeted at non-academics, really well done. She has a chapter on peanut exposure allergies and i think inrecall that these early-exposure results are in fact from causal research vs just correlational research (basically there are at least two types of papers out thwre -- correlational and causal. As you might guess causal is harder to get for many reasons). Great books; she may also have published some chapters on her substack (substack came after the book I think).
I realize as I write this that you are probably saying that for your own experience you can't disentangle correlational from causation, to which I would say -- correct!
Emily Oster is a national treasure that is still flying under the radar for most people.
As above, she presents excellent science in an approachable manner for non-science minded folks. She also has enough of the technical details for this with the knowledge to be confident she has done a strong analysis.
If you are a parent and haven’t checked her stuff out, please do. (Zero affiliation or connection)
Where I grew up, mandatory military service was required, and not just for a few months but rather years.
I've seen people who quit and people, like me, who clinched their teeth and got through the whole ordeal. I myself at the time considered whether I should quit and stop wasting my precious time. I decided against, because in that society not having completed military service would be a social stain impossible to erase.
More importantly, quitting would change the way I view and value myself. I wanted to see myself as someone who performed their fair share of service back to society, and not a parasite. With the mindset I had back then, quitting would have changed my self view, and at least temporarily lost my sense of integrity. I would be a very different person today.
Looking around my social group, I might be biased but those that chose to quit military service more often than not drifted into the sidelines in terms of career, social integration, and other aspects. Of course some are absolutely fine. I can't say if that's merely correlation or actual causality, but I'm content with my loss of years spent doing something I wasn't really enjoying.
The parent comment is about doing something you don't want to do rather than doing something you don't enjoy. Important distinction. You did military service because you wanted to do it. It had real value to you. You did not continue doing something that you did not actually want to do. I would say that was a good decision for you. You didn't enjoy it but you valued it. It is easy to get these conflated.
Someone could have reasons for wanting to do something and reasons for not wanting to do it to. In the comment being discussed, that’s the desire to quit the military (the person did not want to waste their time) and the desire not to quit (not out of eating to be in the military but because those who quit faced negative consequences).
> More importantly, quitting would change the way I view and value myself. I wanted to see myself as someone who performed their fair share of service back to society, and not a parasite.
This is an insanely sad thing to read. You pay taxes, unless you're in an active war, you don't "owe" anything to the society.
True. But imo it is up to the country to decide if they think military service is a social duty, so, whatever. The idea that "taxes are all there is" is... Missing cultural relativism, I guess.
Ofc, caveat, if it's rich people deciding poor people have to do service, then yeah that's messed up. But kind of a separate issue.
> Saying the only way to 'owe' anything is through money sounds like a... weird Americanism to me (speaking as an American).
In their defense, using taxes to pay others to do the work of maintaining/defending a nation allows better specialization of labor which can have its advantages. But it needs to be balanced with actual shared effort too, especially with things like national defense.
I understand what you’re saying, but a country that only has people enlisted when they’re already at war, is not one that’s going to be very secure. Constant preparation is necessary for any nation that wants to have its own military, and being enlisted in the service absolutely counts as a “share of service back to society” to me. It can’t just be someone else’s problem forever.
> I might be biased but those that chose to quit military service more often than not drifted into the sidelines in terms of career, social integration, and other aspects.
When you phrase it like this, it seems to me that you value having a good career and social integration.
On the other hand just seems to me that one's career and social integration is exactly the sort of thing that someone who quits conscription values highly. Without more information, it seems to me that such a person as you describe may consider themself to be leading a good life (in terms of satisfaction and/or morally).
You might go to jail, or there are any number of methods to disqualify yourself from service, for instance through mental or religious reasons (which you'd presumably fake).
I'll throw this out: some people might be against military service enough that if they powered through it, they could get depressed and eventually kill themselves. Considering this, it doesn't seem optimal to stick to it
Love these choices? Wait two years and read again.
More seriously, this content should be read and evaluated divorced from the reader's personal affection for specific tools, otherwise what value did this writeup provide if your opinion was set from the get go?
The bridge is just a demo piece for the manufacturing technology.
I can’t believe this has to be said, but they’re not trying to invent bridges that go over flat land. It’s a demo piece.
This is like when someone gets a 3D printer and prints a 3D Benchy boat. Making toy boats is a solved problem, but that’s not the point of the 3D printer.
I mean, that was an airplane that flew. This is a bridge that doesn't cross anything, and we already have a ton of bridges that cross things. At best this is an art installation, but we already have a ton of 3D printed art. So the novelty factor just isn't the same.
At the end of the day, I'd be interested in what engineering challenges are being solved here. Does this no-tension-members design scale up to let vehicles pass over a river? If so, this is interesting.
Yes, that was explicitly stated in an interview[1] a while back. Quoting from the specific section:
> “Okay, well, WhatsApp — we have this very strong commitment to encryption. So if we’re going to interop, then we’re either going to make the others encrypted, or we’re going to have to decrypt WhatsApp.” And it’s like, “Alright, we’re not going to decrypt WhatsApp, so we’re going to go down the path of encrypting everything else,” which we’re making good progress on. But that basically has just meant completely rewriting Messenger and Instagram direct from scratch.
The "not fun" mentioned by the author is the same principle as good children's movies have to be genuinely scary or sad. See Disney/Pixar classics like Lion King.
The larger amplitude of emotions makes the positive ending stand out.
Amending commits, while having the advantage of keeping the git tree pristine at every single point, is incredibly uncomfortable for async workflows such as the one suggested, where your review might take hours/days and you want to continue coding in a forked branch. Upstreaming any code review changes becomes a pain as git treats the two branches as completely distinct.
