> No, there is Github Copilot, the AI agent tool that also has autocomplete, and a chat UI.
When it came out, Github Copilot was an autocomplete tool. That's it. That may be what the OP was originally using. That's what I used... 2 years ago. That they change the capabilities but don't change the name, yet change names on services that don't change capabilities further illustrates the OP's point, I would say.
To be fair, Github Copilot (itself a horrible name) has followed the same arc as Cursor, from AI-enhanced editor with smart autocomplete, to more of an IDE that now supports agentic "vibe coding" and "vibe editing" as well.
I do agree that conceptually there is a big difference between an editor, even with smart autocomplete, and an agentic coding tool, as typified by Claude Code and other CLI tools, where there is not necessarily any editor involved at all.
Thanks... 2 years felt a bit too recent. I think I was trialing copilot in late 2022, and then got turned on to ... codeium/windsurf in late 2023. The years are merging together now. :/
That's silly. Gmail is a wildly different product than it was when it launched, but I guess it doesn't count since the name is the same?
Microsoft may or may not have a "problem" with naming, but if you're going to criticize a product, it's always a good starting place to know what you're criticizing.
The confusion is when I say “I have a terrible time using Copilot, I don’t recommend using it” and someone chimes in with how great their experience with Github Copilot is, a completely different product and how I must be “holding it wrong” when that is not the same Copilot. That Microsoft has like 5 different products all using Copilot in the name, even people in this very comment section are only saying “Copilot” so it is hard to know what product they are talking about!
I mean, sure. But aside from the fact that everything in AI gets reduced to a single word ("Gemini", "ChatGPT", "Claude") [1], it's clearly not an excuse for misrepresenting the functionality of the product when you're writing a post broadly claiming that their AI products don't work.
Github Copilot is actually a pretty good tool.
[1] Not just AI. This is true for any major software product line, and why subordinate branding exists.
I specifically mention that my experience is with the Office 365 Copilot and how terrible that is and in online discussions I mention this and then people jump out of the woodwork to talk about how great Github Copilot is so thank you for demonstrating that exact experience I have every time I mention Copilot :)
GitHub Copilot is available from website https://github.com/copilot together with services like Spark (not available from other places), Spaces, Agents etc.
This absolutely sucks, especially since tool calling uses tokens really really fast sometimes. Feels like a not-so-gentle nudge to using their 'official' tooling (read: vscode); even though there was a recent announcement about how GHCP works with opencode: https://github.blog/changelog/2026-01-16-github-copilot-now-...
No mention of it being severely gimped by the context limit in that press release, of course (tbf, why would they lol).
However, if you go back to aider, 128K tokens is a lot, same with web chat... not a total killer, but I wouldn't spend my money on that particular service with there being better options!
If it makes you feel any better, the problem you’re describing is as old as peer review. The authors of a paper only have to get accepted once, and they have a lot more incentive to do so than you do to reject their work as an editor or reviewer.
This is one of the reasons you should never accept a single publication at face value. But this isn’t a bug — it’s part of the algorithm. It’s just that most muggles don’t know how science actually works. Once you read enough papers in an area, you have a good sense of what’s in the norm of the distribution of knowledge, and if some flashy new result comes over the transom, you might be curious, but you’re not going to accept it without a lot more evidence.
This situation is different, because it’s a case where an extremely popular bit of accepted wisdom is both wrong, and the system itself appears to be unwilling to acknowledge the error.
Back when I listened to NPR, I shook my fist at the radio every time Shankar Vidantim came on to explain the latest scientific paper. Whatever was being celebrated, it was surely brand new. It's presentation on Morning Edition gave it the imprimature of "Proofed Science", and I imagined it getting repeated at every office lunch and cocktail party. I never heard a retraction.
Please don't lazily conclude that he's gone crazy because it doesn't align with your prior beliefs. His work on Covid was just as rigorous as anything else he's done, but it's been unfairly villainized by the political left in the USA. If you disagree with his conclusions on a topic, you'd do well to have better reasoning than "the experts said the opposite".
Ioannidis' work during Covid raised him in my esteem. It's rare to see someone in academics who is willing to set their own reputation on fire in search of truth.
Vinay Prasad is an oncologist who made his career calling out many of the FDA’s brazenly stupid oncology drug approvals, so I am shocked - shocked! - that the creator of that process would be unhappy with his leadership.
“Foxes agree that henhouse security changes will lead to hungry animals.” News at 11.
Go watch or listen to Plenary Session, and you'll have direct access to his thoughts. My ability to rehash Prasad's arguments doesn't have any bearing on what I wrote.
The world will be greener in a high-CO2 environment. There’s no legitimate argument over that fact.
Where you go wrong is in misrepresenting the argument as “more plants and food”. That’s a straw man. Certainly it’s more favorable for growth of plants that make food, but that doesn’t mean that existing patterns of food production will exist unchanged, or that adaptation won’t be required. But we’re also talking about a 100+ year change timeline. People who tell you that this year’s weather are indicative of urgent, rapid change are exaggerating.
You seem to be willing to accept wild extrapolations of doom without evidence, while rejecting scientifically well-founded statements of fact, so I’d challenge you to examine your priors.
> The world will be greener in a high-CO2 environment. There’s no legitimate argument over that fact.
However it's important to remember that world isn't a high school physics experiment, and you can't easily separate out CO2 concentration from the other impacts of increased CO2:
| Climate change can prolong the plant growing season and expand the areas suitable for crop planting, as well as promote crop photosynthesis thanks to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. However, an excessive carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere may lead to unbalanced nutrient absorption in crops and hinder photosynthesis, respiration, and transpiration, thus affecting crop yields. Irregular precipitation patterns and extreme weather events such as droughts and floods can lead to hypoxia and nutrient loss in the plant roots. An increase in the frequency of extreme weather events directly damages plants and expands the range of diseases and pests. In addition, climate change will also affect soil moisture content, temperature, microbial activity, nutrient cycling, and quality, thus affecting plant growth.
> Certainly it’s more favorable for growth of plants that make food
That does not seem to be what agricultural researchers believe:
| In wheat a mean daily temperature of 35°C caused total failure of the plant, while exposure to short episodes (2–5 days) of HS (>24°C) at the reproductive stage (start of flowering) resulted in substantial damage to floret fertility leading to an estimated 6.0 ± 2.9% loss in global yield with each degree-Celsius (°C) increase in temperature
| Although it might be argued that the ‘fertilization effect’ of increasing CO2 concentration may benefit crop biomass thus raising the possibility of an increased food production, emerging evidence has demonstrated a reduction in crop yield if increased CO2 is combined with high temperature and/or water scarcity, making a net increase in crop productivity unlikely
| When the combination of drought and heatwave is considered, production losses considering cereals including wheat (−11.3%), barley (−12.1%) and maize (−12.5%), and for non-cereals: oil crops (−8.4%), olives (−6.2%), vegetables (−3.5%), roots and tubers (−4.5%), sugar beet (−8.8%), among others
> you can't easily separate out CO2 concentration from the other impacts of increased CO2
>> I never said you could?
I took the fact that you explicitly mentioned "high-CO2 environment" and claimed there was no room for argument over the "fact"s as an indication that you were trying to separate out the impact of CO2 from other factors caused by climate change such as heat stress and drought. If that wasn't the case then apologies for misunderstanding.
> That paper is talking about a net reduction in biomass due to projected losses in places with temperature increases exceeding 10 degrees C.
The abstract says:
| with great biomass reductions in regions where mean annual temperatures exceeded 10 °C
Unless the abstract is especially badly written that suggests that it's not 10°C _change_ but 2°C change leading to biomass loss in areas that are already at 10°C on average.
> IPCC report
Thanks, that's a useful reference! Do you have a link to the final report? That one seems to be a draft and I didn't find the right published version (but there are many so I'm sure I'm missing it).
I note the paragraph you quoted concludes:
> The increased greening is largely consistent with CO2 fertilization at the global scale, with other changes being noteworthy at the regional level (Piao et al., 2020); examples include agricultural intensification in China and India (Chen et al., 2019; Gao et al., 2019) and temperature increases in the northern high latitudes (Kong et al., 2017; Keenan and Riley, 2018) and in other areas such as the Loess Plateau in central China (Wang et al., 2018). Notably, some areas (such as parts of Amazonia, central Asia, and the Congo basin) have experienced browning (i.e., decreases in green leaf area and/or mass) (Anderson et al., 2019; Gottschalk et al., 2016; Hoogakker et al., 2015). Because rates of browning have exceeded rates of greening in some regions since the late 1990s, the increase in global greening has been somewhat slower in the last two decades
So it sounds like a combination of the CO2 increases up to about the year 2000, along with agricultural intensification and various other factors have indeed increased the amount of plant cover, but we are already seeing changes to that picture with further rises to CO2 levels.
> You spent a lot of words arguing with me about things I didn't say.
Well you started with
> The world will be greener in a high-CO2 environment. There’s no legitimate argument over that fact.
And my central point is that the model you're implying there is one in which there's a monotonic relationship between CO2 levels and plant growth. However in reality things are clearly more complex than that, and there is indeed legitimate argument over what factors are dominant in different scenarios.
Your claim that things will only change over long-enough timescales so that you don't have to worry about also seems to lack evidence. In systems with significant feedback loops it seems dangerous to assume that changes will only happen slowly unless you're very confident that you fully understand all the system dynamics. With climate change it's clear that we don't fully understand the system, and some changes are happening faster than earlier models predicted. So _maybe_ we have a few centuries to figure out how to move global agriculture to northern latitudes, and deal with more variable conditions, but from a risk-analysis point of view it seems like a rather poor strategy.
The conclusion is the same, though they've added a paragraph talking about browning in some areas "somewhat slowing" the rate of aggregate increase since the late 90s. Conclusion is unchanged, and in fact, they strengthened it versus the draft by directly attributing it to CO2:
"The increased greening is largely consistent with CO2 fertilization at the global scale, with other changes being noteworthy at the regional level (Piao et al., 2020)"
> So it sounds like a combination of the CO2 increases up to about the year 2000, along with agricultural intensification and various other factors have indeed increased the amount of plant cover, but we are already seeing changes to that picture with further rises to CO2 levels.
Not really. The observations are also made in uninhabited areas. See above.
> And my central point is that the model you're implying there is one in which there's a monotonic relationship between CO2 levels and plant growth.
I said nothing about a monotonic relationship. I said that the earth will have more plants (plant mass, really) with more CO2. This is inevitable. It could follow a monotonic relationship, or it could do something else as factors shift. For example, one big, unpredictable factor that likely swamps everything else, is the randomness of human behavior.
> However in reality things are clearly more complex than that, and there is indeed legitimate argument over what factors are dominant in different scenarios.
No. Greening is occurring, and has been for some time. We have multiple lines of evidence. The IPCC report confidence is high. The only debate is over what might happen in the future, which, again, is fortune telling -- involving not only the climate system, but the actions of people.
> In systems with significant feedback loops it seems dangerous to assume that changes will only happen slowly unless you're very confident that you fully understand all the system dynamics.
I grant you that one can imagine theoretical scenarios in which all sorts of doomy feedback loops happen. The problem with that kind of imaginative exercise is that you have to bring evidence of their existence. So far, with regard to global vegetation, no such evidence exists, and in fact, the opposite of the doom loop scenario is occurring.
Could this change? Maybe! But that's just storytelling right now.
You made a scale-free claim about increasing greenness with increasing CO2 concentration. That implies a monotonic relationship.
> The only debate is over what might happen in the future, which, again, is fortune telling
The idea that using models of physical systems to predict their future evolution is "fortune telling" will surprise many scientists. Indeed, you yourself have proposed a simple model and used it to make a prediction about the future ("the world will be greener in a high-CO2 environment"), and used linear extrapolation of the past to justify the adequacy of your model.
That's not necessarily a bad starting point, but when actual studies with more complex models show different behaviours you should consider there's a possibility you're over-confident in your predictions.
Anyway, I suspect this conversation has become rather pointless. It's always unclear online to what extent people are engaging in good faith, but if it was then I'm rather sure you've now mentally pigeonholed me as a "doomer" who can't be reasoned with.
Its exactly the opposite. Plants grow larger with higher CO2. And they also reduce in digestive quality significantly as more of the material is lignin.
> At the levels of concentration of CO2 we’re seeing, plants are decreasing in size. Trees grow smaller.
No, they don't. Not due to CO2, anyway (maybe temperature, or changes in precipitation for particular plants).
Even if you want to (inaccurately) argue that specific plants will grow smaller, abundant CO2 will lead to more plants.
> There’s a balance to how much CO2 plants can adapt to and absorb while maintaining their growth and yields.
Again, no. Plants are limited by their genetics, and the availability of inputs, one of the most important of which is carbon. CO2 does not limit a plant's growth. That's just silly.
> Right, my bad... it's not directly the CO2 but the effects of CO2 on climate that is restricting plant growth overall [0]. The net effect is the same.
The net effect is not the same. The net effect is that the earth has been getting greener, in multiple measurable ways, since at least the 1980s.
See my sibling comments containing the IPCC AR6 report citations, where they state that this global greening is happening, and has been happening for decades, with high confidence.
There’s low confidence in the magnitude of this effect in that report.
I don’t think these two things are strongly related.
More leaf surface area and biomass is increasing in tandem with climate models. But there have also been observations that the size and quality of individuals has been affected.
I never personally wanted Tailwind as a product, but really feel for them when I see comments like this one [1]:
> Here's a friendly tip for the Tailwind team that you should already know, but I will repeat anyways: If your goal is monetizing your software, then making your software as easy to use for people's workflows, is paramount.
I made the horrible life mistake of starting a company around developer tools, and I would never, ever repeat the experience because of “friendly” stuff like this. I don’t know why software developers are so entitled, but it’s a serious culture problem.
I also made a horrible life decision in starting a company around developer tools, and I agree. Taking one of the comments from the PR:
> It's insane to blame everybody else for not being able to create a viable business model from an OSS project. Everybody who is using Tailwind is actually SUPPORTING Tailwind. Everybody who is reporting bugs properly is SUPPORTING Tailwind. Everybody who is collaborating and PRs changes is SUPPORTING Tailwind.
> Tailwind grew a lot due to community acceptance and support, and collaborations.
> The only person to blame here is the CEO/Main maintainer of Tailwind. They've made bad decisions, hired coders without knowing how to make enough money to pay them.
> If you want to monetize a free service, you either know what you do or you make mistakes and lose what you've built. It was always a risk; we are not at fault.
> @adamwathan I respect you for everything you've done, but you need to take a few breaths, take a walk, think, sleep, and come back, ask apologize of the community, and start working on solutions/crisis management.
And you always know that when you open the GH profile of people saying such things, you'll see an empty timeline. This particular user has a single repository which he's committed to a handful of times over the last year and has setup a GitHub sponsorship for it.
I try to remind myself that these types of people are a (loud) minority but it's absolutely soul destroying.
Yep. I almost edited my comment to include that one as well! "Insane", indeed.
As you note, the tire-kickers were the worst -- people who forked the Linux kernel (with no additional commits) trying to process the entire repo on a free plan, for example, then complaining (loudly) when cut off.
You missed three very important caveats that complicate the story you’re trying to tell:
1) not every strain of HPV causes cancer (iirc, the bad ones are rare).
2) many people (in fact, most people) who are active in the world have been infected with at least one strain of HPV.
3) it’s common to have asymptomatic HPV infections. you probably have one now.
one more:
4) the vaccines likely have little effect on anything unless you were vaccinated as a child (and are a biological woman).
Overall, it’s a situation where you’re asking that sexual partners “disclose”
something that the partner probably already has, if they bothered to be tested for it to begin with. Moreover, nobody does these tests (in men, at least), because there’s no point to doing them, other than creating anxiety.
I will leave the nuances of bioethics to other people, but it’s not as clear a situation as you’re making it out to be.
One final thing: these infections aren’t “permanent”. They generally clear naturally in a few years.
> 4) the vaccines likely have little effect on anything unless you were vaccinated as a child (and are a biological woman).
This guidance is changing. Vaccinating men protects women. Also just because you were infected with one strain, that doesn't mean you can't contract another, possibly oncogenic one. Get vaccinated, it protects against the most common cancer-causing strains. I did, why would I want to unknowingly give someone cancer?
>> 4) the vaccines likely have little effect on anything unless you were vaccinated as a child (and are a biological woman).
> This guidance is changing. Vaccinating men protects women.
Yeah, it was fucking like pulling teeth getting my HPV vaccine as an adult male. "It's for teenage girls" comments from multiple health care professionals.
I only took the first fucking dose in the regime, and none of my health care providers now offer low cost or covered options. I had to spend Covid money when I had it. I still need the rest of the regime.
It’s “like pulling teeth” because the guidance isn’t changing (at least not because of evidence).
There seems to be a very motivated contingency who want to spin a story that male vaccination for HPV has benefits for women. The problems with this story are:
1) Efficacy of the current vaccines for women are incredibly high. Vaccinating young women, alone, is basically enough. Whatever benefits you're imagining must therefore be marginal.
2) Efficacy of current vaccines for men are (surprisingly) low [1], so it’s hard to claim secondary benefits for other people without substantial additional evidence.
It’s perfectly OK to acknowledge that the HPV vaccine is an overall good, should be on the schedule for young women, and yet does not need to be administered to men. Giving it to men (particularly older men) is not supported by data at this time, which is why your doctors don’t make it easy for you to get it.
See table 4. In a naive population of men, the efficacy against DNA detection of HPV runs around 50%, and in men who may or may not have the virus, the number is lower. Efficacy against persistent infection is similar. Compare to tables 1-3 for women, where efficacy nears 100% in some populations.
It's a relatively new vaccine, this commonly happens for a few reasons:
1. They start with a cautious roll out to the highest lifetime risk population (teenage girls in this case)
2. They may be limited by vaccine stocks as it does take time to build up product. There's an entire world to vaccinate, billions of doses needed
3. They need time to prove that it will be useful to give to other populations - in this case, adults
There's no conspiracy here, you had to push to get it because you were going against the existing recommendations, which were reasonable. Not because of your gender.
Those recommendations have likely changed recently because when I went in for shots last month (male, 40s) they immediately recommended that me and my partner both get it.
The situation is pretty clear when you're a woman who got cancer from her boyfriend who knew he had HPV and didn't tell her, or didn't get vaccinated because he didn't feel like it. I think most people would want to avoid that situation. The genital warts thing is just embarrassing but another good-enough reason to get vaccinated early.
On Permanence: 10-20% of HPV infections either don't go away, or go dormant and recur throughout your lifetime. These strains are the ones likely to cause cancer. Low-risk ones cause genital warts that continue causing warts throughout your lifetime. High-risk ones may cause cancer.
The vaccine is available up until 45 years old. Worst case it does nothing, best case it prevents genital warts and cancer.
> The situation is pretty clear when you're a woman who got cancer from her boyfriend who knew he had HPV and didn't tell her
You can make up “just so” stories to justify anything.
The point is, the story you’re telling isn’t likely to occur if the woman is vaccinated.
The vaccine is incredibly effective in young women, and only borderline effective if administered in older men and women who have never been infected. Long-term efficacy in young men is less certain than for young women.
> Low-risk ones cause genital warts that continue causing warts throughout your lifetime.
Again, no. Most infections clear on their own. You are correct that rarely some infections are persistent or dormant, and that these sometimes lead to cancer. But these are the minority.
> It is done less routinely, usually under assumption that since it is women who are mostly at risk, why bother testing men. Which is horrible mindset in anything related to epidemiology.
No. The general reason that people don't do the test for men is that DNA testing is extremely sensitive, and produces a lot of false positives for a virus that is widespread.
It's also not actionable. You can't treat an asymptomatic infection, and a positive leads to the same outcome they would give anyway: use physical barriers and abstinence.
(Edit: hilariously, your first link says exactly what I just wrote, at the very top of the page. Did you read it?)
The claim I refuted is that there are no test for men (there are). Not sure why you want to get needlessly argumentative here, repeating things I already linked (sic!).
Sure, test from penis has lower specificity and sensitivity that for cervix, but it is not binary "works or not" (as side note, just measuring from urethra is rarely enough [1]). Life is probability, and it is a huge fallacy to believe that things work 100% or 0%, nothing in between (rarely the case in medicine).
Results are actionable on many ways. Most important, screening for female partners, informed risk for partners or your on safety for ones partners (condoms BTW reduce infection rates, but do not fully protect, as HPV can be on other parts of skin).
[1]
> The overall prevalence of HPV was 65.4%. HPV detection was highest at the penile shaft (49.9% for the full cohort and 47.9% for the subcohort of men with complete sampling), followed by the glans penis/coronal sulcus (35.8% and 32.8%) and scrotum (34.2% and 32.8%). Detection was lowest in urethra (10.1% and 10.2%) and semen (5.3% and 4.8%) samples. Exclusion of urethra, semen, and either perianal, scrotal, or anal samples resulted in a <5% reduction in prevalence.
I quoted you, and responded specifically to the quote. The reason doctors don’t offer the test is not because of some straw man arguments (“a horrible mindset…”) involving their diminished judgment of importance of the virus in men, as you assert.
You keep saying things in these sub threads that are factually incorrect in some important way that hides nuance, or otherwise seems calculated to provoke outrage. This was another example, which I why I replied here.
so far the comments are adding more vectors to understanding the situation, but nothing that fundamentally changes the user experience
I think the most insightful thing is that there are 9 HPV variants some of which someone wouldn't have exposure to so its worthwhile to get the vaccine anyway
but other than that, the situation is the same. for men's age the utility of the vaccine is based on probability alone, as its a waste of resources to even attempt checking for prior/current exposure
Parent is overstating the case. Neither infection nor vaccination provides sterilizing immunity [1], but the general reasons to prefer vaccination are (in order of descending quality of evidence & reasoning):
1) you probably haven't had all N strains yet.
2a) you likely haven't been infected with the ones that cause cancer, because they're relatively rare.
2b) ...that is especially true if you're young and not sexually active.
2) being infected with one strain does not provide sterilizing cross-immunity against the other strains.
3) even if you've been infected with a strain, some of the vaccines have been shown to prevent reinfection and reactivation better than natural infection alone.
4) in general, the vaccination-mediated immunity might last longer or be "stronger" than the natural version, since the vaccines are pretty immunogenic, and the viruses are not.
But for point 4, it's well-known that vaccine efficacy is lower for people who have already seroconverted (cf [1]), so there's clearly some amount of practical immunity provided by infection.
[1] The vaccines are roughly 90% effective for the major cancer-causing strains, but it's not a simple answer, and varies a lot by how you frame the question. See table 2 here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8706722/
Also be sure to see table 4 if you're a man. The data for biological men and women are surprisingly different!
A question for your doctor and your partner (and of course, you can read the data in the link I posted above and use that to influence your conversation and decision!)
I'm not being avoidant here -- medical decisions are always subjective and multi-factor, and I can't begin to tell you what you should do. (But I also sincerely believe that propagandists try to reduce nuanced data to talking points, which is equally wrong.)
Please note the caveat about gender that I just added. The data for biological men and women are very different. Also, I haven't discussed risks at all, which is the other side of the ledger -- these vaccines are pretty darned safe, but everything comes with risk, and only you can decide what level of risk is appropriate for your life.
I usually am pro vaccine. But the HPV vaccine discussion seems politicized to me. As someone who is monogamous and over fifty, I had trouble following the risk vs reward discussion. The CDC says it is only recommended for young adults so I interpret that for my case the answer is negative.
All vaccination is now heavily politicized in the US. HPV vaccination was an obvious focal point initially because of why we'd do it when we do.
The initial data says you should vaccinate somewhere around 12-14 year old girls because most of them will be HPV naive but if you wait longer they won't be any more. But too many US parents cannot imagine their little girl ever having sex and if they never have sex they almost certainly won't contract HPV so, why are we vaccinating them? Are you trying to make my daughter a slut?
If you've been a teenage American this should strike you as very silly, and doubly so if you understand biology. Teenage girls are not, in fact, celibate by default, so some of them will get horny. And if you understand biology the viral infections aren't caused by the same mechanism as pregnancy "sexual activity" is a shorthand, you can easily get infected while steering clear of anything that would get somebody knocked up. A peck on grandma's cheek is unlikely to work, but if you're sucking face for most of a Stranger Things episode that's definitely enough that you might contract HPV.
> recommended for young adults so I interpret that for my case the answer is negative.
You need to be careful making assumptions.
Previously that recommendation was due to limited vaccine production and trying to prioritize young women.
There were CDC recommendations during covid that were not about what was best for you individually.
As always with health, the right answer is to seek professional advice. But also to take personal responsibility for your own choices (that depend on your specific circumstances).
Same, what is the risk/reward for someone who is and plans to be monogamous. Young or old. Cost not a concern. Give me the info and let me decide for myself, my kids, my parents.
> Same, what is the risk/reward for someone who is and plans to be monogamous. Young or old. Cost not a concern. Give me the info and let me decide for myself, my kids, my parents.
Did I read this correctly? You are going to decide for your children based on their plans to be monogamous?
And you’re also going to decide for your parents? I can only assume you’re in the unfortunate situation where your parents are no longer capable of making decisions?
I don't want to assume, so I'll ask if you're willing to share - are you making the implicit assumption that your kids are and/or will be monogamous, and is that assumption a key factor in your decision on their vaccinations?
The CDC recommendation to get it at 11 or 12 does not make sense to me. I know they aren’t having sex - and I know that some kids do. We will discuss, together, the pros/cons as they get older to see if it makes sense. As they get older, they’ll make these decisions themselves. Until then, I’m weighing the pros/cons and in our case, it doesn’t seem they are at risk in the near future.
The early recommendation age just falls out of the data that shows the vaccine is substantially more effective if you haven't been infected yet, together with the fact that it's a multi-dose vaccine where the second dose comes months later, and realistically for many that's going to mean a year or more before completing the series.
I think there's truth to the idea that the specific 11-12 range is somewhat arbitrary: as much as anything it's that because there was a preexisting "slot" in the vaccine schedule at 11-12. The American Academy of Pediatrics differs from the CDC's panel on this... but on the earlier side: they would start the recommendation at age 9. I think to a significant degree the thinking there is that if you go earlier the messaging and reaction is more "your child will probably eventually have sex and this is an effective time to give the vaccine" and less "your child will be having sex like, tomorrow."
I am a parent who vaccinated my daughter at 9 for HPV, and my son will be vaccinated as soon as he’s old enough, without delay or hesitation. It is my opinion you are doing a disservice to your children with a suboptimal mental model, potentially driven by emotion instead of data.
Your children will have sexual contact with another human eventually as they grow into adults, and there is very low risk with an HPV vaccine. There is, in my opinion, no reason not to vaccinate as soon as possible (considering the material reduction in future cancer risk, and that there is no cure once infected, only prevention via vaccination). You might have feelings, as many have strong feelings, but they won’t matter once your kids are 18 and you no longer control them. Google the stats on parental estrangement.
Try to do better, you are a guardian of your children, not an owner, and your values will potentially not be their values. I don’t care with who or when my children have sexual experiences with once they are old enough to consent, what matters is they are respected, as well as protected from harm and poor health outcomes from these experiences they will certainly have eventually during their lifetimes. If you don’t think your kids are going to have sex when they’re older, or think you can control it, you are lying to yourself. So, protect them from what you can, which in this case is HPV.
Let me start by saying I am mostly in agreement with what you've written. But I do not understand why there is the urgency to vaccinate them when they are 9 (as you did).
Because the United States is rapidly devolving, including around vaccine recommendations and what availability and access might look like because of that, and my child and I were already at the pediatrician that day. Administering the vaccine and me asking the pediatrician “can we do it today?” cost me nothing beyond the time. If I need to find them their second dose elsewhere six months after the first (unlikely, but possible), I am prepared for that, but once they have that second dose, they have the persistent health benefit with very little effort required (regardless of what the future looks like). I’ve just lowered their future cancer risk, with no more than an hour or two of time.
I work in risk management, and have for almost a decade, so that’s how my brain is wired to evaluate and manage risk. I understand others may decision and action differently. Low cost, low risk, high reward choice? That’s a damn good deal, I’ll take that deal.
Pretty sure this line never convinced anyone of anything. We all want to do "better" but have different definitions of what that constitutes.
> If you don’t think your kids are going to have sex when they’re older, or think you can control it, you are lying to yourself.
I don't think anyone thinks this. Some people do hope and expect their children not to have sex outside of a monogamous marriage. If you give your kid a vaccine that is primarily meant for people who do not do this, you are letting your kid know that you don't really have faith in them.
That sends a strong message that some people do not want to send. As GP said, you're free to raise your kids different, and if you don't place value on reserving sex for marriage, it would make sense that you would do differently.
"Sending a message" is generally a cover term for evil.
And there is no issue of having faith in them--you are trying to make a decision you have no right to make. You're a parent, not a slavemaster.
The real world data is that the "good" girls are more likely to get pregnant, more likely to get STDs. And more likely to end up in bad marriages.
And lets add another data point. I used to have a bunch of coworkers from a very conservative background. An unmarried person would not be able to buy a condom in town type conservative. Over the course of many years I became aware of many marriages--and every single marriage was either arranged or due to pregnancy. Every single one. Remember, one of the definitions of insanity is keeping trying the same thing and expecting a different outcome.
Neither does a parent, based on all available evidence, and multiple jurisdictions make vaccination compulsory without exception. Parents aren’t special, and they are failing in this regard by believing they should have a right to say no, simply for being a parent. Anyone, broadly speaking, can have children. That does not make them good or qualified parents unfortunately. It just makes them temporary guardians (until their children are adults) with an opinion.
~54% of Americans read below a sixth grade reading level, for example. We would trust your average American’s judgement on vaccination need or schedule, especially for their children, why?
> based on all available evidence, and multiple jurisdictions make vaccination compulsory without exception
Can you share which jurisdictions mandate the HPV vaccine and have no exceptions? I am aware of only a few jurisdictions where it is required, and all such jurisdictions have exceptions.
They also only require it for kids in schools, so any kid who is homeschooled is not subject to the mandate in the first place.
More importantly, the vast, vast majority of jurisdictions have no mandate whatsoever, so any parent can also choose to move to one of those, in addition to the homeschool option.
Ah ok I'd be curious to know what those are, though I would find them to be less persuasive/relevant from a policy perspective. There are countries that have no freedom of speech, outlaw non-govt schools, etc., and I don't want to be taking cues from such countries.
Regardless, I would imagine that very few jurisdictions, and a relatively small percentage of the world, lives somewhere that mandates these vaccines and has no opt-outs.
No, you have an obligation to do the best job you reasonably can with raising children. We generally do not permit parents to do things which pose an undue risk to their children, and most of the exceptions to this involve religion being given a weight it shouldn't get.
Trying to make sex more dangerous to me falls squarely in the realm of child abuse.
For a 9, 10, or 11 year old? I'm definitely not encouraging them to have sex.
I surely hope we go after actual child abusers than parents who delay or opt-out of this OPTIONAL vaccination for their kids.
The problem here is the do-it-later crowd is going to wait too long. Same thing as we see with sex-ed, knowledge is treated as encouraging when reality says it's exactly the opposite. Honest sex ed leads to later sex and fewer problems.
Well, hope and faith are not effective strategies. Good luck to those who operate from this perspective, they will face disappointment, which is theirs to own. Monogamous marriage is a shrinking minority of potential outcomes [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6], and ~40% of first marriages end in divorce [7] (rates are higher for second and third marriages).
The kids of these people get a chance to do better when they become adults, and that's all we can hope for: that they make better choices than their parents. Better luck next generation I suppose.
[1] How has marriage in the US changed over time? - https://usafacts.org/articles/state-relationships-marriages-... - February 11th, 2025 ("In 2024, US adults were less likely to be married than at almost any point since the Census Bureau began tracking marital status in 1940. The percentage of households with a married couple peaked 75 years ago: in 1949, it was 78.8%. That percentage has been below 50.0% since 2010, when the rate was 49.7%. In other words, less than half of American households have included a married couple for over a decade.")
[2] Charted: How American Households Have Changed Over Time (1960-2023) - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-american-households-hav... - November 6th, 2024 ("More Americans today are delaying or forgoing marriage altogether, with just 20% of women and 23% of men aged 25 being married—the lowest on record. Projections indicate that by 2050, one-third of Americans aged 45 may remain unmarried.")
[3] Morgan Stanley: Rise of the SHEconomy - https://www.morganstanley.com/ideas/womens-impact-on-the-eco... - September 23rd, 2019 ("Based on Census Bureau historical data and Morgan Stanley forecasts, 45% of prime working age women (ages 25-44) will be single by 2030—the largest share in history—up from 41% in 2018.")
> Well, hope and faith are not effective strategies. Good luck to those who operate from this perspective, they will face disappointment, which is theirs to own.
Hm, worked great for many people I know. I can imagine it would depend on a number of factors.
But looking at your links, they don't seem especially relevant to the question of whether more people are having sex before marriage than before. They don't even mention the word "sex" in fact. And of course, the relevant question isn't whether people in general are having sex before marriage less, it's whether people raised in families where abstention is valued are upholding that value in their lives.
But congrats on sharing lots of links, which makes it look like evidence is on your side!
As to whether "hope and faith are not effective strategies", it probably makes sense to listen to the experience of people who rely on such hope and faith in their lives, and who have many friends/family who do. People who express outward disdain for such things are probably not the best source of reliable info on the matter.
I understand that religiosity (faith and hope) is negatively correlated to intelligence, so I also understand faith driven mental models are an uphill climb to better health outcomes at scale. "It is what it is." As I mentioned, perhaps we'll have better luck next generation, when systems have improved in this regard.
(edit: facts and data are not unkind, they just are, and I feel like I have been very polite in my delivery of all facts and data presented; if you are unhappy about the facts and data presented, that is an internal issue to reconcile)
That's a pretty longwinded ad hominem you've got right there.
Forgive me for not digging into your links again...fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
You're entitled to your opinion, but when you go around spouting about faith not being a good strategy and then cite a bunch of unrelated articles, you've shown that you are yourself not very intelligent (or kind).
"Faith" is fundamentally belief without knowledge. Thus you by definition have no reason to rely on it. (Although the word also gets used in situations where there is a track record to rely on but no specific evidence in the particular case.)
And you're using the wrong yardstick. What you should be looking at is the number of adverse events. STDs. Unintended pregnancies.
Everyone hopes for and has faith in their kids with regard to some actions. It could be going to class, staying out of gangs, not drinking/doing drugs. We don't know for a fact our kids will do what we hope, but we act in a way that shows we have faith in them, so as to avoid undermining their confidence.
I don't need to use the yardstick you propose. There are many confounders in aggregate data, and there are not public polls that capture the demographics and beliefs of my family. It would be a fool's errand to pretend that publicly available data is somehow more important than my own understanding of my kids.
It's funny how you think I shouldn't be able to make decisions for my children, but you seem to think that you know better than me what is right for them.
The available data indicates that you're wrong. You *think* you know, you don't.
Would it be acceptable to not belt your kids because you have faith in your driving skills? (And never mind that the one time in my life where a seat belt mattered was when I was essentially PITted by someone who didn't look left. I walked away with nothing but a pulled muscle and because I was belted my foot correctly found the brake pedal while I was spinning around and totally disorientated.)
Or how about the woman from ~30 years back that said that DUI doesn't really matter if your faith is strong enough as god will protect you.
Not belting your kids when you put them in the car is unsafe and is illegal. However, not getting your 9 year old a vaccine for STDs is not unsafe if that kid is not sexually active, and therefore not at risk for contracting the STD. As the kid gets older, the calculus changes because they are more independent. But pretty much any responsible parent has a very accurate sense of whether their 9 year old is having sex.
And the parents who have a sexually active 9 year old that they do not realize is sexually active are probably not taking them in for their regular doctor appts and vaccines.
It's not that they'll be active at 9. Rather, that you don't know when they'll be active and the ones who see this as encouraging sex will delay too long. Thus it's better to do it early.
I'll never understand how differences of opinion can make people so extreme. Child abuse is a serious issue and you have gone through some mental gymnastics to conflate child abuse with my decision to not vaccinate my 9, 10 or 11 year old child for HPV.
You get to make your own health choices here, but as someone who got the vaccine in my 30s, I am glad as I didn’t know about my future divorce when I got vaccinated.
Consider that it's possible that the person's partner may have exposed them to their then-unknown extra partners, creating one of the conditions for the divorce.
There are other STDs that you'd still be at risk of getting/giving in the case of infidelity, so getting this one vaccine doesn't actually make things all good. I imagine for some people, the thought of possibly bringing home a disease would actually be a sufficient deterrent to prevent infidelity. Not just because they wouldn't want to infect their partner, but because they know it could lead to them getting caught.
I'll elaborate: if you are worried about being unfaithful, or your spouse being unfaithful, then protecting yourself against one STD might seem like a good idea. And if the risk of unfaithfulness is very high, then it is better to mitigate one STD rather than none.
But the fact remains that you are still at risk of many other STDs, so you can still bring home (or have brought home) plenty of other diseases.
The last point, which I knew some people here would dislike, is that the possibility of HPV transmission could, on the margin, discourage some people from being unfaithful. This is because it would be a telltale sign of infidelity, and would cause the spouse to investigate.
Granted, this is only the case where the spouse knew he/she did not have HPV before (mostly people who remained celibate before marriage). If you had many partners before marriage, this advice probably doesn't resonate, but for people who did it makes perfect sense. It acknowledges the risk of infidelity and creates additional accountability by not shielding one's self from a likely telltale sign.
Think about your future health while your mind is clear. After the trauma of divorce is not the time.
Also, I think these questions are in bad faith.
It is actually hard to get people to change any behavior. The public health benefits should be a primary concern. Avoid vaccination if there is a downside to you personally, but that isn’t what I’m hearing from your comments.
Ha, we had this conversation with our doctor and they said not to worry about the vaccine if you are married and monogamous. It would likely have zero benefit to us at that point in time.
Now maybe that changes if you get divorced and get a new sexual partner.
> While it won't clear an existing infection, it protects against different strains and reinfection (typically body removed HPV in 1-2 years). See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38137661/
The study you've quoted here is not definitive evidence of the claim you're making, and that claim is...let's just say that it's controversial. Conventional wisdom is that you're unlikely to benefit from HPV vaccination unless you have not already seroconverted for at least one of the 9 strains (6, 11, 16, 18, 31, 33, 45, 52, 58) in the current vaccine.
There's not much hard evidence to suggest that vaccination for HPV has strong ability to protect you from a strain after you've already been infected with that strain [1], as the best available data shows a substantial decline in efficacy for women over age 26 and for women of any age who had prior documented infection [2]. This study is small, unrandomized, and the measured primary outcome (anti-HPV IgG) doesn't really tell you anything about relative effectiveness at clearing an infection. The only real evidence they advance for this claim is:
> Persistent HPV infection after vaccination was significantly less frequent in the nine-valent vaccinated group (23.5%) compared to the control group (88.9%; p < 0.001).
...but again, this is a small, unrandomized trial. We don't know how these 60 people differ from the typical HPV-positive case. You can't rely on this kind of observational data to claim causality.
Vaccination is great, but let's not exaggerate or spread inaccurate claims in a fit of pro-vaccine exuberance. The HPV vaccine has age range recommendations [3] for a reason.
[1] For the somewhat obvious reason that your immune system has already seen the virus.
It's also worth calling out table 4, which shows the (IMO bad) efficacy data for biological men, which is why I only talk about women, above, and why anyone who recommends vaccination without mentioning this factor is not being entirely forthright. Few people are rushing to give older men the HPV vaccine because it's not really supported by data!
[3] I believe the current guideline is under age 45 in the USA.
I understand why it wouldn't be recommended in policy but individually, provided you are rich enough to waste a hundred bucks, worse case is it's useless, best case you are 1-5% likely to spread a bad strain dangerous to yourself or to your partners, right ?
It's your body, and you can do whatever you want (assuming someone will consent to give it to you), but the worst case is that you have a bad reaction. It's rare, but not impossible, and things like GBS do happen -- though it must be emphasized that these vaccines are extremely safe by any reliable form of measurement [1].
But that's the general response to any question of this form. Medical treatments carry risk, however small. There is no free lunch.
> best case you are 1-5% likely to spread a bad strain dangerous to yourself or to your partners, right ?
I don't know where you're getting this number. I don't think anyone knows the actual answer to this question.
The age 45 bit isn't actually a guideline. Rather, finding naive but at risk individuals over 45 is quite difficult. They did not test it on anyone over 45, thus the FDA approval cuts off at 45.
No, there is Github Copilot, the AI agent tool that also has autocomplete, and a chat UI.
I understand your point about naming, but it's always helpful to know what the products do.
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