AI spa-style body imaging & Cheap academic drug repurposing trials - Hacker News (Jun 18, 2026)

Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Effortless AI design for presentations, websites, and more with Gamma - https://try.gamma.app/tad - SurveyMonkey, Using AI to surface insights faster and reduce manual analysis time - https://get.surveymonkey.com/tad - Discover the Future of AI Audio with ElevenLabs - https://try.elevenlabs.io/tad Support The Automated Daily directly: Buy me a coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/theautomateddaily Today's topics: AI spa-style body imaging - Midjourney teased a fast full-body ultrasound imaging concept and even a planned "scanner spa"—raising big questions about AI, regulation, and medical validation. Cheap academic drug repurposing trials - A King’s College London study argues hospitals and universities quietly run low-cost late-stage drug repurposing trials, expanding affordable treatments after patents expire. Local vs cloud AI reliability - A practitioner’s write-up contrasts local Qwen models with frontier cloud AI, emphasizing privacy wins but warning about hallucinations, looping, and lower trust for long agentic coding. AI-assisted retro hardware emulation - A MAME developer used AI to accelerate debugging of Power Macintosh emulation, turning long-standing boot failures into measurable progress and highlighting AI’s role as an expert tool. New version control for binaries - Epic released Lore, an open-source version control system aimed at huge repos with large binary assets—relevant to games, media, and any team fighting repo scale. Reproducible WebAssembly security builds - The Anubis project detailed the messy reality of deterministic builds for WASM and JS fallbacks, a key requirement for auditable security tooling and supply-chain trust. Varnish Cache becomes Vinyl Cache - The long-running community Varnish Cache project rebranded to Vinyl Cache, clarifying governance and avoiding confusion with a separate corporate-controlled code line using the old name. AMD Ryzen memory encryption controversy - Reports suggest AMD’s TSME memory encryption can vanish on some consumer Ryzen systems after newer AGESA firmware, affecting physical-attack defenses and transparency for users. - Study Finds Hospitals and Universities Can Repurpose Drugs in Late-Stage Trials at a Fraction of Industry Cost - Midjourney Unveils Plan for 60-Second Ultrasound Body Scanner and Spa-Based Health Imaging - DeepSeek Chat Site Displays Cookie Consent Notice - Alex Ellis: Local Qwen Isn’t ‘Near Opus’—It’s Best for Private, Bounded Workflows - AI-Assisted Debugging Unlocks Major MAME Progress on Power Macintosh Emulation - Epic Games Open-Sources Lore Version Control Built for Large Binary Assets - Anubis Vendors wasm2js After Reproducible Build Issues With WASM Toolchains - Vinyl Cache Explains Split From the New Corporate-Governed Varnish Cache - AMD Consumer Ryzen Systems Lose TSME Memory Encryption After New AGESA Updates Episode Transcript AI spa-style body imaging First up, healthcare—where two very different stories point to the same theme: making medicine more accessible. Researchers led by King’s College London, writing in the Cambridge Law Journal, describe what they call a “hidden” drug-innovation system. Instead of pharma companies driving every new use for a drug, hospitals and universities are running late-stage trials to repurpose existing medicines—often for a fraction of the cost. The study argues these trials can come in under ten percent of what industry reports for similar work, largely because academic and clinical teams operate leaner and aren’t chasing patent-driven returns. Why it matters: once a drug goes generic, companies frequently lose the financial reason to fund new indications—even if the science is promising. Repurposing lowers the risk because the drug’s safety profile, manufacturing, and supply chain are already well understood. The paper’s bigger implication is policy: governments could formalize support for this parallel system, accelerating affordable treatments that might otherwise never get pursued. Cheap academic drug repurposing trials Staying in medical tech, Midjourney—best known for generative AI—announced it’s building a medical imaging concept it’s calling the “Midjourney Scanner.” The pitch is ambitious: fast, routine, full-body internal imaging, framed as something you could do as casually as a spa appointment. The company claims it can use a large ring of ultrasonic components and heavy computation to produce high-resolution 3D body maps quickly—on the order of about a minute—with AI doing the segmentation to make the results readable at scale. And it’s not just a lab idea: they’re talking about opening a “Midjourney Spa” in San Francisco in 2027, with a regulatory path that starts from simpler measurements and expands toward diagnostic use. Why it matters: if frequent, low-friction imaging ever becomes real—and clinically validated—it could shift healthcare from reacting to symptoms toward tracking changes over time. The bi