gumby

We know so little about biology that the only way to do it is test on humans.

In another comment I said that if the area of biology/microbiology etc were the size of the surface of our sun, the area of our knowledge in those subjects would be perhaps a square millimeter.

And if you think that’s bad, don’t get me started on higher level areas like neurology.

Almost a perfect superset.

Someone else asked this earlier and I wrote this reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50273543

Unfortunately the HN UX doesn’t make it easy to surface these situations, not that I have any idea how one could make it easier.

I’m a cat person but I also am fond of dogs so I would consider that unkind.

But does he have a gap buffer?

He is cute though.

Fun Iridium trivia: it was originally designed to need 77 satellites, hence the name. By the time they deployed they’d figured out they’d only need 66, but for some reason didn’t change their name to Dysprosium.

I started using Emacs at the AI lab in 1978. It's still my main development tool and probably still the program I spend most of my time in today.

If, for a generally known population, it causes positive result and does not have too many (and all tolerable) negative side effects, why not use it?

If you think of all of biology as being an area about the size of the surface of our Sun, all of human biological knowledge would take up about a square millimeter. We're still in the stone knives and bearskins era, especially in neurology, the topic of the posted article.

The good: smartest people I have ever worked with, though also some of the dumbest (think of a saddle curve rather than a bell curve :-). Really interesting, fun, and really super-hard technical problems.

Discouraging-but-part-of-life issues: nobody is in a rush because everything is a marathon. It typically takes decades to get anything into the market; though regulators over the past few decades have been changing things to speed things up (basically doing science to make the process more adaptive and dynamic) it's still hard. You're continually looking for needles in haystacks: wispy signals that may be noise, extracted from huge datasets. As a startup, expensive slow, e.g. an overnight session on an HPLC can be a $10,000 experiment (or more because you're probably running a lot of those instruments in parallel at once) after having a bunch of people working all day to prep the samples.

The terrible: the industry is riven top to bottom with fear. Fear that the science will not work out. Fear that someone else is smarter than you (as a result: pervasive arrogance and hostility). Fear in the FDA that some company trying to game the system* will get something past you, or that the inspector general will launch an investigation, or some congressperson will launch a missile at you for no legitimate reason.

Also, you're launching artillery shells that can't be altered in flight. You write a study and then you have to run it with the protocol you wrote and got approved. You can't alter your marketing message unless it refers to scientific results explicitly demonstrated in a trial. And since the trials typically take years, there's a lot of sitting around.

* Back when I was in the biz we absolutely did not try to game the system and it made it a lot easier to work with the Agency (FDA). But the rules kept being made tighter and tighter to lock our bad action by companies. And of course the recent destruction of the FDA means all the rules have been thrown out the window, but by then I was already long gone. But my friends in the industry are still shocked and appalled.

Whether they can do that or not, in this case it was due to acknewledgedly arbitrary and capricious secret rules dictated by government personnel to the airlines, not decisions by the airlines themselves.

Unless your position is that one of the legally legitimate principles of free business is whether to follow the law or not.

The Wikipedia article is poor, but I cannot not edit it as I attended parts of the trial and in fact discussed the suit with john before he filed it so by Wikipedia’s rules I can’t edit it. Anyway a lawyer would be a better person.

John’s appeal is online. Section [10] of the decision discussion describes being subject to a law he cannot have access to. The judge saw it but could not discuss it in court, with the plaintiff (John Gilmore) or even his lawyer. Also the orders (law) are agreed by the court to be arbitrary, changing day by day and being arbitrarily different between airports. But since the Airport personnel knew them tht was good enough for the court.

And though the discussion mentioned that he could take a bus or walk, the conclusion, [21], said that his rights were not violated at all, both the bus precedent and the legality of being subject to unknown law. The brief Wikipedia page mentions only the former, though the latter was the primary factor of the complaint.

There are whole laws that are classified and cannot be discussed in open court. Ignorance of the law is no defense when you are charged with violating a law and that’s still true in the USA even if the law is classified and you are not authorized to know what it says.

Check out Gilmore v Gonzales for an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilmore_v._Gonzales

Half a decade? More like 60 years.

Coming up with candidate drugs is the easiest part of the process. It’s possible that that could be improved a little (not sped up, but suggesting compounds in silico less likely to fail) and possibly have suggestions for scale up, but those are all hard, and the latter is less amenable to being “read” during trains phase.

This has been one of the target AI applications since the 1960s.

(Former drug developer who will never touch the life sciences again)

On my iPhone I use a “focus” that just rejects communication from a set of bad actors. If I order a pizza or something I disable the focus ND RE-enable it when the pizza arrives.

If you send me one spam sms or notification you go immediately on the list.

Works fine except the notification identifier is different for ipad and phone so I have to add those apps twice.

Don has had the longest-running bug bounty of them all!

What a good point! The web would be much nicer looking if browsers accepted pages written in LaTeX as well as pages written in HTML.

After all TeX is all about high quality printing on paper.

Don’t worry, it’s a pretty common expression used precisely as you did. Haven’t heard it that much in the US in recent times though, which is probably why the parent post complained.

Your English is fine.

I was about to post "this is overkill — just don't connect it to your access point" but then realized that my neighbor has an xfinity router that advertises the public xfinity subscriber SSID. And it could be using an unadvertised SSID for which they've done a deal with the US carrier cartel members.

If this data is worth enough, they could be using IOT 4G service.

This is similar to Flock and Palantir who collect info the government is not allowed to and then sell it to the government.

In this case Meta, Google etc can honestly say they aren't surrepticiously listinging to you or collecting data not in their privacy statement. They just buy it instead.

So I need to write a chaffing agent that runs when I am not home and randomly spouts synthetic conversations through non-smart speakers about nappies (kids a re long gone), nuclear weapons development, plumbing, union membership, crochet, video games, crypto coins, and other things we don't normally do.

The conservativism of English spelling is a help: the meaning ornament unfamiliar word can be more easily defined when its roots are still visible rather than when the spelling simply shows how it might be pronounced somewhere.

In my experience this has been a great help in reading French, while spelling reform is a real hindrance when reading German.

It’s hard to parse the complaints in these transitions. Sometimes there has to be a change in process, sure, or even some genuine incompatibility. But a huge percent is social.

About 25 years ago Palo Alto bought a new email system. Exchange, a huge dual-processor HP system, about 100K in today’s dollars. I went to a council meeting to ask and was directed to the decision maker. He said the big cost would be training: outlook/exchange’s icons looked like the familiar Word/excel ones so few people felt they’d need training, while the Netscape buttons were larger and looked different and everybody felt they’d need a training course.

I ought this would go away as those afraid of computers aged out, especially since the arrival of smart phones with their different iconography. But it seems not.

This is an important comment given the wild (though conceivable) speculations in other comments.

The subsequent sentence on the page also says that if you find a vulnerability in a third-party app you have to tell the third party.

This enshittification and degradation of language (“ad-free”) is not surprising — it’s the same path cable TV followed.

But I struggle to understand the economics of the streaming sites listed in the article. They receive an all-you-can-eat monthly payment but have to keep acquiring (including, it seems, making) new content. The linkage between the two is very loose (monthly vs daily) and most videos etc show up as new and then fade down the rankings. Seems like a pretty crappy business, and Netflix being independent, points towards that in its financial statements.

Also, the existence of this sentence in the article surprised me: “ It doesn’t help that Disney+ doesn’t make the kind of original content that wins at the Emmys.” Winning a major one can have a small boost on a film’s lifetime revenue, but overall the correlation between the two is weak. To paraphrase (ugh) Pournelle: Disney would rather have a lucrative film with no awards than a lauded film with no revenue.

We used to just leave that responsibility to the querying host’s own resolver. I don’t fetishize the end-to-end principle (though I come close) so I suppose a recursive resolver service could be a sort of optimization (plenty of ppl look up, say, gmail.google.com so why not cache it).

In any case, if all resolvers these days are recursive why mention it?

I know this is far from the most important question on the topic of this thread!

Why does it matter that it’s a recursive resolver? They mention this a lot but it seems like the decision would just as much apply to a non-recursive resolver.

I didn’t attempt find the ruling; perhaps the lawsuit was written in an odd way.

They probably have cash in the bank and want to try to put it into something that might make money. An extreme pivot.

These aren’t founding startups, they are founding small businesses, mostly just features.

Even WhatsApp, a self-driven hyper growth startup that mainly did development had, IIRC, 40 people when they were acquired.

Given the government in power wouldn’t that cause them to skew the reports the other way? Its kore in the Americans’ interest to make this supply claim.

Then again, a hard core monarchist of any stripe is unlikely to be a rational thinker.

I don’t know you figure there’s double counting from that article: the shuttles to Fujairah are transiting the strait.

I’m also dubious about the gross figures but I do think it’s an interesting possibility (if they are correct then there’s an uncharacteristic overshoot in pricing, which seems suspicious). But ppl in the industry seem to take Kpler seriously — I just saw them at Gastech last month.

I can’t find the referenced report (it could be just a subscriber note) but here’s a blog entry on how they count: https://www.kpler.com/blog/explainer-the-nuances-of-reading-...

We need to move the global economy off fossil fuels and and an opex-driven fuel system in general. Fortunately that shift is finally well under way, except in the US.