2,091 karma · joined March 7, 2023
Ruby replaced all my shell needs. Almost 25 years ago. I even have a shell written in ruby (it handles both bash-like behaviour as well as ruby code as-is); admittedly it is not quite perfect for everything, but I improve on it steadily. And it works on Windows too, which was one reason I wrote it in the first place (need to have it work via cmd.exe as-is).
Never looked back to shell. It is too awful to use.
Also, the article makes no sense. Why would I want to pay more for DDR4 now? They should tax those AI companies that are responsible for this.
I tend to be too verbose in writing as I want to explain the context in more detail, but short, accurate, concise is best. Many developers fail at that too, though. Many projects do not have working examples. That annoys me the most. It sends a message of "I don't care about new users learning how to use my project".
Having said that, I found consistently that when a project has working examples, ideally documented a bit, aka explained, they tend to work much better than those projects that have no examples. Working examples often also help get into a project quickly and check out how it works. It helps to learn too.
READMEs are not useless, of course, but the quality varies a lot. I also know of folks who use AI slop spam to improve it, but while it may improve a little bit, it generates a lot of horribly to read text that makes no sense. I am noticing this with the ruby core dev team - they (almost) all suddenly have perfect language skills but it is more like an advanced babelfish translator. What they piece together here makes no sense. Claude in particular is now famous for this slop content. And I don't understand what it is used: real people read any of this AI slop? Because I just skip it or filter it away these days.
Alps are "Die Alpen" in german, and rose is rose too. So, a rose or a flower in a mountaineous area. It kind of fits to Switzerland.
Renaming operations are often strange: for instance, the name Raider before it then became Twix. I always found the renaming part peculiar; guess Twix is easier to market than Raider but both names are strange to begin with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twix
I could also swear that Raider tasted better than Twix, but this could be to my aging cells no longer being as performant as they once were. Or they changed the recipe to the worse.
Having said that, I guess that website was AI slop generated, so no wonder it has low quality. I try to avoid AI in general, in particular the low quality slops; sadly youtube is being infected with it, I can no longer watch shorts - so many are just AI spam nowadays.
In principle that statement is not incorrect in that lobbying means that one is able to represent a view.
However had, if money flows, then this skews all bias towards that money addiction flow, at the expense of everyone else. And most lobbying is due to money, that's also a fact.
See here as a good example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...
But it is a bribe. It is not the fault of the people if legislation has been undermined in democracies to suit the rich.
This is a problem pretty much all democracies have, to varying extent.
I still use Win10 for a few things, including testing stuff works there too, via java. I switched to Linux in 2004 or so, though.
Thieves give it back now!
Trump is like the ultimate tool. And he is getting richer by the second.
Why is that money not given to The People?
When the people turn it around and sniff on cops, why is that then any different suddenly?
> we'd need actual legislation
Can the people do legislation? It's always some judges and politicians who form a clique at the end of the day.
At which point is this called slavery?
If you want to include proxies then you'd have to include all who support the proxies, and also include the USA on the other side, including NATO. So is that the point you wish to make here? China would also have to be included on Iran's side by the way.
> I'm not sure if the "who started the war" question is that clear-cut.
I think it is clear-cut. They refer to Israel and the USA bombing Iran. That's very clear.
If you want to go back to history then we have more actors. But it is clear that they refer to the recent start of the war. Right now the USA is still at war against Iran too; that Israel is permanently at war with Iran is also true.
The relevant question is how some skew the private mass media here.
On the big level they are all still in cahoots of corruption, but on a smaller scale the ideology is still in place and overrides some of the corruption in place.
Watson may not have been the nicest scientist, but many people made wrong conclusions back then. Most famous is Linus Pauling's triple helix suggestion.
https://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/coll/pauling/dna/narra...
The article here makes it sound as if Watson and Crick failed completely and were solely leeches on Franklin. Now you can state that there was a mistreatment by Watson and Crick with regards to Franklin, but the article suggests that she made the ground-breaking suggestions. But then why did she not write an article earlier? Yes, you can say that the health was poor and this may have delayed her analysis - but by the same token you can say the article inflates her own contributions with regards to the dsDNA helix.
> Science historian Alistair Sponsel of the Science History Institute and crystallographer Brian Sutton of KCL argue Franklin knew the earlier photo had revealed a helix
That in itself was not an insight at all. See Pauling's triple helix. Conclusion Pauling would have made the correct prediction eventually, he was a genius, but at that time he failed (and if I recall correctly he did not have access to Franklin's data, at the least I seem to remember that, e. g. Watson and Crack had access to the data due to a third guy who was also near or on the campus site; I don't rememeber where Pauling was, but he was probably not "in the close loop" right there, at that time).
And, if I also recall correctly, the helix theory was already proposed before that. I don't remember where I read it, so it could be wrong, but I think older scientific articles or books mentioned it or speculated about. At the least I am almost 100% certain that neither Franklin, Watson, Crick, Pauling etc... were the first to make such a proposal. Phoebus Levene made some suggestions too, even if wrong, you can see that people were getting closer to the puzzle and I think someone else too. But anyway, people will probably only remember Watson and Crick here and I think it is still deservedly so. Nobody says that these two were the only contributors ever.
> photograph 49, showing she made extensive notes about it despite a cosmetic defect. She recognized it suggested a helical structure and used it to calculate, for the first time, the length of each turn in the spiral—34 angstroms—and the number of bases “per turn of helix (if there is a helix).”
Ok, but you can make any local notes. These are not as useful as publishing a "it has not escaped our attention" article.
> No wonder Franklin recorded little in her notes about photograph 51, Sponsel and Sutton argue. She saw no need to repeat herself. Franklin “knows exactly what’s in front of her,” says Betty Smocovitis, a science historian at the University of Florida and co-editor of the Journal of the History of Biology.
No, I don't think so. If she would have had that as an insight, it would have solved many things, just as Crick and Watson did reason about in their own article. So perhaps she was slow. Or she did not figure out the implication; it's difficult to say.
> The flawed image was good enough to reveal key details of the helix to Franklin. But she did not think it was good enough to publish.
You can find billion reasons as to why you don't want to publish. Whatever the reasons, even if one thinks Crick and Watson were sneaky, she was slower. It seems to me as if many do post-analysis from the point of view "everyone was so unfair to her". That is understandable but that's not how science works.
> The reason, they say, is that Franklin was trying to understand different forms of the molecule before publishing
Sorry, that's garbage. Or worded differently, perhaps Crick understood biology better than Franklin did. In fact, I think Crick was smarter than Watson too - no clue why Watson is so praised in the USA.
> Sutton says he understands why she spent months on it, quipping, “I’m a crystallographer, so I want data-rich photos. I can’t do much with a photograph that only has six spots on it.”
Apparently Crick could, so ... and he was correct as well. I am finding these excuses not good here. They seem to come more from the point of view of how unfair life is.
> It was almost a year before she resumed puzzling out the structure of wet DNA.
Well. Crick and Watson did not wait a year.
> But by then Watson and Crick, drawing in part on Franklin’s data, were busy building the metal ball-and-stick model that would soon reveal the molecule’s full form and function.
That is objectively true - they took advantage of that and did not credit her more. No objection. But the "Franklin was the true discoverer" is also just incorrect. It can be debated how much Crick and Watson (also notice how the article prefers to name Watson first) contributed individually; personally I think Crick contributed more since he was smarter than Watson (and Pauling in turn was smarter than Crick, but he was more of a chemist than Crick, who clearly had more understanding of biology than Pauling had, see the central dogma by Crick, even if dogma is a misnomer and it had to be extended lateron) - the article really wants to change a narrative here. That's propaganda.
The only take-away that one could draw is that Franklin contributed more while also being about a step away from a very similar conclusion Crick and Watson made, but these two simply were faster. That's simply an objective fact.
The biggest difference I noticed has been between smartphone/tablet users on the one hand, and oldschool desktop computer system users. I belong to the latter group and I think we, as a group, write more, and faster. I'd also like to assume it has a higher quality, but I am not automatically convinced of that either.
I have not read that many direct comparisons here.
The main two contenders were .avif and .webp. For a few reasons, I selected .avif and in hindsight I think it was the better, choice. Both would be objectively better than jpg or png.
With JPEG XL ... hmmm. AVIF is not perfect, in particular when the compression rate is very high I noticed that some photos lose a lot of intrinsic quality that is not instantly obvious; I noticed this when I took various pictures over the years from outdoors. Still, AVIF beats jpg and png just about on every metric when compression is required. With JPEG XL I guess I have to re-evaluate, but right now I am still sticking to avif. The two factors that will be important for me is compression ratio and quality. I am ok with a bit of loss of quality, if the compression is better, but I am not sure JPEG XL beats AVIF here clearly either, so I am not sure what to do with JPEG XL.