tablarasa

Hm. I don't think there is anything wrong with having terms defining paraphyletic groups. I don't think we need to treat fish or plants for that matter as a monophyletic group necessarily in order to avoid misinformation. The group that includes algae and plants is monophyletic after all, but I don't know what that has to do with the original point.

"Are algae plants?" "Yes."

Is incorrect. That it once stood as the best available information is interesting but not relevant to the veracity.

Your friends’ botany joke is lame. Tree was never taxonomical, only a growth form or “habit” in older parlance. Plenty of individual species grow as trees or shrubs and many genera have representatives from forb through tree. There is no true tree.

The thing is if all you know is that the screwdriver and hammer go in the toolbox, you lack a functional knowledge of those tools and therefore the skill to use them. I for one am confident that you are capable of understanding that while plants and algae are both living organisms, they are functionally, ecologically, evolutionarily, and taxonomically different. The layperson so married to their colloquialisms need not worry about too much detail, yet may benefit from the knowledge that algae are not for bashing nails and plants are not for driving screws. Alas you may wish to know which of the sea you may eat raw or which might seasonally give you a nut flour. Or you may more easily grasp the functional and ecological role of microalgae, armed with the background understanding of their distinction from trees and grasses, should you encounter those creatures. And I hope you do, since you are relying on them to live.

In any case, in my experience, the greater people’s understanding of natural history and their ability to name the organisms in their environment, the more likely they are to see, appreciate, and value the rich mosaic if life around them. The benefits of that are grand for the individual even if they don’t bother connecting the dots on the science.

Colloquialisms are great. But suggesting we all permanently adopt and maintain a state of ignorance because a certain subset of humans had a term, I dunno.

What’s the fish one?

Well, I am an expert. And ya, the “parent group”, sure, but we all have common ancestors though. So by that line of reasoning, I guess you are a plant?

Anyway ya plants evolved from protists. What other groups of organisms do we lump together based on an 19th century understanding of the world? I am amazed by people’s ability to warp the world to their priors rather be bothered to update them.

It is incorrect. They are not plants. I am curious why you think it is correct to call protists plants? It is not just taxonomy, but ecology, life history, tissue structures, and so much more. Some plants do photosynthesis. Some algae do photosynthesis. Not all things that do photosynthesis are plants. Not all things that do not do photosynthesis are not plants.

That this feels like such a representative statement is disheartening. Remember, in a functioning free-market (behold. bow.) negative externalities, like socializing the burden of reduced air quality resulting from for-profit enterprises, are considered inefficient (boo. hiss.) and deleterious. Even people with jobs have to breath air.

light penetrates in useful intensity for photosynthesis to about 200m so that seems like a decent cutoff for "deep sea" for the purposes of discussion around the unique communities there

I mean the mechanism there is not a mystery. Gravity is known to affect humans.

Nevertheless, IMO the placebo effect is still an effect.

I hear you. But 700 anchovies per farmed salmon is not meaningful without considering the number of sardines per wild salmon. Eating higher in the food web costs one way or the other. It is all about relative impacts of producing food people want to eat.

The article is presented as propaganda and the media format is trash but it raises good points. Still it fails to point out growing use of insect, plant, and byproduct feeds. It also fails to mention that feed conversion ratios in farmed fish are better than any of the land animals commonly farmed, so overall i/o is about as sustainable as it gets for animal husbandry. We also fail to recognize that forage fisheries have short generation times and are easier to measure, so maintaining healthy stocks is easier than trying to do the same with wild caught pelagic fish. Sustainable fisheries are beautiful resources. When managed and informed properly they can afford more production than would otherwise happen under maximum exploitation. They require science based management and compliance of course. But there are a lot of success stories as we have adopted fisheries science and I find it annoying that these articles send people to despondency rather than to grounding their consumption choices in science.

> How does the value of LLM-produced 100% branch coverage compare to no-LLM 100% branch coverage?

This is such a salient question. Sometimes (definitely not always) the test suites produced by LLMs are so trivial it's scary. Coverage can be an illusion for sure.

But the legal immigration system is broken and they did that on purpose. And how is your immigration status relevant to your contribution to taxes?

It is not a false equivalence. Both legal and undocumented immigrants are net positive for our economy, less likely to commit crimes, and part and parcel to the American experiment. This “we only disapprove of the illegal ones” continues to be a disingenuous and ignorant point of view.

There is value beyond IPO- companies continue to sell ("issue") shares on the public market as a way of generating cash. They also buy back shares when with excess cash, usually when the market value is low but sometimes, irrationally IMO, when it is high. They also use this as an incentive-backed compensation pool. The relative value of these is debatable, but I don't think it is correct that post-IPO public shares are just traded between third-parties making short-term bets. Happy to be corrected.

Yes many people don’t vote because of deliberately fettered access to polling and/or a generally correct understanding that the electoral college nullifies or makes redundant their vote in their jurisdiction. Your vote for a third party is a signal but essentially a qualified abstention. Your high horse however is so misguided and absurd- to suggest that you held a moral high ground because the Biden administration supported the Gaza genocide is flatly wrong. If you want to place blame for that administration’s actions, blame Citizen’s United, blame AIPAC, blame the DNC, etc. And write letters, protest, get mad. But facilitating the ascent of what is objectively, obviously, candidly worse to make that statement is insulting to the intelligence of anyone to whom you make the argument. Perhaps your vote was in a jurisdiction where you could assume the electoral votes would go to the Dems anyway, but that just makes it flat out virtue signaling. The left will continue to cut off its nose to spite its face to the peril of US democracy and world peace. You nailed em tho.

As my friend said of doing a PhD, “you learn more and more about less and less until sooner or later you know nothing at all”

IMO, speaking from the perspective of an ecology doctorate, while PhDs have much to contribute outside of academia, the training is laser focused on that route, to the detriment of students and funders (which is, generally speaking, society/taxpayers). The reality is more PhDs are minted than exist professorships, yet many advisors wish you to be their academic offspring, not just continuing in research but in their line of research. This dynamic was far more the cause of mental health issues than the work being “hard”, which checks out since there are innumerable other forms of hard and harder work.

Not a stupid question at all. But these aren't search and rescue services, they are just other sailors. I'm talking about locales that are far far outside of the realm of typical rescue services, and in no particular jurisdiction. Your best bet for rescue is your fellow sailors or commercial shipping traffic. Radio nets like the Pacific Seafarers Net allow you to make yourself known so that folks can keep tabs on you (and you them) in case something happens.

EPIRB and other emergency beacons still use HF radio frequencies (not HAM of course) and countries like the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and others I'm sure are monitoring those signals. But even then, they will first and foremost look to the seafaring community to actually render assistance, and that kind of call to action does often make its way through HAM radio nets, though I'm not sure exactly how, e.g., the U.S. Coast Guard makes that first outreach as the rescue coordinator.

I got my license because I'm an offshore sailor. It is useful as safety and communication equipment (radio nets to keep track of other boats, their weather and fishing conditions :), and let your would-be-rescuers know your position and status), but also for sending and receiving data. It is my primary interface for weather info at sea using traditional weatherfax, but also more modern GRIB extraction. I can even update my blog using my SSB on HAM frequencies at sea. It's fun. Never had a shoreside station though.

In California it seems a lot of cities decided to try and add bike infrastructure but the design process yielded many compromises, since that infrastructure comes at the expense of car (and parking) infrastructure. As a result we got really bad bike lanes, but gave up few parking spots. The design process declared victory via compromise- best of both worlds. In reality, the bike lanes are worthless and cyclists like myself just use the primary vehicle lanes, since not dying is more important than protecting the convenience and respecting the supremacy of other road users. Drivers honk and yell and deliberately endanger you, but that was true before too.

The article talks about using design and engineering out of the problem. I do not believe that is what was done in the cities you cite, even if that was their headline intention.

Good points. It would be a productive use of all of the time those trucks spend idling too, going into and out of ports and in freeway traffic. Seems like there are times and circumstances when directing excess diesel energy to the trailer battery could be reasonable.

It is sometimes surprising to learn which organisms are more or less like us. Annelid worms like the ones you likely find in the soils where you live do have brains, for example, albeit ones with different characteristics than those of crustaceans or mammals [1]. They don’t have lungs though sometimes gills. Are they more like crabs or humans? Tough to say but fun to ponder. Incidentally, of the marine invertebrates, the ones we are most closely related to are tunicates and salps, which are blobs that filter feed [2]. Who said cladistics wasn’t cool?

Imagine all the ways we can’t imagine how other organisms experience their existence. But as you learn more about their biology it’s incredible how much we share.

1. https://frontiersinzoology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.118...

2. https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/invertebrates/tunicates-not-...

This is about water use, as opposed to land use. Land use matters, but let's try to stay focused for a second, esp. b/c some of the livestock are not local to the feed grows.

The Colorado River has barely touched the Gulf of California for years. There is inherent value as well as economic value in the ecosystem services that result from allowing natural systems to thrive... or even just function at all.

Here is a nice summary of the state and characters in Colorado River ecology: https://www.coloradocollege.edu/dotAsset/cbb78858-d078-4a7c-...

I hope we are not so cynical as to suggest that the over-extraction of the river and the destruction of the reliant ecosystems is an acceptable consequence of human success.

Even if you like hamburgers, is it worth the cost to continue to over-extract for their production from locations that cannot support it just because people have been doing it for a while and have a strong sense of private property rights? Why shouldn't we tell these farmers to pay up for the water or go somewhere to produce that food where it is more abundant?

Imperial Valley farmers are paying a trivial $20/acre-foot of water and are primarily growing hay to feed domestic and foreign livestock. Looks like 685K acre-feet per year to feed livestock out of a total water extraction of 1188K acre-feet (had to add up the totals from their graph to get that). So that means ~58% of the water is for cows.

Given how politically impossible it seems to be to increase rates or re-litigate water rights, I think I have to agree with the conclusion of the article: we got to stop eating the meat they're producing.

The health of the Colorado River Basin affects tons of people very directly in the U.S. and Mexico. We have been over-extracting it for ages. I am in favor of wise water usage in non-agricultural settings, but it's time we took action to mitigate the increasingly detrimental impacts of legacy water users from a legacy social and environmental climate.

This is really cool. Can’t underestimate the power of this material to inspire future scientists. Hell I am a scientist and it inspires me too. I look forward to the launch (hehe)

100% yeah totally agree, I feel very similarly about TS (and can barely stand vanilla JS at this point)

Sure, a little bit. It is a change in peoples' workflows after all, and a lot of developers are pretty choosy about that. But I think you can overcome that if you make a respectful case.

I think you are spot on that people coming from weakly typed languages often don't realize what they're missing. "It clutters the code" is really just "I'm not used to seeing it that way" so if you can get people to try it out (maybe in a well-cordoned area of the code base or in some new dev) they will find out for themselves that it saves time and grief in the end.

Huh. In any case, I think the main point of its existence is on the inside.

> "Since the IDE can hardly infer any type, and since even the ones it could infer can dynamically change in shape at any time, the IDE cannot provide as helpful suggestions and as powerful navigation as IDEs for other languages can."

I've felt this pain a lot. I finally took the time to learn how to make use of the type hinting that python does offer, and now I write those type hints without even thinking about it. It makes the development experience so much better for me and across the team, since we've all bought in. It doesn't do everything. It is kind of lipstick on a pig. But it's worth doing.

Salmon is found in high-latitude systems around the globe in both hemispheres. Overfishing is something that occurs to populations, not species. Most of the salmon populations that I am familiar with are not over-fished, but have suffered from spawning habitat loss due to dams and logging. Those are major issues and they continue to negatively affect those populations; you are doing the loggers and dam builders a favor by blaming fishing, which is far easier (and more politically palatable) to regulate.

This has been tried and works pretty well. My own parent was able to get into Uni and attended solely b/c they had to accept them if they had a High School diploma [1]. They easily might not have gone to Uni at all otherwise. And here's the thing- perhaps shocking to some- they actually blossomed in that environment, eventually displaying intelligence and aptitude that their High School teachers would never have believed.

So, perhaps binning children as teenagers and sorting them for life is actually wrought? Perhaps some of the people posting against this idea benefitted from admissions not b/c of their higher merit, but because it gave cover to the falsehood of such higher merit.

Universities have "competitive" admissions to cultivate mystique and exclusivity, because it gives them better pricing power and more donations.

[1] https://www.tonganoxiemirror.com/news/2016/jan/22/kansas-uni... [relevant quote: "Prior to 2001, Kansas universities guaranteed admission to anyone who graduated from an accredited Kansas high school, according to the Regents."]

Ha yeah this is all pointless speculation... I can't help but point out though that in my observations of religious people, it's not hard to believe that a majority or even a large majority might (temporarily, occasionally, whatever) eschew some of the central tenets of their "belief" system.

Kind of like how lots of citizens can (temporarily, occasionally, whatever) eschew some of the laws. I'd hardly consider Americans <21 a solid no-alcohol control group even if it were valid to compare adolescents to adults as control and treatment in any study.