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cygxon The best WebAssembly runtime may be no runtime

A reference was already provided. Here's a direct link to the demo of a cross-site scripting attack via webassembly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glL__xjviro&t=450s

cygxon Mozilla Standards Positions Opposes Web Integrity API

As far as I know, the Mozilla Corporation is owned by the Mozilla Foundation, which is a non-profit with the mission to make the internet a better place, or something along those lines. So shouldn't we look at the boards of things like the Wikimedia Foundation or the Internet Archive instead of bay area CEOs for comparison?

It's also not a particularly good look when your own salary keeps rising while you're laying people off and market share keeps plummeting (in my neck of the woods, Firefox actually used to be dominant at 60%+)...

That said, I haven't looked at this in any kind of detail, and all I know of Baker is what her Wikipedia article tells me, which includes writing the Mozilla Public License, managing mozilla.org on a volunteer basis for a while and being instrumental in the creation of the Mozilla Foundation.

cygxon Hungary nuclear plant cuts output because of warm Danube waters

> This is, of course, an easily verifiable lie.

It's not a lie, you just failed to get the point:

Assume, for the sake of the argument, that you have a power plant that always works at 100% capacity and cannot be shut off. To provide energy security, you would have to budget capacity to account for highest possible demand. But if you do so, you will over-produce electricity most of the time, and there are economic incentives against doing so.

> somehow you blame nuclear

I don't blame nuclear energy production, I blame an over-reliance on nuclear energy production.

cygxon Hungary nuclear plant cuts output because of warm Danube waters

Insufficient supply in winter times due to electric heating, mostly. Nuclear power plants are relevant insofar that they (in particular the older generation of power plants) are bad at providing energy on-demand. So while everyone worries about Germany and the issues associated with variable availability of solar and wind power, there are also documented cases where Germany had to fire up its coal plants to meet nuclear posterchild France's electricity demands.

I used to read German online magazine Telepolis regularly. They've got a writer who advocates for renewable energy, hence I used to come across related articles every now and then.

cygxon Hungary nuclear plant cuts output because of warm Danube waters

Sure. It's not so much a physical limitation, but a failure of policy.

cygxon Hungary nuclear plant cuts output because of warm Danube waters

Even before the most recent maintenance period, there were problems: In 2019, French regulators had to ask industry to cut consumption by 1.5GW to keep the grid stable as utility frequency was dropping significantly [1]. That issue comes up basically every other winter, but so far, we've avoided catastrophic results.

[1] https://www.cre.fr/actualites/RTE-fait-appel-aux-industriels...

cygxon Hungary nuclear plant cuts output because of warm Danube waters

These are rare anomalies

Note that partial shutdowns due to excessive heat happen regularly in France, e.g. in 2018, 2019 and 2022. The problem's been around for a while, see e.g. this article [1] from 2009 that also mentions the heatwave of 2003, where regulators had to grant special exemptions to allow discharging 30°C water into waterways, well past the 24°C limit.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110612153407/http://business.t...

cygxon Age of universe at 26.7B years, nearly twice as old as previously believed

He's proposing a hybrid model that does incorporate tiered light, cf https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stad2032

"While tired light (TL) models have been shown to comply with the JWST angular galaxy size data, they cannot satisfactorily explain isotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations or fit the supernovae distance modulus vs. redshift data well. We have developed hybrid models that include the tired light concept in the expanding universe."

cygxon Age of universe at 26.7B years, nearly twice as old as previously believed

See [1] for a less revolutionary possible solution to the 'Impossibly Early Galaxy Problem', namely, that the initial mass function [2] (distribution of masses of newly-formed stars) was different in the early universe, mainly due to the higher ambient temperature.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4KH1Jw6HBI (Dr. Becky)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_mass_function

cygxon Age of universe at 26.7B years, nearly twice as old as previously believed

That's a totally different model.

cygxon Red flags in the Threads privacy policy

Works in Chrome, but in Firefox, I just gets a bunch of CORS errors...

cygxon Perl 5.38

Back in 2000, when Perl was riding high and 13 year old, Larry Wall announced "Perl 6".

Rinding high is something of an overstatement: The Big Thing at the time was Java, and PHP was already chewing away at Perl's market share. Some people thought the writing was an the wall, hence the mug-throwing incident that launched the Perl6 effort...

cygxon Perl 5.38

Nowadays, sub signatures can be enabled via

    use feature 'signatures'

which is implied by

    use v5.36

cygxon Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

I would say that this part is also unethical.

Agreed. However, it's probably covered by their terms of service.

Same thing with the recent reddit kerfuffle. I'd have much preferred a Usenet 2.0 instead of centralizing global communications in the hands of a handful of private companies with associated user-hostile incentive structures.

cygxon Twitter now requires an account to view tweets

If done against the wishes of the owner of the site, yes, I would consider that unethical. Thankfully, Google respects robots.txt and noindex.

cygxon Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

> SARS2 none of this has been found, which stands in stark contrast to all previous coronavirus spillovers.

Do we have that for HCoV-HKU1?

cygxon Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

Not everyone chose to get vaccinated.

cygxon Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

Curious. At the time, I also made a pretty picture comparing deaths in 2020 to the 2015-2019 average (ignore the drop off at the end, as the data was incomplete at the time):

https://i.imgur.com/X6BKdnt.png

Sweden was the only country where the result was clearly distinguishable from noise...

cygxon Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

As far as I'm aware, we still do not know the first intermediate species of SARS-1 (cf Wikipedia: "Infected palm civets at the market were traced to farms where no infected animals were found. It is unknown whether the virus was originally introduced to the market by civets, humans, or another animal." and "Phylogenetic analysis of these viruses indicated a high probability that SARS coronavirus originated in bats and spread to humans either directly or through animals held in Chinese markets.") So no, it hasn't been months, but 20 years...

cygxon Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

I haven't run the numbers, but it seems hard to believe just visually comparing excess mortalities for, say, Sweden and Denmark:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...

April 2020 did a real number on that country...

cygxon Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

It's amazing how many people still never got the memo that lockdowns and masks had no effect whatsoever.

Do you have a source for that? It's been a while since I've looked at Covid numbers, so the only research I know off the top of my head that claims there was no effect is a meta-analysis by some economists, which originally claimed lockdowns only prevented 0.2% of deaths. After criticism, they had to re-evaluate their approach and arrived at 3.2%. However, not all objections were addressed, so who knows if there isn't another order of magnitude hiding somewhere.

Personally, I've been leaning towards lockdowns having the potential to be effective based on excess mortality in the nordics: Sweden was the only nordic country that did not lock down in March 2020, and it's also the only one of these countries that saw significant excess mortality in April 2020. There could of course be another reason for that, but until someone offers such, the lockdowns seem to be the obvious factor...

cygxon Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

and i still havent been given an explanation why

I'm just guessing, but an obvious reason would be because the vaccines were not as effective against the new variants? As in, while the vaccines still protected the vaccinated person, they did not effectively prevent spread of the disease, so other ways to do so remained relevant...

cygxon Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

> And no you could publicly question everything back then.

You're remembering things through rose-colored glasses. Ellen DeGeneres and Laura Dern, Bill Maher and the Dixie Chicks can tell stories of what happened in the 90s and 2000s when you went against the mainstream. In fact, people were cancelled over the silliest things (remember nipplegate?). Government censorship was also alive and well: Under the Bush junior administration, NASA and EPA scientists were not allowed to use the phrase 'global warming'.

cygxon Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

Refutation: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2211107119

I'm not qualified to evaluate these arguments on their merit.

cygxon Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

There is, however, quite a bit of precedent for bat coronaviruses eventually infecting humans, most likely through zoonotic spillover via an intermediate species (e.g. HCoV-NL63, HCoV-229E, SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV, SADS-CoV), and thanks to humans shipping animals all over the globe, huge distances aren't necessarily a deal breaker.

cygxon Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

But severity and timeline of lockdown measures varied from country to country, ie there was some diversity of opinion. Also note that even Sweden eventually implemented policies such as restricting opening hours of bars and restaurants, limiting the size of some gatherings, etc. for a time.

cygxon Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

I don't believe the main reason for suppression (insofar as that happened) and ridicule of the lab leak theory was a reasoned evaluation of any negative consequences. Rather, it became a partisan issue, and instead of being seen as an independent hypothesis that one should evaluate on its own merits, it became part of a whole package contentious issues (masks, vaccines, ivermectin, ...) that divided people along party lines. That the lab-leak hypothesis was pushed by the conspiracy crowd of course did not help.

cygxon Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

However none of this applies to rhetoric against Russia [...] How come no US citizen is attacking Russians [...]

Quoting https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/03/03/anti-russia...

As Putin’s invasion of Ukraine intensifies, some Russian-themed businesses and Russian Americans in the United States are suddenly getting a frosty reception — and in a few cases, experiencing outright hostility. A Russian restaurant in Washington, D.C., called Russia House, was vandalized and the owner indicated that he thought anti-Russian sentiment might be to blame. Some Russian Americans say their children are being bullied at school.

“Americans were encouraged to sympathize with the people of Russia rather than the government. And that seems to me to be what is really different from what we’re seeing now, where you see people at protests with signs saying all Russians are to blame for Putin’s aggression,” he said.

Thulien pointed to another incident in which the parents of a close friend, a couple in their 80s, had their car scratched and vandalized overnight this week.

Also note that in the context of the US culture war, Russia is seen as an ally against the 'woke left', leading to the bizarre situation where Putin himself made references to Harry Potter author JK Rowling in a speech about the invasion of another sovereign country. This might shield Russians against at least some antagonism from that part of the political spectrum.

cygxon Why Is Markdown Popular?

Yes. In particular a 'lightweight' variant, cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language

cygxon Tomorrow the Unix timestamp will get to 1,666,666,666

Note that there are different variants of the Julian Date: For example, the Julian Date(Universal Time 1) drifts against Julian Date(Terrestrial Time), with the former being based on Earth's rotation, the latter being an idealized time scale which can be approximated by TAI + 32.184s.