jyounker

It's even weirder than that. It turns out that at very low concentrations caffeine seems to have similar effects on insect neurology as it does on ours. There are some plant species whose flowers produce caffeinated nectar. Bees seem to like these flowers preferentially, and have an easier time remembering where they are. (Yes, bees get buzzed.)

> I kinda wonder sometimes why medicine doesn't try to fix some of these species level genetic problems more broadly or more quickly

Because the technology to do so doesn't exist yet.

We're at the point where we're trying to fix only most severe conditions, conditions for which there are no other treatment options.

He is famous for his writing, and not for being a chef.

His 2000 book, "Kitchen Confidential," was a New York Times best seller, and it's what put him on the map. It's still one of my favorite books, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. The chapter on his bread baker, "Adam Real Last Name Unknown," is one of the funniest things I've ever had the pleasure to read.

It was only a staple in your mind. Those views you remember were very much reactions against what already existed, and where things were headed. Things never changed direction, and here we are.

It's nobody on here is talking about Rheinhardt's #2 point: The US is not spending enough on regulation. He specifically points out that regulators are underfunded and understaffed. In the US, this is often an active strategy by conservative politicians to undermine regulations, and portray the story that the regulations are bad, when in fact, the regulatory agencies are being intentionally preventing doing their jobs efficiently.

Peter Reinhardt is specifically talking about pumping massive amounts of a synthetic liquid into the ground.

The history of the 20th century is full of people insisting that some industrial product is perfectly safe to dump into the environment in massive amounts, and then it turns out years later that it's not safe at all. I can't imagine the process for injecting some new synthetic into the ground taking less than four years in any situation. It's going to take more time than that just to do basic studies.

The specific kinds of regulations he's arguing about have been written in blood and tumors, and they exist for good reasons.

Given Hegseth's record of financial mismanagement I have deep misgivings about what's being done.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/02/pete-hegseth...

> They need to be actually hit by the load to care. (BTW I can confirm, > although quite violent, pigeons seemingly don't readily learn from > this experience... They are really fucking stupid.)

That doesn't sound stupid to me. Rather it sounds like they're willing to put with a lot of annoyance in order to get food.

I came here to day that. I am slowing building a crow air-force on my balcony in Berlin. No pigeons.

The advantage of dependent typing systems is that you can say that the arguments to a matrix multiplication function must have dimensions (m, i) and (i, n) and that result will have dimensions (m, n).

Are you sure about that?

Another point of view is that the IT department isn't meeting the users' needs, and that they're bypassing IT because they just want to get their work done.

When one government bet on solar power failed (Solyndra) the message from the right in the US was, "look what a waste it is for the government to invest in solar technology," instead of taking the appropriate lesson. That lesson was that we weren't spending enough backing solar companies.

China shoveled billions into developing solar manufacturing technologies, and as a result they figure out how to cheaply mass-produce solar cells. Solyndra failed because they couldn't compete against the resulting cheap solar cells.

No. Absolutely not. I can't think of anyone using a pre-emptive pardon until Trump's first Presidency.

Sadly I think Biden's choice was completely rational given how Trump is weaponizing the US justice system.

JetBrains language plugins don't really map well onto VSCode's idea of a language server.

The first thing you do in a JetBrains language is to write a lexer and parser for the target language. Your parser produces a syntax tree containing enough information to reconstruct the original document, and the IDE then operates on this semi-abstract syntax tree. When the IDE saves a file, it re-generates the contents from the semi-AST.

JetBrain's products are best understood as a refactoring engine (their original product) skinned with an editor.

Not any more.

And what would that off-the-shelf software have been?

I think you're overstating his point.

While you can grow them in, lets say, Houston, they're not easy to grow. They get infections at the drop of a hat, and if you so much as turn around, some sort of insect will munch through them. They don't yield much fruit, and the fruits they do yield generally leave something to be desired in the flavor department.

This is his point. The plants don't have much energy to fend off infections or predators, and they don't have much less energy to put into their fruit.

If you put a tomato plant in a more suitable climate, the things are nearly weeds. You put them in a bucket, make sure they get enough water, and you a few months later you have sweet, juicy, flavorful fruit with basically zero effort.

While we've bred cultivars that can be grown in places like Houston or Florida, the plants don't particularly like it.

Tell me you've never read the original fairy tales without telling me that you've never read the original fairy tales.

He was apparently known as an appalling house guest, and someone made a game about it: https://www.patreon.com/posts/trapped-in-your-71881711

The author's first example seems to undermine the thesis. Their Point class allows two separate locations to independently update the X and Y fields, leaving the object in an inconsistent state.

It seems to me that this is exactly the sort of thing that Rust is intended to prevent, and it makes complete sense to reject the code.

The human equivalent dose for a 70 kilo person is around 85mg. See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4804402/

Across species dose adjustment is based on surface area rather than mass.

Mass is proportional to volume. Volume increases super-linearly with respect to area. Therefore area increases sub-linearly compared to volume. Therefore dose increases sub-linearly with respect to volume. Therefore does increases sub-linearly with respect to mass.

Most fruits and vegetables in grocery stores taste pretty bland. They're bred more for appearance, shelf stability, regularity, and transport rather than taste.

There are legendary varieties that are lost to time. Occasionally we rediscover them, and we get to compare. Usually the modern industrial varieties are pale imitations.

https://gastropod.com/the-most-dangerous-fruit-in-america/

The problem historically was that when consumers were given detailed ingredient labels, they often decided to not purchase the products. Chemical and food manufacturers spent vast amounts of money to get ingredient labels watered down so that consumers wouldn't see the chemical names. In the 70s labels were much more detailed.

Labels like "natural flavors" exist to cover up what's actually in the food. "natural vanilla flavoring" sounds much nicer than "vanillin and acetovanillone extracted from waste sawdust".

It's goes back even further. Artificial dyes already had bad reputations by the late 70s.

In the mid-late 70s labels on foods and cleaning products told you exactly what was in them. I remember because my father was an organic chemist by training, and he would look at most labels and explain what was in them, and why we weren't buying them. (My family ended up shopping for most of our groceries at organic food stores.)

It turns out that a lot of people didn't want those ingredients either, and it was impacting sales, so companies successfully lobbied to get the disclosure requirements watered down. These days labels in the US basically tell you nothing.

I studied organic chemistry in college, and there's little as disturbing to me as "natural flavors" or "natural colorings". You have no idea what the chemicals are, what they were extracted from, how they were extracted, and what compounds/processes were used in the extraction. It's a non-label that tells you nothing about what's actually in the food.

We should be entitled by law to know what we're consuming, so that we can actually make informed decisions, and industrial food manufacturers don't want us to know, and have spent vast sums of money to ensure that we can't easily find out.

On the other hand, people who write good novels tend to read a lot. Reading isn't sufficient, but intensive reading generally seems to be required.

Describing things in enough detail that someone else can implement them is a pretty important skill. Learning how to break up a large project into smaller tasks that you can then delegate to others is also a pretty important skill.

Having command line tools to spin up multiple containers and then to collect their results seems like it would be a pretty natural fit.

Yeah, you have to be really careful about how you use LLMs. I've been finding it very useful to use them as teachers, or to use them in the same way that I'd use a coworker. "What's the idiomatic ways to write this python comprehension in javascript?" Or, "Hey, do you remember what you call it when..." And when I request these things I'll try to ask in the most generic way possible so that I then get retype the relevant code, filling in the blanks with my own values.

That's just one use though. The other is treating it like it's a jr developer, which has its own shift in thinking. Practice in writing details specs goes a long way here.