pigpop

I've got bad news for you. It may seem like a good thing that Y. Pestis is bacterial since we have antibiotics but remember that bacteria can become antibiotic resistant. You might say "no problem, that would only happen if there were a lot of cases and people weren't properly using antibiotics" and while this is true it is also possible to deliberately make Y. Pestis antibiotic resistant. "Who in their right mind would do a stupid thing like that?" you may ask, well it turns out the Soviets did and likely stockpiled large amounts of it with plans to deliver it in an aerosolized form over cities. Aerosolized particles are how you contract pneumonic plague which if you can't treat it with antibiotics is nearly 100% lethal in all cases. It can also be passed from human to human via coughing. So, here's hoping that this is just a rare case of wild type Y. Pestis that the lab worker somehow unfortunately inhaled and didn't get treatment for in time.

Making it antibiotic resistant is not difficult and they already did that back when they were the USSR. Not only did they develop it, they produced large quantities of it to stockpile for a rainy day.

The Soviets developed antibiotic resistant strains of the plague meant to be dispersed over cities as aerosolized droplets. Inhaling these droplets causes pneumonic plague (coincidentally the type of infection this lab worker supposedly had which seems odd) and pneumonic plague can be spread human to human via coughing once the infection has been allowed to incubate for a few days. It can also be passed to animals from humans which could result in another vector for infection via handling, butchering or eating infected animals resulting in either primary bubonic plague or pharyngeal plague. Untreated pneumonic plague is almost always fatal so it goes without saying that antibiotic resistant plague is effectively 100% fatal in all contracted cases.

It would be more effective than chemical weapons in that it is more persistent, has delayed action and can be spread person to person or through animal vectors. This means it would be possible to deploy it more discretely and that it requires greater effort to contain. You're right that it is a better weapon for a terrorist attack or asymmetric warfare. It would still make a good weapon for creating an undue amount of stress on a region's medical capacity, if enough people were infected then a significant amount of antibiotics would initially be used attempting to treat them and a lot of resources would go to containing the spread, quarantining the infected or potential exposures and providing supportive care to a lot of people that would inevitably die very miserable deaths.

Yes, this is why doctors are only required to read textbooks and pass a written exam before practicing. Only mastery of the documentation is necessary. /s

Come on, coyotes are classified as a least endangered animal and for good reason; they breed like crazy and eat almost anything. They are also a massive nuisance to livestock, a minor danger to people and they'll eat your cat or dog given half a chance. Culling prairie dogs would just mean their population would be slightly less booming.

Aedes aegypti aren't native to anywhere outside of Africa. Native mosquito species in most other continents don't spread the same diseases that infect humans. Aedes aegypti mostly breed around where humans live since they lay their eggs in containers of stagnant water, other mosquito species live primarily in wetlands and areas that stay moist due to thick vegetation or soil conditions. The native species of mosquitos are a much larger food source than Aedes aegypti for that reason.

Aedes aegypti are container breeders, you can totally eliminate them from an environment through diligent removal of standing water left in buckets, tires, pots, etc. This has been done before but the effort wasn't properly sustained so they've made a major comeback in disease prone areas. Killing a lot of them does have a substantial effect because they don't easily travel long distances by themselves so if the remaining resistant population is small enough it might just as easily end up dying out due to its breeding cycle being interrupted through other means. The part that should be criticized here is that any eradication campaign should also involve efforts to eliminate their breeding environments by removing junk and unattended containers that collect water.

We are choosing to not undo the harm we caused by spreading Aedes aegypti all over the world in the first place.

Aedes aegypti is an invasive species native to Africa so removing it from the environment everywhere else in the world that it has been spread to would benefit the local mosquito species which don't spread the same diseases and are less of a nuisance to humans.

100% and if you've never had the experience you really can't properly conceive of how bad the smell is. It's not just stinky as in someone blowing up the bathroom, it's a smell so thick in the air that it can make you want to vomit and will likely give you headaches from the methane or other gasses involved. Depending on how it's being handled e.g. if they spray it on a field they use to grow feed for the cattle you can wind up dealing with levels that feel unsafe for weeks out of the year.

> At (edit) 10m, it often exceeds the 90dB threshold for hearing loss.

> Why would you be anything like that close if you don't work on site?

I'd also question whether that is inside or outside. We already have regulations that govern the acceptable noise levels around commercial and industrial properties so I highly doubt that a datacenter is going to have an exception.

Make sure to do a fair comparison that includes fertilizer production, pesticides, herbicides, farm equipment and machinery, grain drying and all of the other inputs and processes.

Back when all clothing was hand cut and stitched out of cloth also made by hand every pair of underwear was overflowing with human touch and also cost so much time or money that you'd be lucky to have more than one pair if you weren't very wealthy. Now most clothing and especially basics like underwear and socks are mass produced and even the poorest people can afford to have new clothing on a regular basis and own multiple changes instead of wearing rough homespun and patched up rags. Yes, it became commodified. Is this a bad thing? Decidedly not unless you prefer only the wealthy to be able to afford clean, new and even stylish clothing.

Notice that commodification didn't eliminate the demand for custom made or designer clothing. It stayed a luxury and demand and variety even increased. Commodification opens up a range of markets as well besides just the cheapest market you get a whole spectrum of quality, cost and niche markets that weren't possible when supply was constrained. The same thing will happen with software. If you want to make artisanal, hand made to order apps and websites then there will be plenty of people that want that but now everyone will be able to afford their own good enough app or website without investing a huge amount of time or money to build it.

People just do this anyways and we have all kinds of "bias" and "fallacy" labels to identify the ways in which they do so. We've also known about the impossibility of making people understand something in exactly the same way that you do for all of recorded history (and probably longer). Pearls before swine, can't make a horse drink, none so blind, etc. you can disseminate as much information as you want but people will ignore it, misinterpret it, reinterpret it to suit their own beliefs or potentially, even interpret it more correctly than you have (shocking, I know).

Sorry if I'm reading your comment the wrong way but it seems like this is the interpretation that many people would have (ha!), if you meant it more ambiguously then I apologize. I'd agree in the case where this is a neutral outcome where some will use it to delude themselves, many will use it in a way that doesn't stray too far from the norm and others will use it to great effect to improve their understanding.

Imagine if there were 5 competitors all selling variations of the same basic products with minor cosmetic differences! The horror! How would you ever make any money? It's simply inconceivable.

Those things seem fairly obviously not online culture but parts of "real life" culture that have an online presence, obvious to me at least. Video games and especially multiplayer video games are a core part of what you could call the indigenous online culture and serve the role of sport and to a large degree casual socialization. Their equivalents in the real world are team sports, board games and party games. These things aren't mutually exclusive and they certainly bleed over both ways but you can easily say that a game like Counter Strike is primarily online and a game like Basketball is primarily offline even though there are Basketball themed video games and Counter Strike themed in-person events.

To put it simply, it's a Venn diagram with two overlapping, non-coincident circles. The amount of overlap has varied with time but that doesn't mean online culture doesn't exist or conversely that everything is part of online culture.

Due to shifting definitions, I believe that makes you a boomer[0] so you'd be readily excused for not knowing.

Sarcasm aside, gaming and FPS terminology are so tightly coupled with online culture that it's just assumed everyone knows it. Spawn camping is among the oldest examples of gaming terms that broke out into common online usage and it dates back to Quake some time around 1997.

[0] anyone older than 39 at this point

My mother was a stay at home mom and at least from my perspective she never seemed isolated but that seemed to be because there were many other stay at home moms on our block. We basically knew everyone on our block that had kids, which was most of them back then. I distinctly remember all the time we spent at our neighbours' houses for combination play dates and card games. Us kids would play inside or outside and the moms would play cards and socialize. There were always people coming and going and it felt like the entire block was a sort of extended family. I don't remember many organized dinner parties but that could just be from being a small child at the time so we weren't up late and didn't spend time sitting at the "adult table" when there were gatherings (we'd be fed something and then go play with the other kids in the basement or another room).

Maybe with a more expansionist attitude we'd already have a moon base.

I guess I just don't see the need to ship something like a modern chip lithography machine? When the colony is first getting established they don't need to be making 2nm chips, there's only so much of that equipment that they would want for their own uses and they could get by without it just fine. There's something like a Maslow's hierarchy of needs for equipment that they would want from Earth starting with the most essential equipment for building habitation, power generation, growing food and extracting and recycling oxygen and water. Mars is a frontier not a new subdivision so the people who would settle there need food and shelter instead of laptops and TVs. Even after basic needs are met it would make more sense to figure out how to produce all of the tooling and manufacturing equipment you need locally instead of trying to ship everything, that's what self-sufficiency really means: you can produce not just the end products but all of the raw materials and machinery needed to create those end products. That's not to mention the biggest reason to make everything locally would be that it has to work in Martian gravity, there are a lot of manufacturing processes that would need to be redesigned for that. I don't deny that they would be dependent on Earth at first but there isn't any way around that since the whole idea is to move part of humanity from Earth to Mars. That doesn't make independence impossible though.

I don't really see the point in arguing against it. If a private company and private individuals want to try to colonize Mars then what does it have to do with anyone else? You can't cling on to their legs and scream "don't go!" It all just seems to be in the same vein as that famous headline saying man will never fly.

Not as crazy of an idea as it sounds. A bomber that could fly as fast as a missile and orbit the planet allowing it to deliver a payload and then return and land would be a useful technology. Might be a preferable way of delivering "Rods from God" style kinetic impactors since it wouldn't involve keeping an armed satellite in orbit where it could be targeted.

I'm not saying it wouldn't take one or two hundred years to become fully independent for the necessities to survive on its own. I don't see that as an argument against it, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago after all. I don't think restoring civilization to Earth is a primary goal either. The primary goal is having a technological civilization survive the destruction or fall of the one on Earth. If a Martian colony is sufficiently robust and wealthy enough to send physical aid to Earth after a disaster then that's great but if it can only look after itself then its still achieved its purpose.

Global economic collapse due to an asteroid or nuclear war might not cause human extinction but it would mean a very large regression in our technological capacity. That could endure for hundreds if not thousands of years. Maybe we would never fully recover, people argue that point based on all of the easy to access resources having already been exploited though I have more faith in humanity's ingenuity. The role of a Mars colony in this scenario isn't to send iron ore to Earth, it's to maintain high technology and continue moving forward.

The risk of a pandemic becoming interplanetary is much lower than the risk of international spread. Travel between Earth and Mars is necessarily constrained by their orbits with a window opening only every 26 months. Most travel would likely be uncrewed cargo and when people do make the trip there would be strict quarantine measures taken (this is already done with current crewed launches to orbit and there is established history of immigration being subject to quarantine). Most importantly, the trip to Mars takes much longer than the incubation period of any disease likely to cause a pandemic so the disease will have run its course by the time the ship reaches Mars and they can decide what to do at that point (at the extreme they may resupply it and send it back but that's probably not necessary in most cases).

To your first point: yes, that's the whole idea and it's been the same playbook for any colony from the Americas to Australia. Mars is a much bigger challenge but our technology has advanced enough to make this possible. Let those who would dare risk their lives to achieve something great do so. If you don't want to participate then you don't have to, this isn't a national or international project so you can safely sit it out.

To your second: there are calamities for which a second self-sufficient planet would be necessary. A large asteroid impact would utterly wreck the global industrial base which is highly dependent on international trade and specialization of resource extraction and manufacturing in different regions of the world, having an independent backup on a different planet is one of the few ways to hedge against this. You could argue that every country on earth be fully self-sufficient and then maybe they could survive but that seems like a much bigger task since you'd be building multiple completely independent civilizations instead of just one. Guarding against another global pandemic is another and being out of range of nuclear weapons and their fallout is a third.

Elon is the world's biggest stan (who is actually doing things rather than just talking about it) for solar power and electrification of transport, how is that a call for inaction?

That doesn't make much sense, a previously private corporation (which just recently went public) is achieving economical launch to orbit and has made continual progress on that front over decades while politics has both worked for and against them. To me, that is a refutation of "launching things into orbit is politics" especially when you compare the very politically entangled incumbents' launch cadence and capacity.

>I went back to TDD, to my PRs with just 5 files changed. To my 2-line PR descriptions that were straight to the point.

It baffles me that someone who prefers TDD can't just stick to writing the tests and then using them to validate and constrain the AI's output. Only making a small number of changes per PR is easy to enforce as well. The problem here doesn't seem to be using AI, it seems to be a lack of discipline in how you use AI.

>There were tasks I could have done in 20 minutes easily, that took 5 minutes of an AI agent, and then 2 days for me to review.

This shouldn't happen at all if you constrain the problem. I've seen it happen many times when you just YOLO a vague spec and just keep prodding it to continue without paying attention to what is being done. If you have a well defined task that should only take 20 minutes of your time then it should only take 10 minutes to review the small amount of output. If the PR is 1000 lines changed then something went wrong, throw it away and rewrite your specification.

That's not surprising, I've used LLMs to write several chapters of a book and it's many times more difficult than getting them to write working code. It's not a task that they're well optimized for but the biggest hindrance is that there are practically no tools that allow you to validate prose especially at the lengths required for a book.

Getting a good writing style out of them requires careful prompting and many corrections, their default writing style(s) are so highly reinforced by training that they will always tend to drift back to them. Maintaining continuity requires you to create a lot of documentation outside of the text itself. It's a much more manual process than working on a codebase where you've set up a lot of automation and tooling that allows them to check their own work.

Edit: it's also worth noting that many LLMs have gotten much worse at writing prose as they have gotten better at writing code.

This really isn't the same thing as an interview. I'm not talking to you for the benefit of an audience or as a way to document your thoughts. I'm saying what I think and responding to what you think (and accuse me of thinking). I'm expressing my own opinion, I'm not trying to win a debate or make myself look good.

It doesn't really matter what the business is, farming was an example but if you need a concrete example of a billionaire that started as a farmer and built his fortune in agriculture and ag related business then look to Harry Stine[0]

There are plenty of other billionaires that started as small business owners putting in their own work. They became billionaires by successfully managing their business and scaling, expanding and pivoting it. There are also ones who derive their wealth strictly from investing or purchasing other businesses, maybe that doesn't seem like work or seems unfair for some reason but you can't just take a random person and hand them millions of dollars and expect them to turn that into a billion dollars. Most would go bankrupt if they tried, smarter ones would just be low risk millionaires living off interest or broadly diversified investment returns. To me, those ones would be the only people I'd say aren't really earning their money but if it's their money then it's their choice what they do with it.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Stine_(businessman)

You're assigning motives to me that I don't have. Maybe that is the distinction, you think how you appear to an audience is important, I'm viewing this no differently than I would a private conversation. I'm not performing or signalling to anyone.