readittwice

Can someone explain how "I have my whole genome sequenced by Nebula" relates to the news just now that "The human Y chromosome has been completely sequenced"?

How can someone have their whole (!) genome sequenced already when so far we weren't able to fully sequence the Y chromosome. And this person seems to have a Y chromosome.

Since there are people here that seem to know a bit about this stuff, I will take the chance to ask some naive questions ;)

Do I have this right that CAR T-cells have this engineered B-cell/antibody like receptor that recognizes antigens only on the cell membrane. While the regular T-cell receptor can look into cells as well? And that's why the T-cell receptor is potentially better at recognizing solid cancers?

So cancers usually create this immunosuppresive environment, wouldn't this stop this engineered T-cells as well?

There are plenty of articles from May 2020 that all discuss in various words that a deal was struck. If you believe that AZ didn't sign a contract with the UK before Aug 28 then the burden is on you to prove that.

It is well known that AZ sells the vaccine at cost. E.g. "... is being offered by the drugmaker at cost during the pandemic and at no profit in perpetuity for low-income countries." [1] That's because the vaccine was developed by the Oxford university and Oxford made this a condition. If AZ makes a profit from the vaccine during the pandemic they would break the contract with Oxford.

It seems the cost price differs from country to country because of different production costs and other factors (maybe shipping).

[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/astrazeneca-vaccine-cost-hig...

The president could prevent that though and could ask for a re-election in case of a candidate change after the election. So not nothing ;)

Almost no one would argue that because AFAIK that never happened. Pretty sure people would argue that way as soon as this happens.

That article was clearly published in May 2020, I don't assume AZ sneaked that article in. Are you really saying that AZ was faking the press release in May 2020, so that in 2021 they could claim that the UK signed the contract three months before the EU?

IMHO that sentence doesn't prove your point that "The link also says they wouldn't export EU manufactured vaccines".

AZ is selling at cost, so they are not making a profit from the vaccine atm. So that statement should be trivially true.

Oh right, that's true. Sorry. He is now still a European civil servant though. In my defense, I quickly googled his name and that's what popped out first. On TV was announced as "spokesperson of the European Commission", so I thought that was his official job title.

No, I've already posted the article that states that the UK signed the contract with AZ in May. There are also other news articles from May 2020 (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/18/coronavirus-astrazeneca-aims...) that prove that the UK already ordered back then.

That's why it was considered "news" when it was reported that one particular contract was signed by the UK one day after the EU. But that's not the full story, since the UK had binding contracts with AZ well before that.

"The link also says they wouldn't export EU manufactured vaccines, except Italy blocked an export to Australia a couple of weeks ago." I haven't seen that claim in the article you linked.

Again, this is simply not true. Yes, the UK signed one particular contract on Aug 28, so one day after the EU with AZ. However, the UK had a binding contract with AZ since May.

"However, the key lies in an earlier agreement that AstraZeneca made back in May with the U.K., which was a binding deal establishing “the development of a dedicated supply chain for the U.K.,” an AstraZeneca spokesperson said."

Quote is from this article: https://www.politico.eu/article/the-key-differences-between-...

True, the EU even waived its right to sue because delivery delays.

"And as POLITICO reported last week, the non-redacted version of the contract shows that the EU also waived its right to sue AstraZeneca in the event of delivery delays."

Quote from this article: https://www.politico.eu/article/the-key-differences-between-...

I agree with that. However, Martin Selmayr (Secretary-General of the European Commission) recently explained on TV that the slower approval was the reason that the EU is lagging behind the US in vaccations. Well, obviously that slower approval was for "more safety" according to him.

That explanation doesn't make a whole lot of sense since the delay was only a few weeks for Biontech/Pfizer or Moderna. As you mentioned, AZ is not even approved in the US. Europe would need to vaccinate around 50M people in a few weeks.

EU politicans know that the EU has failed at procurement. They now try to cover that up by blaming AZ and explaining delays with additional safety measures.

Again: No, the UK had a binding contract with AZ since May already.

"However, the key lies in an earlier agreement that AstraZeneca made back in May with the U.K., which was a binding deal establishing “the development of a dedicated supply chain for the U.K.,” an AstraZeneca spokesperson said."

Quote is from this article: https://www.politico.eu/article/the-key-differences-between-...

No, this isn't FUD. AZ wasn't lying. Yes, it's true that the EU signed one particular contract one day before the UK on August 27. However, the UK had a binding contract with AZ since May already.

"However, the key lies in an earlier agreement that AstraZeneca made back in May with the U.K., which was a binding deal establishing “the development of a dedicated supply chain for the U.K.,” an AstraZeneca spokesperson said."

This quote is from this article: https://www.politico.eu/article/the-key-differences-between-...

Those numbers don't make sense to me, it claims that Safari would use 73M of memory with both Twitter and Gmail. But locally on my machine I see that Activity Monitor already reports 490M of memory usage just for the Gmail process of Safari alone. The Twitter login page also already needs 90M. Can someone check as well?

I don't have confidence that (in the case of the EU) the same politicians that just claimed that they couldn't foresee any problems with mass production, did everything they could've done to ramp up production last summer. On the contrary the EU ordered quite late and less than they got offered from the vendors. In addition, the EU doubled the ordered doses only this January from 300M (100M of those were optional) to 600M from Biontech, after some EU member states also made additional orders. Imagine these orders would've been made in July. That might have provided the financial incentive for the vendor to e.g. ramp up an additional production line or factory in summer. I can't say whether this would have helped or not, but I certainly don't have the feeling the EU did everything they could have done to make the vaccine available as soon as possible.

My 81-year old grandparents will get their first dose of vaccine on February 28, while other countries are already vaccinating much younger people.

In that particular interview, I tend to agree. However I've seen/read multiple other interviews and talk shows where EU politicians talk quite differently. They may admit some general mistakes (without naming one) but still dispute each and every critic.

In one talk show for example a representative of the European Commission at least mentioned twice that in Africa even less people got vaccinated than in the EU. Like this would be the frame of reference.

I can absolutely imagine that scaling production is extremely hard.

However I don't have confidence that the same politicians that just claimed that they couldn't foresee problems with mass production did everything in their power to help here last summer. I mean the EU ordered only in November from Biontech and Moderna (and less doses than the companies offered). That doesn't really look like an incentive for companies to look into opening another factory already in summer.

Aside from that: The US, UK and Israel have all proven that it is possible to do better than the EU here. They didn't know as well and ordered way sooner and more. AFAIR the UK even recently claimed that they vaccinated more people than the EU even in absolute numbers.

The EU bet pretty heavily on AstraZeneca and that's not the Eastern European countries fault. The EU already ordered in August, while they only ordered from Biontech and Moderna in November (11th and 25th). It wasn't wrong to buy AstraZeneca, it's cheap and more importantly easy to handle. The failure was to bet so much on it. AstraZeneca wasn't something that was odered as well, it was and still is THE vaccine that's intended for the largest part of the population.

Money also can't be an issue, the EU has come up with 750B euros to fight the economical impact of the pandemics. That was already in April or so. For the vaccine the EU only had around 2.7B available for most of 2020. The UK alone spent more than that, the US over 10B$. The worst thing: 2B of those 2.7B euros were simply repurposed from an already existing fund. That means the EU states only had to come up with 700M euros together in total. Even ignoring all of that, the vaccine is so cheap compared to the costs of lockdowns (and lives) that the price simply does not matter much. Ironically the price they got is the part the EU is especially proud of and EU politicans are quick to point out that Israel payed twice as much per dose.

What they don't say that the Pfizer/Biontech vaccine's price depends on the amount and delivery date. So you could actually pay more to get the vaccine sooner. It seems the EU chose not to do that because they felt good enough with AstraZeneca (they were supposed to start production in October). Unfortunately that information isn't public so we don't know for sure. But this would both explain why the EU didn't expect significant shipments from Non-AZ vaccines in the first quarter and why they got it cheaper.

Unfortunately the EU still communicates there is no problem with the procurement but only with evil pharmaceutical companies not delivering as promised. There will not be any remorse.

It really must hurt them that even the heavily criticized politicians Johnson, Netanyahu and Trump did a much better job with procurement than the EU.

Absolutely, however the EU's politicians are playing dumb and claim that they couldn't foresee that mass production could be a problem.

The EU ordered too late and simply not enough. Now they are trying to blame everyone else for their failure.

There is the caveat that generated machine code can embed addresses of objects that get relocated by the GC. In this case the code needs to be patched even though the code itself doesn't move.

I don't really know that particular GC, but not necessarily. Code objects are usually stored in a separate area and might be managed differently than regular objects. So a copying GC might not relocate code - maybe not even collect it. In case objects are relocated by the GC, there is usually "relocation information" which can be used to patch the code after it got relocated.

Releasing memory is definitely useful for mobile devices or browsers. Even in some server use cases it's useful, e.g. when you pay for memory usage. I guess that's why the JVM has this -XX:SoftMaxHeapSize option.

I guess it depends whether GCs are always scheduled in an allocation or can be triggered another way. Either way that should be easy to disable.

I read somewhere that D doesn't have write barriers, so I would assume they have a hard time implementing more advanced GC features like generational collection or concurrent marking. It's not suprising that the GCs in the JVM achieve much better pause time.

> What LLVM has going for it versus GCC, is the license, specially beloved by embedded vendors and companies like Sony, Nintendo, SN Systems, CodePlay can save some bucks in compiler development.

The license is probably considered an advantage by many companies. However it is definitely not the only reason for LLVMs success. There are many technical reasons as well, e.g. cleaner code and architecture. My personal impression is that a lot of research and teaching has moved from GCC to LLVM as well, universities usually do not care that much about the license.

Yes, GCC has GIMPLE (and before that just RTL) but it is not as self-contained as LLVM's IR. In GCC front-end and middle-end are quite tangled on purpose for political reasons. Nevertheless I agree that LLVM isn't as revolutionary as the poster you are replying to is claiming, reusing an IR for multiple languages was done before. However I don't think any other system was as successful as LLVM at this. E.g. Rust, Swift, C/C++ via clang, Julia, Fortran, JITs like JSC/Azul JVM are/were using LLVM as a compilation tier, GPU drivers, etc. Those are all hugely successful projects and if you ask me this is an impressive list already while not even complete. It seems most new languages these days use LLVM under the hood (with Go being the exception). IMHO this is also because LLVM's design was flexible enough that it enabled all those widely different use cases. GCC supports multiple languages as well, but it never took off to the degree that LLVM did.

I don't know all the compilers you mentioned but how many of those were still maintained and available on the systems people cared about by the time LLVM got popular? Are those proper open-sorce projects?

> Maybe dial it back a bit with the challenge to point at literature. The literature has not really caught up with the existence of WASM yet.

It wasn't me who claimed that WASM is "obviously" a register machine, despite the inventors saying otherwise. They even explicitly state that they decided against a register machine. I guess it's then reasonable for me to ask on what definition of stack vs register you are basing this opinion on. Let me be clear: I was not asking here for literature about WASM specifically but a definition of register/stack machines that supports your claim.

WASM's instruction encoding is very much based on a stack machine. Even with the initial limitations you mentioned I don't think it qualifies as "obviously a register machine". As already mentioned in multiple comments those restrictions were already lifted with the multi value proposal.

I understand that there is a grey area, but simply claiming "obviously a register machine" doesn't seem right to me. Implementation-wise WASM is a stack machine even if it needs/needed locals to be turing-complete.

I have to admit this line seems arbitrary to me. So WASM is a register machine to you but if they would simply add those 2 instruction would it suddenly become a stack machine then? Those instructions would actually be trivial to add. I think those terms are relatively well defined and when you argue that WASM is a register machine even though the inventors explicitly claim it's a stack machine you should have really good arguments for that. Personally I would be surprised if you could point me to any literature that supports your definition.

I would still consider WASM a stack machine and not a register machine. Yes, there are mutable local variables in WASM but Java bytecode has them as well - which you consider a stack machine. BTW the designers of WASM explicitly call WASM a stack machine here: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/Rationale..... With WASM's MVP it was necessary to store e.g. loop state in local variables, thanks to recent changes this doesn't seem to be necessary anymore. I think this was the main argument that blog post considered WASM to be a register machine. javac also makes heavy use of variables in bytecode, but somehow no one considers the JVM a register machine.

> my observations are that people with experience in the field tend to prefer register machines

That's actually the opposite of my observation, they seem to prefer stack machines.

Maybe, however remember that you then need to buy new hardware to use new WASM features.

Also WASM isn't really ideal for interpretation, this could make implementing the CPU harder (however I have no clue about implementing CPUs, so this is just a guess).

What would be the advantage? Performance? Probably not much after JIT compiling WASM to native machine instructions. If there is an actual problem there, I guess it would be better to just add new native instructions that support WASM semantics. The JIT can then use these instructions if available.

Right now WASM can't do much without a runtime, so I think a WASM-only CPU is probably infeasible for some time.