simiones

I think the exclamation point at the end of GP's message is intended to indicate sarcasm - GP also doesn't take these claims seriously.

I'm still not getting how the funding of trials that don't succeed is supposed to happen. Individual researchers don't have the money to fund a serious drug trial on their own. So even if someone put a prize of 100 trillion dollars for curing pancreatic cancer, and you had an idea for a drug that you think can easily do that, but you'd need 10M dollars to actually synthesize and trial it, how do you go from here to there? Sure, you could sell equity in your prize, but how do you convince people to buy it?

Whatever you do, you can't get around the fact that the people with medical knowledge need to convince the people who have the money to invest in them before any research can take place. There is simply no way to get rid of the pitching to bureaucrats step here, not even in the most idealized societies - research just needs too many resources for any one individual to control.

My point is this: assume a world where free market maximalists win and patents (for drugs) get abolished, in the hope of reduced prices from increased competition. Since the reasoning is free market maximalism, this society will almost certainly not force companies to publish their drug formulas, it will allow them to keep these formulae a secret.

My contention is that in this case, the hoped for market competition would not materialize, drug prices would stay roughly the same for novel medicine normally covered by patents today. I admit that this may only be true for some drugs, not for all - some drugs may indeed be very easy to reverse engineer, and those would benefit from such a change. For example, the use of lithium to treat bipolar disorder would probably be easily reverse engineered and transformed and generic alternatives would quickly appear.

What I was pointing out with the generics part is that the formula publication requirement of patents is in practice having a significant positive impact today - all drugs that are off patent are being successfully synthesized and sold much more cheaply by generics drug manufacturers. This only happens for drugs that are far too old, so I'm not a fan of this system, but I think there is a real risk that even this small thing will get lost if we replaced patents with trade secrets.

> Since the people with the money don't understand the science, these possibilities must then be assessed by bureaucrats, and this causes our best to spend half of their time writing proposals instead of working and researching. A complete waste of time.

What part of this changes when a company is paying for the research, and why can't that same part be used in a government office? It's not like drug company CEOs and CFOs are also world class medical researchers. And if the funding decisions are entirely done by a CTO who is, then why would this model not be possible in a government office?

Ultimately someone needs to pay for all of the trials that don't work, and someone needs to do a cost/benefit/likelihood analysis on any research to decide whether it will be funded or not. With a public funding scheme, the benefit analysis could be based on public health interests. With a private company funding scheme, it has to be based on profitability. In healthcare, there is usually a huge gap between these two, unlike other more traditional markets.

The recipe for Coca Cola, the most popular soft drink in the world by far, has been a trade secret for over 100 years. And I'd wager a guess that it's slightly simpler to make then most medicines. So I don't see any reason whatsoever to assume that drugs would be easily reverse engineered.

Instead, I'd say that the assertion that today's drug making is hard to reverse engineer is hard even knowing the exact formula, substance, and dosage of every drug is unlikely to be true - is there any example of any drug that generics companies are not producing more cheaply than the original inventor, once the patent has expired?

I'm not really happy with the current system either - I tend to think that the state should just mandate that all medical research be fully published, and either have companies compete on research and manufacturing, or pay for it directly if it can't be made to work as a private business. My point was just that this is very much not a capitalist or libertarian position.

> If the US was maximally capitalist it would be a free for all with no patent protection.

The much more likely alternative in a maximally capitalist / free market maximalist society would be keeping all drug formulas as trade secrets, and thereby having all drugs as branded, no generics whatsoever (or few - perhaps some substances could be reverse engineered). In such a society, having the state force companies to publish their formulas would be seen as unacceptable interference in the free market, almost certainly.

The maximum libertarian alternative to patents isn't free-for-all copying, it's trade secret formulas - e.g. Coca Cola. Drug patents actually exist as a compromise given the clear need for the state to force companies to publish their drug formulas for research. Allowing companies to just keep their drugs secret would be even more capitalistic, and would increase drug prices even more.

If you are running Emacs, either in the terminal or in graphical mode, pressing Ctrl+C does not generate any interrupt signal, it simply passes the C-c key to Emacs, which is just a general key bind.

Now, C-c in particular is the key stroke which non-core modes are recommended to use for their key binds (for example, sgml-mode uses C-c as a prefix for all of its commands, e.g. C-c C-f for sgml-skip-tag-forward, C-c C-b for sgml-skip-tag-backward, etc). Running `killall -SIGINT emacs` will not be interpreted as a C-c key being hit in emacs, it will just cause emacs to quit.

The same thing is true for other terminal based programs, like vi. Pressing Ctrl+C in vi does not generate an interrupt signal, it just passes this key combo to vi to do with as it pleases.

Ctrl-C in Emacs is not "terminate program", it is "start of user command", in most modes. Similarly, even in vi/vim, Ctrl-C does something completely different. So this has nothing to do with the terminal whatsoever.

Most proponents of the existence of qualia regard them as fundamental to what they call the hard problem of consciousness. People like Chalmers and Searle assume that all of the externally observable behaviors of people could be (at least in principle) explained without the need for qualia; that is, they believe it's possible for p-zombies to exist; this then gives rise to this question of consciousness - if all physical behaviors can be explained without qualia, and yet everyone of us has qualia, how and why does this happen?

I thought the point above was in a similar vein - that qualia and language are theoretically separable phenomena, so that we can imagine a being might have qualia without language, or language without qualia, and so these need to be explained separately. I was trying to point out that we have no proof for the existence of beings that possess these two qualities separately, so that I don't think the theoretical distinction is necessarily true. Just like any volume of gas has a temperature and a pressure, the existence of separate concepts doesn't mean they are physically separable.

Modern Hebrew is built on Biblical Hebrew, on Mishnaic Hebrew, on Medieval Hebrew, on Yiddish, and has influence from many other languages. However, there is nothing similar to how English and other native languages evolved. Between the 2nd or 3rd centuries CE and the 20th century, there were no native monolingual speakers of Hebrew - even Mishnaic Hebrew was used only as a second language; while Medieval Hebrew was a lingua franca that Jewish populations speaking other languages would use for communication, not a native language to any of them.

Also, while the creation of Modern Hebrew began around the 1880s, it was an extremely niche phenomenon until much later - at least according to Wikipedia, in 1900 there were fewer than 10 families even in Ottoman Palestine speaking Modern Hebrew currently.

> It’s far more likely than not that they do experience things.

I don't think this is a fair statement. I also happen to believe that there are no gods and that most animals have subjective experiences in some sense similar to our own (while I also believe that atoms and rocks don't), but I don't really think there is a meaningful probability you can associate with either position.

This is pure pseudo-science at its finest. You're using sciencey words without putting any real meaning behind them. A frequency has to be a frequency of something (e.g. an electromagnetic wave). There would also have to be a mechanism that would explain why each body is tied to exactly one and only one "frequency" throughout its entire life, and why it never happens that different bodies share a consciousness; and there are thousand other things - but I'll stop here as I've already put more thought into this non-idea than it deserves.

> The point is that bats do have a subjective experience of the world which is very different from a person's. It seems like you think only humans have this?

This is definitely a possibility given the very basic level of understanding we have of this. The reality is that we don't know, and we don't even have a well defined way to know (that is, we don't even have any idea what kind of proof we would need to bring that animals have an experience of the world in some sense that is the same as ours but different from a rock's).

> And a modern Hebrew speaker can easily understand Biblical Hebrew — they're closer than even Modern English and Shakespearean.

Of course, because modern Hebrew was constructed based on (the modern understanding of) Biblical Hebrew around the 1920s or slightly earlier, whereas Modern English naturally evolved for ~400 years from Shakespearean English and other forms of English.

"American" would be ambiguous in this context, right? Both the Cherokee and the English-speaking residents of the USA are American, but the specific point here was about whether Sequoyah was only a Cherokee speaker or if he had any knowledge of English, Spanish, French, Latin or any other European language. In this context, saying that Sequoyah's father was "American" would not make any point - it wouldn't tell anyone reading the comment that he was not Cherokee nor from any other native population; whereas European makes that point succinctly.

> qualia totally precede language; one could experience qualia without language, etc.

While I do believe this as well, I don't think there is any way to prove this with current knowledge. You can introspect and separate your experience of a color from your language, but this type of introspection can also be misleading. And that's about all you can do - we don't know of any way to objectively test if another organism experiences qualia, and any historical/evolutionary evidence is also lost.

UB has 2 very different implications:

1. It means that even if your program happens to work, it can't be portable

2. It means that even if your program happens to work today, it might stop working tomorrow when you add some new code, when you change some compiler flags, or when you do even a minor compiler upgrade

Of course, a compiler can't address 1. However, a compiler can very much address item 2. If Microsoft were to say "in MSVC, we define integer overflow to wrap", then they would guarantee that `INT_MAX + 1` will produce `INT_MIN` regardless of any optimization settings, any compiler upgrades, any other changes to the code. Of course, compiling the exact same program with Clang or GCC might cause it to crash or corrupt memory or anything else - but as long as you stuck with MSVC, your program would have perfectly defined semantics.

This is similar to using compiler extensions or intrinsics - they are not portable and not defined by the standard, maybe even explicitly defined to NOT be supported per the standard (such as variable length arrays in C++ in GCC), but they are nevertheless perfectly safe as long as you stick to your chosen compiler.

Edit to add: the integer overflow example is not just a theoretical possibility - lots of C++ compilers provide the `-fwrapv` flag; when using that flag, signed integer overflow is no longer UB for that program, it is defined just the same as unsigned integer overflow.

Note that, while complex, there exist GCs that can handle both soft real time and even hard real time constraints - especially for Java. Memory overhead is a problem with GC languages, though, and that one is by design.

> No - if something is UB in the spec, it's UB.

A compiler is still free to ignore the spec and declare that something is not UB. However, this is very much compiler based, not platform based. Windows might guarantee that aligned DWORD-sized memory accesses are atomic, but that doesn't mean Clang when compiling for Windows would respect this - but MSVC might.

Light has nothing to do with this.

The point is that mass bends space-time. The amount of bending is dependent on the size of the mass and on the distance from the mass. Even though the Sun is incomparably heavier than the Earth, it is also MUCH farther away from you. So, space-time around the Earth is curved much more towards the center of the Earth than it is towards the center of the Sun. In the mattress analogy, consider a large mattress, with a bowling ball and a car sitting on it. The car will obviously bend the mattress much more, but if you're close to the bowling ball, you'll still fall towards the bowling ball first before both you and it fall towards the car.

So, say you're in an airplane moving directly forward, with the Sun just overhead (and the Earth obviously just below you). The Earth curves spacetime towards it a lot in this area, while the Sun curves it towards itself just a little bit. The overall curvature is such that time still moves more for the bottom of the plane (closer to the Earth) than the top of the plane (closer to the Sun). So, the bottom side moves a little slower than the top side, but the structural integrity of the plane pulls the top side towards the bottom, causing a slight motion towards the Earth - gravity [note that the GP's explanation got the signs a little wrong - time flows slower, not faster, closer to a big mass]. Conversely, if the Earth disappears from the picture and only the Sun remains, now the top part of the plane will move slightly slower, pulling the bottom part towards it, and thus towards the Sun.

I think these sorts of things are very commonly misleading. The Romanian school system I grew up in for example nominally had way more advanced subjects even in middle school, not to mention high school, than what is commonly taught in much of Europe and the USA. For example, we did a solid two-three months of basic group theory in the 10th grade (sophomore year?) - learning about monoids, groups, rings, fields, proving isomorphisms between various structures etc. These were even part of the Bacalaureat, our equivalent of the SAT. A foreign language (almost universally English) is part of the national curriculum in Romania starting from the first year of primary school. When I went through school, we also used to have a set of canonical literary works that we were expected to read and be able to provide literary criticism on during the national exams at the end of middle school without access to the text; for example, the exam you'd take at the end of 8th grade would ask students to write a ~700 word essay on the main character of a particular Romanian novel; or on the themes of a piece of poetry the exam named, but did not reproduce.

However, the number of students who actually ever understand any of this is typically only a small fraction. In particular for the Romanian language exams, despite the theoretically high level of literary knowledge that it tested for, the actual rate of functional illiteracy between students who passed this exam was >20-30%. A huge swath of students either cheated, or simply memorized entire essays by heart, without even understanding what they meant. Of course, some of us actually did learn all of this from an early age - but this was far less typical than looking at the curriculum, exams, and even exam results would have suggested.

They said "Spanish/French/German/whatever should be the second foreign language they learn, gated behind Greek & Latin being their first.".

That sounds great, and very different from what GP said ("make French/Spanish/etc the second foreign language they learn after Latin&Greek").

Edit: I will still say that Greek has little relevance to common English vocabulary, though it is very relevant to almost every scholarly domain. The same is true to some extent for Latin - as the vast majority of non-scholarly Latin words in English are actually borrowed from French, and have (Old) French spelling and pronunciation, not Latin ones.

I am a Romanian native, so I know quite a bit about it :D . Romanian has kept the major features, but it still dropped a lot. For example, instead of 6 noun cases, Romanian only has 3, of which only 2 are commonly used (the third, vocative - "hey, you, bird!" - is quite rarely needed; and even when it is, it's usually replaced with the nominative by most speakers - we commonly say "pisica rea!" instead of "pisico rea!" for "bad cat!"). There are also fewer verb tenses in Romanian than Classical Latin, and some are formed with auxiliary verbs instead of being truly separate verb forms. Also, the neuter gender, while technically existing in Romanian nouns, is simply masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural, there is no unique third form for adjectives or articles.

Slavic languages also have a case system (I think it's possible that this is part of why Romanian kept the Latin case system, as there was quite a bit of Slavic influence in Romanian), but they didn't "retain" it from Latin, as they are not Romance languages at all - they simply share this linguistic feature; Latin and Old Slavonic are by no means the only languages with a case system.

The point of a fixed curriculum is that there is a minimal level of knowledge on various subjects that we should expect all of our fellow citizens to have. Maybe you find biology very boring, but that still doesn't mean you should be able to finish school without knowing that living organisms have cells that power them, that all animals have hearts, that plants do photosynthesis etc. It's alright to not like history, but you should still have some idea of what the Roman empire was or about the Second World War. It's ok to hate physics, but it's not ok to have no idea about Newton's laws of motion or about the notions of pressure, volume, and temperature and how they relate to each other in gasses.

Knowing Latin doesn't compensate for lacking knowledge about the fundamental details of the world we live in and share.

(Classical) Latin nouns have one of 3 genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and each noun has 12 possible forms (6 cases * 2 numbers); pronouns follow similar rules; and the adjectives modifying a noun have to agree with it in case, gender, and number (so typically a single adjective has 36 possible forms). Verbs vary by voice (active/passive), mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative, infinitive, participle, gerund, supine), tense (different moods have different numbers of tenses, with 6 for the indicative), number (singular or plural), and person (3 persons); overall, a single verb will have more than a hundred different forms.

Because verbs have so many specific forms, it is also pretty common in Latin, as in most modern Romance languages, to omit the subject of a sentence, as it can typically be inferred from context plus the specific verb form - so, you often have to recognize the verb form to be able to understand who the sentence is even talking about (e.g. a sentence might say "amo regem"; if you recognize the words but not the specific forms, this means "love king"; but this unambiguously means "I love the king").

Now, there is quite a bit of regularity here - there are 5 categories of regular verbs (plus some specific irregular verbs), and 5 categories of nouns (though there are multiple sub-categories, as there is some variation in noun forms even in the same category; plus of course some irregular nouns).

Overall no, I don't see any comparison where you could say that Latin is a simple language. All modern Romance languages have universally merged or dropped various of these features. For example, Spanish drops the case system entirely, drops the neuter gender, and reduces the number of moods for verbs.

I fully agree on phonics, but teaching Greek and Latin before any modern language? That seems deeply weird as an idea. Especially since Greek (by which I assume you mean Ancient Greek) is a pretty isolated language, with relatively little relation to any modern language except modern Greek. Another huge issue with Ancient Greek and Classical Latin is that they have extremely complex grammars compared to any modern European language, which makes them very daunting to English speakers especially.

Note also that Greek words used in English are almost exclusively scholarly words (like "metaphor", "diagnosis", "theology"), they are not popular borrowings like many Latin words ("difficult", "pork", "to count").

Another pretty famous example is Stalker, based on Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. The novel is an ok sci-fi concept, but the film takes it to a whole other philosophical level.