Biology is another discipline where the author is wrong. See e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog_protein
Don’t forget the Thagomizer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thagomizer
Readit NewsBuyMyBitcoins commented on Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools larr.net/p/namings.html... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
BuyMyBitcoins commented on Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri reuters.com/world/us/rubi... · Posted by u/italophil
Most federal courts require documents filed there to be in Times New Roman font.
Moreover, due to executive order the typeface is now called “Times New American”.
Are 20 year unmaintained weapons an effective deterent? Would there have been capacity to resist occupation if it wasn't? Would Ukraine have been coerced into some form of union through economic means and would that be better or worse for the people of Ukraine than the invasions?
All sorts of questions to ask. Yes, if our timeline was otherwise unchanged, but the nukes were kept and maintained, it seems unlikely that invasion in 2014 would have happened... But it's a big change to the timeline to keep the weapons, and there's too many unknowns to predict the resulting changes. I do strongly suspect few countries will accept similar assurances in the future, unless under duress, but then Ukraine wasn't exactly free from duress at the time either.
While Ukraine had Soviet nuclear weapons, it did not have the launch codes, infrastructure, technical knowledge, or the economy needed to convert them into an arsenal under their sovereign control. Moscow still “held the keys” for all of those warheads.
Given how insistent the international community was on making sure those nukes were disposed of, and how economically devastated post Soviet countries were, I don’t think Ukraine stood any chance of having a nuclear deterrent.
BuyMyBitcoins commented on Moss Survives 9 Months in Space Vacuum scienceclock.com/moss-sur... · Posted by u/ashishgupta2209
So... Now we have a way to commit an act of biological terrorism on the whole Milky Way? Just get a hundred of tons of moss spores to space and accelerate them in all direction to spread them all over Milky Way. It is somehow a very satisfying thought. Maybe I'm a born terrorist deep down, and just didn't get the chance to become one?
While spores seem hardened against the extremes of space, we haven’t shown that any of this hardy life is capable of colonizing a barren world. It seems like all life on Earth depends on some already functioning biosphere. In other words, even if we sent tardigrades to a world with oxygen and liquid water, what would they eat? Where would they get nutrients such as vitamin B? All the vitamin B we consume is created by bacteria, no animal produces it on its own. So we would have to send thousands of interdependent species. And I’m willing to bet the majority of them aren’t nearly as hardy.
Sending spores to a planet that already has life might work. But I can’t help but think whatever life we introduce would be at a disadvantage. Maybe life on that planet never incorporated certain proteins, vitamins, or amino acids and whatever we send just ends up getting scurvy and dies out.
BuyMyBitcoins commented on Astrophotographer snaps skydiver falling in front of the sun iflscience.com/the-fall-o... · Posted by u/doener
> This is not just a ...
Dead giveaway
Let’s bump up the AI even more, instead of “dead giveaway” you should have used hence.
BuyMyBitcoins commented on GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT openai.com/index/gpt-5-1/... · Posted by u/tedsanders
I just changed my ChatGPT personality setting to “Efficient.” It still starts every response with “Yeah, definitely! Let’s talk about that!” — or something similarly inefficient.
So annoying.
A pet peeve of mine is that a noticeable amount of LLM output sounds like I’m getting answers from a millennial reddit user. Which is ironic considering I belong to that demographic.
I am not a fan of the snark and “trying to be fun and funny” aspect of social media discourse. Thankfully, I haven’t run into checks notes, “ding ding ding” yet.
BuyMyBitcoins commented on AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is fastcompany.com/91435192/... · Posted by u/felineflock
It's not a racism thing, it's because India is in a fairly unique position: their population is so large, that (relatively speaking) the top 0.1% of Indians in any sector tend to outnumber the top 0.1% of (for example) Americans in that sector, plus if an Indian immigrates to America, a company can pay them less than an equivalent American employee (for various reasons).
So you basically can pay an Indian immigrant a junior dev salary, for significantly-better-than-junior-dev work. It's just stonks.
>”for significantly-better-than-junior-dev work.”
Not even close. We had two offshore contractors working with our team for about two years and they were consistently terrible. Despite this, some higher up pressed us to “hire” them so we conducted an interview. One of them said they had 8+ years of SQL query optimization experience and could not explain what a table scan was. The other claimed to have 5 years of C++ experience and thought a pointer was a url. I am not exaggerating.
Whereas our team’s college intern turned junior dev has consistently delivered increasingly valuable contributions and doesn’t lie to us.
Why did that almighty watchmaker create anti matter in the first place that anihilates the normal matter? They could have just created the normal matter and zero anti matter. Why carefully fine tune these number?
All of these situations are quite convoluted if you want to fit a designer in there.
As a fun aside, have you heard of Nominative Determinism? From a purely rational standpoint, it is mere coincidence that I know a dentist with the last name “Pullum” and an electrician with the last name “Cable”. My confirmation bias doesn’t account for the 99.9% of other people with unremarkable names.
But then I realized… whenever I create fake people for unit tests I give them names that correspond to what they do. Could this be a sign that the universe is a simulation? And, that God is just a QA running some tests on it?
So maybe we’re living in an edge case!
BuyMyBitcoins commented on Microsoft Teams will start tracking office attendance tomsguide.com/computing/o... · Posted by u/thund
> Thankfully this “update” shouldn’t affect me too much. We already have well established guidelines and schedules for remote work
Not yet. Whenever you feel “this doesn’t affect me” about anything, just pause and think “if my situation was different, would I feel differently about it?”. If the answer is yes, you should react the same way as if you’re affected by it.
Don’t get me wrong, I think this is a bad thing. Microsoft has really ticked me off lately, and I lament the fact that there’s really nothing I can do to change this. Microsoft doesn’t really listen to feedback, and when they do, they tend to just delay the rollout until after the controversy has died down (Recall).
BuyMyBitcoins commented on Microsoft Teams will start tracking office attendance tomsguide.com/computing/o... · Posted by u/thund
Thankfully this “update” shouldn’t affect me too much. We already have well established guidelines and schedules for remote work.
That being said, I feel like complaining about Teams. Who else is frustrated by its unusually short idle timer? Setting my status to “Away” after only five minutes just makes me look bad. There are definitely managers who somehow think that an 8 hour workday actually means 8 hours of continuous activity. Why can’t this be changed or configured to some other span of time? I wouldn’t complain about 15 minutes.
I got around this by downloading a program called caffeine. There are some other workarounds like preparing to start a fake call, or by entering a PowerPoint presentation and then alt-tabbing away from it.