Aren't bacteria generally much larger than viruses?
Phages don't devour bacteria, they get inside and hijack them, like viruses tend to do with cells.
Readit Newskarolinepauls commented on One universal antiviral to rule them all? cuimc.columbia.edu/news/o... · Posted by u/breve
Sounds like you might want to actually read the thread? Unless there is a geological process involved (very rare, and obvious when there is), long term forests and wetlands are carbon neutral - or they would be sitting on massive quantities of carbon. The vast majority are clearly not.
I was responding to as single comment. I do not have a responsibility to respond to the whole thread. I'm going to include it again, in full:
> A forest or wetland is a carbon sink only in the growth phase. In a long-term equilibrium, it's carbon-neutral, like biofuels.
Highlight: *In a long-term equilibrium*. The comment literally talks about long time periods...
There is zero chance this makes a difference at the scales required. That is my point. Or are you proposing somehow making billions of tons of lumber into charcoal a year, and stopping it from further decay?
There isn’t enough room. Let alone equipment.
and it sure isn’t what happens naturally.
The parent comment I'm responding to is literally:
> A forest or wetland is a carbon sink only in the growth phase. In a long-term equilibrium, it's carbon-neutral, like biofuels.
To which I'm stating that forests and wetlands are not carbon-neutral but carbon-negative.
Then you miss the parent comment's context and start in an inflammatory way:
> Bwahaha, this is so ridiculous.
And take it somewhere else (move the goalpost) - from whether forests are carbon neutral or not to how effective charcoal creation is at carbon capture, in our human timescale.
Meanwhile the only practical point wrt. charcoal creation from forests was:
> Humans could actually cut down old trees, dry them, and convert them to charcoal later used for soil enrichment.
Which doesn't propose an effective carbon capture solution. At most it's something like emission reduction - the key phrase is old trees. And soil enrichment.
Recommendation: don't argue against points people didn't make.
The result of division of two numbers is a comparison of those numbers.
The root of good faith conversation is that we don't latch on fuzzy meanings of words like "comparison" but try to understand which precise meaning should apply.
The result of subtraction is a difference. In my mind this is the most basic way to compare things. Subtraction of differing units is illegal.
The result of division is a quotient (day to day we say ratio). Division of different units is legal but not always practical.
A kilogram is more than enough gasoline to move my car a meter.
`kg of fuel per metre` is division, not comparison. You can divide different units by each other. It isn't guaranteed to always make sense but it's very useful.
Since this is about language and similes, what about "You can't compare apples and oranges"? People say that frequently, but why in particular is that so?
I think you can compare any one thing to any other one thing. You can discuss what are their common features and what features they have that are not shared.
So it seems to me "Can't compare apples and oranges" is often used just as a polemic device, trying to attack your opponents by claiming what they are saying cannot be said.
It's always been like "you cannot compare values of different units" to me. Maybe we should start saying "you cannot compare kilograms to metres".
Bwahaha, this is so ridiculous.
Show me the megatons/year of charcoal being produced by the worlds forests eh?
We could process them yes, but we can also just make them into timber - or burn them for energy. Or just bury them somewhere under a bunch of clay. Oh, and now we’re back to this thread.
It's as ridiculous as the comparison of the most recent 12k years of the holocene to the age of plant life on the Earth.
As for using lumber for timber, when eventually disposed it would have to be turned into charcoal rather than burned for energy or let decompose in conditions that don't sequester carbon.
You also missed the point about using charcoal for soil enrichment.
A forest or wetland is a carbon sink only in the growth phase. In a long-term equilibrium, it's carbon-neutral, like biofuels.
The world is more complicated than a 17th century lab experiment in combustion.
Forests sequester carbon through forest fires producing charcoal. Humans could actually cut down old trees, dry them, and convert them to charcoal later used for soil enrichment.
Wetlands capture carbon by incorporating wood from dead trees in anoxic conditions.
> When plant productivity exceeds decomposition, net soil carbon accumulation occurs. This process eventually leads to the formation of deep peat deposits, which can accumulate for thousands of years.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44246-024-00135-y (first search result for wetland carbon sink)
karolinepauls commented on Keep Pydantic out of your Domain Layer coderik.nl/posts/keep-pyd... · Posted by u/erikvdven
I'll go further and elsewhere at once: APIs should not present nested objects but normalised data. It enables clients to easily to lay out their display structure independently of API resource schemas and eases out tricks like diffing between subsequent responses, pulling updates or requesting new data by passing IDs and timestamps of already known data, etc. API normalised data obviously shouldn't correspond to DB normalised data. Nested objects are superior only for use with jq.
karolinepauls commented on Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025 mbh4h.substack.com/p/neur... · Posted by u/keiferski
> Cyberpunk was essentially a sub-type of counterculture, and counterculture itself has pretty much been dead for a couple decades now. When the hackers are primarily interested in VC funds, the cryptocurrency ethos overtaken by the finance industry, and the goal of every artist to “make it” as a creator, there’s basically no room for culture that explicitly wants to operate outside the system.
Counter-culture still exists. Look to minorities for it to exist, and think independently outside of what you get exposed to through media. The small web, and mastodon, are both built on the backs of queer/bipoc people, and it's possible to find spaces that still are operating outside of the system, you just have to actually leave the system to find it. Nobody's going to put it on your facebook or linkedin feed.
Sadly, the minorities (in the Anglosphere at least) don't deliver at either "think" or "independently". Their counterculture is as countercultural as joining a church. Just another way to fit in. Be be slightly different and they'll chastise you - a high-profile example of this mechanism has just happened again https://archive.is/qeDfU. Unless that's what it's always been.
Hooligan-like countercultures are also excluded as far as "think" or "independently" goes for an obvious reason.
Thus, the only independent thinkers I've encountered are individuals who don't aim to have all the answers, who can accept disagreements, who attempt to know themselves - but those are individuals, not countercultures.
I'm erring on saying that countercultures were never about independent thinking. They were about fitting in with different people.