mapt (u/mapt) - Readit News

mapt commented on An SVG is all you need jon.recoil.org/blog/2025/... · Posted by u/sadiq

wongarsu · 2 days ago

SVG was once hailed as the Flash-killer. With SVG + CSS + JavaScript you could do anything you could do with Flash, including those fancy Flash websites or complex applications. There just weren't any good authoring tools, while Flash had an amazing one.

Then Flash just died without being replaced by anything

mapt · 2 days ago

Certain businesses paid for years to keep a private-label version of Flash alive for their internal Flash business applications.

mapt commented on The Tor Project is switching to Rust itsfoss.com/news/tor-rust... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

flipped · 2 days ago

What's the point of having one relay? You're better off using a reputable VPN like mullvad or ivpn. Tor is the best you're gonna get for low latency anonymous overlay network. It's been studied and refined over the years.

mapt · 2 days ago

It's very difficult for me to contemplate how anybody could run a VPN, however reputable, that isn't compromised by one intelligence agency at least. Their incentive structures and their costs to participate in this space just make it a no-brainer.

If you're starting a brand new VPN company with ironclad ideals about privacy - are you going to be able to compete with state-run enterprises that can subsidize their own competing "businesses", on top of whatever coercive authority they possess to intervene in local small businesses?

mapt commented on The Tor Project is switching to Rust itsfoss.com/news/tor-rust... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

willvarfar · 2 days ago

1 = no privacy from relay

2 = risk of collusion between relays

3 = goldilocks default

4 = ... actually, you have more attack surface and you are more susceptible to fingerprinting because everybody else is using 3, so you're timings etc help identify you

So the default is 3 and nobody ought change it! Use 3 like everybody else.

The exception is .onion sites. TOR actually deliberately defaults to 6 hops when accessing .oninon sites - 3 to protect you and 3 to project the site.

mapt · 2 days ago

The right number for you to use is the default. But the right default is not necessarily 3.

mapt commented on The Tor Project is switching to Rust itsfoss.com/news/tor-rust... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

GoblinSlayer · 2 days ago

With 3 proxies traffic circles around the planet 2 times, which takes light 1/4 second to travel. Response does it again, so 1/2 second in total. Light is slow.

mapt · 2 days ago

Plus TLS handshakes.

5 proxies does it even slower but would make attacks much more difficult.

mapt commented on CRISPR fungus: Protein-packed, sustainable, and tastes like meat isaaa.org/kc/cropbiotechu... · Posted by u/rguiscard

colechristensen · 2 days ago

Also it's a multi-species mutation that stuck in humans and the great apes which broke the urate oxidase enzyme.

If we fixed it, nobody would get gout.

I kinda wonder sometimes why medicine doesn't try to fix some of these species level genetic problems more broadly or more quickly. There's this enzyme every other mammal produces, why isn't there a fast track to engineering a micro-organ to produce it or inject an engineered version in gout patients (I did some research and yes people are somewhat doing these things... slowly)

Why can't I, a healthy adult, be genetically engineered to start producing my own Vitamin C like every other mammal?

mapt · 2 days ago

Gemini:

> Therapeutically, recombinant urate oxidase (like rasburicase or pegylated urate oxidase) is used as a medication to rapidly lower uric acid levels, treating tumor lysis syndrome, hyperuricemia, and gout, especially when other treatments fail or are contraindicated.

Wikipedia:

> It has been proposed that the loss of urate oxidase gene expression has been advantageous to hominoids, since uric acid is a powerful antioxidant and scavenger of singlet oxygen and radicals. Its presence provides the body with protection from oxidative damage, thus prolonging life and decreasing age-specific cancer rates.[15]

> Children with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL), specifically with Burkitt's lymphoma and B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL), often experience tumor lysis syndrome (TLS), which occurs when breakdown of tumor cells by chemotherapy releases uric acid and cause the formation of uric acid crystals in the renal tubules and collecting ducts. This can lead to kidney failure and even death. Studies suggest that patients at a high risk of developing TLS may benefit from the administration of urate oxidase.[17] However, humans lack the subsequent enzyme HIU hydroxylase in the pathway to degrade uric acid to allantoin, so long-term urate oxidase therapy could potentially have harmful effects because of toxic effects of HIU.[18]

> Higher uric acid levels have also been associated with epilepsy. However, it was found in mouse models that disrupting urate oxidase actually decreases brain excitability and susceptibility to seizures.[19]

> Graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) is often a side effect of allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT), driven by donor T cells destroying host tissue. Uric acid has been shown to increase T cell response, so clinical trials have shown that urate oxidase can be administered to decrease uric acid levels in the patient and subsequently decrease the likelihood of GVHD.[20]

> Urate oxidase is formulated as a protein drug (rasburicase) for the treatment of acute hyperuricemia in patients receiving chemotherapy. A PEGylated form of urate oxidase, pegloticase, was FDA approved in 2010 for the treatment of chronic gout in adult patients refractory to "conventional therapy".[21]

As a general rule though, you can effectively treat/prevent gout by significantly increasing consumption of water and by replacing proteins with cereal grains (or fruits and vegetables or vegetable fats). These are inexpensive, fairly safe solutions.

mapt commented on · Posted by u/flail

mapt · 2 days ago

Either you endorse making demographic facts part of admissions to aim at some kind of social justice target, or don't. An disturbingly large fraction of people who discuss this are hypocrites or willful idiots who can't or who refuse to see the conflict. The people who implemented affirmative action in the 60's/70's were not; They were just swinging around a crude tool to try to redress very obvious and profound institutional ills by forcing a bunch of known bigots to act as if they were not bigots.

"Discrimination" originates in a neutral term.

mapt commented on The tiniest yet real telescope I've built lucassifoni.info/blog/min... · Posted by u/chantepierre

ggm · 2 days ago

When did buying a mirror on Ali overtake grinding your own? I guess when Ali became Edmund scientific ie mirror grinding hasn't been a thing since I was in shorts (the 70s)

mapt · 2 days ago

Mirror grinding is still a thing. Just not a thing that young people generally do. Distribution got easier and real estate got more scarce. Those of us who have garages, have filled them up.

In my understanding it's gotten considerably easier over the years with better availability of diamond and CBN abrasives, and with more electronic control of the grinding hardware. Slumping glass and bonding a thin sheet to ceramic foam reduced the costs and weight a great deal as well. Mastering these techniques make it easy to start a small business rather than to do a one-off in your garage, though.

As a sidenote: The Celestron RASA astrographs are so effective and so inexpensive of a wide-field instrument that it's a lot harder to justify the DIY activity that existed in the 2000's.

mapt commented on The universal weight subspace hypothesis arxiv.org/abs/2512.05117... · Posted by u/lukeplato

bmacho · 5 days ago

Vote for the Party that promises academic grants for people that write 1k character long forum posts for the laypeople instead of other experts of the field.

mapt · 5 days ago

We have this already. It's called an abstract. Some do it better than others.

Perhaps we need to revisit the concept and have a narrow abstract and a lay abstract, given how niche science has become.

mapt commented on Kroger acknowledges that its bet on robotics went too far grocerydive.com/news/krog... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

Animats · 5 days ago

What you've re-invented is Keydoozle, from 1937.[1] This was the first automated grocery store. Three stores were opened, but there were enough mechanical problems that it didn't work well.

[1] https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/keedoozle-automated-store-p...

mapt · 5 days ago

And what some of us might not have the context for, is that grocery stores at the time were usually clerk-serviced; Just like you don't pump your own gas in New Jersey, at the time the norm was that you handed the clerk a list of products and they fetched them from the shelves for you.

Arguably this model has a great deal of compatibility with robotic compact storage, especially in high-land-value areas.

mapt commented on Kroger acknowledges that its bet on robotics went too far grocerydive.com/news/krog... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

roryirvine · 5 days ago

That's the thing, though - you'd think that this would result in these "heavyweight" Ocado-style home delivery options being more viable in the US than in London. And yet, they're not.

Sure, you have Doordash-style same-hour options which are largely based on someone picking stuff up from a local store on your behalf (we have lots of those too). But the Ocado/Kroger robotic hive fulfilment centres ought to be more efficient than that whilst offering higher quality by cutting out the labour-intensive warehouse -> store -> shelf -> checkout part of the process.

I think some of it comes from a feeling of "that can't possibly work", perhaps as a hangover from the failure of Webvan during the dotcom boom. Maybe with some "well, I have to use my car for everything else, so I might as well use it to collect groceries too" layered on top.

Which all points to it being a fairly intractable problem - there are a bunch of only tangentially-related issues that need sorting out before it can be become a widespread success.

mapt · 5 days ago

Another possibility: For perishable goods in the sort of SKU counts typically offered, it can't work unless it has a certain minimum scale. Local supermarkets supported by a largely automated (and has been for 30 years) regional distribution center have that scale from walk-in traffic. A new delivery service using high-density storage could save on real estate and labor costs on the backend, but it has to have runway to replace a lot of the local market (which may take a decade), and the whole time you're scaling, these low-velocity SKUs are literally spoiling while these expensive, high-throughput robots are mostly idle. The frontend costs of delivery are a separate category of problem.

Replacing the regional distribution center instead with even higher levels of automation, and getting your groceries delivered from the same warehouse the supermarket is, would give you the scale from the start... but then that increases your frontend delivery costs and more importantly your frontend delivery latency; High latency is a much worse thing with milk than with books or hammers.