Many of the “no” comments here are very focused on the current state. The author seems to be looking at a longer time horizon of computing paradigms, for example invoking ENIAC. On that scale I tend to agree. Vibe coding has only been around a year or two and look how big of an impact it already has. Imagine what another 10 years of progress will look like.
Readit Newspfbtgom commented on If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C? stephenramsay.net/posts/v... · Posted by u/sramsay
pfbtgom commented on California Will Stop Using Coal as a Power Source Next Month latimes.com/california/ne... · Posted by u/01-_-
A study on this is referenced in the The Great Courses, Everyday Engineering series taught by Dr. Stephen Ressler, a Professor Emeritus from the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Any potential engineer watches this as part of their assignments in Intro to Engineering. Lecture 12 iirc.
They referenced a study showing Natural gas power plants emit 0.2% Sulfur Dioxide, 7% NOx, 60% of CO2 compared to coal power plants, and the study only compared single cycle plants, where most are combined cycle that further lower pollution per kWH metrics.
The CO2 in most combined cycle plants is captured as a valuable feedstock for other industrial uses, or sale.
> I'm not sure what California Air Emission Regulatory is.
Its a generalization for the state of Regulatory in California with regards to air standards.
Specifically, I'm referencing the untenable and ever growing sprawl of ad-hoc legislation that is driving the last two refinery's (Chevron) out of California, as well as the bans on any use of certain chemicals like natural gas.
Last I checked there were at least 6-10 partially overlapping AB/SBs that have been passed and are awaiting implementation deadlines. The cost to do anything as a direct result of runaway regulatory is part of why California is having so many problems. The legislature's actions show they don't want people to be able to do business for certain things within California.
> Any potential engineer watches this as part of their assignments in Intro to Engineering. Lecture 12 iirc.
As someone who trained in chemical engineering in the 2000's, we never really discussed the fact that reactor waste streams were pollution, just another effluent to put somewhere. I'm pointing this out since I don't think that the relative performance profiles of petrochemical plants is going to be common knowledge.
> Specifically, I'm referencing the untenable and ever growing sprawl of ad-hoc legislation that is driving the last two refinery's (Chevron) out of California, as well as the bans on any use of certain chemicals like natural gas.
There are more than two remaining refineries in California. According to this there are 15 active in the state (with some certainly slated to close). https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
I don't disagree that the regulation in California is burdensome, but these refineries seem to have a really poor track record. I live in the bay area and it's a repeating story about excessive flaring or a gas leak from the east bay refineries and that communities should shelter in place. There was even a big fire at Chevron El Segundo this month that took several of their units offline. In the last 5 years that facility has had 46 air quality violations, and in the last 10 years 17 OSHA violations. https://calmatters.org/environment/2025/10/refinery-explosio...
Then let's not forget the Aliso Canyon gas leak in LA in 2015.
> It was widely reported to have been the worst single natural gas leak in U.S. history in terms of its environmental impact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliso_Canyon_gas_leak
I don't see a reason why we should linger on petrochemical technology if we don't have to. This isn't stuff you want in your backyard.
In hard sci-if settings like The Expanse, would we expect that all of the electronics in space to be a few generations behind the state-of-the-art planetside to account for radiation hardening? Would the electronics be more likely to be installed inside of ships where presumably there is already radiation shielding for people (thinking sensor packages and hard points)?
pfbtgom commented on The Turkish drone that changed the nature of warfare newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/tekdude
Wouldn't a COTS drone be relatively easy to jam or have early warning by detecting its control/video links?
I get why Russia is having trouble adapting (logistics, sanctions, brain drain, paper tiger military) but outside of the Russia-Ukraine war, how effective would a COTS drone really be in a different state-vs-state direct conflict?
I’m not sure how effective signal jamming would be against COTS quadcopters. It’s relatively easy to provide on-loss-of-signal instructions to the navigation microcontroller. Perhaps it could be a return to set location command or a home in on signal jammer and explode command.
With the release of GitHub’s Copilot, I wonder how far we are from ML identification of malicious repositories.
pfbtgom commented on Ask HN: Getting started in biology with a software background · Posted by u/nscalf
You may way to look into biotech incubators such as IndioBio[1] to get an idea of what it takes.
pfbtgom commented on Show HN: ClearBrain (YC W18) – Automated Causal Analytics clearbrain.com... · Posted by u/bmahmood
I think you have an interesting product, but I'm having serious issues with your marketing.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. How many of your estimated treatment effects have been supported by experiments? Do you have experiments demonstrating that your model generalizes? How accurate are your estimates compared to experimental results?
It's ironic that you're marketing a causal + analytics product without any data. Generating a narrative and basing it off of observational data is the typical trap that many causal claims fall into. Portraying yourselves as statistical experts and pushing unsubstantiated claims is misleading bordering on unethical.
I feel you're conflating two different types of migration, and the issue isn't nearly as big as your 150 million deaths figure.
Almost all countries have ample space that will still be habitable for their entire population in 2100, even if climate change is left unchecked.
Those that don't represent a small portion of the global population, certainly less than 500 million people. I grew up in Botswana, and I know that "all of central Africa is uninhabitable" is not a likely outcome anytime soon. Most of Africa is actually really good land to live in, and will continue to be fairly good through the century.
In any case, Italy does not need to "park 10 million people in camps". Italy is a tiny country in terms of land area, so why would they need to take so many? Russia and Canada alone could easily fit a few billion immigrants each if global warming is really severe in a few centuries.
The notion that the only solution to climate change is to move everybody into already crowded places doesn't seem to have a base. We can solve the migration problem with or without moving people into Europe.
Anyways, my core point here is (a) we won't need to deal with this migration anyways, because we will solve climate change way before it becomes necessary, and (b) even if we didn't lower our emissions, I'm confident we can solve the migration problem without millions of deaths.
I'm less confident that a mass migration wouldn't result in millions of deaths. An example might be the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Only 14 million displaced, yet an estimated 200k-2 million deaths and another 2 million people missing[1]. In many ways, this planned displacement was a more favorable scenario than a chaotic climate refugee situation.
If we don't have a good answer to the relatively simple refugee migrations now (eg. Central America, Syria), then I have extreme pessimism that we will be able to manage a larger-scale, persistent event. Whereas with economic + political refugee situations we can always hope to resolve the root cause, with climate change it is simply the new normal.
pfbtgom commented on Effects of short-term fasting on cancer treatment ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti... · Posted by u/JPLeRouzic
I really don't get the excessive warnings of caution for fasting. It's not hard to try. It's not very dangerous (unless doing prolonged fasts). In the case of prolonged fasts, if the patient is monitored by qualified people then there is little risk as well.
I'm battling a crippling illness. Fortunately I've found the cure and the recovery is nothing short of miraculous. But it's a huge HUGE uphill battle because the medical community works incredibly hard to throw road blocks in my way.
Why does the medical community work so hard to throw up as many road blocks as possible to experimental treatments that are low risk? Why do you insist on being the only group of people who can say what is and isn't tried? Why do doctors and public health officials ignore the work of biochemists? Why do you ignore millions of people battling crippling illness that say your treatments are ineffective, and that other approaches are more effective?
Seriously. I don't get it. I don't believe you're a bad person, but the only explanations I can come up with are arrogance, ego, cowardice, or greed.
This reminds of the abandoned practice of women being prescribed Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) for menopause. Essentially the reasoning was "why not, it seems to improve patient health and we don't see any ill effects". It was such common sense at the time that it took over 30 years before a clinical trial was performed. That trial demonstrated a much higher rate of breast cancer and heart disease in HRT patients.
The NY Times has a good write-up on it and more generally the challenges with epidemiology and causal analysis in medicine. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/magazine/16epidemiology-t...
It didn't. They are shortening "deployment" to "deploy" for unknown reasons when they say: "Atomic deploys -
Each deploy is a full snapshot of the site"
Not that weird though. We've, for example, turned "build" into a noun.
Perhaps, ahem... "buildment"?
But no, apparently "build" has been screwed up since the 1660s[1].
[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/build#etymonline_v_18047