In other news today...
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@rhywden yeah, it sucks when you're dealing with self-modifying code and it suddenly starts running code in a section that you previously thought was unreachable...
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@benjamin-hall said in In other news today...:
@masonwheeler it's like we as a species have a bad habit of claiming we understand a lot more than we really do...
It's usually more details vs. grand picture. We have a basic understanding of how stuff works. It's the details which let us stumble now and again.
I mean we're able to genetically manipulate bacteria into producing exactly the compounds we want - that's not a sign that we got something fundamentally wrong.
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@rhywden said in In other news today...:
I mean we're able to genetically manipulate bacteria into producing exactly the compounds we want - that's not a sign that we got something fundamentally wrong.
No, that's a sign that we didn't get that fundamentally wrong. It says nothing about other areas of knowledge, even if they're related.
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@masonwheeler said in In other news today...:
@rhywden said in In other news today...:
I mean we're able to genetically manipulate bacteria into producing exactly the compounds we want - that's not a sign that we got something fundamentally wrong.
No, that's a sign that we didn't get that fundamentally wrong. It says nothing about other areas of knowledge, even if they're related.
I see. You're arguing like a mathematician. I guess you know the joke about the black sheep then.
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@rhywden said in In other news today...:
I guess you know the joke about the black sheep then.
No, actually. Mind sharing?
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@masonwheeler said in In other news today...:
@rhywden said in In other news today...:
I guess you know the joke about the black sheep then.
No, actually. Mind sharing?
An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician sit in a train rolling through Scotland. While looking out of the window they see a black sheep.
The engineer says: "Well, all sheep in Scotland must be black, then!"
The physicist scoffs: "Dimwit, you can't say that all of them are black! But at least one is!"
Then the mathematician chimes in: "Well, technically, we only know of at least one sheep that is black on at least one side..."
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@rhywden said in In other news today...:
The engineer says: "Well, all sheep in Scotland must be black, then!"
RACIST!!!!!!11!!!
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@masonwheeler There's also the balloon joke, but I'm certain you know at least that one :)
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@rhywden I heard a joke about a balloon once, but I think it might have gone over my head.
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@masonwheeler said in In other news today...:
@rhywden I heard a joke about a balloon once, but I think it might have gone over my head.
Anyways, the CEO of a big company is in a hot air balloon but has lost his map and is thus flying around aimlessly. Finally he spots a guy on the ground. He yells down at him: "Hey you! Do you know where I am?" After twenty minutes he hears faintly:
"You're in a hot air balloon!"
Incensed he yells back down: "And you're a mathematician!"
"While that is correct, how did you arrive at that conclusion?" he hears back.
"Well, three reasons. One: You took a hell of a lot of time to answer me. Two: You were absolutely correct. Three: Your answer was absolutely useless! Now I'll be late for my meeting and you're responsible for it!"
After a short while he hears back: "Ah, so you're an important manager then!"
"And how did you arrive at that conclusion?"
"Easy. Three reasons. One: You don't know where you're coming from or where you're going to. Two: You promised something you cannot keep. Three: And now it's all my fault somehow!"
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@rhywden Oh, OK. I've heard several variations on that. Never that specific one, but yeah, I'm familiar with the basic joke.
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@rhywden said in In other news today...:
@mzh said in In other news today...:
@tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
@dkf said in In other news today...:
it's recursive self-modifying code and everything is done with stupid regular expressions and substitutions.
Don't forget it's also compressed! That makes is sooo much more difficult to analyze well.... :)
And the vast majority of DNA is commented out code that that no one bothers to delete. Four billion years isn't long enough to come up with source control?
Actually, that "commented out code" plays some rather important roles...
I would be very careful to delete any of those "comments" :)
I could have sworn I read about an experiment a long time ago where a bacteria's non-coding DNA was replaced with random DNA sequences and there was no apparent change in behavior. I'm probably wrong about this.
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@rhywden said in In other news today...:
@masonwheeler said in In other news today...:
@rhywden I heard a joke about a balloon once, but I think it might have gone over my head.
I was gonna say this.
Here's a like even.
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@rhywden said in In other news today...:
I mean we're able to genetically manipulate bacteria into producing exactly the compounds we want - that's not a sign that we got something fundamentally wrong.
We're basically on the level of trying to reverse-engineer a modern CPU when we've just now figured out a rough idea of how transistors work.
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@anotherusername and even that may be drastically overstating our knowledge. The number and interconnectedness of interacting biological systems in a person are both huge quantities.
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@benjamin-hall said in In other news today...:
@anotherusername and even that may be drastically overstating our knowledge. The number and interconnectedness of interacting biological systems in a person are both huge quantities.
Yes, but the underlying rules are pretty much known. Complex systems does not automatically mean complicated systems.
Just look at bird swarms: Complex behaviour but only three simple rules.
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@rhywden said in In other news today...:
Just look at bird swarms: Complex behaviour but only three simple rules.
They have really slim waistlines and low insurance rates.
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@blakeyrat said in In other news today...:
@rhywden said in In other news today...:
Just look at bird swarms: Complex behaviour but only three simple rules.
They have really slim waistlines and low insurance rates.
That's only two. You're missing one.
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@rhywden Ornithologists hate him! Local man discovers three simple tricks for more effective bird swarming!
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@rhywden etc
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@tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
@dkf said in In other news today...:
it's recursive self-modifying code and everything is done with stupid regular expressions and substitutions.
Don't forget it's also compressed! That makes is sooo much more difficult to analyze well.... :)
Not really. It's actually gone in the other direction - lots of redundancy and bloat.
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@timebandit said in In other news today...:
Who could have predicted that !
https://www.axios.com/study-higher-minimum-wages-hasten-automation-job-losses-2472925911.html
That entire thing is unsurprising, even for someone (me) who thinks minimum wage should be higher (in general - I'm also an advocate for regional adjustment depending on local cost of living). The more you pay your workers, the more likely replacing them with automation is to make sense, unless it's a job where automation doesn't work well (yet). But it's largely just hurrying things up a bit - low skilled jobs doing easily roboticized or computerized tasks are going to go away no matter what as computing power and robotics become more accessible commodities. People will naturally move to other jobs if they can, and some will resist or not be able to do so for various reasons as well.
It sucks, and its worth looking into what's most effective to handle those cases efficiently (so people aren't unemployed for very long), but that's not a good reason, in my mind, to advocate for keeping the minimum wage lower than is practical (assuming that's the case).
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@dreikin said in In other news today...:
but that's not a good reason, in my mind, to advocate for keeping the minimum wage lower than is practical (assuming that's the case).
The only justification for a minimum wage at all is to help people who are in those low paying jobs. If it doesn't help them (because they know get payed no money) than yes, that is a perfectly valid reason not to raise it.
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@mzh said in In other news today...:
@rhywden said in In other news today...:
@mzh said in In other news today...:
@tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
@dkf said in In other news today...:
it's recursive self-modifying code and everything is done with stupid regular expressions and substitutions.
Don't forget it's also compressed! That makes is sooo much more difficult to analyze well.... :)
And the vast majority of DNA is commented out code that that no one bothers to delete. Four billion years isn't long enough to come up with source control?
Actually, that "commented out code" plays some rather important roles...
I would be very careful to delete any of those "comments" :)
I could have sworn I read about an experiment a long time ago where a bacteria's non-coding DNA was replaced with random DNA sequences and there was no apparent change in behavior. I'm probably wrong about this.
Some of non-coding DNA's function is structural: it doesn't matter too much what is there, just that something is there (within certain parameters). And some "functions" are just spurious side effects; they're not essential or required for a healthy organism, but they are there and have some effect.
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@dragoon said in In other news today...:
@dreikin said in In other news today...:
but that's not a good reason, in my mind, to advocate for keeping the minimum wage lower than is practical (assuming that's the case).
The only justification for a minimum wage at all is to help people who are in those low paying jobs. If it doesn't help them (because they know get payed no money) than yes, that is a perfectly valid reason not to raise it.
There's a lot of things there I'd debate, but I'm not really in that mood so I'll just focus on this: I'm not saying it doesn't help the group and I don't care, I'm saying that the core type of problem causing the loss in jobs (replace-ability via automation) under these circumstances isn't within the domain of problems a higher minimum wage is meant to address; it's a different issue requiring different solutions, and which would exist, albeit at a slightly slower pace, without the minimum wage increase.
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@dreikin That is total bollox.
The same bit of DNA that makes a chicken's heart beat, does the same for us.
It is just code. I would have thought this would be obvious by now.
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@lucas1 said in In other news today...:
@dreikin That is total bollox.
The same bit of DNA that makes a chicken's heart beat, does the same for us.
It is just code. I would have thought this would be obvious by now.
Uh, what's bollox? Your simplistic understanding of DNA? That's not necessarily true, and not just because there's more than one "bit" of DNA involved. There's a lot of common code, even some very very strongly conserved code, between most pairs of differing organisms, but there's also a lot of room for variation, and also the development of a particular "feature" in different ways in different lines. But beyond that, DNA isn't just code, it's structure as well (at least). And there's a lot of stuff in computer code that "doesn't matter too much what is there, just that something is there (within certain parameters)". Whitespace, for example. It doesn't matter which type you use (space or tab, commonly), nor how much of it (Python and similar languages partially excepted), just that it's there to separate tokens.
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@dreikin said in In other news today...:
@tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
@dkf said in In other news today...:
it's recursive self-modifying code and everything is done with stupid regular expressions and substitutions.
Don't forget it's also compressed! That makes is sooo much more difficult to analyze well.... :)
Not really. It's actually gone in the other direction - lots of redundancy and bloat.
Mostly due to static linking in each package.
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@dreikin Well I know the chicken DNA and stuff is true.
I didn't bother much with biology at school, being a dude I wanted to know how to make things go bang.
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@lucas1 said in In other news today...:
@dreikin Well I know the chicken DNA and stuff is true.
I didn't bother much with biology at school, being a dude I wanted to know how to make things go bang.
Banging is a big portion of biology
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@dreikin Not that sort of banging I mean making explosions. I used to like throwing coke cans at the super chavs full of gas from the lab
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@tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
@dreikin said in In other news today...:
@tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
@dkf said in In other news today...:
it's recursive self-modifying code and everything is done with stupid regular expressions and substitutions.
Don't forget it's also compressed! That makes is sooo much more difficult to analyze well.... :)
Not really. It's actually gone in the other direction - lots of redundancy and bloat.
Mostly due to static linking in each package.
Not really that, either. By way of example, here's a chart showing what protein each RNA codon is translated into:
Note there are lots of ways to say most proteins (and the stop command), except methionine and tryptophan.There's also a lot of duplication, which is sometimes meaningful and sometimes not. The most noticable case of this being having two of each chromosome, which even given that they ought to be from different branches are still fairly redundant.
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@benjamin-hall said in In other news today...:
@anotherusername and even that may be drastically overstating our knowledge. The number and interconnectedness of interacting biological systems in a person are both huge quantities.
Yeah... it's probably more like trying to reverse engineer the internet.
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@rhywden said in In other news today...:
@blakeyrat said in In other news today...:
@rhywden said in In other news today...:
Just look at bird swarms: Complex behaviour but only three simple rules.
They have really slim waistlines and low insurance rates.
That's only two. You're missing one.
They can't count.
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@rhywden @masonwheeler And mixing sheeps and business people, there is this one that I like:
A shepherd was watching his sheep when someone comes along and they start talking. After a while, the guy boasts:
"You know what, I can count all of sheep from here!"
"No way, there are too many... if you can do that, I'll give you one sheep."
"OK... you have exactly 247 sheep."
"Wow, that's right! Well, I guess you've earned yourself a sheep... But tell me, how did you do that?"
"Eh, very simple, I just counted the number of legs and divided by 4."So the guy picks up one and starts to leave, when the shepherd calls back:
"Hey, wait! Want to make another bet? If I can guess your job, I'll get my sheep back!"
"Ha! You can always try, you'll never find!"
"Easy, you're a consultant."
"Oh... how did you find?"
"Three things: One, you come along to solve a problem that I don't have. Two, you use the most complicated method possible to do so. And three, you make me pay for that. Well, and a forth one: now give me back my dog!"
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@remi And that joke always reminds me of another:
A man stops by a shepherd reclined against a tree and asks him if we knows what time it is.
Without getting up, the shepherd raises his arm and picks up a nearby cow's udder and says"It's about four and a quarter in the afternoon."
The man is surprised.
"You can tell the time just by feeling the cow's udder? That's amazing!"
"Nah," says the shepherd. "I was only getting them out of the way so I could look at the church tower's clock."
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@remi said in In other news today...:
Well, and a forth one: now give me back my dog!"
Should've used a language with type checking.
A procedural programming language without type checking
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@rhywden said in In other news today...:
I mean we're able to genetically manipulate bacteria into producing exactly the compounds we want
That's a “sort of…” thing. If the compound we want is very similar to what the bacteria makes already, it's really easy. If the compound is more exotic and requires more processing steps, it gets very difficult indeed. It's particularly tricky if you have intermediate compounds that are either readily transformed by other cellular enzymes — not all enzymes are highly specific— or if those intermediates are cytotoxic. In the first case, your problem is building up enough reagent for you to transform to the thing you want, and in the second your problem is not killing the cell. You have to balance the reaction rates (by trimming efficiencies and number of genetic copies) so as to favour the reactions you care about. It's really difficult. (I used to work with people who were doing this, and these things were the stuff that they actually worried about a lot.)
Just because we can open a text editor and write
print "Hello World"
in it doesn't mean that we can easily make a triple-A game. ;)
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@mzh said in In other news today...:
I could have sworn I read about an experiment a long time ago where a bacteria's non-coding DNA was replaced with random DNA sequences and there was no apparent change in behavior. I'm probably wrong about this.
Some parts can be replaced easily enough. Others can't. There are bits that are just there to allow other parts to stick onto the DNA and “do something”; those tend to be pretty important. (They're a lot more common in eukaryotes like plants and mammals than in prokaryotes like bacteria.) Other bits really are random bits of junk that happen to just usually be non-harmful and so aren't really being got rid of.
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The South Carolina Emergency Management Division isn't expecting any major problems on eclipse day, other than heavy traffic.
Oh, and maybe a Lizard Man sighting or two.
The agency sent a tongue and cheek post on social media Wednesday about possible paranormal activity on August 21, the day the total solar eclipse will pass through South Carolina.
Then also sent a map that has a list of possible Lizard Man sighting. (The Lizard Man, for those who don't know, is basically South Carolina's Bigfoot, although a scaly-reptile like creature rather than a hairy beast).
"SCEMD does not know if Lizardmen become more active during a solar eclipse, but we advise that residents of Lee and Sumter counties should remain vigilant."
They add, "if you see something, say something."
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@polygeekery These guys have it all reversed.
Lihzahrds have a chance of dropping a Solar Tablet Fragment, which you can use to build a Solar Tablet to summon a Solar Eclipse.
But Lihzahrds aren't found during a Solar Eclipse; they are inside the Jungle Temple, which is underground.
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@polygeekery said in In other news today...:
tongue and cheek
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@hungrier for all intensive purposes it's a mute point in this doggy dog world. I could care less about this sort of stuff, it's like a bowl in a china shop
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@jaloopa said in In other news today...:
it's
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@rhywden said in In other news today...:
@benjamin-hall said in In other news today...:
@anotherusername and even that may be drastically overstating our knowledge. The number and interconnectedness of interacting biological systems in a person are both huge quantities.
Yes, but the underlying rules are pretty much known. Complex systems does not automatically mean complicated systems.
Just look at bird swarms: Complex behaviour but only three simple rules.
Yeah, we're talking about systems with proteins, with which we're largely at the trial and error stage of understanding. I dunno...maybe it's possible to be super minimalist about it at the subatomic level or something, but that's probably not in any way useful for dealing with all of the much higher level emergent properties of biological systems.
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@cabrito said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla that is a dev/fly_fixed_final2_for_real/ , not even zipped so no checksum
Isn't that what people mean when the say "source control"?