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The books are really good, too.

I need to watch the series at some point.


I not sure how many realize this, but the books were actually written by a team of writers, well 2 writers, in parallel, defining the world, characters, and storylines. James S.A. Corey is the pen name of authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. Great series too :)


And it get really interesting who their friends are down there in New Mexico :)


I read them. All of it including Novellas and stuff. They are awesome. Especially once you are used to the chapter by character thing GoT also does. But surprise, New Mexico connection :)


They work nicely together.


What is the problem with using a container based approach for production workloads?


I bought the family plan (5 licenses, I think) for $100 back in 2013. I can't upgrade past 1Password 6, but I'm ok with that. It works well enough that I can't justify a subscription just to get a few of the newer features that I probably will never use.

I'll probably have to switch if/when the firefox plugin stops working, but hopefully that won't be any time soon.


Yet more proof that our method of tying health insurance to employers is completely insane.


Yes, It is a national shame that the USA has such bad average health care. The rich havd the best in the world. The poor die young. Just look at the age stats for Cuba versus the USA in these charts etc. Yes, Cubans outlive Americans, so do Canadians. All dues to crooked Doctors, insurers, pharma companys, hospitals and... https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sp.dyn.le00.in

https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publicatio... https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy


I think their biggest ask is for GM to stop using temp workers to get around union obligations. When you have a "temp worker" who has been working for you for 4-5 years, they should probably be classified as an employee.


What about the half of Google workers who are merely contractors?


However that doesn't impact current union employees. Is it just the union fearing for its own loss of power?


In part, though I think it's more complicated than just a loss of power. The responsibilities for employers are getting more and more expensive so they are doing the rational thing and switching to contractors.


Does Terminal.app allow you to customize it to always dock to the top of your screen?


If we had the tech to do that we would already have the ability to genetically modify embryos with heightened intelligence. Do we even know what genes are responsible for that?


Found your counter interesting so looked up this[1].

We already have the tech to do selection as above but it is cost prohibitive to produce the number of embryos required to do it at scale.

Where you misunderstood was that this is selection, not modification.

We do not know which genes to modify specifically.

We can however, using commonality and statistics, select embryos for increased likelihood of increased intelligence based on a number of different phenotypes.

That's where my understanding ends but the link below has more.

The interesting idea was that we can repeat the selection process using the already selected for embryos - effectively skipping potentially many generations. As in, your kids could more correctly be your great great great great great grandkids.

What I want to know is how far you could theoretically take it before the statistical analysis starts to break down.

As in, can we get to twice as intelligent? Does our statistics / scoring even know what that might look like?

Could we be looking at human induced evolution?

[1] https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection#polygenic-scores-for-...


> As in, can we get to twice as intelligent? Does our statistics / scoring even know what that might look like?

No to your second question; that being the case, your first question has no meaning.

We don't score intelligence with cardinal numbers, which would be required for "twice as intelligent" to make sense as a concept.


> We don't score intelligence with cardinal numbers, which would be required for "twice as intelligent" to make sense as a concept.

We actually do score intelligence with cardinal numbers if one wants to. As I mentioned in my other comment, a number of subtests have absolute scales with true zeros: digit span, vocab, and reaction time come to mind. Quite helpful for cross-species comparisons like humans and chimpanzees...


The fact that we score some intelligence correlates on scales with true zeros does not mean intelligence itself can be treated this way. Indeed, since the rigorous way to define intelligence is to do so perturbatively (e.g., as a certain principal components in data, or as the first-order effects of flipping a bunch of SNPs), we should generically expect it to break down as a robust concept outside the perturbative regime.

Or in other words, the fact that one person can be twice as fast as another person in the 100m dash does not make it meaningful to say that one person is twice as athletic as another. In particular, we don't expect the person who is twice as fast to also be twice as flexible or throw the shot-put twice as far, even if those can be made true statements for small (e.g. 5%) difference with appropriate multiplicative factors (e.g., a 5% increase in top-speed predicts a 10% = 2*5% increase in shot-put distance).


> Or in other words, the fact that one person can be twice as fast as another person in the 100m dash does not make it meaningful to say that one person is twice as athletic as another.

It does make it meaningful to say they are twice as fast, though. Which provides a basis for discussing improvements to the general factor. Since there are meaningful zeroes for speed or flexibility or throw distance, it must also be meaningful to discuss doubling the effect of fitness on them. Whether it works out in practice is the question, but it is meaningful and not nonsense.


> Since there are meaningful zeroes for speed or flexibility or throw distance, it must also be meaningful to discuss doubling the effect of fitness on them.

I feel like something's gotten switched around here. We can measure reaction time with cardinal numbers. Check.

This makes it meaningful to talk about doubling or halving reaction time. Check.

We could attribute part of reaction time performance to the general factor of intelligence. OK... but this will be variable.

It's not obvious to me that if we allot responsibility for someone's reaction time scores among several factors, perform an intervention, get improved reaction times, perform the same allocation, and calculate that the contribution from g has doubled, that we can then conclude that the subject's g has itself doubled.

We want to measure that g has doubled, and we have no numbers for that.


> Since there are meaningful zeroes for speed or flexibility or throw distance, it must also be meaningful to discuss doubling the effect of fitness on them.

If the effect of fitness on speed is small (as a fraction of absolute speed), then doubling the effect has little to do with doubling speed. If it's large (order unity), then we don't generically expect to be able to double the effect while staying in the regime where intelligence is well defined. These two notions of double are just completely different -- one is a derivative, one is a magnitude -- and it's a mistake to link them.


Wouldn't you need to install those packages as root for the code to have privileges to take advantage of that exploit?


I've known plenty of developers whose automatic response to `packagemanager install packagename` failing is `sudo packagemanager install packagename`.


I sincerely hope all modern package managers, when invoked with sudo, immediately spawn a very-low-privilege process that does most of the work sandboxed to /tmp/whatnot, and the root process just copies files to the right place and runs some system calls to update databases etc.


Most package managers I know support Turing complete install hooks. How would a package manager detect what parts of those require/are safe to run with root?


No. Packages would not need to be installed as root. Additionally, many possible ways to use the exploit in GP could run as unprivileged users.


Wouldn't the package need to be executed as root, though? Or does spectre/meltdown not require privileged access?


No, that's the entire point. They need almost nothing at all but the ability to run code fast in a loop with memory calls. The entire point is that they bypass privilege checks.


I wish MS would release a stripped down version of VS for OSX/Linux, but I know it probably won't happen.


Visual Studio Code is pretty neat, and it's plugin system is very powerful: more and more languages are adding amazing IntelliSense and interactive debugging support for it. It's like Atom, if Atom was faster and focused on exposing nice APIs for autocompletion!



I've played with VS Code a bit, it's a pretty cool tool for small scale scripting, but it's not really a replacement for a full fledged IDE.

Hopefully Jetbrains will release their cross platform C# IDE sometime soon. I would prefer Visual Studio, but I don't think that's going to happen (at least not anytime soon).


From my experience, Rider is pretty stable and usable. Have you tried it out at all? https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/


Oh, didn't realize you could request early access. I'll check it out, thanks.


Not being fully fledged IDE can be good and bad. I'm using VSCode for most things I use VS for. It's super fast to launch, great language extensions, debugger, integrated terminal and tasks. It's like sublime and visual studio had a baby. I have licenses for jet brains but I seldom ever use it.

I may also be a bit biased since I contribute to VScode extensions. But I see that as a positive. I use a free editor that I can hack, look at its source and collaborate in the open.


We use core samples to measure historic levels - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_sample


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