Symmetry

69 ms·

871.
by Symmetry 5y ago
Would you say that dumping disinfectant in a petri dish is just selecting for bacteria resistant to disinfectant? If a mutation arises that prevents the sex selection process then sure, the mosquito populations can recover. But whether su
872.
by Symmetry 5y ago
Yeah. And I'd say that anybody wanting to think about life on other planets ought to read Nick Lane's book about the early evolution of life on ours.
873.
by Symmetry 5y ago
Obviously not on the surface in the vacuum and frozen ice but down in the liquid interior you're protected from the radiation by all those kilometres of water. On Earth we had kemosynthetic life for hundreds of millions of years befor
874.
by Symmetry 5y ago
Usually populations evolve resistance to pathogens or toxins via intermediate steps where some mutation delivers partial protection and the organism can build on that to higher and higher doses. Expose a population of bacteria to a large d
875.
by Symmetry 5y ago
I thought that it was changes in salt intake that caused high blood pressure rather than high levels of salt intake. That is, if you increase your daily salt intake by 500 mg or whatever you'll see you blood pressure go up immediately
876.
by Symmetry 5y ago
That's why spinlaunch is flinging a whole rocket high into the air rather than just the payload.
877.
by Symmetry 5y ago
Yes. And in fact the Omicron variant seems to have evolved in mice. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34954396/
878.
by Symmetry 5y ago
This is more about how what you can remember about an event after five seconds differs from all that you experienced, as opposed to what you can remember a year later. I think most people can give a word for word summary of an utterance af
879.
by Symmetry 5y ago
That makes a lot of sense. One big result from a lot of the subliminal stimuli research scientists do is that nothing that doesn't enter your consciousness and get combined with your other sensory input streams get preserved by the br
880.
by Symmetry 5y ago
Tadpoles have been: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14519690-700-space-fr...
881.
by Symmetry 5y ago
My understanding is that the binding constraint in training these models is the quantity of computation they consume. While a human makes do with drastically less input data, we also have drastically more computational resources in our hea
882.
by Symmetry 5y ago
I think this is overlooking two of the most important benefits of multi chip modules, re-using engineering and simpler supply chains. Once AMD has designed their eight core die they've got a design they can re-use between the cheapest
883.
by Symmetry 5y ago
Mancur Olson[1] strikes again. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_sclerosis
884.
Why experts are terrified of a human-made pandemic and what we can do to stop it(vox.com)
19 points by Symmetry 5y ago|11 comments
885.
by Symmetry 5y ago
It's not that it's a replacement for individual authority, it just removes the need for that individual authority. You can't rely on getting several people together to make the decision to launch a retaliatory attack in time
886.
by Symmetry 5y ago
If you have Eigen-like code that won't tend to have many cases where you're not having many branch mispredicts or loads the prefetcher can't figure out and you also have enough calculations that you can use the width of the
887.
by Symmetry 5y ago
The compile time loop fusion is also particularly nice.
888.
by Symmetry 5y ago
I think I'd rather have the Soviet system of having this system that you can turn on that fails deadly while also requiring multiple parties to agree to turn it on or launch than the US system where just one person has the authority to
889.
by Symmetry 5y ago
If you do it accidentally, yes. The reason our airlines are so safe is that even if a lethal crash is due to the error of a pilot or mechanic we don't try to punish them but instead try to improve our systems so that it doesn't h
890.
by Symmetry 5y ago
Well, Wuhan is a big transportation hub so regardless of the original crossover point it isn't crazy that the first super-spreader event might happen there.
891.
by Symmetry 5y ago
For exposures not turning into pandemics, I think it's also important to note that most bat/human coronavirus crossovers occur in relatively small communities that limit the size of potential super spreader events. In something l
892.
by Symmetry 5y ago
In a high k virus like Covid-19 you shouldn't really expect to be able to localize things that well. When the virus first entered France, for instance, there was a chain of individual transmission a half dozen links long before the fi
893.
by Symmetry 5y ago
There have been many documented instances of lab leaks. It's even happened with Covid-19 research[1] at least once that was reported, and with the virus being pandemic around most of the world I'd assume there were many other lea
894.
by Symmetry 5y ago
In both cases you're well protected against the solar wind by distance and atmosphere in the case of the Mars rover and by the Van Allen belts in the case of the Space Shuttle. But both still have to worry about cosmic rays. Mars&#x2
895.
by Symmetry 5y ago
So they're adding decimal floating point this generation too then ;)
896.
by Symmetry 5y ago
It's a crystal so just one molecule for all the transistors. In terms of atoms it's something on the order of the size of a 30 nm cube and with each silicon atom being .2nm in diameter something like 3 million, give or take an or
897.
by Symmetry 5y ago
NVidia and AMD datacenter GPUs continue to diverge between focusing on deep learning and traditional scientific computing respectively.
898.
by Symmetry 5y ago
Modern CPUs have a structure called the bypass network that lets different ALUs forward their outputs to another's inputs without having to hit the register file. It's not exactly like a local accumulator but it's something
899.
by Symmetry 5y ago
Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach[1] is the textbook that gets recommended the most on the topic, I believe.
900.
by Symmetry 5y ago
The architectural details here were pretty interesting: https://moonbaseotago.github.io/talk/index.html It would be nice to get actual performance numbers rather than just frequency scaled Dhrystone but I suppose we ha

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