"Life, uh, finds a way."
Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park
Debug Project
111–120 of 127 posts
Re: Debug Project
#112Re: Debug Project
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Verily (under which this project exists) is part of Alphabet.
That's kind of out of character for Google. Their motto is to organize world's information, not cure diseases.
Google has a number of passion projects typically run by people who established credibility/value to Google a long time ago. Not surprisingly, some of those are medical/biological in nature, because that's an area that tech people like to contribute in after they've reached tenure.
I was a computational biologist and specifically went to work at Google to get access to their world-information-organizing technology to apply it to medical/biological problems. I was convinced at the time (mid-to-late 2000s) that AI was going to transform medicine, especially drug discovery, and that huge amounts of (organized) data was going to be key to achieving this goal. While there, we worked on protein folding and design and drug discovery, as part of a team that eventually was called Google Accelerated Sciences. It was mostly made up of people who had some level of scientific background, then had made $$$ for Google, and made good friends with the leadership and could use some of the research budget.
Of course, the protein folding and design work ended up being replaced by DeepMind's work on protein structure prediction, which led to protein design and drug discovery, mainly in DM spinoffs.
Many people at Google who work on CS stuff would absolutely love to see Google's resources applied to curing diseases. I know that Jeff Dean has been angel investor in this space.
Re: Debug Project
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Surely we can agree that eradicating non-native species is a good thing? So...which areas is humanity native to?
If you mean that seriously: homo sapiens came into existence in Africa, existed solely there for a long time (generating lots of genetic diversity) and then spread throughout the world in multiple waves. It's complicated by the fact that there was no single location and population that became homo sapiens- it was more like a network of locations and populations that evolved concurrently (there was genetic exchange be…
> that doesn't really help this discussion
It's the clearest possible example of the fact that simply "eradicating non-native species" is anything _but_ simple, and will have unforeseen implications and consequences. I doubt that modeless intended to advocate for the culling of the majority of humanity, but that was technically what they did. Similarly, SilverElfin correctly points out the high probability of unforeseen consequences of "just" changing the species make-up of a large component of the food web.
Re: Debug Project
#115Maybe a dumb question, but why release them back? Why separate and raise sterile males when you could kill off both male and female and be done? Is the idea that introducing sterile males back into the population has a compounding effect?
Every time a wild female mates with a sterile male, that's one less time they've mated with a viable male. It greatly reduces the number of successful females and therefore the size of the following generation.
Re: Debug Project
#116A less high-tech way to reduce mosquitoes in your own back yard is to set up an attractive nesting location, such as a bucket filled with plant cuttings and water with protection from the rain, and putting Bti(Bacillus thuringiensis subspecies israelensis) in it. Bti will kill the larvae after they hatch. You can buy Bti pretty easily, usually in a dehydrated form called mosquitoes bits or mosquito dunks. Make sure t…
I am not an expert, but the last time I looked at this kind of thing what I took away from it was that you're not really doing anything to negatively impact the total mosquito population, you're just creating a new nesting site that won't produce adults. My understanding was that while it might feel good, it is not actually doing much to impact the population.
Apparently mosquitos don't really migrate. They get migrated by wind, but otherwise they stick to a relatively small radius. The idea with these is that you can reduce the hyperlocal population, like in a patio area. I use them on my property. It's not a silver bullet, but I can spend most nights outside without being overwhelmed as long as I maintain them.
Re: Debug Project
#117[deleted]
Re: Debug Project
#118I thought this was about the old MSDOS debug utility, funnily enough it was named debug.com
Re: Debug Project
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
The DEBUG utility was originally named DEBUG.COM in early versions of MS-DOS, but it was renamed to DEBUG.EXE starting with MS-DOS 3.2 Shoutout to the 12 of us who remember debug> g=c800:5
Sure I remember, but since I purchased Spinrite doing lowlevel was needed just once while changing ST-506 controller to a different type or for a new disk, former was quite much rarer needed. Then even after std lowlevel it was worth using Spinrite to check if interleave value was proper. And if it wasn't it was worth letting it first before anything else. Same when changing a faster CPU as it could speed up IO so mu…
Sigh. How the times change. Right now I'm looking at 2 days to rebuild my NAS array after adding another 10TB disk.
Re: Debug Project
#120Why does releasing infertile males prevent the fertile males from reproducing? Are mosquitoes pair-bonding??
It is because female mosquitos only mate once in their lifetime.