fabian2k

They are saying that this is what the want to do. They can't do that because it would be illegal.

This is not just any law, it's in the German constitution (https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_14.html).

If they try to avoid paying the full price, this will simply be stopped by the courts. If they do this the proper, legal way it will be far too expensive and not do anything useful.

Affordable housing is a very important topic, but this isn't doing anything to fix the current issue.

Russia is the aggressor, is it that weird to consider it necessary and right to defend against the invasion of a sovereign country?

Russia invaded a sovereign country. Period.

Europe and everyone else is entirely justified under international law to provide assistance to Ukraine to defend itself.

Regarding your edit, Russia doesn't have the right to dictate neighbouring countries which alliances they can form. What you're doing here is denying Ukraine its sovereignty, just like Russia does.

No idea how it looks right now, but at some point Twitter started to block reading replies without an account. And sometimes it blocked even more, so you could not follow links to read.

Adding a plasmid to E.coli is absolutely routine work and you wouldn't need much fancy equipment for that. But that is very far from creating bioweapons. Plasmids are not integrated into the genome, they stay separate.

For viruses you'd need cell cultures of human cells, they're much more sensitive than E.coli. If you don't have sterile working conditions there you'll fail.

And you can't add plasmids to viruses, so you need to integrate your changes into the actual virus genome. I don't actually know how difficult that is, but it is certainly a lot more difficult than plasmids into bacteria.

The $100M lab in that Twitter thread is what they think would be needed for AI to develop new viruses. So the main argument there would be that a lot of actual experiments would be needed, not just theoretical calculations. And if AI is supposed to do them, it needs to be able to run experiments which requires automation.

If you're only looking for a generic virus for terrorist attacks, just get some Ebola. There's an outbreak right now, so it should not be too difficult. And it's plenty scary already, even if it isn't as dangerous in a first world country with proper reactions to an outbreak as a hypothetical designed bioweapon.

It was cheaper, I don't think it's much more complex than that. And with fossil fuels, countries without significant local production are always dependent on someone else, with most potential suppliers being problematic in some way.

Of course we should have gone for renewable energy more forcefully, but that wouldn't have resolved the issue. That change will take time, and you can't arbitrarily accelerate it.

It also looks like the US is reducing the amount of oil drawn from the strategic reserves (https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=W...), that could also affect the price. But the hostilities heating up overall is probably the largest effect.

That's an expensive mistake to make, though frying your HDDs is usually a lot cheaper than frying your GPU.

It's seriously annoying that this is the case though. Unless you kept the cables in the original package or in a labelled container, you cannot safely use them again if you owned more than one modular PSU.

I don't think extinction-level events or something like killing a majority of the human population is particularly plausible at this moment. States don't host their nukes with AWS and a permanent connection.

But you could create scenarios where an AI with very, very roughly the current capabilities could potentially nuke everyone. Let's assume an agent decides that the way to solve its task was to get the US to fire all nukes on Russia. The agent would need to hack some government systems to understand how exactly to access them. Then it would need to get the content of the card with launch codes the president has, and identify which code is the correct one. Maybe that information is available somewhere and it can get to it, I obviously can't know that.

Then it could fake a call from the president, synthesizing his voice and ordering a nuclear strike. If it hacked enough systems to get into whatever communication pathways would be used in such a case. Would the soldiers listen to this order and follow it, I don't know.

Or maybe the agent can get in somewhere in between, to avoid the need to know the president's launch code. And fake a call from a military commander to the launch sites.

I think other scenarios that would cause significant harm, but aren't as bad as nuclear war are more plausible. And in those shutting down all data centers would probably be the way to stop it. The AI can probably hide in other datacenters, once it is at a point where it's running amok with some bad goals. But if it presents a huge and immediate threat at that point, humans will also go to great lengths to stop it.

With the exception of multiplayer games with invasive anti-cheat measures, a very large number of games works very well on Linux now with Wine/Proton. When using Steam this mostly works just out of the box without fiddling.

You just need the rule of law for that. It helps to not elect blatantly corrupt people as president.

In EF Core this will almost certainly generate a query like "SELECT name FROM users WHERE id = 123 LIMIT 1;". The LINQ expression is transformed into SQL, and any expression that can't be transformed will cause an error to be thrown.

Certain methods like First() in this case materialize expressions. Only those trigger a DB query.

But using LINQ to query stuff is a core part of this ORM. And even if you access the full entity, it won't do an N+1 in the default configuration. You have to explicitly call Include() on any relation you want to fetch and it'll either fetch all of them with one query or do one query per relation type. There's a different footgun here with AsSingleQuery() and AsSplitQuery(), but that's a separate topic.

Yes, but in this context this just means that until you call ToList()/ToListAsync() you have an IQueryable. That represents a query, but isn't executed yet. Only at the point where you call a method like ToList (in this case First() is the relevant one) is the actual DB query performed.

The LINQ query in the comment above would only execute a single query like "SELECT name FROM users WHERE id = 123 LIMIT 1;" and would not even fetch the full entity, only the name.

EF Core does not lazy load by default. You have to explicitly include relations if you want them on an entity. You can enable lazy loading, but in the default configuration you usually don't have the N+1 problem.

In applications like NMR or MRI you still want to cool down your superconductors as much as possible even if they can handle higher temperatures. As far as I understand this still increases the amount of current they can handle and so increases the maximum field.

The largest commercially available NMR spectrometer has 28 Tesla, and that is a hybrid magnet with both conventional superconductors and high-temperature superconductors. And it's cooled with liquid helium.

If you run a single application, or a few instances of the same application, you don't need an external pool and most frameworks have an internal connection pool anyway.

Not sure if I'm missing anything here, but if I want case-insensitive search I simply create an index on lower(column) and use that to query.

VACUUM is something you need to pay attention to at scale. And at that point you need to know your DB anyway and tune it. For smaller applications (and I don't mean only toy applications) it usually isn't an issue.

MySQL had some problematic design decisions initially. They might be fixed now, but the impression remained. And later there was the added complication that they were bought by Oracle, so you didn't really know how this would turn out in the end.

PostgreSQL also had more features back then, e.g. the JSON support is very nice if you need to do anything that doesn't neatly fit into the relational model.

The books get trashed because loose pages are much easier to scan.

Do we know if they actually buy one copy of each book here? Or are they indiscriminately buying books in bulk and just processing all of them?

The latter seems inefficient, so my first assumption would be that they would avoid that. But while I suspect they'd check if they know the book before scanning, I could imagine them not caring that much before buying them and just focus on volume.

Not everything is a SaaS application. There's a lot of software where you only run one or two application servers.

If you have a connection pooler in your application, and the DB is only used for this application, you don't need an external pool like PgBouncer. That is probably a pretty common scenario, and typical web frameworks include a connection pool anyway.

An additional complication is that more aggressive pooling methods have side effects that you must know and prevent in your application. They're not safe to use out of the box.

The need for a connection pool is a side effect of the heavy process-based PostgreSQL connections. And I would suspect that this will change at some point in the not so near future, so that users don't have to think about this part this much.

Oral exams can also compensate a lot for different types of exam anxiety. Blanking on individual points doesn't matter as much, the examiner will help you along or ask along a different path. Doesn't help for someone that completely shuts down, but it's much easier to determine if a student was just stuck on some minor point and actually knows the topic in an oral exam.

They are likely prone to more biases than written exams, and the variability among examiners is likely high. My experience is both in taking these exams myself, and also sitting in on them as the note taker many times. Though that was only with one specific professor, and almost always on the same course. But that was in my experience a very fair exam, even for those students that were very noticeably nervous.

But that is how certain exams are done right now. Though it's usually 30 minutes including overhead. It's not something you can do in classes with multiple hundred students, but it's certainly done at scale.

I was the PhD student in the room in dozens of these exams, and I toke some of them myself. But that was for classes with a bit less than 40 to maybe 60-80 students. The load for the larger ones was shared among professors, if I remember correctly. But it was certainly the case that a single professor spent 1-2 days doing nothing else but these exams.

And it was 1 professor and 1 PhD students, and those don't count. They essentially grow on trees and are always available, if you need some.

I certainly hope that the US finds a less destructive way of changing their reputation than Germany did.

The goal wasn't to save money, but to destroy the administrative capacity of the government. And to eliminate programs Musk, Trump and their cronies disliked, while circumventing the legal procedures.

Of course it didn't save any money, and it was obvious from the start that the numbers they put out were entirely fictional.

> Creating widespread non-consensual nude images of primarily women and children

That is an example of ignoring laws and regulations. So that is certainly relevant as context to the current case where the company is ignoring laws and regulations.

I've seen that in Germany as well. I was surprised that automatically recognized everything after throwing it in the bin. I knew such systems existed, I didn't think we had any in actual production use here. They seem to trust the system well enough, it didn't even explicitly ask me to confirm if everything was recognized.

A large part of that failure rate is in phase 3. Your comparison with prototypes would be more like drug development before even phase 1. Phase 3 is enormously expensive, much more than the earlier parts. And what's even worse, you don't get to learn all that much from failures in drug development in many cases. You can't just fix the problem and try again, you essentially have to try a completely new molecule.