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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • You need at least two copies in two different places - places that will not burn down/explode/flood/collapse/be locked down by the police at the same time.

    An enterprise is going to be commissioning new computers or reformatting existing ones at least once per day. This means the bitlocker key list would need printouts at least every day in two places.

    Given the above, it’s easy to see that this process will fail from time to time, in ways like accicentally leaking a document with all these keys.





  • That was one of the original proposed mechanisms to explain how the (obviously false) autism was caused.

    But since then, since thiomersal was removed, other ‘causes’ and moral issues have been invented, including cells from abortions.

    The one that makes me laugh the most is that it’s terrible that the poor poor baby is exposed to so many illnesses (measles, mumps, rubella, polio, tetanus, notovirus, rotovirus and more) in such a short space of time, it’s no wonder the poor dear’s immune system is compromised. And then the same mother drops the kid off at daycare and exposes the poor dear to all those viruses and more - and live viruses at that.

    There is no bleeding logic, just feels. And they get so angry at the fake harm that medicine is causing, and simultaneously actually causing real harms to real people.





  • Sorry for taking a long time to reply.

    with plain old binary fission cell division, how do you get both to divide at the same time, and give each cell one of the new organelles?

    An excellent question! Luckily it was answered in the paper. The researchers actually had a high resolution soft x-ray movie of cell division (ok, an exaggeration, they had a few micrographs showing the sequence). In the sequence, it showed how the organelles (including the novel N2 fixation one) undergoing division and each ‘child’ organelle ending up in different halves.

    Cell division is controlled in the cell by an amazing process:

    • 2 centres are created on opposite sides of the cell
    • Structures like tethers are built that connect each centre to each of the organelles (the nucleus, mitochondria and the N2 fixators). These are called microtubules
    • The microtubules then start shortening, pulling the organelles in two directions, separating them.

    The x-ray micrographs show that the N2 fixators are already integrated into this mitosis mechanism - my guess is that the N2 fixators already ‘understand’ the parent cell’s mitosis signaling.

    The authors also say that the organelles have lost a number of genes for essential cellular functions, relying on the parent cell to provide those capabilities. By comparison, mitochondria have only 37 genes left, and chloroplasts weren’t known for having any DNA when I was at school, but are now known to have about 110 genes.

    In other words, a lot of evolution has already occurred and they are well on the way to being ‘proper’ organelles.





  • Elon sounds like he’s experienced, skilled and is approaching things from a theoretical or ethical or other grand point of view. He used to impress me with his approach on building an electric car company with full self-driving vehicles in the 2010’s. I wasn’t a full believer, but I thought he was competent and wanted Tesla to succeed.

    Then he went and bought Twitter. As a software engineer all my life, and in the startup scene, and having worked in a failed social media platform, I have some experience. Everything he’s said about Twitter is crap and everything he’s done is stupid. And the results speak for themselves.

    I’ve seen people say that Elon sounds great about things they don’t know too much about. But when the topic comes to things they do understand, Elon clearly is wrong.

    He started his career with hundreds of millions of dollars, and he bet it all on a couple of businesses be bought (he was never a founder, always a purchaser).

    Basically he’s been lucky twice (Paypal and Tesla), but each of these won 10-100x on his initial stake.



  • This is exactly the answer.

    I’d just expand on one thing: many systems have multiple apps that need to run at the same time. Each app has its own dependencies, sometimes requiring a specific version of a library.

    In this situation, it’s very easy for one app to need v1 of MyCleverLibrary (and fails with v2) and another needs v2 (and fails with v1). And then at the next OS update, the distro updates to v2.5 and breaks everything.

    In this situation, before containers, you will be stuck, or have some difficult workrounds including different LD_LIBRARY_PATH settings that then break at the next update.

    Using containers, each app has its own libraries at the correct and tested versions. These subtle interdependencies are eliminated and packages ‘just work’.