BTW, re: the Congo in particular: the most common traditional type of fishing is basket fishing with woven funnels suspended in the rapids. You sure as hell better know how to swim if you want to do that.

Famous angler Jeremy Wade referred to the local Congo fishermen as nearly suicidal, just diving into the rapids to get nets unstuck and the like.

SIGH.

There were 10 people chosen and people with dark skin in the USA make up about 1 out of 8 Americans.

1 in 8 is 12,5%.

African-American without mixed race in 2024 is estimated at 46,3M, or 14,2%
With mixed race, that rises to 51,6M, or 15,8% of the population.
Some hispanics have dark skin, some light. In 2023 there were 62,5%, representing 19% of the population (though there's a small overlap with black - doesn't affect the numbers much).
In 2023, Asians were 25,8M people, or 7,7% of the population. This is again a diverse group with mixed skin tones (for example, the Indian subcontinent)
In 2023, there were 1,6M people (0,49%) of pacific island ancestry and 3,3M native Americans - again, mixed skin tones.
People of Mediterranean European ancestry often have so-called "olive" complexions.

With a strict definition of dark skin, you're probably talking like 1 in 6 or so (~16,7%). With a looser definition, you could be talking upwards of 40% or more of the population.

The chances of the 10 people to be a perfect representation of the racial demographics of the USA is quite small.

Here are the actual odds of selecting no dark-skinned people at different population percentages being "dark skinned", by one's definition of "dark":

15%: 1 in 4
20%: 1 in 8
25%: 1 in 17
30%: 1 in 34
35%: 1 in 73
40%: 1 in 165

Then consider that NASA astronauts are required to pass a swimming test

It is not a test of swimming prowess, just of an ability to not drown. You have to be able to do three lengths of a 25-meter pool without stopping, three lengths of the pool in a flight suit and tennis shoes, and tread water for 10 minutes while wearing a flight suit. This is not some massively imposing task. You don't have to be Michael Phelps to become an astronaut.

and as a general rule those with African ancestry tend to have less stamina in swimming than those with lighter skin

Yes, white athletes tend to have an advantage in swimming. A 1,5% advantage. While a 1,5% advantage may be of good relevance at the highest level of a sport, it's hardly meaningful in a "can you tread water with a flight suit on" test.

Think of the different races as just really big families

That is not how genetics work, and is instead the pseudoscience that drove fascist movements, and in particular, Nazism.

There is far more genetic diversity within a given "race" than between them. Certain genetic traits tend to have strong correlates - for example dark skin and sickle cell anemia - but that's not because races are some sort of genetic isolates, but rather for very practical reasons (dark skin is an adaptation to not die of skin cancer in the tropics, and sickle cell disease is a consequence of a genetic adaptation to not die of malaria which also happens to be found in such climates). But the vast majority of genes don't have such strong correlates.

The concept of "race" as a distinct biological category is not supported by modern genetics.

If we are to ignore skin color and just put one big family up against another big family on swimming ability then just due to random mutations, perhaps some Darwinian selection way back in the family tree, one family will swim better than the other

The main "racial difference" in swimming ability in the US is "inherited", that is, parents who don't know how to swim tend to not teach their kids how to swim. As a result, white children are 56% more likely to receive swimming lessons than black children. One can expect that to directly correspond to an advantage in adulthood. But again, the ability to tread water is not out there knocking 90% of astronaut candidates out of the race - especially given that astronaut candidates tend to be athletic and motivated to learn new skills.

People with light skin tend to have ancestors that had to go fishing for their protein

Utter tripe. Fish consumption has no correlation with skin colour. How much fish do you think your average herder or plains horseman ate? And fish is massively important in much of Africa - in coastal areas (Gabon, Ghana, Sierra Leone in particular note), along the Congo (it's literally the world's largest river, people have been fishing it since time immemorial), Lake Victoria, Lake Chad, the Niger Delta, etc etc. What sort of racist stereotype world are you living in where black people don't fish?

Having a large candidate pool relative to the number chosen makes it easier to show bias and still get high-quality candidaes, not harder.

Yes, the -gate habit comes from the Watergate scandal. Watergate was during Richard Nixon's second term as president, in 1972-4. He was a Republican, and resigned the presidency before he could be impeached. The name comes from an attempted break in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington DC that ended up uncovering a whole pile of shady stuff Nixon had been up to.

Are Americans actually this ignorant of their own history?

Aw, I'm disappointed there's no reply on Zuckerberg's origins.

Everything's an AI artifact. It's not like lazy people who slept through high school chemistry have been punching unit conversions into calculators for generations.

You can use the UV light. You need different material with a different bandgap. Basically a whole other panel, stacked on the first. But before you go after that 5% UV you're going to want to go after the blue, and probably the red and some of the near IR.

They're called multijunction solar cells and they're used in places where you need maximum efficiency, like in space. For regular use, single junction cells are much more popular because a single bandgap panel absorbing at the maximum solar emission is going to be more efficient price-wise than a multijunction cell where the extra bandgaps are in lower emission ranges.

Wine runs in user space. I don't see how Wine could ever run drivers, such as peripheral drivers required by things like the iPhone sync functionality of iTunes or kernel-level anti-cheat required by major online games supporting pickup matches with strangers.

People who use software that requires Windows are "forced" to buy Windows along with a new PC. An OEM Windows 10 license that came with a PC is locked to that PC. A new PC purchased to replace a PC that cannot be upgraded to Windows 11 will come with a new Windows license.

Start with stage0 (whose binary seed is about 1 KiB) and GNU Mes. Use mescc to build tinycc, then GCC 2.95, then GCC 4.7, then fairly modern GCC, and then use mrustc to build some version of Rust. The time-consuming part is that each version of the Rust toolchain uses fairly new features in the Rust language, so yes, you'll probably have to build the world a couple dozen times starting with the most recent version supported by mrustc.

If I had to guess, we let this happen by the USA electing George W. Bush in 2000. His incoming Attorney General settled United States v. Microsoft Corp., 253 F.3d 34 (D.C. Cir. 2001), with a wrist slap instead of a Windows division breakup.

You probably guessed correctly: equitable relief in the form of an injunction against Disney bringing a trademark lawsuit. I haven't read the complaint, but I'd be surprised if it didn't cite Kellogg and Dastar.

The Supreme Court of the United States has decided a few cases about the interaction between the Lanham Act, which inclues trademark law, and exclusive rights pursuant to the Copyright Clause. Key cases includes Kellogg Co. v. National Biscuit Co., 305 U.S. 111 (1938), and Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 539 U.S. 23 (2003). In both cases, the Court ruled that the Lanham Act cannot be used to extend the effective term of exclusive rights in an invention whose patent has expired or a work whose copyright has expired. Disney's legal counsel ought to be familiar with the latter case, seeing as it involved a company that is now a subsidiary of Disney.

From the article:

The Go project recently arranged for Go itself to be completely reproducible given only the source code, meaning that although a build needs some computer running some operating system and some earlier Go toolchain, none of those choices matters."

[...]

The Multics review is famous for pointing out the possibility of adding a back door to a compiler to insert back doors in critical system programs during compilation [...]. Reading the report inspired Ken Thompson to implement exactly that attack on an early Unix system, probably in early 1975. He later explained the attack in his 1983 Turing Award lecture, published in Communications as "Reflections on Trusting Trust."

David A. Wheeler described a defense against a back door that propagates through the compiler in a 2009 PhD dissertation titled Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling . Diverse double-compiling (DDC) involves choosing two or more other independently developed compilers A and B for a language, bootstrapping compiler C from source code through each of them (building C with A or B and then building C with itself), and ensuring that the output is byte-identical. This relies on previous effort to make builds reproducible.

However, DDC also relies on having more than one implementation of a particular language. Go and Rust each have only one widely used implementation. This means someone trying to wrangle a supply chain has to do one of three things: trust a particular old version of a compiler not to have a back door, compile every version since the dawn of the language (such as when Rust was prototyped in OCaml), or implement a usable subset of the language in a more widely implemented language. This is why mrustc is so important, as it's a way to skip forward by several years' worth of versions when bootstrapping a Rust compiler.

From the article: "The only problem left is key distribution: The verifier must know who should have signed the code. [...] To the extent that questions of identity can be solved, having authors sign their software can provide even stronger guarantees." It goes on to describe how Debian and Go package repositories include the expected hash value of a package, so that package downloading tools can reject a package that has been replaced.

However, the approach used by Debian to verify developers' identity, that of new developers physically meeting existing trusted developers at key signing parties to exchange OpenPGP public keys, doesn't scale very well. A lot of contributors are disconnected from the strongly connected set of the web of trust because they cannot travel to key signing parties. This can be because of cost, work or child care scheduling, regulatory restrictions related to geopolitics, or regulatory restrictions related to public health (most recently during 2020-2021). These disconnected contributors must forever rely on the bottleneck of "sponsors" (trusted developers who forward packages from the maintainer to the distribution) to get their work into a distribution.

And sponsors are indeed a bottleneck. From the article: "And then you need to be ready to update to a fixed version of that dependency." When a package's upstream maintainer releases an updated version of a package, the package's sponsor in a particular distribution may be too busy with other tasks to handle it the same day. This can mean that there is no available labor to forward the update to the rolling distribution and backport the fix to the version of the package in a stable distribution.

Oh dear, I'm sorry I didn't read this before replying above.

Zuck was one of several government projects along the same lines back then, and he got lucky, that's all.

So is he a CIA operator indoctrinated from birth a la The Bourne Identity, a genetically programmed clone, or a straight up android?