Realistically, open source software that has a decent number of maintainers means that the quality is good and bugs get fixed, including security bugs. But what that also means is that when problems get fixed in the open source repo, those changes have to be pulled into the source code that companies are building into their products. The more they diverge from the open source version, the harder that becomes. So while a company theoretically could do what you are describing, the reality tends to be tht companies contribute the vast majority of their changes, keeping private only the parts that are specific to their custom integrations with their product.

For example, LLVM is under a permissive license, and some of the biggest contributors are companies like Apple. They use it in their proprietary products (Xcode). But they are basically using it as a library and giving back their changes. What they're not doing is giving back the tools that they wrap around it. But the original core functionality is still out there, still open, and still being maintained.

The GPL doesn't actually prevent that from happening. It just means that the code gets rewritten instead of being copied. It makes the closed-source app ever so slightly more expensive to develop and ever so slightly later to hit the market. If the closed-source app is better than the Free Software app, it will still dominate the market unless someone is prepared to throw resources into making the Free Software app equally capable, and the market will still determine the winners and losers.

I don't want to diminish the accomplishment; that seems like a very cool dataset and probably one that was really fiddly to pull together; but, if you are talking single-neuron resolution; I am curious about whether you can still call an individual sample "the human brainstem" rather than "a human brainstem" and what comparative purposes you can use it for without running into trouble with cases where there are multiple ways for a brainstem to be adequately healthy, so long as certain requirements are met, so you'll need considerably more samples to draw useful inferences about exactly what the problem abnormality is.

Same sort of thing as when "sequencing the human genome" was a big project. Obviously a major exercise in gene sequencing and a basis for situating subsequent sequencing operations; but once you start talking detail there isn't 'the human genome'; literally everyone has one; and it turns out that different differences matter or don't at radically different levels.

Presumably the methods used to do it once will be helpful in doing it more often in the future; but I'll be curious what we discover about the balance of 'normalcy' vs. some relatively subtle and confusing combination of surprisingly variable ways to have a brainstem that seems to work just fine along with surprisingly subtle, no ghastly big lesions, ways to have one that ends up being totally dodgy.

We can't understand why you can't understand basic fundamental realities that these twelve year-olds you speak of are able to plainly see.

Dude Biden has been out of office for almost two full years. He is to feeble to sexually harass most women now and probably needs help getting in and out of the shower, so even his daughter is mostly safe.

Allow me Fix the headline!

Over 200 Economists Embrace Sensationalism To Drive Ad Impressions on Blogs and Substack Subscriptions.

The problem here is the loss of trust. I have migrated almost everything I used to still use Windows for (at work left Windows at home behind a long time ago), to either MacOS natively or a Linux VM.

Microsoft made the experience of using Windows 11 so bad it was worth it abandon workflows with a decade or more of use to avoid it!

The very idea the find/search feature on the desktop should have ever searched for, let alone returned results from the internet prior to those found on the local machine and maybe possibly maybe some user identified data sources like attached network volumes and associated sharepoint / intranet resources in business environments was both stupid and malevolent.

Windows from at least 22h2 on through now is basically malware, by any reasonable definition and identification of characteristics. It literally does everything out of the box people once objected to BonziBuddy doing!

I find "NOTE: Experiences vary by region." to be a bad sign for something that would be so trivial for MS to alter the behavior of; and where they are obviously not earnestly making improvements that were previously impossible but grudgingly rolling back bullshit they thought they could get away with.

Probably means good news for users in the EU; same way they get left out of some of the most egregiously bullshit 'AI' stuff; may help EDU and enterprise; but I'm guessing that it's no promises for less favored users.

Your link - seriously?

"Tobacco giants say"? Dude, they said that smoking is actually healthy for a few decades. I'd trust my cat around buckets full of her favorite treat more than those companies.

In all seriousness, though, if bankruptcy is a real possibility, the idea of a public buyout of some of these old companies isn't a terrible one. Maybe even have the government buy it and make it free for U.S. citizens, but continue to make money on the property abroad. :-)

Assuming M4A ends up being a single payer system, that would, in fact, make it very possible to force providers to lower costs.

Research should be funded directly, not by paying more for unrelated prescription drugs. That's the whole point of having grant programs from agencies like NIH.

One of the biggest problems, IMO, is healthcare consolidation. When most of the hospitals in an area are owned by big chains, it really doesn't matter if they are nonprofit. Big organizations just naturally tend to bloat and waste tons of money at every level of the system, because they don't have the same incentives to keep things lean. Consolidation has generally resulted in higher prices and lower quality of care, from what I've seen.

Every other entry? Try every entry. Something like 1% of my Facebook feed is actual organic content from friends. 14% or so is from groups. The other 85% is ads. And I'm being optimistic when I say that it is only 85%. When I see about the first or second ad, I close Facebook, because it's just going to be ads all the way down after that.

I'll make an offer right now to buy it for $1,000 with the intent to release the entire catalog into the public domain (CC0) 28 years after its creation.

Sometimes I wonder if this is all a grand conspiracy to destroy federalism and make us 50 nifty little states..

I hope so

Anytime you convert from one time of power to another you usually incur a ton of loss. Charging the battery with the engine or running the motors with the generator output, mechanical -> electric only to go back to mechanical pretty much destroys any advantage you get from running the engine more optimally.

Yes rail roads do this, but it is not about (fuel) efficiency, it is about torque / tractive effort (not a rail way engineer so I don't understand all the details differences )

With automotive hybrids it is more sensible to capture waste energy regen breaking, and help the engine when it is outside its power band, use the motor to provide the extra power needed for acceleration etc.
Use the motor more as the prime mover in situations like stop/go where engine power is hard to manage effectively at all, and there is otherwise lots of idling.

Trucking though (long haul) is pretty efficent accross most of the US. You have large loads on engines with tall gearing, and everything runs at pretty stable speeds.

Most of our interstate highways, with some exceptions in mount regions have a fairly narrow range of again consistent grades.

A battery-electric boost where efficiencies of the main power train fall down, long grades in the mountains, any kind of stop/go situation due to accidents, road maintenance etc, and the last miles in/near destinations in a lot of cases, stands to pack a huge punch in energy savings. Without adding a lot of weight to vehicles that already place stress on roadways and structures, at least as compared to trucking around enough battery for the long runs.

Hybrids especially if you can put the hybrid tech into the trailer rather than the tractor, therefore making it possible to use cheaper lighter traditional trailers on routes where the hybrid tech offers less advantage, is pretty smart. It also sides steps the problem of not being able to operate if you can't charge for whatever reason. Substations do catch fire sometimes, storms / fires do take out major grid supports having a trucking industry entirely grid dependent is problematic because they may need to be delivering the very supplies and equipment needed to effectively repair the grid when needed.

I think the correct approach is the best of both here, use electric propulsion when it is more efficent, than the ICE drive line can be or can be alone, use electricity when it be generated with lower carbon foot print and deliver better cost per mine, use fuel where energy density remains key, be able to use fuel for any job if operating in stand alone mode become a sudden requirement.

At the scale of a commercial transport truck this should all be very do-able