It's being comfortable with someone who rants about his personal political views that don't align with me.
James Watson was humanity's finest. His contributions defined science. He said a few controversial things, late in life. I felt the response was excessive. It's not as if he actively harmed anyone. He said words, disagreeable things, over things he had no power to change, .........in his 90s.
The cancel culture should at least make exceptions to those with outsized contributions to our species.
Any one in their 90s earned the right to be cantankerous, just as it is normal for little children to throw tantrums.

Or... people change. We become cynical as we age.
He had a lot going wrong in his later life.
I just remember him for the artist he was in his early career.

s/is/has/

I agree with all that.
Underpowered studies are a bane in medicine and nutrition research is ruined the reputation of science among lay audience.

I disagree. I see both sides. Medicine and the computational side.

Research in medicine is full of con-founders, inadequate samples, and imperfect experiments. The confidence you bring from clean and sophisticated methods and analyses misleads you in interpreting messy evidence (I understand that you say that education research is similar). I care as much or more about where the research was conducted than what they wrote in the paper because most research in medicine is plain wrong in its conclusions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The statistical methods used medical studies are relatively much simpler than in say, engineering. That's not where gotchas are. So we need robust studies, a convergence of evidence, and meta-analyses from competent centers.

> And C++? I am not even sure you can port that to Rust without essentially writing a compiler that adds all the missing OO features. Rust has limited and very non-standard OO. Which makes sense given its aims, but not when you come from C++.

GenAI will generate the code.
Rust makes most sense to C++ devs since it is essentially encoding C++ best practices into a nicer, more modern language.
People who have migrated C++ to Rust have reported good experiences for years. Microsoft had plenty of experience in the area.
AI can sort out the necessary transformations in type structure.

Not really. Rust was always built to gradually replace C++.
They don't need to do a complete rewrite of anything at once.
It will coexist in each C++ project, slowly replacing things, few types and functions at a time.

It still would have been a mammoth task in the past. But GenAI automates much of this.
Rewrites aren't as big of a deal now, compared to 3 years ago.
This is what GenAI is supposed to do. Improve agility. Better conform to best practices etc.

On the up side, it means they won't layoff devs too much, since keeping up with changes is still lots of work.

Everyone can read papers. Not everyone is qualified to understand them in proper context.

Unless you have at least a masters in the related subject, ideally a PhD, your ability to vett the papers in that domain should be assumed to be rather limited, especially when you are arriving at conclusions that the experts aren't by consensus.

In biology and medicine, evidence works differently than in tech. Controlling for confounders is much harder.

You might have misremembered it. Or the author was dumbing it down for the ease of the audience, especially if it was a lay-public science magazine.
It's a scientific category. Legal definitions are local. The term did not originate in US and it took a while to take hold in US.
Here is the Brazilian epidemiologist who coined it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

> things that couldn't be made in a normal kitchen

It's a definition that a random influencer would give, not one used in science.

Nova is the most recognized classification/definition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The stuff you mentioned fall under: "minimally processed foods". That's the healthiest category.

Cottage cheese is in the minimally processed category.
Cheddar is processed. You don't need any special technology to make it. It was made by aging it in damp caves in the 12th century.
Cheese singles are ultra processed.

> Although I don't buy the worst food because we have health standards here

We have health standards to protect us from food poisoning and poisoning from additives.
We don't have health standards to protect us from chronic diseases.

> if I would switch over to completely healthy my grocery bill would become two to three times more expensive.

It would not. It would actually be cheaper. Mine is. You are doing it wrong.

Regular cheese, yogurt and sauerkraut are not considered ultraprocessed.
Are there ultraprocessed cheese products and sugar loaded flavored yogurt products with fillers? Sure.

Not really. US is a large country with a large range of cost of living.
Where I currently live, it's below median. The store nearby often has great sales.

The basic stuff you listed cost about the same. $1 pasta. Bananas 59c/lb etc. Chicken thighs 45c/lb on frequent sales. Legumes are cheap everywhere.
If you cook for yourself with traditional ingredients, food is highly affordable in US. The low income people have food banks and get money from the government. Food is perhaps 2% of my expenses unless I need to eat out at work.

Unfortunately, ultra processed food consumption is 55% of caloric intake in US. It's much worse in the young.
https://www.npr.org/sections/s...

Even as a busy professional, I cook for myself (about 3 times per week) and have my teen waist line and weight in late 40s. BMI is 21.4. Normal and basic food is inexpensive. I don't specially exercise. I just walk rather than drive.

However, even those on food assistance buy a lot of prepared and processed food. Whenever I ate processed food, I gained weight fast, even when I wasn't buying sugary stuff. I just avoid buying prepared food and include enough vegetables and fiber in my diet. My carb intake is only complex carbs. US is not protein deficient at all, but vegetable and fiber intake are inadequate on average.

That's all it takes, some basic common sense about diet. Food is very affordable in the developed world.

> I've been calling it techno feudalism

You and every Cyberpunk author ever.