Accurate statement: "Humans invented a way to harness CRISPR/Cas9 to create transgenic organisms"

Inaccurate statement: "Humans invented CRISPR/Cas9"

This isn't complicated.

If there were animals adeptly using fire long before humans existed, we would not call humans the first to "master fire" just because humans understood what they were doing.

Here is a list of all the animals besides humans who have mastered the use of CRISPR technology:

FYI, humans didn't invent CRISPR/Cas9 - bacteria and archaea did.

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

It's an antiviral immune system. They bait bacteriophages into inserting their genes into noncoding regions of their genome, and then use CRISPR/Cas9 to match up anything from these noncoding regions that are in their coding regions, and to cut it out.

We humans stole that tech from them :) They mastered it long before we ever existed.

When something goes badly wrong with a nuclear power plant, the entire human population sees an uptick in cancer rates and a chunk of the planet gets declared uninhabitable for 10,000 years.

That's true of only fission reactors, but TFA is talking about fusion reactors. Aside from the radiation being much, much less, it has a much, much shorter half-life. Additionally, the chances of something going horribly wrong are much, much less since fusion reactors can't have a run-away chain reaction.

To pay a fitting tribute to the man, I'd drop the coin into a dish of acid, but then instead of saving it while there was plenty of time left, I'd leave it to be slowly eaten away while occasionally dropping in healing herbs and drops of organic fruit juices, and then only try to rescue it once it was far too late

Half the purpose of the entire practice of engineering is exactly that. Making a reliable thing that you need, from unreliable things that you have.

TCP/IP being the obvious example.

As if that's different from any other "Sponsored Item" search results?

I really look forward to more widespread adoption of AI search in listings. I hate spending hours having to manually dig through listings to see if the product listed *actually* meets my needs or building up spreadsheets to compare feature sets. This should be automatable. We have the tech to do so now.

What I asked relates to my comment because I'm NOT assuming he actually meant anything. I'm asking what he meant, or at least I'm pointing out the inconsistency if I were to assume a particular meaning; but at no time did I assume he actually meant a particular thing. That aside, I'd hope that a software engineer would be more precise when using computer-related terms.

.. but I don't think it means what the author thinks it means. FTFA:

The Apple Calculator leaked 32GB of RAM. Not used. Not allocated. Leaked.

First, AFAIK, leaking memory means you allocate it, but don't deallocate it. So how can he say "Not allocated?"

Second, leaked how? If it's leaking 32GB of RAM on, say, every keystroke, that would be serious; but if it allocates 32GB RAM once on start-up and simply forgets to deallocate it upon termination, it doesn't matter since the OS will reclaim the RAM for the entire process.

Today's real chain: React > Electron > Chromium > Docker > Kubernetes > VM > managed DB > API gateways.

OK, those are lots of layers of abstraction and they each use memory, perhaps a lot, and he has a point that modern software tends to use too many layers, but that doesn't mean that any of that memory is leaked: just used.

Based on that part of his rant, is he complaining more about the 32GB size of the (alleged) leak of the Calculator app, i.e., why should a calculator need 32GB? Sure, complaining that a calculator using 32GB is valid, but it's not a leak, just inefficient or lazy on the part of the programmer.

To get an SLS-equivalent payload to the lunar surface, it will take 8-16 Starship launches

You're extremely confused. SLS cannot land on the moon in the way that the (lunar variant) Starship can. It can only launch Orion to the moon. Orion is 8 meters tall and 5 meters in diameter. Starship is 52 meters tall and 9 meters in diameter. These are not the same thing.

SLS/Orion missions are expected to cost approximately $4,2B each. If you fully disposed of every Starship, the cost for 8-16 launches would be $720M-$1,44B. But of course the entire point is to not dispose of them; the goal is to get it down to where, like airplanes, most of the cost is propellant. The propellant for a single launch is $900k. Even if they don't get anywhere near propellant costs, you're still looking at orders of magnitude cheaper than a single SLS/Orion mission.

By far, most of SpaceX's launches are for Starlink, which is self-funded.
Nextmost is commercial launches. SpaceX does the lion's share of global commercial launches.
Government launches are a tiny piece of the pie. They don't "subsidize" anything, they're just yet another minor revenue stream.

The best you can say is that they charge more for government launches, but everyone charges more for government launches than commercial launches. You can argue over whether that's justified or not (launch providers have to do a lot of extra work for government launches - the DoD usually has a lot of special requirements, NASA usually demands extra safety precautions, government launches in general are more likely to want special trajectories, fully expended boosters, etc), but overall, the government is a bit player in terms of launch purchases.

Why on earth should content creators get to control derivative works and levy a tax on them?

Suppose I make an independent film and it becomes popular in the limited places I've shown it. Suppose at one of the showings, an audience member is a big movie studio executive who loves my film, then goes back to his studio and creates a very similar film, a derivative work, and makes many millions for the studio and I get nothing. Are you OK with that? Copyright works for both the big and little guys.

That's true whether the panels are on the car or on the home. Putting panels on the car only allows the battery to be reduced but Aptera hasn't done that since a car needs more than 20 miles of daily range. Panels on the home provides a superset of what Aptera provides.

The only subset of people that would benefit from solar panels on the car are those who live in apartments that don't own a home to put solar panels on.

In my experience it is, how effective it is is directly proportional to preexisting project complexity when the commands are run. The bigger the project, and the more parts that are interfacing together, the worse it performs. But for small, simple projects and creating frameworks, it can be amazing.

I'm not sure what "Building the Metaverse" is supposed to even mean anymore. Is he still obsessed with Ready Player One fantasies?

I mean, if he's just talking about generating 3d assets and the like, then maybe? AI 3d model generation is pretty useful if you don't care about every tiny detail matching up to some specific form. For example, I used an AI tool to make an image of an ancient mug with cave-art scrawled around its edges. It got the broad shapes of the model right, but had trouble with the fine engravings, making a lot of them part of the texture rather than the shape, but overall it was good enough that I just left off the engravings, had it generate a mug without them, then re-applied them with a displacement map. It got all the cracks and weathering and such on the mug really nice, and the print came out great after post-processing (cold-cast bronze + patina & polishing).

(I ended up switching from cave art to Linear A, because I also plan to at some point make a Linear B mug so that I can randomly offer guests one of the two mugs, have them rate it, and thus conduct Linear A-B Testing)