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MillironX

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Points are an inconsistent unit of measurement

buttondown.com
5 points·by MillironX·قبل شهرين·1 comments

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MillironX
·قبل 10 أيام·discuss
We covered yew extensively in toxicology class in vet school, but I didn't know about any animals that eat the berries. My favorite fact about yew is that the Iowa State Lloyd Veterinary Center is named after a toxicologist, yet has yew planted for decoration all around the building.
MillironX
·الشهر الماضي·discuss
Of the communities mentioned that I recognized, most were retirement-aged communities. In that case, wouldn't age demographics alone explain the population differences?
MillironX
·قبل 4 أشهر·discuss
My personal gripe with Ente is that they seem to value making new half-baked products over making their current products feature-complete. Case-in-point: RAW photos are still not supported in Ente Photos [1]. Locker and now Ensu got priority over a key feature in making the Photos app a photos app.

[1]: https://github.com/ente-io/ente/discussions/625
MillironX
·قبل 5 أشهر·discuss
My college has replaced textbooks with internet resources and "current academic literature," but I'm shocked at the number of people who can't interpret a scientific article, nor properly search a database like PubMed or CABI. It can't be for lack of training: we have entire semester-long courses dedicated to research and library use. Maybe the distractions of text messages and TikTok are to blame like the article suggests.
MillironX
·قبل 6 أشهر·discuss
https://archive.ph/C4GOs
MillironX
·قبل 6 أشهر·discuss
In the animal world, the genomic vaccine revolution has led to two new types of vaccine being produced.

1. The Autogenous vaccine, where a veterinarian submits swabs of offending organisms to a lab that cultures and produces a vaccine specific to that strain to sell back to the clinic. Genomics play a role in determining if the currently circulating strains match the culture that the vaccine is based on.

2. The prescription platform vaccine, where genomic sequences are used to create a custom antigen that is produced in a microbial factory.

The efficacy of these types of vaccines is hotly debated because they do not have to go through clinical trial before distribution. The development of "commercial" (i.e. clinical trial-burdened) vaccines appears to have slowed based on my observations. While I think some of these new vaccines show promise, many autogenous and prescription platform vaccines are just more expensive versions of vaccines already available, or they package organisms that are suspected commensals and market it as something that no one else has done.

It's hard for me to call today a "golden age of vaccine development" in that light. I hope that the article is only taking human vaccines into account and that there is appropriate efficacy data for every vaccine shown in the last chart.
MillironX
·قبل 7 أشهر·discuss
> A key assumption in my argument is that the marginal benefit of spending more time on an exam is always nonnegative

That is a very bold assumption, and I doubt the data supports it.

I couldn't find much published research on the correlation, just this one paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2304/plat.2009.8.2.5.... It shows no correlation between time on exams and final score, but its methodology is questionable.
MillironX
·قبل 7 أشهر·discuss
The first argument actually leans in favor of LaTeX or Typst as a better replacement for Docx.

A LaTeX or Typst document can contain both the content and formatting together within the same file. This isn't idiomatic for either language, and my experience is that this is more common for Typst than LaTeX, but both can do so. All of those formatting rules like small caps, table widths, margins, page numbering, etc.? Those can be rigidly defined in either LaTeX or Typst and are better guarded aginst accidental formatting rules breaches from double click, copy/paste, or table cell insertion than in Word.

I'm more sympathetic to the network effect argument. It's hard to envision a reasonable redline system compatible with both Docx and LaTeX/Typst.
MillironX
·قبل 7 أشهر·discuss
> I don't think Julia really solves any problems that aren't already solved by Python.

But isn't the whole point of this article that Matlab is more readable than Python (i.e. solves the readability problem)? The Matlab and Julia code for the provided example are equivalent[1]: which means Julia has more readable math than Python.

[1]: Technically, the article's code will not work in Julia because Julia gives semantic meaning to commas in brackets, while Matlab does not. It is perfectly valid to use spaces as separators in Matlab, meaning that the following Julia code is also valid Matlab which is equivalent to the Matlab code block provided in the article.

    X = [ 1 2 3 ];
    Y = [ 1 2 3;
          4 5 6;
          7 8 9 ];
    Z = Y * X';
    W = [ Z Z ];
MillironX
·قبل 7 أشهر·discuss
I'm not sure I understand your point. You're saying that channels are like apt/sources.list or yum.repos.d, and flakes are like the Apple App Store? Or the other way around?

One thing that probably didn't help my understanding of channels was that I run Nix on non-NixOS systems (primarily MacOS and Fedora). If I'd stuck to NixOS, then thinking of a channel in the same terms as apt/sources.list or yum.repos.d would have been an easier mental model.
MillironX
·قبل 7 أشهر·discuss
> The flakes were the main UX/DX improvement for me. Before them I honestly could not do anything.

Agreed. I think flakes are far more intuitive than channels. In a flake everything is declared in the repo it's used in. I still don't understand channels.

For someone who's used to thinking in channels, I suppose flakes would be jarring. For someone (like me) who came from the world of Project.toml and package.json, flakes make a lot of sense.
MillironX
·قبل 8 أشهر·discuss
I've started experimenting with Typst for a few documents, and here's my stack:

- Zed editor with Typst plugin

- Tinymist LSP settings turned on to render on save in Zed, see https://code.millironx.com/millironx/nix-dotfiles/src/commit...

- Okular open to the output document. Okular refreshes the document when changed on disk.

It's not as polished as say, LaTeX Workshop in VSCode, but it gets the job done.
MillironX
·قبل 8 أشهر·discuss
Bureau of Labor Statistics says that the mean annual wage of "Automotive Technicians and Repairers (SOC code 49-3020)" is $55,780 as of May 2025, so yeah, something doesn't add up.
MillironX
·قبل 8 أشهر·discuss
I remember hearing about that rumen swap experiment. One of my professors at the time said that more substantial changes could be affected by doing repeat rumen content swaps.
MillironX
·قبل 8 أشهر·discuss
Hugo includes native KaTeX: https://gohugo.io/functions/transform/tomath/

The docs recommend setting up KaTeX CSS (which requires either a CDN link or Node), but by changing output to 'mathml,' you can have the browser render equations with zero dependencies.
MillironX
·قبل 9 أشهر·discuss
> Is this normal for the machine?

No, it's not "normal," but it is fairly common. When I worked in NGS, nearly 1/4 of flow cells were duds. ONT used to have a policy where you could return the cell and get a new one if it failed its self-test.
MillironX
·قبل 9 أشهر·discuss
I think all elected officials plug their ears when they hear this.

I know the governors of Wyoming gave land away to NCAR and Microsoft talking about how they were going to "diversify Wyoming's economy," and then every employee of those data centers was a contractor out of Colorado. The current governor has kept up the hype, now claiming that AI will be good for the local energy companies despite the fact that the proposed centers are going to be connected to out-of-state energy pipelines.

When you look at top campaign contributions and see Google and Microsoft at the top, you understand why the gubernatorial class keeps their ears plugged.
MillironX
·قبل 10 أشهر·discuss
> scientists have uncovered a mechanism that could help explain this connection, finding that bacteria can travel through swallowed saliva into the pancreas

Except, this study didn't do that. It did shotgun sequencing and found a correlation between certain microbial species (some were fungal, not bacterial) and cancer risk. It *did not* demonstrate anything about mechanism.

Based on the way it's phrased, maybe this article is saying that previous studies have found a mechanism, and this study found the microbial culprits. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the full study to see if that's the case in its introduction or discussion. Even so, that's an incredibly misleading opening to the article.
MillironX
·قبل 10 أشهر·discuss
Was this in any way inspired by Fireship's recurring gag, "Tinder for Horses?"
MillironX
·قبل 11 شهرًا·discuss
Except Apple code signing on MacOS is basically what Google is trying to copy over to Android. I can run arbitrary programs on MacOS, but I have to go and remove the com.apple.quarantine attribute from any application that doesn't have Apple's explicit permission to exist, i.e. most FOSS apps. I suspect that option will go away eventually.