Did you pronounce that as ‘scone’ or ‘scone’?
Did you pronounce that as ‘scone’ or ‘scone’?
That language is at a very much higher grade level and complexity to that of the current political discourse. Wow.
There’s a word for not being able to handle this: misophonia
It seems that for some people (myself included) it generates a primal urge.
Or stepping off an escalator and just stopping right there to get their bearings.
Some rules weaken, and others are created or subtly change - that’s why parents can never get their kids’ slang quite right. It’s not that the parents can’t simply weaken their grammar, it’s that the kids do some things differently with very strict rules.
Thank you for writing ‘a lot’ and not ‘alot’.
I see that alot.
^ ^ ^ ^ that’s my trigger
So do I understand correctly that a certain hox gene is activated in basically all cells which are in the “domain” of a certain vertebrae
Yes
and they all activate some subset of homeobox genes which in combination with the original hox gene cause them to start turning into all the different parts associated with that vertebrae (so organs and other structures)?
Not quite. The hox gene creates a protein that tells the nearby cells that they are in a specific segment. After this specific cells in that segment start signalling so they cooperatively lay out the cardinal directions to make that specific segment. In the shoulder segment, for example, a specific cell becomes the tip of the arm and tells all the cells about it with its signalling protein. All the cells in between it and the root now ‘know’ which part of the arm to grow.
This is a cascade of ever finer positioned ‘location markers’ that guide generic cells to specialise correctly.
Ultimately, as two bones grow into each other, they know to form a joint, and as that joint takes form the joint surfaces fit each other exactly.
Would we then need an entirely new hox gene to produce even a single gill? (I know you basically just laid out most of a response to this question.) Because I would assume although the exact point at which the development of our arms and legs begins is part of the whole hox gene “superstructure”, but couldn’t we ‘basically just’ highjack this same system and duplicate this gene to produce at least a single gill in the region where the current hox gene for our neck is expressed?
Assuming we want to keep our neck, jaw and ear features, we need to keep our existing hox gene and all the genes that turn on in this cascade to produce these structure. If we alter them, our development will change.
The issue is that in a fish or shark, exactly the same location marker is used to lay down their gills. So adding a shark hox gene will result in a human segment at that location. Hox is a marker - not the full set of instructions to build the segment.
We therefore need
Long story short: what is the biggest reason why we can’t just hack into a later part of the sequence and continue on from there with what you said?
Well, we can’t reuse the existing one because it creates human structure. So we need brand new genes for 2 and 3.
I’m not a professional in this area, but I haven’t seen anything that suggests we can fo this yet.
I think part 4 (the bit about creating new tissues) might in fact be the easier part. But to cause them to be developed at the right time in the right place and at the correct size with brand new signals is waaaay out there.
Or would your proposed plan also just end up like this in the final product and you laid it out like this because it’s already the most viable route into this mess? 😅
Speaking as someone whose last practical biology wiped out all the very expensive cell colonies, and that was 30 years ago, I hope my wild suggestions here are even vaguely in the right direction.
In a way, your jaw is a gill arch, just built in a different way with some interesting diversions. After a couple of 100 million years, the changes do add up.
If you really had to add in a gill, i have a plan, but I need to talk about one important evolutionary trick: duplication and divergence.
A fairly common DNA copying error causes a section of a chromosome to be duplicated in the offpring. In most cases this is fatal or prevents children, but some duplications work out just fine.
For instance mammals lost colour vision in the time of the dinosaurs - mammals were probably nocturnal. The loss was caused by losing genes for the yellow colour receptors in the eye. This is why dogs and cats see in something akin to black and white (they do see red and blue and all the yellows and greens are just shades of red and blue).
But apes were lucky. An accident duplicated the existant red receptor and, over time, because there are now two genes, one gene was gradually selected for a higher and higher light frequency. This has become our green receptor and all apes see in red-green-blue colour.
Duplication is not necessarily fatal because it just codes for something we already have. But once there are 2 genes, evolution can select away for different capabilities and we end up with something new.
Ok, with that out the way let’s plan!
Step 1 might be possible today. Step 2 might be within current reach (but it would take incredible work to disentangle all the connected system in development and the working body. Step 3 is beyond current tech (as I understand).
If you like this, this goes under the moniker ‘evo/dev’ - evolution of the ‘development’ of the organism. A lot of genes don’t code for proteins that ‘do’ something in the body, like haemoglobin or fingernails - they code proteins that tell the body how to develop from a single cell. Many are active for a short window in development. Some are active in a single location, like at the thumb end of the limb bud, and tell the cells where to become a finger, thumb or palm bone. Some work across vastly different animal classes - the ‘build an eye here’ gene works in humans and flies and everything in-between.
In short, we could, but the cost would be incredible.
All vertebrates are animals that develop from a series of segments, with a vertebra at the core. In our time from eel-like fish, we’ve specialised these segments so, for example, we have ribs on the vertebra corresponding to the rib cage.
To support arms and legs, specific vertebra have become highly specialised in the form of hips and shoulders.
Gills are composed of a series of gill arches, one on each vertebra in the neck area. These structures have (in eels) a lot of blood vessels to carry the blood that needs reoxygenation.
An interesting thing happened as the eel-like creatures differentiated, evolved jaws and ultimately ended up as mammals and humans: nature co-opted the specific vertebra that had these gill features and turned them into jaws and ears and a variety of other features in the head and neck. For example the tiny bones in your ear were once fish jawbones which were previously one (or more) gill arches.
The stupendously complex anatomy in this area comes from all the short-term ‘decisions’ evolution took to make all the magnificent creatures that inhabit the earth.
For example the nerve that connects the brain to the larynx (the recurrent laryngeal nerve) emerges from a vertebra high up in the neck, decends down under the aorta in the chest and then back up into the neck to the larynx. In the giraffe, the nerve is many meters long, even as it’s direct path could be a few centimeters. The reason is that the heart used to be close to the gills in fish and sharks. As the heart moved in land animals, the nerve was caught in a loop around the critical aorta and it was ‘pulled’ along for the evolutionary ride.
So, in order to turn your gills back on, you need to unprogram 450m years of evolution of the structures you call your head, face and neck.
I’d recommend ‘Your inner fish’ by Shubin - it’s a wonderful read and explains this in far more detail that I can manage.
Just to add one more sidenote: France is of course named after the Franks, a German people who lived next door to the Alemanni and the Saxons.
All junior devs should read OCs comment and really think about this.
The issue is whether is_number()
is performing a semantic language matter or checking whether the text input can be converted by the program to a number type.
The former case - the semantic language test - is useful for chat based interactions, analysis of text (and ancient text - I love the cuneiform btw) and similar. In this mode, some applications don’t even have to be able to convert the text into eg binary (a ‘gazillion’ of something is quantifying it, but vaguely)
The latter case (validating input) is useful where the input is controlled and users are supposed to enter numbers using a limited part of a standard keyboard. Clay tablets and triangular sticks are strictly excluded from this interface.
Another example might be is_address()
. Which of these are addresses? ‘10 Downing Street, London’, ‘193.168.1.1’, ‘Gettysberg’, ‘Sir/Madam’.
To me this highlights that code is a lot less reusable between different projects/apps than it at first appears.
Typically you need about 1GB graphics RAM for each billion parameters (i.e. one byte per parameter). This is a 405B parameter model. Ouch.
Edit: you can try quantizing it. This reduces the amount of memory required per parameter to 4 bits, 2 bits or even 1 bit. As you reduce the size, the performance of the model can suffer. So in the extreme case you might be able to run this in under 64GB of graphics RAM.
I think that’s a better plan than physically printing keys. I’d also want to save the keys in another format somewhere - perhaps using a small script to export them into a safe store in the cloud or a box I control somewhere
You need at least two copies in two different places - places that will not burn down/explode/flood/collapse/be locked down by the police at the same time.
An enterprise is going to be commissioning new computers or reformatting existing ones at least once per day. This means the bitlocker key list would need printouts at least every day in two places.
Given the above, it’s easy to see that this process will fail from time to time, in ways like accicentally leaking a document with all these keys.
I agree, so much legislation is broken, the legislators aren’t doing shit, so we citizens need to fix it!
But we could start with the right to repair.
If you’re pushing everyone’s buttons it’ll end badly.
I don’t think that the anti-oop collective is attacking polymorphism or overloading - both are important in functional programming. And let’s add encapsulation and implementation hiding to this list.
The argument is that OOP makes the wrong abstractions. Inheritance (as OOP models it) is quite rare on business entities. The other major example cited is that an algorithm written in the OOP style ends up distributing its code across the different classes, and therefore
Instead of this, the functional programmer says, you should write the algorithm as a function (or several functions) in one place, so it’s the function that walks the object structure. The navigation is done using tools like apply
or map
rather than a loop in a method on the parent instance.
A key insight in this approach is that the way an algorithm walks the data structure is the responsibility of the algorithm rather than a responsibility that is shared across many classes and subclasses.
In general, I think this is a valid point - when you are writing algorithms over the whole dataset. OOP does have some counterpoints encapsulating behaviour on just that object for example validating the object’s private members, or data processing for that object and its immediate children or peers.
TSMC and Intel both use ASML lithography, but there are many many more steps than just lithography - Intel, TSMC, Samsung and other chipmakers use different processes to make the components on their chips (many of which are patented and so owned by specific parties).
These things include the physical structure of the components and wiring on the chip, how the silicon is doped and with what ions, what coatings are put on to be etched in the lithography and what coatings are applied to the etched layers, how the chips are packaged and also how multiple chips can be combined into one package.
Basically there are similarities but also hige differences between the different manufacturers, and a lot of trade secrets.
If you’re interested in this kind of thing, I’d recommend the youtube channel Asianometry - the content creator is amazing.