Seriously now, content mills like Medium and Substack are simply not appealing to people who want more control over how their site renders. Or in fact, who want any sort of control over their content.
I like my content in Markdown on my own git repository, thank you.
Glad you like it, but it's a million miles from my ideals. I want my content to be under my control and free to read without obstruction. My blog loads hundreds of times faster and uses far less bandwidth than a Substack newsletter blog.
Small, regional, and niche corporations die. Global conglomerates that are diversified into hundreds of different industries, many of which they have obtained near-absolute monopoly on, don't.
Also, governments die all the time, there was a revolution in Afghanistan like three weeks ago, the new government hasn't even picked its flag yet, are you under a rock?
> If a zoned market solely accept Bitcoin and a good costs say 1 BTC
The problem is that nobody selling regular goods WANTS to sell his goods with a fixed bitcoin price; the volatility of bitcoin would make it easy for buyers to buy the goods only when their prices where especially low in non-crazy-volatile currency and resell the goods at a favorable price immediately. There's arbitrage there
> Is the point that the information on the DNA gets copied onto RNA while the DNA remains intact?
Close, but I think it's more that the information gets used to assemble the RNA, and the resulting RNA also encodes information. Saying "copied onto RNA" can imply that the RNA previously existed in some kind of blank slate form.
So the arrow denotes a transfer/flow of information, but does not denote a chemistry 101 style reaction that changes a physical piece of DNA into a piece of RNA and then into a protein.
As an analogy - DNA is source code. The first arrow is the parser and creates RNA that is a reflection of the DNA. The second arrow (RNA to protein) is the compiler, taking the parsed code (RNA) and generating a program (protein) from it.
At no point is the source code consumed to create the program, akin to DNA.
De Grey has always seemed overly eccentric to me. But maybe that is to be expected of someone that works on something as contrarian as anti-aging research.
Sexual harassment is not okay.
To give him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps it was some kind of lack of social skill on De Greys side rather than actual sexual predatoriness? Am curious what that legal investigation will find out
> To give him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps it was some kind of lack of social skill on De Greys side rather than actual sexual predatoriness? Am curious what that legal investigation will find out
This isn’t the benefit of the doubt. You don’t get a pass on bad behavior by reason of actual mental illness. If in the grips of psychosis you slander or assault someone you did a bad thing. You do not get off because you have BPD or are schizophrenic or whatever. There are consequences. And even if de Grey is autistic as fuck he’s intelligent enough to emulate allistic people’s basic social sense and something approaching consensus morality. If I can do it he can.
This is not a commentary or prejudgment on whether he did or did not do anything. It could be a giant nothingburger like with rms. He could be a monster. Wait and find out.
Conflating lack of social skills with evidence of sexual predation does seem like a very effective attack vector against many of the best academics in the world. I'm inclined to reserve judgement until the facts are in, I don't know any of the players even as celebrities I follow.
> To give him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps it was some kind of lack of social skill on De Greys side rather than actual sexual predatoriness?
I really take issue with this defense. Just because someone has NPD for example, doesn't mean that they are free of the consequences of their shitty behavior toward others. Why should autism (or any other socially inhibiting condition) be given special treatment over other disorders?
>for the first time since castles vs. troops without cannon, defense was stronger than offense
In the seminal book "On War" which was published in 1832 and is still required reading in many military academies, Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz explicitly says that defense is stronger than offense.
Potentially what actually happened and von Clausewitz mention something about this, is that the armies had no ability to "think" fast enough to deal with any breakthrough. As mentioned the ability to plan and undertaken the first action was always there; the assault, the counter attack. But the subsequent actions were impossible to plan for and impossible to execute on the fly. These were old school armies; communication was antiquated and initiative was practically non existed.
I mean, to some extent, defense will always be stronger than offense—offense always needs to travel to get there, for instance, while defense happens where you are—but the degree makes a big difference.
If, all else being equal, it takes a force of 1500 attackers to overwhelm 1000 defenders, defense is still stronger than offense, but you can still expect to be able to make progress relatively easily.
If, on the other hand, it takes 5000 attackers to overwhelm 1000 defenders, suddenly you have to make very different kinds of calculations about what is worth the cost, and what is even strategically feasible to take without destroying your army's ability to fight.
This is still true and accepted military doctrine. We look for at least a 3:1 force ratio before considering attack a viable option. It's not exactly scientific and plenty of military historians have questioned the validity of this rule of thumb, but it still is the official doctrine, at least of the US Army. I can't speak for other countries.
Force ratio doesn't have to be strictly numerical, though. Offense can have better weapons, rely on element of surprise, and we also like to attack during really bad weather because it sucks a lot more to be dug in during a rainstorm than to be on the move. There's also some advantage in indirect fire in that it's easier for artillery to hit a stationary target than a moving one, so provided your artillery itself is mobile enough to survive counterbattery strikes, that goes to the offense. Unless the defense is so well dug in that artillery can't even affect it. So it depends on a lot of things.
But in general, defense always has the advantage. They get to choose where to fight, they can prepare their positions, they don't need to expose themselves.
I guess it's reversed in cyberwarfare if you want to think of it that way, but it's really not analogous. It's never been all that difficult to sneak a small surgical force inside an enemy perimeter, but you can't take and hold land that way, which is what attack versus defense force ratios are thinking of. This is more of a law enforcement thing, which has always relied on either having more cops than criminals or extremely harsh punishments. The issue here is we can't enforce the law against foreign actors if the host nation won't help. When actual Americans have been caught breaking into American computer systems, they've totally had the book thrown at them and I think that really has deterred domestically launched cyberattacks. It's not like the NSA can't find you, but if the only way to actually stop you is to send in Seal Team Six, that isn't worth starting a real war over.
> But in general, defense always has the advantage. They get to choose where to fight, they can prepare their positions, they don't need to expose themselves.
I'm curious about the "they get to choose where to fight" question, actually.
I can see where this would apply on a tactical scale, like if I'm preparing an ambush. But on an operational scale, doesn't the attacker choose where and when to fight?
Tactically, defense is stronger than offense in that you need a numerical advantage to defeat a prepared defense.
Strategically, there is a lot of value in the attack because you can choose the time and place of fighting to your advantage. This didn't pan out on the Western Front of WWI for a variety of reasons.
Let's say we have fortifications. People are needed to man them. This is understood by everyone. Entry points are checked, etc.
Compare with 'cyber' systems. How many people are adding features, working on bugs and the like, versus how many are even looking into security vulnerabilities?
Translating to the physical domain, it would be as if we were building a fort, then moving almost everyone to build extensions or new forts, with a handful responsible for the security of all fortresses - and the paths in between them! In the dark.
The fact that most systems are not immediately "owned" speaks volumes on how difficult this is to accomplish. Barring zero days, the main way one gets compromised is by making mistakes (not patching, leaving systems unsecured, etc). That is, there's a door that's open and unguarded...
"Defense vs Offense" is underspecified for this disagreement. Considering "defense" as the developers writing an application, and "offense" as the reverse engineers attempting to exploit it, defense may still be cheaper in some scenarios.
If you consider "defense" as an organization attempting to provide a service securely, and "offense" as all the security threats they are exposed to, it seems hard to argue that the defensive side has any sort of advantage over all of the attackers.
I was once a volunteer at the world championships of a team sport. At the podium sceremony my job was to lead the team to the spot where each player received their medal. The bronze medalists were super happy and smiling. Almost all silver medalists that I led to the podium were literally crying.
No sophisticated facial recognition was needed to ascertain who was happier.
Medal ceremonies in team sports are usually after a bronze medal match (which bronze medalist won), and a gold medal match (which silver medalist just lost).
In addition to the "last match" effect mentioned in the thread, I wonder if this has to do with who wins which medal. Maybe the people winning bronze are more often doing better than they expected, while the people winning silver are more likely to expect that they might have been able to win gold.
