great_tankard

5 ms·

1.
by great_tankard 20d ago
The question is about how much permanent damage the administration will have done by 2029. They're obviously trying very hard to kill academia in this country, and the answer is not going to be zero, but I don't understand who els
2.
by great_tankard 21d ago
Bought my wife a pair of Klein bottle earrings. They arrived with pictures Cliff had taken of them in his garden. Lovely man.
3.
by great_tankard 21d ago
I would think that repeatedly having to launch millions of pounds of infrastructure into low earth orbit counts as extra build-out cost. This is a literal physical constraint keeping this business from scaling like others, and I don't
4.
by great_tankard 21d ago
Yeah I'm sorry massive infrastructure projects with mandates to properly map access and measures to prevent fraud don't fit neatly into a four year presidential term before being effectively yanked away.
5.
by great_tankard 1mo ago
This is an absurdly irresponsible way to report this work. Doesn't think to mention that they're working with phage (viruses that infect bacteria, NOT humans) until halfway down the story.
6.
by great_tankard 2mo ago
Are you saying that the priorities of the Department of Education have been misplaced, or that it was a mistake to have a Department of Education at all? "Academic accomplishment has not advanced at all" feels like something peopl
7.
by great_tankard 5mo ago
Yes, but the HN crowd isn't Zitron's main audience. He appeals to smart people who don't understand anything about computing or business. I do not mean this in a disparaging way; it's a curious audience that has somewhat
8.
by great_tankard 5mo ago
This is exactly how I feel about him too. I also find his "number big" approach to writing ("check out my 18,000 word blog about something I'm learning about in real time") off-putting, so I've completely stopp
9.
by great_tankard 5mo ago
This is a really strange, deterministic view on something we collectively have influence over. That thing about "unintended consequences that [may be] materially worse?" We've actually just quietly folded the materially worse
10.
by great_tankard 9mo ago
>We need to identify the highest quality research projects and fund those. Congratulations, you have described the system that's been in place for decades.
11.
by great_tankard 9mo ago
Very cool. Are you a dancer yourself?
12.
by great_tankard 1y ago
"YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE: I have now joined the club everyone assumed I was already a member of."
13.
by great_tankard 2y ago
This is not an original observation, but it took me too long to realize so I think it bears repeating: your personal website is also the one place where you have control over how much to write, how it looks to the reader and how long it sta
14.
by great_tankard 2y ago
You might want to look into why "journalism is dying" and whether Google (and Facebook) had anything to do with it.
15.
by great_tankard 2y ago
About time. Any organization or person actively posting on that platform is just lending it undue credibility.
16.
by great_tankard 2y ago
I must have missed this drama. Who was offended by it? When was Gary "cancelled?"
17.
by great_tankard 2y ago
This is an awesome writeup that really helped me understand what's going on under the hood. I didn't know, for example, that for the limited number of PTMs AF3 can handle it has to treat every single atom, including those of the m
18.
by great_tankard 3y ago
It's true that Science is very invested in this bad (for everyone else) publishing model, and I suppose if somehow, by omission, they managed to convince the population that open access is inherently scammy, that's all the more
19.
by great_tankard 3y ago
This topic has broken the brains of so many otherwise reasonable people. Is a lab leak possible? Of course it is. But the purported evidence for it is so weak, repeated by the same cranks who seem to have made up their minds. Also, it'
20.
by great_tankard 3y ago
Agreed on all counts, though it's important to note that this protein has bacterial homologs that almost definitely have the same function (5'-3' RNA ligase activity).
21.
by great_tankard 3y ago
>Ridiculous not in a political sense (I have no strong feelings one way or another about the economic fates of career writers) but in the sense of being incoherent. It is not incoherent if you believe art to be an expression of the human
22.
by great_tankard 3y ago
Make sense. Plastics are notorious for absorbing in the UV range- for most useful spectroscopy experiments below ~400 nm we have to go straight to quartz cuvettes.
23.
by great_tankard 4y ago
You're right! I didn't like what she had to say because the thing she said was transphobic. The "trans issue" itself is not a weird topic. But there are certain ideas that seem to have taken hold ("the MASSIVE risk
24.
by great_tankard 4y ago
Yes, you've gotten exactly to the heart of what I was trying to say. Of course there are people who get unfairly maligned for saying the "wrong" thing (or when the things they say have been taken out of context). But people p
25.
by great_tankard 4y ago
I don't typically question a person's motivation for asking questions! But the "great trans bathroom debate" has blown up far out of proportion, and its such a weird topic to wade into unprompted, that I have a hard time
26.
by great_tankard 4y ago
Ok I guess I have to spell this out explicitly: the self-censorship thing obviously applies doubly to the trolls and doxxers and "virtual vigilantes." Nobody deserves that kind of treatment.
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by great_tankard 4y ago
Yes. I've often wondered about how previous generations got certain things so wrong, but this is the first time I've been fully aware of a revolution taking place right under my nose and I feel mostly powerless to do anything abou
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by great_tankard 4y ago
Lol
29.
by great_tankard 6y ago
The only reasonable thing you said was that people generally aren't acutely aware of their energy usage. That has more to do with our society's attitude towards how we build things and how we get around than anything else. To cond
30.
by great_tankard 6y ago
eh, I don't know. NYT sucks up a LOT of talent from across the country. What I'm saying is: this sort of thing is maybe excusable from small/independent journalism outlets trying to stay afloat, but you don't need to mak

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