The biggest red flag to me is the confident claims about where the money is going. I really don't think it's plausible to any extent that a backend developer for a major app would have any idea whatsoever to what account any particular fee is being deposited (they might know the account number if they worked on that area, but knowing that the account represents a legal fund or whatever is extremely unlikely).
You don't need to know the account or account number, just need to know the transaction logic, which most backend developer will know of as long as they work in that area.
If the product managers keep boasting about their new strategy (which I have seen in almost all companies I have worked for), even the juniors will know what's going on.
There has never been a period where most humans would die at ~30.
While life expectancy at birth was ~30 for the whole history of humanity up until the mid 20th century, this doesn't in any way mean that average people died in their 30s. Instead, life expectancy was highly bi-modal: most people died as children (most before age 1, but still a large number before age ~15), and most of those that didn't die as children lived into their mid to late 50s.
No, but there is a non-green left. And the greens do get most of their policy influence by associating with the rest of the left, since there are very few green parties that govern directly, or at least alone. So it's fair to say that such initiatives are successful because a subset of the broader left, the green-left, likes the idea.
The reason we know about Theranos is because they took the grift up to a huge level and went from grift to outright fraud once they had to show actual results.
It is not only not unique, but in fact extremely common for startups to be grifts around impossible technical promises, live a few years off gullible investors who have way more money than sens and/or for whom losing a few million dollars on a long shot is just as bad as me wasting a few dollars on a gizmo off Temu I know probably won't work, and which then die out because their ideas obviously couldn't work.
They even sometimes find a niche by pivoting to some vaguely related tech. Say, while flying taxis obviously won't work, a startup trying to build them might find itself developing into a small company building helicopter propeller blades for some specific niche.
Bird flight doesn't scale significantly. You can deliver very small objects via bird, and perhaps build a bird-like drone that does the same. But you can't build a human-carrying bird.
It's very possible, and in fact most likely, that it can't scale. Insect flight is an even better example - the mechanisms that allow most insects to fly simply don't work past a few grams of weight. So, it is simply impossible to create an insect-like drone that can carry a human.
I expect the exact same is true for birds - the kinds of effects that allow birds to fly with so little energy compared to a propeller-based aircraft are almost certainly not scalable, due to the fundamental properties of air as a gas. As far as I know, bird flight is made possible by complex turbulence effects induced by the microscopic structure of their feathers. It's very unlikely this effect could skale to 100kg of weight.
Yes, it is safer. Basically what we discovered in the 90s is that cannibalism (an animal eating others of its species) has a relatively high chance of leading to protein mis-folding in that animal, producing prions. Those prions can then cause additional mis-folding producing more prions, this time in a very direct way that is unrelated to who consumes the meat.
So pig > pig or cow > cow is known to produce prions. I believe it's also somewhat proven that, say, pig > cow > pig does not produce prions in the same way. However, insect digestion is very different from vertebrate digestion, so it's not necessarily safe to assume that pig > cow > pig being safe means that pig > insect > pig would also be safe. However, it does prove that pig > insect > cow > pig would still be safe - the insects don't add a risk in themselves, we're just not certain that they eliminate the risk the same way vertebrate digestive systems do.
While cannibalism is related to transmission in some cases I don't understand it to have anything to do with prion formation in and of itself. See scrapie for example. While highly contagious the underlying cause of scrapie is typically (afaiu) genetic and transmissible through the environment over fairly long periods of time.
Which is to say that things are likely even a bit worse than you seem to be making out.
Its only safer because of dilution - insects are less likely to have proteins that a prion can induce to misfolding.
But unless it is demonstrated that insect digestive systems have some magical enzyme that can do what autoclaves can't, that is break down prions, then it cannot be assumed safe.
Yeah and to be honest the research on it is still at the start. Maybe with the advances in protein folding computational research we'll be able to understand this better
Because that's the biological equivalent of that catastrophic bug that only happens in very weird and very specific conditions
My understanding is they don't actually simulate or calculate (meta)stable states of proteins, but rather extrapolate on known folds of experimentally confirmed proteins (basically peeking at what types of folds are found in similar sequences in other proteins. then known as homologous proteins).
How proteins get folded, unfolded, refolded etc depends on the exact cellular or vacuolar environment.
AlphaFold isn't trained on the environment, it only sees the known mappings from genetic sequence to protein structure. It is patently unaware of any environmental aid or frustration in correctly folding a protein.
An incorrectly folded protein structure (putative prion structure) and its correctly folded structure share the same genetic sequence. AlphaFold is effectively blind, it was just trained on correctly folded proteins with known structure.
Unless future versions of alphafold use ML to speed up actual QM or molecular modelling calculations
I don't see how alphafold can help enumerate all potential misfolds of all proteins generated or preserved in an animal of species A and consumed in an animal of species B, and calculate all possible ways a misfolded protein from A may act as a prion in B.
Very spurious claims, given that there was no effort made to check whether the IMO or ICPC problems were in the training set or not, or to quantify how far problems in the training set were from the contest problems. IMO problems are supposed to be unique, but since it's not at the frontier of math research, there is no guarantee that the same problem, or something very similar, was not solved in some obscure manual.
Not really. In all of our physical theories, curved paths are actual curves. So, (assuming circular orbits for a second) the ratio between the length of the Earth's orbit around the Sun and the distance between the Earth and the Sun is Pi - so, either the length of the path or the straight line distance must be an irrational number. While the actual orbit is elliptical instead of circular, the relation still holds.
Of course, we can only measure any quantity up to a finite precision. But the fact that we chose to express the measurement outcome as 3.14159 +- 0.00001 instead of expressing it as Pi +- 0.00001 is an arbitrary choice. If the theory predicts that some path has length equal exactly to 2.54, we are in the same situation - we can't confirm with infinite precision that the measurement is exactly 2.54, we'll still get something like 2.54 +- 0.00001, so it could very well be some irrational number in actual reality.
> I mean if you feel kidnapped because your train connection didn't work out
It's not "your train connection didn't work out", it's "you were planning to go somewhere, and the train took you somewhere else entirely, much farther away than when you started, and gave you no way out of this, and not even an apology or explanation". This is absolutely comparable to a form of kidnapping.
If you got into an Uber and they took you to some completely different place, many km away from your destination, and didn't let you get out of the vehicle until they got there, would you not say that they kidnapped you? Would you not be tempted to call the police and press charges, even if they did tell you that they would let you go out once they reached their destination?
* It has tracks so it cannot go anywhere it wants to go
* It can only let passengers go at certain places, these are called stations
So no, I would not compare it to a random Uber driver that takes me somewhere random on a whim. I wouldn't call the police if an Uber took me on a different road if the original road was closed. Etc.
The train took them 5+ stations away from their destination. They could very well have stopped in any of those stations, they just claim that some bureaucracy prevented them from doing so. Also, trains can in fact stop anywhere they want and let people get off. It's not normally done, but it could be a very good option rather than forcing people to travel much farther away than their destination.
> it remains decodable even when the specific tooling is lost, making it the most robust encoding for long-term information survival.
This may be true if you mean text written on a physical medium (especially if it's engraved in stone or clay), but it's not true at all if you mean text stored in a computer medium. Text is just binary with a dedicated codec. Good luck interpreting Chinese plain text files after humanity has forgotten about Unicode and UTF-8.
While text-based representations may be easier to decipher than random binary data even without knowing the encoding (as in an archeological setting), it's hardly going to be the easiest. Bitmaps, for example, have a much more limited set of symbols than Unicode, so I'd bet it would be much easier to display a long lost .bmp file than a random .txt file even a few hundred years from now. Same goes for raw audio, too. Now, JPEG and MP3 might be much more difficult, because the encoding is doing much more work.
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