The most likely way it gets into the blood is through the digestive track. Some possible mechanisms: 1. Some detergent or similar chemical (e.g. PFAS is a solvent) dissolves the food (or the oil carrying the food) into water. The stomach pulls water back into the blood stream, bringing dissolved things with it. 2. There is some damage to the stomach or intestinal lining, stemming from physical injury, things getting stuck (lack of fiber), acid damage, some other chemical destroying mucus lining, etc. 3. You also have some autoimmune damage on your intestines. 4. You eat certain foods that require a symbiotic digestion with gut bacteria, but lack that bacteria or have killed it with eating preservatives or pesticides or artificial sweeteners, etc. The undigested food makes it to the larger absorption holes at the end of the intestinal run.

It’s also possible that a brain injury caused some brain cells to end up in the blood stream. Normally, though, the body has a mechanism to avoid attacking its own cells, the CD47 mechanism. Maybe that can become damaged or malnourished in some way. I’m sure that there’s a host of other things that can go wrong with that.

My feeling is that hardware companies do better when they ship the software needed to utilize their hardware for free. (You need a little margin in the hardware price to cover the software development). However, the FPGA companies haven't figured this out. They try to make way too much software and charge exhorbitant fees for it, somehow thinking that their hardware is useless without that. In fact, their hardware is useless because I can't put anything on it without a 1-to-20 hour compile time. That makes it impossible to use it as an accelerator. I can compile OpenCL for my GPU in a few milliseconds; that's what we need for the FPGA. Even thirty seconds would be easily tolerable -- there's many a game that still requires 15 seconds to load a level and compile its shaders.

FPGAs could be much more useful than they are at present. They've artificially limited themselves to ASIC prototyping alone.

So Intel bought an FPGA company -- nobody knows why. AMD got scared and did the same thing with no clue what to do with it. They've both let them rot. Intel did start incorporating it into its compiler targets, but it was only half-baked. Now they've wisely divested themselves of the company, but it should have never happened. They should have just focused on selling the hardware at a small margin whilst opening up the data to use it.

If there were a reasonable probability of you and your continent being without electricity for a year, how would you prepare? I'm interested in your thoughts on the things I listed below -- where to get these things and what I'm missing.

Water: I don't know if the water pressure to my house would stay or not. Assuming not, I need some mechanism for collecting rain water off the roof or off a tarp. I need some water filters that work well for pulling water from a nearby stream. I've seen water purification pills, but are there any without detergents in them? I used to have a house with a well; if I get one again, I'll get a hand-pump for the well. Hopefully the toilets will stay flushable by dumping water in them.

Food: I will keep several buckets of wheat berries and oats. I grind my own wheat regularly anyway. I need a hand-powered grinder to go with them, though. Some extra canned food would be handy. I expect the deer in the nearby forest would disappear quickly, but I might try to shoot one early.

Heat: I need a propane tank and a heater for the house. The propane needs to be used for cooking too. Without electricity, maybe a large battery with a solar charger would be helpful to run a blower? Or maybe a wood-burning stove would be sufficient? There is forest nearby.

Communications: it would be awesome if our phones could work peer-to-peer. I haven't seen that tech yet, though. (Work on it!) Maybe I and my extended family could have satellite phones that only cost when used. It would be nice if they could bring in weather and news. I need solar chargers for all these small devices.

Are there any major needs on that list I'm missing? Some things I might want: extra gasoline, a generator powered by my bicycle, a waterwheel generator, dry beans, and a large house battery (though I haven't been impressed by these yet).

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43644609

Points: 2

# Comments: 6

In a recent concert (at Carnegie) Lang Lang brought out a melody in Chopin's first Scherzo that was very innovative though subtle. If you have any appreciation at all for Chopin, you would want to hear that rendering. It made a show piece into something both beautiful and astounding. But can a machine be made to tell the difference? The song is so fast and notes so blurred that it's almost noise from a reverse-engineering/transcribing standpoint.

Similarly, Sarah Brightman (in her early years) and Loreena McKennitt have far superior vocal skills to the typical modern pop singer. But if you're never exposed to real vocal skills, or if you've never attempted to sing an pure open vowel on pitch and hold it there for a sustained amount of time, why would you care? You wouldn't even know what to appreciate. So is it the algorithm's job to expose people to artists of higher skill and talent? I would like it to. That's absolutely a feature I want. I want to be exposed to those people. I'd like it to go even beyond that. I want to be exposed to talented composers regardless of performer.

Hand-drawing the equations, like you would do on Zoom's whiteboard, is not great. We all have mouse & keyboard interfaces, and mouse-drawn square-root symbols and subscripts leave a lot to be desired. Also, we copy and paste equations and modify them. The whiteboard interface has a struggle with this as well. The mouse-drawn stuff tends to be too large; we can't fit enough on screen.

What tool would you recommend for this scenario? A bonus would be to have something like a mini Desmos calculator on the side, where I can drop (in)equations and get them rendered.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42515617

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

Most packages on Pypi are complete crap. It's also heavily burdened with domain-specific applications and one-off student projects. They have no standards for what makes a useful package, and no ranking system aside from the number-of-downloads. I think package maintainers should be required to push an update every other year or have their package get dropped. I think frameworks should be separate from applications. I think packages without a lot of downloads should utilize endorsements and code-cleanliness metrics.

GLPK should not be used as a guide for the general field. The commercial solvers will do infinitely better than GLPK.

Related to this book is what we call "vertical feature slicing". (I'd be curious to know what other books cover this topic.) There are some Youtube videos on the topic. There was a great 2-hour video from 20 years ago that influenced me. Unfortunately, I don't remember the title and cannot find it today.

The video "Simple Made Easy" had a profound influence on my programming: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/