Just kidding, I don't see how the overhead of the directory entry is even remotely enough to warrant removal. Most of the magic can be left to efficient DEFLATE compatible blocks and removing entries not in the central directory in the first place (ZIP files can support concatenation of new data so long as you re-write the central directory at the end of the file).

https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

https://amiunique.org/

I'm curious to know what you would rate as the most important features to make this work? It seems like calc+if do a lot of the heavy lifting, but the new function syntax is what makes instruction lookup tractable.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978032399...

Once that's true it does seem there's a lot of host and microbiome interactions we've only begun to explore, but it shouldn't be surprising that co-evolution of the microbiome and host begins to take over as soon as you have one. One great example is short-chain-fatty-acid (SCFA) producing bacteria in the human gut. [1] These seem to be essential, and if there was a general takeaway to improve health, it would be to eat your roughage so they can do their job.

This is also why high alpha-diversity (community richness in particular) is such a dead-ringer for healthy vs diseased states. And frustratingly, is often exactly where the story ends for a lot of observational studies.

Also, in case you are curious, artificially sterile mice (gnotobiotic mice) tend to act differently than other mice, which is pretty odd to be honest, and why the gut-brain axis is a plausible mechanism to research further. [2]

[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10180739/ [2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088915912...

"Is Human Behavior Just Running and Tumbling?": https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/wzvn9_v1 (This used to be a blog post, but its down, so here's a essentially identical preprint.) A scale-invariant control-loop such as chemotaxis may still be the root algorithm we use, just adjusted for a dopamine gradient mediated by the prefrontal cortex.

"Give-up-itis: Neuropathology of extremis": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03069... What happens when that dopamine gradient shuts down?

Usually Gibbs is used when there's no directly straight-forward gradient (or when you are interested in reproducing the distribution itself, rather than a point estimate), but you do have some marginal/conditional likelihoods which are simple to sample from.

Since each visible node depends on each hidden node and each hidden node effects all visible nodes, the gradient ends up being very messy, so its much simpler to use Gibbs sampling to adjust based on marginal likelihoods.

Ideas like fold and map where _never_ mentioned in lisp (to exaggerate, every function had to have the recursive implementation with 5 state variables and then a simpler form for the initial call), at no point did higher-order functions or closures make an appearance while rotating a list by 1 and then 2 positions.

The treatment of Prolog was somehow worse. Often the code only made any sense once you reversed what the lecturer was saying, realizing the arrow meant "X given Y" not "X implies Y", at which point, if you could imagine the variables ran "backwards" (unification was not explained) the outcome might start to seem _possible_. I expect the lecturer was as baffled by their presentation as we were.

In general, it left the rest of the class believing quite strongly that languages other than Java were impossible to use and generally a bad move. I may have been relatively bitter in the course evaluation by the end.

How would you do this otherwise? I find `conda list` to be terribly helpful.

As a tool developer for bioinformaticians, I can't imagine trying to work with OS package managers, so that would leave vendoring multiple languages and libraries in a home-grown scheme slightly worse and more brittle than conda.

I also don't think it's realistic to imagine that any single language (and thus language-specific build tools or pkg manager) is sufficient. Since we're still using fortran deep in the guts of many higher level libraries (recent tensor stuff is disrupting this a bit, but it's not like openBLAS isn't still there as a default backend).

That said, I don't think anyone who studies biology is particularly concerned with hard-line definitions, as nature tends to eschew them every chance it has.

I think Pando and corals being considered "modular bodyplans/habits" is perhaps a more useful concept than individual or clone.

I would kind of appreciate having two formats, since what are the odds they would change together? While there may never be a 3rd format, a DRY importer would imply that the source generating the data is also DRY.

I would also agree that it's harder to confuse complex types as any single instance of a type is unlikely to overlap once you have a few fields.

I absolutely love the concept of using a logic language for authorization, and I think Polar's aesthetic qualities make it significantly more approachable for most people (over Prolog/Datalog).

But even without the authorization problem, Polar is just... really nice looking. It would be awesome to be able to use it as its own language outright.

That's actually already how it works, the kind of inverse you use depends on if the account is credit-normal or debit-normal. You end up in the same place.

> Imagine showing negative revenue. That would be mostly useless.

Revenue is already credit instead of debit, which if you were consistent in using negative numbers, a negative revenue be completely correct (so you would want to sweat if revenue was a positive number). It's weird, but it lets your cash on hand be a positive number, which is just a necessary consequence of the system.

> Imagine how misleading it could be to show $0 in expenses last month, when in reality, you had $100 in expenses, but you subtracted $100 out because you returned some big purchase from last month and got a refund.

Wouldn't that be accurate? This would be a debit of 100 and a credit of 100 which nets a balance of 0. But individually you would see the transactions and could sum the credits and debits if you were so inclined.

Alternatively, contra-accounts exist if reporting these individually is material for some reason.

Something that makes this simpler to think about from a modern perspective is that accounting is older than the popular use of negative numbers. By a lot. If we were to invent accounting today, we'd probably use positive and negative accounts instead of debit and credit accounts.

Algebra over addition is second nature to us at this point, but it would not have been obvious to the average merchant in 1604, and even then, negative numbers were viewed quite poorly.

What is important is that there are always two sides to a transaction and that they are inverses of each other. This is all a credit and debit are. Inverse operations on a number.

Therefore, we can make a rule that a transaction balances when credit = debit. (aka we didn't invent money as debit + credit = 0, but remember that we didn't like negative numbers when this system was invented, so this last fact is more of a happy coincidence that happens to ALWAYS WORK, for some reason, rather than the goal).

What is then reasonable is to consider literal cash on hand to be the most positive (debit) kind of account there can be, and work backwards from there. If I want to handle an expense, then I need to invert the cash account somehow (credit it) and therefore have the opposite kind of entry for where the money went (debit it). So an expense account must have a generally debit (or positive) balance.

But where did the cash come from? Well that comes from income and I want the cash to be debit-ey so the place it came from must be credit-ey otherwise I risk writing a transaction that doesn't balance (equal zero). So then income accounts must generally be credit accounts rather than debit account (aka they hold a typically negative balance or are "credit normal").

What is really killer about this system, is it just so happens that every mundane transaction you could ever write will end up as balanced transactions and each of these possible transaction accounts end up having the same usual balance of credit or debit (negative or positive). I think that is just so elegant.

It does seem unclear what it means to exceed precision (given rounding is such an expected part of the way we use these numbers). Magnitude feels easier as at least you definitely run out of bits in the exponent.