An example of this might be adding load shedding. You could spend hours talking through it, or you could say "I'm going to add a load shedder to the blah service as a proof of concept" in standup then take an hour to implement it, and have the team critique it from there.

I agree that whether they're a useful gate is debateble, but they can be a useful means of expressing an idea to be approved or rejected.

At a much smaller company, you might find that a single person does part of the job of a BA, PM, and engineer, that they can produce a PR much more quickly as a result, and that it's more common for a PR to prompt the first detailed discussion about how something will work. A small team has quicker turnaround time on PRs and design, and can thus position in-depth reviews later in the process because less work will be thrown away in the case of a rejection.

I picked up some rubbish from the street on my way home yesterday. That act probably raised all our property values by some microscopic fraction of a cent. Then global macroeconomic conditions affected the property value by a huge amount more. It would be incorrect to attribute any gains to picking up rubbish, but it would be a very understandable human mistake, I think.

I've been disappointed by the coverage because none of it has helped me understand the legal context behind why they don't like this one specific thing.

I would welcome correction.

The inevitability of death is a philosophical question. I read the GP and maybe the GGP as talking about the more practical question of whether it's moral to let broke old people die from bedsores and starvation or whether we pay for nurses.

How do you detect schizophrenia in the 400 people in the non-smoker category? The answer is that you can't. They don't have schizophrenia. This is what it means for something to have an environmental trigger.

I get that you're making a point about ableism and environment, but in order to do so you're confusing two things: the onset of autism (at a very early age or even before birth and triggered by who knows what), and the occurrence of any specific symptom of autism (at any age and triggered by things we generally understand).

I think it's overly dismissive to summarise a drop in these behaviours as just "less obvious and disruptive to non-autistics". I can't imagine slamming your head into stuff is pleasant regardless of whether you have autism.

Male homosexuality is believed to have a small genetic component but is also linked to birth order. One theory is that in utero testosterone from older brothers can affect the sexuality of a younger brother.

I disagree that it makes no sense for environmental factors to lead to the onset of autism, on the basis that environmental factors can make someone gay or schizophrenic. That is to say, they can influence a personality and a mind in complicated ways that don't seem intuitive.

I've mostly heard "what happens if the next ISIS or the next Jim Jones can modify ebola to be waterborne or create super-MRSA because AI simplifies the process?" which is why I ask what it would take to create a more virulent virus on a shoestring budget. Not do novel Nobel-worthy research, just copy some existing paper from ten years ago.

Definitely worth it though! We did gel electrophoresis too, and some other bits and pieces.

I'm not suggesting that making bacteria glow in the dark is the same as making arbitrary changes to a virus. At the same time, do you really need $100M of automated freezers and cell culture rooms? Do you need to synthesise a whole virus? Presumably you could just find a building in the desert, shoot anyone who goes near it, feed the past decade of gain-of-function research into Qwen, splice stuff into viruses based on the most promising leads Qwen gave your biologists, then infect some immunosuppressed political prisoners and see who dies fastest.

I would have thought the main thing stopping people is that this is a clearly stupid thing to do and offers little strategic advantage. But at some point it'll be cheap enough for you or I to do it with a little AI assistance, right? Or at least within the capabilities of an Aum Shinrikyo style doomsday cult.