There are iirc some good write ups from years ago by employees at Blizzard about these things and why “spinning up more servers” wouldn’t suddenly let millions of people login to games simultaneously on launch days.
You email the RNA strand (a text file) to a lab along with some money. The lab converts that information into a physical object (read: virus) and sends it back to you in the mail.
Distance from mailbox to live virus is a few days of bench work from a semi-competent biochemist.
And yes, this service claims to have safeguards. Does every service? Does every future analogous service? Are those safeguards guaranteed to be robust against totally novel pathogens?
Really? mRNA? What kind of meme nonsense is this? You really don't know anything about these protocols do you.
Still, even though your estimates are silly, they aren't silly enough to change the conclusion that this isn't a comforting security barrier, so I suppose we agree on that much.
Real missed opportunity before this all got out of control to simply bundle everything needed in a single file and give it an extension that tells the OS its executable.
Linux already has its own binary executable format, ELF (that you could just statically link, if you wanted to bundle everything).
Also the usual way to indicate that some file is executable on linux systems is just through an execute bit, not through an extension.
But the discussion here is more about how to package properly an application (for updates, app centralized management etc,) than how to deliver an executable on linux.
Exactly. It’s no surprise that people just blindly hit accept on permission prompts after the 80th time Claude code asks if it’s allowed to read-only parse a csv.
Another heaping portion of words from a company that has Fable flag a “safety issue” and refuse to answer if you innocuously request something readily answered by a high school chemistry/biology/physics textbook.
This must be similar to what seemingly every documentary on Netflix uses in all their editing when showing any sort of footage taken more than 5 years ago.
Some show will be showing a clip of an interview recorded in 2020, and for some reason it’s edited to appear to be a poorly-stored VHS when the original was almost certainly a 1080p or 4K digital recording.
Let’s not forget the fact that despite their new market cap and being the beneficiary of having a near monopoly on making incredibly complex pickaxes during a gold rush… Nvidia is still the company with a long and consistent history of misleading their customers via marketing. Their greatest hits include:
- The digital equivalent of the VW emissions scandal where drivers detected when they were being benchmarked and altering rendering for better results
- Selling GPUs as having 4gb vram when it was only 3.5gb usable, the remaining 0.5 being absurdly slower and causing performance loss when used
- Using intentionally misleading naming schemes to obfuscate things like memory bus width being drastically different between what superficially appeared to be similarly spec’d cards
A dozen other less egregious but similarly disingenuous decisions
But to be clear, I’m a huge fan and continue to run Nvidia because their products are generally incredible regardless
That 4gb vram deal sounds ahead of its time. CPU caches are tiered, why not ram? Looking forward to future systems with 8gb ddr6 and 8gb ddr5. "Swapping to ram" would become a thing.
Xbox has that right now. Some memory channels have 1GB chips while some have 2GB chips. So part of your memory space uses all channels and part uses more like half.
That GPU was much worse though.
If that .5GB had been moderately slower it wouldn't have gotten the same attention. But because it was a weird backup path to that segment of memory, on a design that normally runs all segments in parallel, it ran at 1/7 the speed of everything else. Overflowing into it was devastating.
There are lots of platforms where RAM is tiered, and operating systems that support it. For example, CLX allows for a "NUMA node without CPU" abstraction; there was a HN article recently about Facebook cooking up their own silicon and Linux patches to implement this so they could expand DDR5 platforms with retired DDR4 memory. Not a new idea...20+ years ago I used mc68k & ns32k BSD systems that had a couple of meg of fast memory onboard and more, slower memory hung off a VMEBus. System tried to keep hot pages in fast memory and it worked reasonably well.
