The goal is not to make them argue about it, it's to make them actually subject to competitive pressure so that if they try to charge an unreasonable fee, it's really easy for anyone to go with someone else.
I think we'll see a reduction in complexity and an increase in transparency, rather than just on-prem.
One medium-sized server can now easily serve the entire banking system of a large country. So you don't need clusters of servers with careful tradeoffs between consistency and availability because of the CAP theorem.
Just get a big honking host, slap Postres on it, and run your application server in a VM on the same host. For backup, export the WAL logs from Postgres onto your favorite off-site blob storage. UI for it? There's Pigsty.
It still makes sense to host this in a cloud provider, just because you probably don't want to deal with actual hardware. And maybe get a second standby server for redundancy.
That's it.
You'll need a bunch of external dependencies for email, 2FA, observability, LLMs, and so on. But they should all be outgoing dependencies that should not allow access back into your system.
A PostgreSQL server on an NVMe can handle several _million_ simple requests per second. This is bonkers.
Do you think you can hit these load levels? For compute, a 64-core CPU can saturate a 10G network with simple template rendering. If the code is written in something reasonably fast (Go, Rust, Java).
Of course, if you're on a scale of Amazon or Stripe, you'll need more than that.
This is how we spot someone that has never done transaction processing in a consumer facing business. You are focused on completely the wrong dimensions.
Both "yes" and "no". AI has been doing great in protein structure prediction.
It's a task that is well suited for the current generation of AIs, (most) proteins consist of a constrained "alphabet" of components, and the alphabet then forms recognizable shapes ("motifs"). So working backwards and generating a protein that binds with another protein is the logical next step.
The problem is in the efficacy. Monoclonal antibodies work surprisingly poorly as antivenoms. They are too specific, and real venom is a mix of multiple kinds of proteins with a lot of variation. Which makes sense, as venoms are under high selective pressure, so there's going to be a lot of genetic variability within a single species (never mind _across_ species).
Snake antivenoms are a major underserved area with a decent amount of research. But so far the century-old method of producing antivenoms (injecting horses and then collecting their blood plasma) is the best one.
How much of the ocean is deep sea vs not? Slow recovery doesn’t mean it’s the worst until you normalize it. Rare shallow but short life populations might be significantly more delicate
It depends on where you want to count the start of the deep sea in terms of depth, but the answer is somewhere between "most of it" and "almost all of it." Most of what we're used to is in the top 100 or so meters of the ocean, a very thin layer on top of the rest of the sea.
I'd say anything but the continental shelf (red on this map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_shelf#/media/File:...) counts as deep sea. That seems to also be the definition used by Deepwater Horizon, which was right at the edge of the continental shelf.
light penetrates in useful intensity for photosynthesis to about 200m so that seems like a decent cutoff for "deep sea" for the purposes of discussion around the unique communities there
Except that much/most of the life in that top 200m regularly commutes into the depths in pursuit of food/shelter/temperature. We all like sea turtles. Leatherbacks regularly dive to well over 1000m.
> We all want no traffic, and lots of parking, so low density please, but that creates housing shortages and limits the usefulness of public transport.
Sigh. Democracy is going to hang itself with the bike lanes and public transit, isn't it?
Density increases and ubiquitous transit result in HIGHER levels of housing shortages. Just ask France.
I'm pretty sure you just said "If you make a place nicer to live, then more people will want to live there, so we should stop making places nicer to live."
Anyway, nobody who has ever been to a major French city believes that they've tried to increase core density. They famously have building height restrictions all over the place. Pretty much the entire city of Paris caps out at 7 stories.
>Pretty much the entire city of Paris caps out at 7 stories.
And despite that, Paris is one of the densest cities in the world, and an incredibly pleasant place to live. This should be a good lesson to everyone that "high density" does not have to be synonymous with reams of skyscrapers.
Paris actually isn't that dense compared to some US cities. NYC for example has far more people in the same space as Paris. Not that that is a goal to shoot for but there you go. That being said, at the moment Paris isn't a very nice place to be with all the smoke and looting and all.
That's not really true. Paris (intra-muros) has ~53,000 people per square mile[1] which is quite high. Manhattan is a fair bit denser at ~74,000 per square mile[2] but NYC's next densest borough of Brooklyn has only ~39,000[3]. And nothing else in the US comes anywhere close; the next densest city is SF which only hits ~18,000[4]
Even if you go beyond the city proper, a number of the Paris banlieues are similarly dense and I think most of the most populous ones are like twice as dense as SF (which, again, is America's second-densest city).
Supply and demand. If you don’t want to increase supply, then you can reduce prices by turning the city into the kind of place that nobody wants to live in.
I repeated the same argument here many times. But the reality is that density creates a vicious cycle of price increases. Higher density provides easier access to talent for companies, so they concentrate in urban cores. This in turn results in the only desirable jobs (and housing) being within the commute distance from the cores. So more people move in, resulting in even greater advantage for companies. Rinse, wash, repeat.
Think about this: EVERY large European city now has a "housing crisis". And nice cities just a couple of hours from them have housing that is essentially free. In Japan it's often _literally_ free.
Want an example of a city that doesn't have a housing crisis and is comparable in population to Paris or Berlin? Houston, TX.
No, it doesn't. The rent growth has been mostly stable over the last 2 decades and generally followed the inflation: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1ZPQy And it increased only slightly recently (attributable to increased density as Houston relaxed the minimum lot requirements in 2014, btw).
You're still just saying "If you make a place nicer to live, then more people will want to live there."
Density is not the thing making the prices go up. Local supply lagging behind local demand is what does that. Your two choices are either build more or make living there less desirable compared to somewhere else. There's no third choice.
> nice cities just a couple of hours from them have housing that is essentially free
If nobody wants to live there then tautologically people have decided that they aren't nice.
Dense cities are not nice places to live, especially for less well-off people. Just look at the number of children per capita. You are just _forced_ to live there by economic forces, whether you like it or not.
Japan is really illustrative there. You HAVE to live in Tokyo or other large cities if you want to achieve anything. Yet a young person will not be able to afford anything decent. And forget about families.
Oh, and the construction capacity in and around Tokyo is maxxed out. Parts of the city are literally permanent giant construction zones. They're building housing as fast as possible. Yet the prices are _skyrocketing_.
> Your two choices are either build more or make living there less desirable compared to somewhere else.
You don't have that choice. The construction rate in large cities can't keep with demand if the city is growing.
You can try to streamline permitting (like in Japan), prohibit foreign ownership and/or investment (Vancouver), regulate the rents (NYC), dance around naked under the full Moon - and nothing will work.
> There's no third choice.
False. There is one: make other places nicer by promoting remote work and incentivizing companies to open new offices in smaller cities.
Houston is a great example. It's pretty much the only large city in the US that doesn't have a housing crisis. And it did that (on accident) by not having a real consolidated urban core. Instead, it's a collection of smaller cities, each one with its own business core.
> Houston is a great example. It's pretty much the only large city in the US that doesn't have a housing crisis.
Houston is a great example of many things, but being a good place to live isn't one of them. Most of it is a depressed concrete wasteland of sprawling blight and freeway lanes far from any natural beauty with weather that causes people to stay indoors most of the time. I lived there for 20 years and have family there and you could not pay me enough to move back. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/article/houston-li...https://secrethouston.com/houston-unhappiest-cities-us/
Paris in the middle of a riot is a far better place to live than Houston.
> Most of it is a depressed concrete wasteland of sprawling blight and freeway lanes far from any natural beauty with weather that causes people to stay indoors most of the time.
Hm. "Depressed concrete"? And concrete in Manhattan is hyperactive, and concrete in Japan is meditative?
I absolutely loved not having a commute in Houston (I could get to work in 15 minutes!). The average commute in Houston is shorter than in ANY comparable European city.
Weather is probably the reason Houston became so successful: pretty much nobody WANTS to spend a lot of time outdoors in summer. So city architects ended up building the city for humans and not buses and bikes.
> far from any natural beauty
My backyard was periodically visited by deer, I had a family of crows living in a tree, and my neighbors had a beautiful garden.
> Fertility tracks religion.
It primarily tracks urban density, which is also associated with religion.
And how do you build more land for single-family houses? Around 80% of people in the US would prefer to live in a SFH.
But even putting that quip aside, you physically can't keep up with the demand. Large cities physically can't grow fast enough to keep up with the demand.
A typical apartment unit now requires about 2 work-years of labor to build. So if you're growing your city by 5% a year, then 10% of the city will be apartment construction workers! And then you'll need to keep upgrading the infrastructure, and this is usually exorbitantly expensive.
To give some perspective: one mile of Manhattan subway now costs as much as 1500 miles of modern 6-lane freeway.
Very much disagree. Plenty of people would be fine living in multi-family housing. Everything from apartments to 2-family houses.
74% of people live in SFH right now in the US. How many of those have actually never experienced living in multi-family homes? Probably most of them. How can you prefer something you've never even tried?
Also, keep in mind that in many places SFH is literally the only choice right now.
Given real estate prices in places like Boston and NYC I think multi-family housing is doing just fine
> Very much disagree. Plenty of people would be fine living in multi-family housing. Everything from apartments to 2-family houses.
Yeah, and you don't even need multi-family houses. A bunkbed would do, like in Singapore!
> 74% of people live in SFH right now in the US. How many of those have actually never experienced living in multi-family homes? Probably most of them. How can you prefer something you've never even tried?
They also did not experience living in buildings without AC or heating. Remove them.
> Given real estate prices in places like Boston and NYC I think multi-family housing is doing just fine
Then invert your argument. Can a person in NYC who hates living in a multi-family home have an option to NOT do that?
I need it to build the recent Expo ( https://expo.dev/ ) versions, and to target newer iOS features. I tried to stick with Sequoia for as long as I could, but I had to upgrade to macOS 27 last month :(
Fortunately, I found that there is now a way to reduce the stupid corner radius ("defaults write -g NSConvolutionOverride1 -float 8") and to remove the floating sidebars ("defaults write -g NSSplitViewItemSidebarDefaultsToFloatingAppearance -bool false").
Does it? Take it to the limit: would a single question from the IQ test with unlimited time be a serious challenge? Of course not. So time is the crucial part of the test.
My IQ is around 120, so it's higher than average, but nothing exceptional. But I'm pretty good at math, so I competed at the national level in my country when I was at school. And as a part of that, I got to attend a summer camp with people who have a REALLY high IQ. Several of them went to win the IMO.
They were able to solve problems much faster than I could during training sessions. Often by the time I started feeling that I had a way to the solution, somebody already had the complete answer ready to be discussed. But with unlimited time to think, I could solve most problems.
In real life if you want to solve a problem and you have unlimited time you also have access to resources such as books and other people.
Then there are some problems that some (almost all!) people couldn't solve with unlimited time and resources. Say prove Fermat's Last Theorem.
And then there are the problems that test special knowledge. I remember being in a waves and vibrations class where on Thanksgiving break the prof assigned us the homework to solve for the motion of two coupled harmonic oscillators. I didn't have anywhere to go but I did have a cold and had a fever but I powered through it anyway and managed to solve it with sin and cos. I was the only one.
Some of it was my general intelligence g and some was determination and hard work, not having distractions, etc.
When we had class next week the prof solved it in minutes on the board using the fact that
exp(iθ) = cos(θ) + isin(θ)
which of course made an impression on all of us! An IQ test tries to ask questions which don't depend on your knowledge but it's tough to do that completely.
From time to time you see a press release that some celebrity took an IQ test got the maximum score on Raven's Progressive Matrices. [1] A lot of people are going to say "of course these people are really smart, this is proven by their success" and maybe that's right, I mean a good actor is a quick study who is good at learning the lines, easily adapts to whatever they have to do in terms of systems, technology and procedures on the set, etc. But it would not be hard at all to get coached on Raven enough to get a perfect score.
[1] see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices which are about as independent of culture and language as is probably possible but... verbal intelligence is it's own thing, like I maxxed out every test of verbal intelligence I've taken since I was 17 and my IQ score is respectable despite having a bit of Meehl's "cognitive slippage" which impairs my complex task performance in a test environment although I have a lot of strategies to correct for it in real life
Thanks to frontier models the playing field can accommodate slower thinkers.
Academia nowadays are dominated by people like Tao, fast, knowledgeable, but not necessarily deep thinkers. In physics, even mathematics, of the (g)olden age, before standardised tests, famous problems and whatnot---- deep but slower thinkers had an edge. Now every thinker has access to roughly one quasiTao worth of g and a worldclass library in a box.
[heterodox postKeynesian macro, maybe one could call it postpostAbundance. Where goes universities' spend? Internal social (media) moderation. Not PR/HR!!]
It's possible "we" will return to such golden ages, once the "intellectual arts" lose 90% of the prestige and all of the perceived usefulness. When tests are more than useless for curbing "talent oversupply"/"support undersupply". Watch out for an AI fuelled broom dancing resurgence.
These articles are often misleading. With the modern detection methods, we can find seemingly anything in everything. Mass spectrometers can detect individual atoms and molecules, after all.
It's always important to check the quantities detected and the corresponding safe limits.
Since the article does not make any claims about exposure levels, no, it's not "misleading." You (wrongly) assumed there's no research on safe limits, or that there even ARE 'safe limits.'
Meanwhile you're making a nonsense claim about the capabilities of the sort of mass spectrometer used for this sort of study (like you know anything about mass spectrometers), while also ignoring the well established evidence these chemicals are causing harmful effects to human health.
Probably because you didn't bother to actually read the study summary, yet you felt qualified to whine about it being misleading while hiding behind weasel words like "often" and "seemingly."
Skepticism not a substitute for being informed and educated. Stop doubting and questioning things you're not qualified to doubt or question...especially when you clearly haven't read the material you're so smugly questioning.
"A significant body of research supports the conclusion that current exposures to BFRs are having an adverse effect on human health and that early-life exposures are of greatest concern. PBDEs have been particularly well-studied and human exposure has been associated with harm to neurodevelopment, especially reduced IQ, as well as reduced fecundability, reduced birth weight, reproductive abnormalities, reduced fertility, papillary thyroid cancer, and alterations in thyroid function (Chevrier et al., 2010; Goodyer et al., 2017; Hoffman et al., 2017; Kim et al., 2014; Lam et al., 2017; Stapleton et al., 2011; Zota et al., 2011). Bromophenols are structurally similar to thyroid hormone, and evidence from in vitro, in vivo, and epidemiological research indicates that, like PBDEs, bromophenols can affect thyroid function (Michałowicz et al., 2022). The effects of brominated flame retardants on thyroid homeostasis may explain their ability to harm neurodevelopment, particularly via disruption of thyroid-hormone mediated development that occurs during fetal development. Several mechanisms for disruption of thyroid homeostasis have been elucidated. In human liver microsomes, 2,4,6-TBP and hydroxylated metabolites of PBDEs were found to inhibit deiodinase, key to regulating levels of active thyroid hormones (Butt et al., 2011). In vitro binding assays found 2,4,6-TBP bound transthyretin (TTR), which transports thyroid hormone, with ten times the potency of the natural ligand, T4, and that a number of BFRs, including some PBDE congeners, increased the response to T3 (Hamers et al., 2006). Results from a placental cell line found that among BFRs, 2,4,6-TBP was the most potent inhibitor of thyroid hormone sulfotransferase (TH SULT), which regulates intracellular levels of thyroid hormones (Leonetti et al., 2018). Mice exposed to 2,4,6-TBP had lower thyroid activity and levels of free T3 and T4 (Lee et al., 2016). Epidemiological research suggests sex-specific effects on thyroid hormone: in placenta samples from 95 North Carolina, USA women, accumulation of 2,4,6-TBP in the placenta was significantly associated with higher levels of T3 in females (Leonetti et al., 2016b). Male infants with higher levels of 2,4,6-TBP had lower T3, though the association was not significant.
Evidence indicates that other BFRs affect the endocrine system, including antiestrogenic and antiandrogenic effects, increased production of testosterone and estrogen, and disruption of thyroid function (Chen et al., 2019b; Johnson et al., 2010; Mankidy et al., 2014; Saunders et al., 2013). Because of concerns regarding persistence, bioaccumulation, and toxicity, along with high production volume, BFRs have been the target of regulatory efforts. These include a ban on their use in enclosures for electronics displays in the European Union and in New York State and in all enclosures for indoor electric and electronic products in Washington State (European Commission, 2019; State of New York, 2022; Washington Administrative Code, 2023). A number of product manufacturers, including Apple and HP, also restrict the use of organohalogen flame retardants in their products."
Yes, and that's exactly why I said that such articles are misleading. Without listing the detected levels, these articles are entirely useless.
The quoted study found median concentrations of ~1ng/g of dry samples, so far below any reasonably dangerous levels.
I can very easily fear-monger too: "There's detectable URANIUM in every tested sample of mothers' milk!" And this is true, most of this uranium is from natural dust.
> Meanwhile you're making a nonsense claim about the capabilities of the sort of mass spectrometer used for this sort of study (like you know anything about mass spectrometers)
I worked with mass specs.
> while also ignoring the well established evidence these chemicals are causing harmful effects to human health.
In what quantities? And how do they compare with the detected ones?
In comparison, transit is about 99% subsidized (when capital expenses are included) and about 90% subsidized just for the operational budget.
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