Genomes are sequenced when they're both accessible and are of scientific/economic interest. This results in an overrepresentation of:
- Humans and their pathogens
- Economically important organisms (e.g. crops and farm animals) and their pathogens
- Model organisms
For example, compare the number of Genebank sequences for HIV-1 [1] versus Feline immunodeficiency virus [2]. HIV-1 is additionally problematic because it has an extremely high mutation rate [3], making it more likely for a random sequence to match some sequenced HIV-1 genome.
Using the number of BLAST hits as the basis of an argument is about as reliable as using the number of results when searching for a string on GitHub. Without further analysis of the specific sequence and its biological context it can be highly misleading. See a previous Twitter thread on some other purported HIV inserts: https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1223666856923291648
There also seems to be some circular reasoning the argument. Apparently we can ignore RaTG13 because it’s obviously synthetic, which makes SARS-CoV-2 look even more synthetic. It would be interesting to compare to the BANAL family of SARS-CoV-2-related viruses that are even more closely related to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13 [1].
I’m not sure why only viral genomes were searched for the furin cleavage site sequence. Viruses famously exchange genetic material with their host organisms. The “smoking gun” sequence also appears Mycobacterium smegmatis, for example [2].
Nuclear weapons do not have situational awareness. They’re intended to be used as part of a larger deployment system with a human in the loop. There’s no threat model for them that includes self-arming when mysterious aircraft approach their storage location.
Existing Intel software (with potentially broken version checks) will work on ARM Macs under emulation. Once they rebuild with the new SDK they'll get the receive the correct version.
The T2 chip is a derivative of the A10. It has similar power requirements to the SOC in modern iPhones.
They could probably use a cut down derivative of the W2 chip used in AirPods with the audio codec etc. removed. I’m guessing phone batteries reach a point where they’re still storing energy but can’t provide enough current to safely boot the whole phone. The BLE chip could sip on the remainder of the battery for a long time.
The way I’ve approached it in my compiler [1] is that garbage collection can never occur while Lisp/RFI (Rust function interface) code is executing. Once the program returns to the event loop GC can occur with a small number of known roots. This works because there will be no way to block without waiting on a future which can then return to the event loop. I’m considering adding a `conditional-gc` macro for long running computations that’s internally implemented as waiting on a future that’s immediately resolved.
This means that RFI code can treat GCed values as having a `'static` lifetime. One caveat is that RFI code cannot capture values except for a few special runtime functions. This works naturally with the language’s pure functional design, however.
As far as data structures go its impossible to support performant Lisp code by implementing lists as native vectors; the guarantees and idioms are too different. My runtime [2] provides Rust bindings for data types that e.g. allow you to create an `Iterator` from a list or construct a list from one. That should allow transparent interoperability with idiomatic Rust patterns and data structures.
You’re not parsing XML at that point. You’re parsing a text based data format that looks superficially like XML. This can work if you strictly control the encoder but it’s not generally interoperable.
The flip side of time dilation is Lorentz contraction. As you approach the speed of light objects in your direction of motion will become shortened from your frame of reference.
For example, there are particles from cosmic rays that should not be able to make it to the surface without decaying. However, they're detected all the time. Two valid ways to think of this are:
1. From the Earth's frame of reference time moves more slowly for the particle. This slows down the process of decaying.
2. From the particle's frame of reference the Earth's atmosphere is considerably shorter so it doesn't need to travel as far.
Things get a bit hairy to talk about once you actually reach the speed of light. One way to think of it might be from the photon's frame of reference its entire path has become infinitely short so it had no distance to travel at all.
This is a concern but it usually works for two reasons:
1. Most firmware is sufficiently broken that Linux drivers are already hardened against devices being brought up in arbitrary states.
2. kexec walks the device tree to shut down all devices before starting the new kernel. This usually gets devices closer to a startup state, or at least a smaller number of known shutdown states.
iOS 11 removed support for 32bit applications. Because the iPhone X requires iOS 11 I’m not aware of any way to run 32bit code on A11 processors and above. A32 support is likely already gone at the hardware level.
There is Barycentric Coordinate Time which is the time from a hypothetical clock at rest at the centre of mass of the Solar System. This is easier to calculate across spacecraft than an Earth-centric time would be. However, because it's outside of Earth's gravity well it ticks slightly faster than Earth time.
Presumably this would interact poorly with FaceID’s attention aware features. iOS periodically activates the front facing camera while unlocked to determine if you’re paying attention to the phone. This influences automatic screen dimming and alert noises.
You can’t set FS/GS from user space on x64-64 until the FSGSBASE instructions were introduced in Ivy Bridge. The kernel only needs to be involved as its privilege is needed to set the register; the kernel doesn’t “know” that they’re being used for TLS.
- Humans and their pathogens
- Economically important organisms (e.g. crops and farm animals) and their pathogens
- Model organisms
For example, compare the number of Genebank sequences for HIV-1 [1] versus Feline immunodeficiency virus [2]. HIV-1 is additionally problematic because it has an extremely high mutation rate [3], making it more likely for a random sequence to match some sequenced HIV-1 genome.
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/Browser/wwwtax.cgi?mod...
[2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/Browser/wwwtax.cgi?mod...
[3]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4574155/