I once read a book about this: How to Build a Dinosaur: The New Science of Reverse Evolution, by Jack Horner and James Gorman. The basic idea is that dinosaur DNA is carried around by modern day chickens. The concept seemed pretty out there but the book does make a convincing argument for why it should be possible. The first author is a well known paleontologist, and the book was recommended to me by a paleontologist before I spent the week (as a volunteer) in his field crew.
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> The technology for this doesn't exist yet, and the ethics would be extremely questionable.
I do agree with this. Just because we can do it, doesn't mean we should.
And yet, generative AI also seems to be poor at randomness. When I ask Google Gemini for a list of 50 random words, it gave me a list of 18 unique words, with 16 of them repeated exactly 3 times.
Currently I am reading the book Grit by Angela Duckworth. The author cites studies of grit and has done much research on the subject. Are you suggesting that that research does not replicate?
> I spent some time porting some of the functions to Python, but realized to make it useful it'd be a bigger effort than I had time and skill.
Getting py5 off the ground started during pandemic lockdown and took many months. Managing the source code is best done computationally, with py5generator creating the actual py5 source code.
py5 is a version of Processing for Python 3.8+ that is well integrated into the Python ecosystem. It connects the Processing Jars to Python using JPype. If you like Processing, please give it a try!
I once worked in a financial firm with an intern who did nothing else besides pick his nose. No joke, that's the only thing he did. He made no attempt to do actual work or help our team and no attempt to hide his nose picking.
His father was a senior executive and so he knew he would get a seat on the equity trading desk no matter what, so he didn't care about us. I hated that guy, and I hated him even more because I knew his career would be way more successful than mine would ever be.
The finance industry (and surely other industries) have this concept of "pedigree" that values some people more than others. It's bad for the organizations because poorly qualified nose-pickers get promoted as they coast by in life, while others who are working hard to improve themselves and add value will either get passed over or used as pawns.
I always ask a direct question about ethics. Something like, "tell me about the kinds of ethical problems that this team is faced with and how you handle them." Good answers involve speaking up about the problem right away & not try to hide anything and being transparent with relevant entities. Bad answers are things like "there haven't been any ethical problems," because that most likely signals that ethical problems are being ignored or overlooked.
> Note that this is a resource-intensive filter. Memoization is strongly advised!
Can you make this be the default for non Safari browsers? This really made my CPU fan work hard. Also, why does this need to recalculate the image so many times a second if it is the same image each time? It really only needs to redraw when I change one of the options.
> Nowadays the closest I've gotten to this is the people who keep using my Gmail address as their own email address. I find this behavior rather bizarre and don't know what it achieves.
I have this problem also! I thought it was rare. In my case I think the person is very bad with computers and doesn't know what their email address is. I've gotten emails from their bank, cell phone, and even online dating. I tried mailing them a letter once to tell them they are making a mistake but nothing changed.
Please learn more about the needs of blind people before writing something like this.
Adding accessibility for screen readers is much more difficult to add later in the project lifecycle. Thinking about those design considerations early makes a big difference in how accessible it will later. If developers don't think about these things early, most likely the product will never be fully accessible, ever. Blind people have seen this played out before with other software products and know where this path leads.
(I'm not blind but have worked with blind developers. I'm not an expert in accessibility but I know enough to know how important it is to listen to accessibility needs)
> The only way you’ll stop this thing from mutating into a variant not covered by the vaccine is by eradicating it everywhere, simultaneously.
Even if it were possible and achievable to vaccinate all humans, we'd still have a problem because COVID has spread to other mammal species. There's no reasonable plan that I know of to vaccinate animals in the wild.
> We’re all in this together. When COVID spreads in Africa and makes a new strain, it may as well be on your own doorstep. The world needs to step up and distribute vaccines to every corner of the globe, for FREE, or we’ll never get out of this.
But you're 100% right about this. I don't want what I said about your last sentence to diminish the importance of wealthy nations sharing the vaccine with other countries. We're all in this together. The idea that a country can vaccinate only their own citizens and then consider this problem solved is completely false.
Can someone tell me more about how the predefined Game of Life patterns came to be? It it fascinating to me that these have names that people remember. I know this subject is well researched, but are the researchers finding these things randomly or is there some kind of analytical approach to design patterns that are likely to have a desired result?
When I was in High School (early 90's) we got a new computer system that nobody was using yet. I discovered there was an email system of some kind and that every student had an email address that we were not told about. I also discovered Tetris installed in a directory on the server. I was able to play Tetris and I could show other students how to access it, but it was inconvenient to get to.
Therefore I decided I would email Tetris to every student (I emailed the executable, not a link to Tetris), making it easier for everyone to play also. As soon as I did this the entire system got very slow...apparently the server had no quotas or partitioning and the hundreds of copies of Tetris filled up 100% of the hard drive space. It was a disaster. The computer "specialist" had no idea how to fix the system and she was teaching an adult education class that evening that required the system to work. She was furious and wanted me to get suspended. It didn't happen though because I spoke up about the problem right when I knew there was a problem and also some other teachers intervened on my behalf.
The woman who was responsible for the computer system back then is now the superintendent of the school system. I wonder if she remembers me.
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> The technology for this doesn't exist yet, and the ethics would be extremely questionable.
I do agree with this. Just because we can do it, doesn't mean we should.