You might find that your attitude is the problem, and not the industry itself. If you’re so cynical as to compare writing code for a living to human trafficking and sex work, which are very real problems that you have carelessly and insensitively used as a metaphor, maybe you should find a new gig.
And this isn’t about political correctness, either. I don’t care about them. But if you were going to use this metaphor and this style, you better do it well, and you failed. This post isn’t edgy or interesting or novel.
It's not really new; Musicians and artists who make an income from their work often compare it to prostitution. You're not selling your body, so much as your soul. Personally I find the comparison melodramatic, but I understand the sentiment.
> You might find that your attitude is the problem, and not the industry itself. If you’re so cynical as to compare writing code for a living to human trafficking and sex work, which are very real problems that you have carelessly and insensitively used as a metaphor, maybe you should find a new gig.
He's extending on a comparison by Dave Chappelle, who wasn't actually talking about sex work itself, but rather the kinds of manipulation exploitative people use to push others past their limits in order to profit from them more. Someone linked it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25997841.
I think the OP article has issues, but not the one you're complaining about.
If you scan WSB, you'll find a seemingly never-ending string of posts saying, essentially, "don't be distracted by silver, stick with $gme," and yet article after article after article suggests that WSB is focusing on silver now.
I don't know what the source of "WSB is focusing on silver now" is, but it is clearly not actual WSB posts.
How are you going to do a short squeeze on silver, which is not being shorted?
The real crime? Quite possibly, more than 100% of $GME may be currently owned by investors right now- thanks to shorting more than the available shares. If true, that would be clear evidence of fraud at the highest levels of our market.
Silver is quite the distraction from the real show today.
There's much more silver owned by investors than there is physical silver in the world.
It's the same idea: you have a synthetic version of an asset trading for the same price of the real asset. If people start demanding the real asset, there isn't enough of it to go around and prices start to rise.
Not saying that's what's going to happen, but it's not absurd.
If it did, mining companies would be out of business almost instantly - their product being only useful in the market when it's worthless.
Futures contracts involve actual carrying costs - storage, transporation, delivery - with real physical goods; even if you personally aren't involved in the physical aspect (by trading derivatives or the like) someone else (e.g. the people with actual silver demand for their companies) is, and they'll make sure you can't just drive the price of silver up higher by cornering the physical market.
Short float and speculative positioning (long and short) is regularly published for commodities. This is common knowledge. You should find these things out instead of asking rhetorical questions as a way to make a point. If you were genuinely asking, I apologize.
For the vaccine to lose effectiveness, the mutation would have to drastically alter the spike protein of the virus.
This is effectively impossible as the virus is dependent on a functioning spike protein in order to infect cells, and the machinery involved with the mechanics of the spike are extremely delicate. Errant mutations that would cause compositional changes to the shape of the protein are almost guaranteed to cause functional failure. Using terminology, this is what we call a highly conserved area.
In both cases for the South African or UK strain, if you take a look at the areas where mutations have occurred, you’ll see that the code responsible for generating the spike protein is basically completely unaffected. This will generally hold true for any successive future strains.
This doesn't make much sense to me, given that coronaviruses, with spike proteins, have existed for eons, and humans have had lots of time to build up immunity to previous coronaviruses (ones that cause colds, for example). So there was something about the Covid-19 coronavirus spike proteins that was different enough where it didn't look like "familiar" coronaviruses, so I see no reason why it couldn't evolve further to evade whatever antibodies humans are able to build up to the vaccines.
You can make multiple spike proteins that target the same receptor.
This generally happens when a virus from another animal (and thus with a slightly different version of the receptor) adapts to humans.
Basically, a gradient descent from a very different starting point ending up in a different local minima.
The question is, is the spike protein at a local minima (very probably quite close to it), and could it jump to another local minima then? Most likely not.
It's possible it will evolve to make our antibodies slightly less effective, likely as a trade off for infectiousness, but incredibly unlikely the spike protein would evolve to be unrecognizable to our immune systems. Historically, this doesn't happen all that often, except for viruses with chronic infections over years that can do a deeper search over the gradient, but even then it generally takes years to decades.
Given the non-linear dynamics that proteins must live under, I like the usage of local minima as an analogy. It feels apt.
Generally though, within the context of machine learning, one of the benefits of gradient descent, especially when stochastic, is that we can get past those local minima humps. Does this hold less true with respect to the process of sequence mutation that viruses go through?
Another way how to characterize the "context of [deep] machine learning" is that it is the regime of high temperature
(stochasticity) as a result of small batches and/or large learning rates, and/or the regime of high momentum (Adam et al.). The evolutionary dynamics in the genetic space is (intuitively) at much lower temperature (shorter jumps) and with no momentum (because of the evolutionary pressure).
The difference in viruses is that if you get on the hump, you are outcompeted by other viruses that stayed in the minimum, which makes it a lot more difficult.
you are speaking about a general case scenario, there is conservation of sequence region and variation of sequence region. to wit one protien encoding sequence has separate regions corresponding to regions of the product protien, the receptor binding ___domain[RBD] is a moderately conserved region ; the ImmunoAntigenic regions are not tightly linked to the protiens receptor binding function thus may vary at a greater rate than the RBD regions
This isn't correct. The constraints placed upon epitopes by the cell receptor vs antibodies aren't the same. Rhinoviruses and Influenza viruses escape past immunity without fundamentally altering their biology all the time!
The 2nd paper cited does in fact show functional virus with a charge-shifting E->K mutation in its receptor binding ___domain that escape many antibodies raised against earlier strains.
I used to engineer viruses and human immune cells for a living - maybe read a little more virology/immunology.
While that may be true, I think that scale plays a role here.
The ancestors of this virus were bouncing around between a relatively small set of humans and animals for a while before becoming SARS-CoV-2.
Now with a significant portion of the world infected, it does not seem unreasonable that it would mutate. Although at that point it probably would not be considered the same virus anymore.
There’s pretty strong support for RISC-V and open source hardware in general at Google.
Are they doing it to try and capitalize / control the market? Somewhat. But I don’t see it as necessarily a bad thing. The ecosystem benefits from it ultimately which is my primary concern.
Oh yeah I'm sure Google in general is a fan just like all the other companies. But at some point in the (distant?) future, we will see Android phones and apps with RISC-V apps processors. Specifically the impact to android developers is what I'm curious about -- that's the challenge that google has to balance. Today there's support for x86_64 and arm, do they want to add the burden of rv64gc?
The lipid nanoparticle bilayer is also created by Biontech.
Basically, Pfizer is responsible for logistics/distribution and Biontech does the specialized research and development. It’s a good partnership.
Also why you’re seeing manufacturing issues from the Moderna side by the way, as they tried to do everything by themselves, with no experience in logistics/distribution.
