> I want it everywhere badly in west as well as east and middle(-east).
It's already there.
With the exception of the US, almost every country I've traveled to in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe has tap-pay enabled. The Middle East has virtually everyone paying with their phones via NFC. In India Apple Pay doesn't work but when I travel there I can use my phone every time. NFC cards are also the norm.
This is possible because of a concept called a flash loan. Using a smart contract, you can borrow (without collateral) and the smart contract would reverse the transaction if the money is not repaid. There is a cost to borrowing, but in this case it obviously made sense. Cryptocurrency arbitrage bots were some of the first implementations of flash loans that I know of.
Based on my own tests, once you have a 'normal' program that does a bit of IO, calls out some C based libraries etc. etc. I've rarely seen more than 10-20% performance increase across the whole program run.
For individual functions you can see 2-4 times speed up over pure python.
Most importantly, I've never seen it result in slower than cpython performance.
It's all about compatibility to be honest. PyPy has done yeoman's work and it's still lacking in compatibility for important packages (e.g., psycopg2). Performance means little if we can't use major parts of the ecosystem.
A few years ago I experimented with running a Pyramid/SQLAlchemy/Postgres app with PyPy. I was able to get it to work with https://pypi.org/project/psycopg2cffi/
I didn't notice any particular speedup for this app - manipulating lots of JSON Python data structures is not really PyPy's sweet spot. Whereas for some processing of large genomic data files I saw a substantial speedup.
Is it preferable on PyPy to use a libpq wrapper over a native solution? As far as I can tell, even though CPython C API is in some way supported on PyPy it's really only advisable to use packages using it as a last resort for performance reasons. Aside from psycopg2cffi, which you should be able to use with PyPy, I'm pretty sure I saw other PEP 249 implementations for PostgreSQL the last time I checked (which admittedly was a few years ago).
> As far as I can tell, even though CPython C API is in some way supported on PyPy it's really only advisable to use packages using it as a last resort for performance reasons
Yes, but so much of the Python ecosystem uses the C API that the "last resort" and the "common case" are one in the same most of the time. `psycopg2cffi` IIRC that's not very well supported. It looks like it was updated last in January of 2021 but before that the last update was from 2018. This was what prevented us from using it in 2020. Moreover, there are other packages besides Postgres drivers; that's just the one that I recall running into problems with. To be clear, I want Pypy to be successful, and the project is nothing short of amazing.
> I'm pretty sure I saw other PEP 249 implementations for PostgreSQL the last time I checked (which admittedly was a few years ago).
There was a pure Python version, but it didn't seem battle-tested and there was no indication of its quality or performance. I don't want to pull a package like that into production for something as important as a database driver. It's been a couple years since I looked into it as well, so perhaps things have changed for the better in the interim.
Yeah, that's shame, because 1) that API is mildly awful, and 2) it really restricts implementation choices to the extent that making another implementation of the language is a problem just because of the need to fake to numerous existing C extensions that your implementation choices are the same as CPython's (when really your implementation is likely to work very differently on the inside). I guess Python people really programmed themselves into a corner here.
Without further clarification, when I read "compiler" I translate it as "standalone program which takes source code and emits exactly one binary which executes the program".
It can be a much broader term, for example you will run into people here arguing (with some justification!) that a "transpiler" doesn't exist since it's a mere subset of the broad definition of a compiler.
I'm just reporting on the mental image that calling such-and-such a compiler forms in my mind's eye. I expect I'm not alone in that.
There's nothing "broad" about a compiler not generating "exactly one binary". First, most of the time, even in conventional systems, it is the linker who creates that binary, not the compiler. Second, in other systems, such as Oberon, there's not even "exactly one binary" for anything, unless you're talking about the currently running system as a whole.
I really don't like FG either. I use Roll20[1], but if you are completely home-brew, Owlbear Rodeo[2] is very simple and great. Character sheets on D&D Beyond[3] and the Beyond20 Chrome extension to link DDB and Roll20.
Reliance Jio has already inked a pact with Anil Ambani-owned Reliance Communications for airwaves sharing while the latter has acquired the Russsian telco Sistema that offers services under the MTS brand.
The deal allowed Reliance Communications to get access to MTS spectrum in the 850 Mhz band that can be used to offer 4G services.
Your snark is unnecessary. Had you Googled a bit more, you would have seen that they also share towers with Airtel, among others. Airtel is also a retail telecom competitor.
Completely false. Across three factories in two states, I don't get "guaranteed" power. In fact, the only place I see basically uninterrupted power is in the nice parts of residential Bombay.
While the author is pretty clear that "only a passing knowledge of modern microbiology" is necessary, I think that understates some of the technical language in here. I really laughed at the line, "Silencing a gene with CRISPR/Cas is incredibly simple." Still, I learned a lot. This is the closest I've come to feeling like I know what's going on in CRISPR.
CRISPR has got to be one of the most important scientific achievements of the past few decades, right?
Absolutely. The movement from discovery (from the unsexiest of all fields, bacteriology!) to a reliable tool is unprecedented[1] in the scientific realm. For my money it is easily on track for a Nobel Prize: it allows mankind to examine with precision unknown just years before.
[1] I see a parallel to short hairpin RNA gene silencing (shRNA, a.k.a. RNA interference, RNAi). A breakthrough discovery, at use at the bench in less then a decade, and an easy clinch for the Nobel Prize. CRISPR has gone even faster.
(basically, restriction enzymes are what CRISPR is basically set to replace for complex systems/organisms where restriction enzymes are too weak; although for simple systems restriction enzymes are waaay simpler)
That's already happened with NG DNA assembly. PIPES cloning vs. Gibson Assembly vs. ColdFusion, etc.
In the case of restriction enzymes, though, they've been around in continuous use since something like the 70s, they're very well characterized, NEB has had a continuous research program where they've been optimized out the wazoo.
Technically speaking they are fundamentally simpler than CRISPR (one component, vs. 2). They also are more generally useful when your genetic manipulation is done outside the cell. So there's a clear tooling difference in CRISPR/RE. Most people who use CRISPR, will use REs in the process of make the DNA piece they're putting in alongside the CRISPR. You'd be a fool to use CRISPR in E. Coli or Yeast.
Yes. The next time some "What is the most promising technology?" thread pops up on reddit, you can safely post CRISPR.
Depending on how things go with the patent stuff and the technology itself, sooner or later this will absolutely transform our lives. We are looking at the incubation of a technology that may easily save millions of lives (over a long time frame).
Potential for misuse is near infinite though - imagine a privatized CRISPR inaccessible to the sub-$50 million/ year crowd.
The limitations of CRISPR really do appear to be few though. Lots of techniques and methods will be developed and figured out in the next years. It allows us near complete control over the most essential biology. And all that in vivo.
The road ahead is rough but I am confident that CRISPR can become the magic tool I just described. It will be black and white magic. Question is which will dominate?
Potential for misuse is near infinite though - imagine a privatized CRISPR inaccessible to the sub-$50 million/ year crowd.
I can imagine a lot worse than that. Imagine genetic engineering gets dirt cheap, and that does seem to be the direction we're headed. Novel pathogens are going to be a lot easier to design than treatments and preventative measures to protect against them. How do you stop the proliferation of bio-weapons? I'm thinking that would be about as easy as stopping the proliferation of malware.
I totally want the gene to control metallic objects :-) But I agree with you, at some point you will have to ask what species is this? Are you human or something else? I expect CRISPR to show up in athletes first, high risk/high gain and difficult to claim cheating.
One major difference is that you have to order your DNA typically from a third party provider and they can screen for pathogenic sequences. We could probably stop malware if we could screen all the code before anyone was allowed to run it. I think the current system is reasonably robust for stopping novel syn bio pathogens.
In my mind the big risk comes with home based DNA printers. There are several close to getting to market (eg http://www.kilobaser.com/), at that point we lose control over what gets printed and then maybe there are concerns... though I do think creating a pathogen is really hard and most likely to end up killing the creator before anyone else.
> at that point we lose control over what gets printed and then maybe there are concerns
You have never had control. Perhaps instead you are more worried about our biological weaknesses; there are many! People die all the time from various diseases and even aging. I suggest fixing this before you outlaw DNA manipulation. All of life is a manipulation of DNA in one way or another, and is in fact essential to the maintenance of life... But vulnerabilities should be patched, not swept under the carpet.
It's very hard to Figure out what a random piece of DNA will do just from the sequence. Combine that with other molecular biology techniques for combining, slicing, and dicing DNA, and there would be very little hope to do any sort of prospective screen.
> It's very hard to Figure out what a random piece of DNA will do just from the sequence.
While it's certainly true that it's hard to determine the function of a DNA sequence from scratch, it's considerably easier to compare that sequence (or the sequence of the translated polypeptide) to other homologous sequences to see if it matches something dangerous.
I previously worked in a lab that studied Bacillus anthracis, and we had a bit of trouble getting a major gene synthesis company [1] to produce a plasmid with a variant of atxA [2], and atxA isn't even a toxin, it's just a transcriptional regulator. We presumed that they just BLASTed [3] the sequence we gave them and threw up a red flag when it matched anthracis. So this sort of sequence-checking already occurs.
Whether I agree with the number or not is irrelevant, but the implication I get from the article is that the judge is more upset that after TWC was sued, they still made 74 calls. I assume that the per-call fine was upped because of that.
It's already there.
With the exception of the US, almost every country I've traveled to in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe has tap-pay enabled. The Middle East has virtually everyone paying with their phones via NFC. In India Apple Pay doesn't work but when I travel there I can use my phone every time. NFC cards are also the norm.