Eh, I've run applications on RDBMSes with multi-billion-row tables, and I've never found normalization/denormalization to be particularly impactful on performance except for in a few rare cases. The biggest impact came from sensible indexing + query patterns. Normalization vs denormalization had a big impact on convenience, though (not always favoring one way or the other!).
But I'm no fan of Prisma either. Drizzle has its own pain points (i.e. sequential numbers for its auto-generated migrations means annoying merge conflicts if multiple people iterate on the schema at the same time), but it's much better than Prisma at sticking close to the metal and allowing good query performance and table design.
The trial lawyer angle doesn't seem accurate. Did trial lawyers prevent pregnancy tests from rolling out? COVID tests? Or any other automatic diagnostic, as long as it was reasonably accurate?
Not as far as I know. Once an automated diagnostic is reasonably accurate, it replaces humans doing the work manually. The same would be true of anything else that can be automatically detected.
No comment on whether radiology is close to that yet, although I don't think a few-million-param neural network would tell us much one way or another.
Are you aware of any states in the US that have made it harder to sue doctors for malpractice?
My point, which I made poorly, is this: There's a reason doctors that went to medical school in India and trained as Radiologists in India can't read US cases remotely for a fraction of the cost of US trained and licensed radiologists.
It's not because the systems to read remotely don't exist.
It's not because they're poorly trained or bad doctors.
No, it's because the AMA lobbies to protect American doctors' jobs, and refuses to license them to practice in the US. Of course you can still sue for medical malpractice regardless of citizenship. Trial lawyers have nothing to do with it, American doctors who don't want competition are entirely to blame.
You can't download Gemini's weights either, so it's not relevant as a comparison against Gemini.
I think the actually-relevant issue here is that until last month there wasn't API access for Grok 3, so no one could test or benchmark it, and you couldn't integrate it into tools that you might want to use it with. They only allowed Grok 2 in their API, and Grok 2 was a pretty bad model.
On this issue there is no difference between the previous admin and the current one. The FTC voted 3-0 to postpone. Even though Trump fired two of the original five, if those two had both voted against postponing they would have still lost 3-2 and the same decision would be reached — and I don't think there's much evidence that the two he fired would've voted against postponing, anyway.
This is incorrect. The party makeup of the 5 people changed with the new administration. Lina Khan (D) left and Mark Meador (R) was appointed, changing the balance from 3(D)-2(R) to 2(D)-3(R).
Ah, I hadn't realized that. Still, given that it was 3-0, all three of the former FTC commissioners would have had to be unanimous against deferral — and given that all of them voted for deferral on Jan 19th [1] (the original deadline, when none had been fired and Lina Khan was still onboard) — I don't think there's much change here.
There are generally a few answers to this. But they all boil down to:
* You never used to be fat.
Once you become fat, your body's homeostatic set point is permanently altered. Your body never destroys adipocytes — it only shrinks them. If you stay within some range of your current homeostatic set point, your body will either increase the size of your adipocytes, or decrease their size, depending on whether you're over- or under-consuming. But, after a certain amount of overconsumption, your body will actually create new adipocytes... And once you have them, you can never get rid of them, minus expensive and dangerous surgery.
The best you can do is shrink them. But, keeping the adipocytes shrunken takes significant willpower. So basically, once you get fat, you're going to have a hard time.
Pretty much the only alternative is somehow tricking your brain/gut into not getting hungry when it "should." Ozempic, etc seem to somehow allow you to not feel as hungry even when your adipocytes shrink, or at least alter your perceived set point to be more-shrunken. Bariatric surgery is similar although much more dangerous. (Liposuction actually removes adipocytes, but it's quite dangerous — and it doesn't remove visceral fat cells, which are the worst kind of fat from a health perspective.)
Now, there's a separate question of "why do some people get fat initially?" And that can result from poor childhood nutrition, or genes (e.g. Samoans), or exposure to certain chemical compounds (e.g. certain psychiatric medications), or natural aging (recent research indicates middle-aged mice, and probably thus middle-aged humans, have their stem cells trigger more adipocyte production), or just lifestyle. But it's the initial weight gain that ends up trapping people into the higher homeostatic set point, which is very difficult to recover from, even with dieting and exercise, since you will need to keep yourself basically constantly hungry either by eating less or by exercising much more even after you "lost" the weight — because while you lost weight on the scale, you didn't lose adipocytes, and adipocytes do not want to be kept empty.
The way Windows does it is users are prompted to elevate permissions, and can be tricked into clicking "Yes," just like users can be tricked into using sudo.
But the entire threat model we were discussing was that the user might be tricked:
Being a setuid binary means that sudo also suffers from attacks where an attacker runs `sudo ./malware` and then convinces the user to authenticate
That's why the OP said that's not an enforceable security boundary. If the user is capable of attaining superuser privs, you can trick them, regardless of how attaining those privs is implemented.
Ubuntu continuously updates itself without permission, killing apps and losing previous state
I've never seen this happen and I've run Ubuntu in production for years. Apt does not auto-update unless it's configured for unattended upgrades — and both Debian and Ubuntu allow you to configure unattended upgrades in apt. And unattended upgrades via apt should not kill running user processes or cause data loss.
The Ubuntu packages, drivers, and kennel are laughably behind Debian.
This is just plain wrong — even for the steelman argument of Debian unstable or testing, which are not intended for general use. Debian unstable and testing are on kernel 6.12. Ubuntu 25.04 is on kernel 6.14.
Debian stable, meanwhile, is on 6.1. Ubuntu has the far more-recent kernel.
I don't know what you mean by "drivers" — there aren't separate drivers on Linux from the kernel; they're shipped in the kernel. Ubuntu's are also more recent than Debian, since the kernel version is more recent.
With respect to packages, obviously I can't check every package version, but e.g. coreutils in Ubuntu are on 9.5, released in March 2024; systemd on Ubuntu is a version released this year (and until last month Debian unstable and Ubuntu were identical); gcc is identical; etc. While Ubuntu occasionally lags Debian unstable, it's not by much.
If you compare to actual Debian stable, it's not even close. Debian stable is ancient.
And ultimately... Why are you using Debian unstable? It's called "unstable" for a reason. It receives basically no testing. Even the "testing" version is more stable, and that's not intended to be stable at all and doesn't necessarily receive security updates. Ubuntu is less-stable than Debian stable, but far more up-to-date; Debian testing is less-stable than Ubuntu... And usually still not even as up-to-date. Debian unstable is basically untested; if you want that you'd be better served by a rolling release distro like Arch where the packages are going to be way more up-to-date anyway.
The Debian wiki cautions against treating unstable or testing releases as general purpose, so I truly don't think even this steelman is viable. [1] In fact, they refuse to even call Debian unstable a "release" since there are no release practices associated with it and the code is effectively untested.
Ubuntu is nowhere near my favorite Linux distro, but claiming it's more out of date than Debian is just FUD.
Debian is very very stable — at least, Debian stable is — and people love it for that. But the tradeoff is that everything in it is ancient. If you want something that's like Debian, but more up-to-date but slightly less stable — that's Ubuntu. If you want a rolling release, that's Arch. (And of course, there are even more-different distros like NixOS or ostree-based ones; there's the Red Hat universe of RHEL and the closer-to-bleeding-edge Fedora; etc etc.) Using Debian unstable is either a magnanimous act of sacrifice in order to help test future Debian versions, or it's self-harm.
Personally if I wanted to use a Debian-derivative on the desktop, though, I'd probably use System76's PopOS, which is basically a cleaned-up Ubuntu with some nice GNOME extensions. I'm more curious in the future to try out ostree-based distros, though, like the various Fedora Atomic ones, since they have nice rollbacks without the user-facing complexity of NixOS.
"the same rules would apply to EU maybe competitors... if there were any."
That can actually be an example of a tariff, though. Basically every country specializes in something, and imports things they're not good at making. For example: cheese, or luxury watches, or GPUs. If you have a special law that charges companies money only for the categories you import and you carve out exceptions for "small" (aka domestic) markets, a la the DMA, you have effectively created a tariff.
American brands should tread carefully: while America is willing to ban their (cheaper, sometimes better) competitors, Europe is much less willing to — especially now as America itself has taken a much more bullying tone towards its allies.
America overestimates its economic strength on the world stage because they have an unmatched military, but when all books are closed its only 300M people and most of em are broke. That's a market the same size as Brazil, Australia and the UK combined - it's a lot but it's not enough to start unilaterally declaring yourself the boss. USA is playing a losing strategy here.
But I'm no fan of Prisma either. Drizzle has its own pain points (i.e. sequential numbers for its auto-generated migrations means annoying merge conflicts if multiple people iterate on the schema at the same time), but it's much better than Prisma at sticking close to the metal and allowing good query performance and table design.
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