kevin

"May" is doing a lot of work here. This is a low-level regulatory element of a systemic protein. It's a neat result - this kind of biochemical investigation is hard and worthwhile - but it's miles from any kind of therapeutic AFAICT

And if these smart academically inclined people can’t reason about the merits of the system beyond whether it has worked for them, then they are as I accused them … unintelligent or childish.

Nah, it's really hard to notice things that are against your incentives to notice. And if all of the people around you are prospering in the same system, extra hard. The myth of meritocracy is extremely compelling, possibly to an even greater extent in academia than elsewhere.

success in academia is its own reward with prestige that should not be underestimated.

No doubt. And listen, I'm on the tenure track job market at this very moment, having said that last year was definitely going to be my last attempt. There's some kind of cultish nature, all the more inextricable in that I can see it, and it doesn't stop me.

I guess my point is that it's obvious to most of us that that success is extremely rare, and getting rarer. The thing that keeps me in it is the sense that I can do more good pursuing knowledge for knowledge's sake than work that is easier and more remunerative but less fulfilling. Call that stupid or childish? Maybe 🤷.

I can understand why it seems the way. But the people doing academic research by and large could make a lot more money working less hard at some company, but choose instead to try to advance human knowledge.

The incentives are just terrible. When I was a PhD student, I railed against this system, but when it came time to publish, I was overruled by my PI. And I know now that he was right - success is built off publication, and the best journals have this shitty model.

I used to think that when I became boss, I wouldn't participate in the bullshit, but if any of my trainees want a career in academia, that stance would be screwing them over. The rules need to come from the top, but the people at the top, almost by definition, are the ones that have prospered with the current system.

I've also got a gazelle, nearly 5 years old - no complaints! I occasionally need to use it on battery and it's pretty power hungry, but if you turn off Nvidia graphics for those times, it's quite a bit better.

Really curious where you came across this - I (virtually) know Jakob from the Julia community (he and I are the primary admins of BioJulia), but I'm not aware of his reach elsewhere.

It's a really great post!

You said a bunch of things you like about cinnamon, and nothing that you don't. Is there something motivating you to switch?

Animal testing need not be gruesome - and indeed must not be according to most and approvals.

Typically, minimizing animal suffering and humane procedures for determining when and how to euthanize animals is typically a big part of getting sign off for this kind of thing.

The man has a way with words and is righteous about giving credit where due.

There are a lot of things that would be "pretty cool" as long as we don't worry about the suffering they inflict. I mean, in a sense, factory farms are pretty cool in their level of technical sophistication and efficiency of converting grain and energy into meat. The accomplishments of breeding to generate chickens with breasts so large they can't stand up or procreate without intervention, and grow so fast their skeletons can't keep up with their weight are amazing. The density of animals we can grow while keeping loses to disease acceptably low with antibiotics is also remarkable.

And yet, all of these things that are "pretty cool" are also horrendous on a scale that is difficult to comprehend. Raising an intelligent animal like a pig just to harvest its heart for a human might be an ethical trade-off you're comfortable with - and given our treatment of animals for food I've no doubt that it's one society at large is fine with. If my own parent needed a heart transplant, I would likely have a hard time saying no if this were available. But from a Rawlsian perspective, thinking in advance, I don't think this is something we should be doing.

You know, it would also be pretty cool to have some kind of animal that could perform human-level tasks and ideally could understand human language. Maybe we could distinguish them from people based on some superficial physical characteristic like skin color 🤔

Well that's an excessively low bar.

OpenSUSE for pried from my hands because the college I work for set up a Cisco proxy server / 2FA that I couldn't get to work with openconnect, and Cisco's AnyConnect won't run on it.

After a few weeks on Rocky, I am desperate to go back.

I really understand this as a starting position, but it can definitely be taken too far. I feel like the details matter a lot.

A few years ago there was a big dust up in the Julia community when they wanted to add a small amount of telemetry to the package servers - basically the plan was to identify real users from things like CI runs, and to be able to identify the number of unique users , which matters a lot, especially for grant writing (and a lot of academics use Julia, so this would be a boon to the ecosystem).

The core devs were super up front about it, offered easy opt-out, and even were receptive to a plan that would switch from unique identifiers for downloaders to some scheme that would give an accurate count without the ability to trace a particular download to a particular user, but a couple of prominent members of the community were incensed.