At least some of the difference is that building codes can be a lot more lax in Texas as compared to Canada. It rarely gets as cold, and certainly not for as long.
As I understand it, full sequencing is a _lot_ more expensive. 23 and me currently shows the genotyping is like $100 while sequencing is $1000. It’s probably too expensive and time consuming for them to sequence everybody’s samples unless they pay for it.
There is still some code hosted on SourceForge that has no other public source. This is unsettling because I don't know how long SourceForge will continue operating and Wayback Machine captures of SF pages don't include tarballs. Download backups yourself whenever you find something like this.
I'm contributing to someone's software that started as an academic project. The current version is on GitHub with history back to 2014 but early releases back to 2008 (from before the author started using version control) are on SF in the form release_1.0.tgz, release_1.1.tgz, etc. I stumbled on these old versions this weekend while looking for related material. Once I decompressed them I found that they contained notes and old code that really helps to understand the current project's evolution and structure.
Yeah, what especially irks me with SourceForge is the common habit of projects regularly deleting all outdated releases (due to some per-project size limit? or just not to clutter up the list?). In old projects with messy releases, it can be very hard to piece together exactly which revisions went into a version "x.y.z" that everyone else depended on, except by actually looking into the released files. If those files don't get archived anywhere, they just get lost to the ether. (At least, short of a manhunt for anyone with the files in an ancient backup at the bottom of the sea.)
It was early example of the "enshittification" phenomenon. It was a particular bad example of advertising and other spammy distractions because sites for developers have the lowest CPM of anything except maybe anime fan sites.
It is super hard to break through a two-sided market but it is possible when a competitor has given up entirely on competition, which might have happened in the SourceForge case because the money situation was so dire they couldn't afford to invest in it.
...lowest CPM of anything except maybe anime fan sites.
I am not in ads, so could you expand on this? Why are anime sites low value vs other niche? I would naively expect that anime has huge numbers of <20 year old fans who are more prone to advertising merchandise.
They pirate or already subscribe to Crunchroll. Many sites are nowhere near brand safe (one reason Danbooru is as good as it is that is not even brand safe for porn ads.) Some of them buy figurines, but they already know where to get them. Good smile would rather invest in 4chan than buy ads on western anime sites. I have no idea what it is like in Japan.
I am skeptical of claims that “advertisers want to target young people because they have a lifetime of consumption ahead of them”. Maybe that is true of Proctor and Gamble (who expect to still be selling Dawn and Tide 50 years from now) but few advertisers are thinking ahead more than one quarter, if that —- particularly in the internet age where an ad click can be tracked to a transaction.
People today will say all the ads on TV target oldsters because only oldsters watch TV but circa 2000 there was no streaming and watching TV made me think “I want to die before I get old” because there were so many ads for drugs and embarrassing health conditions and personal injury lawyers and relatively little for things you would spend your own money on because not a lot of people in the audience have money to spend particularly after paying the cable bill.
A small SourceForge retrospective for those not around at the time:
This post's overview of contributing to Open Source is largely correct. You'd get the source tarball for a project, make some changes, and then e-mail the author/maintainer witch a patch. Despite the post's claim Open Source existed long before 1998.
Rarely did Internet randos have any access to a project's VCS. A lot of "projects" (really just a program written by a single person) didn't even have meaningful VCS, running CVS or RVS were skills unto themselves. There was also the issue that a lot of Open Source was written by students and hosted on school servers or an old Linux box in a dorm.
SourceForge came along riding the first Internet bubble. They let a lot of small FOSS projects go legit by giving them a project homepage without a .edu domain or tilde in it. They also got a managed VCS (CVS at first then Subversion later) and contact e-Mail addresses, forums, and other bits that made the lives of Linux distro and BSD ports maintainers much easier. They also had a number of mirror sites which enabled a level of high availability most projects could never have had previously.
Then SourceForge's enshitification began as bubble money ran out. The free tier of features was decreased and then they started bundling AdWare into Windows installers. SourceForge would literally repackage a Windows installer to install the FOSS application and some bullshit AdWare, IIRC a browser toolbar was a major one.
As the officially upstream source for FOSS projects bundled for package managers the AdWare wasn't much of a problem. But SourceForge was the distribution channel for a significant amount of Windows FOSS apps like VLC, MirandaIM, and a bunch of P2P apps which were impacted by the AdWare bundling at various points.
A GitHub founder patting themselves on the back for the success of GitHub is sort of funny because GitHub followed a similar track to SourceForge but got bought by Microsoft instead of a company coasting on VC money. I can easily imagine a world where an independent GitHub enshittified had they not been bought by a money fountain.
It did not. Free software did. The term "open source" was coined by Christine Peterson at a meeting in January of 1998, as Netscape was contemplating releasing their source code as free software. The Open Source Initiative was founded a month later, and forked the Debian Free Software Guidelines, written by one of the OSI founders, Bruce Perens. This was a deliberate marketing exercise, both to avoid the unfortunate "as in beer" connotations of free software, and to distance the concept from the FSF and Richard Stallman.
In 1998 there definitely weren't millions of open source projects. Debian 1.3.1 (released in 1997[0]) had over two thousand packages. I pick Debian here because they only packaged software with unambiguously Open licenses. That's just packages shipped by Debian and not a full accounting of all open source software packages available in 1997. I'm sure some Walnut Creek CDs had a bunch more tarballs with more ambiguous licensing.
Open source software existed before 1998. I don't know why you're trying to quibble about the exact branding, just because the Open Source Software term wasn't coined until a certain date doesn't mean that is the start of all software with open licenses or people publicly releasing the source of their software. The GPL, MIT, and BSD licenses are all from the 80s.
Potentially investments in a site could have huge leverage because of the existing user base.
I (and most of my team) lost our jobs at one of the most well-loved open accessing publishing sites in the world because of a complex chain of events that was rooted in the site not having a sustainable funding source despite the fact that it was fantastically cheap to run if you divided the budget by the number of daily users. Fortunately they figured it all out and the site is still here and if you work in physics, math or cs you probably used it today.
Still it was painful to see “new shiny” projects that had 4x the funding but 1% the user count at most, or to estimate we could save users $500M a year with a $500k budget.
Thus you can overthrow SourceForge but cannot overthrow something profitable and terrible such as Facebook, Match.com or the “blob” of review sites that dominate Google, see
GitHub offered a better experience than the existing offerings. They then scaled massively to the point where it was expensive to run without a lot of good options for monetization. Thankfully for GitHub they got bought by Microsoft and not say Verizon or GameStop (which owns the corpse of SourceForge for unfathomable reasons).
GitHub could have easily enshittified in an effort to make money had they not been bought by someone with deep pockets.
GitHub was not on the same track as SourceForge, and I would hazard they were in a completely different world than then one SourceForge developed in. For instance, GitHub is far less likely to host an executable for any software, which is where you're going to get bundled installers with AdWare or malware. I know that GitHub allows installers to be uploaded, but if we're going to compare the time period before Microsoft purchased GitHub, I really don't think this is fair. I understand the history of not trusting Microsoft, and even as someone who is deeply involved in using GitHub and Microsoft software and features, can understand a level of distrust. Everything you said about SourceForge is correct, so I don't mean to put down your entire comment here.
I believe GitHub's underlying use of the Git SCM, as well as the interface that allowed web users to look at "pull requests" as a concept was the real value in GitHub, far before hosting binaries or attracting the attention of Microsoft. The attraction to Microsoft was the ability to pull in the growing network of git users, the popularity of GitHub to a growing number of developers, and the ability to integrate the service into their developer offerings (this was the key that would have made the other two "positives" worthless to them).
I think any tool or technology you should have an "out", in case another corporation/company takes over and doesn't align with your values. Being stuck on SourceForge, Google Code, GitHub, Bitbucket, etc. is a recipe to lock yourself into being put down to pasture because you couldn't adapt and realize that there is a huge world out there, and tools and tech come and go. Always have something as an alternative for whatever you do, because things change too quickly, plus you get another point of view with solving problems (if that's your thing, and you aren't just developing for the money, which is fine if you can admit it to yourself). The fact that you are able to dive back into time with SourceForge tells me you are one of those people that have been into technology since pre-dot com bust, but probably got burned by Microsoft in some form. I'm not defending Microsoft for their past practices, only coming at this from what they have done with GitHub to this point. Hopefully I'm not wrong, but I do have a plan in place in case I am, and I think that's the most important thing in software.
I don't think GitHub's situation is completely analogous to SourceForge. You're right that GitHub doesn't have a huge moat by virtue of the way git works. I think Microsoft realizes that, no one necessarily loves GitHub so much they'd not jump ship if GitHub became too user hostile.
To be clear I'm not trying to be down on GitHub here. They made a good product and a very good alternative to SourceForge. I think they just got lucky getting bought by Microsoft when they did. By 2018 I think they'd gotten to the point where their costs would have required to start chasing revenue.
Was it actual malware? I thought it was just automatically checked software like the Ask.com toolbar for Internet Explorer, along with the Oracle.com JAVA JRE. Maybe I was just more careful than most, but I have been using FileZilla for many years, and never had any of these issues as long as I paid attention to the installer and what was included.
You got a chuckle out of me with such a specific reference that I know I got auto-installed too. I don't know, personally, but I do recall reading accounts of malware from them from around that era.
I suppose I would call what I saw "Grayware" [1], which is debatably not malware (but debatably is, too). It was enough of a smell for me to stop using their site, though. I'd actually just forego software I was seeking out from them instead.
I definitely don't deny that what they did was definitely not on the "up and up", for sure. Dark patterns, and I haven't heard the term "grayware" before, but it definitely fits! I was only lucky because I actually watch installers, and tend to mess with install locations, strictly when it comes to Windows software. I would prefer to be on a Linux-distro for work, but it's honestly just easier for me to stick with Windows because I have to help so many other people, and I know I would eventually end up losing the (current) knowledge of what can go wrong with Windows. Over time, I would be out of touch.
I only learned the term grayware from this thread. I wasn't sure precisely what did and didn't qualify as malware, so I checked Wikipedia and found it there.
As for the Windows fear, I understand that. That was me 10+ years ago, and I _am_ less knowledgable at helping people with Windows these days. I can still figure some things out by searching, and "I couldn't figure it out after 5-10 minutes" has turned out to be an acceptable answer too sometimes :)
Was there ever a point in time where it wasn't something that basically sucked? For some reason there are still some widely used ham radio packages that are hosted on sourceforge and it annoys me greatly. When you click the big green "Download" for the project you get.... .... a dll file. Why? Because the actual release artifact is some other zip file and for some reason it doesn't deserve the "Big Green Download" button.
SF has always been this bad. Their core data model just doesn't jive with how people actually interact with open source projects.
... and for that matter didn't they stir up some controversy a long while ago for tampering with project artifacts and adding extra "stuff" in them? (spyware / nagware / **ware?)
Yes, they were cool once upon a time. It the place to be, you didn't have to host your own CVS without charge (no git back then, hell, even SVN was released few years after SF). It was like geocities.
It looks almopst impossible today, but launching a service was really hard and expensive back then. It cost a lot of money/effort in just software. All that stuff you can just download and it actually works? No way man, didn't exist yet.
That is why LAMP stack was so great back then, it was free, working and reasonably low-maintenence and super easy to set-up.
Yes, they used to be great for open source projects. They did get wrapped up in controversy where another company took over and were including other software in the installers, if you weren't careful to uncheck the optional (and unrelated) software. There is still great software hosted there, like FileZilla if you use a Windows environment. FileZilla did have the optional software installs for about a year or so, but as long as you paid attention, it was easy to get around (you just had to pay attention, but that's not an excuse for what they did).
> Was there ever a point in time where it wasn't something that basically sucked?
Yeah, when it launched it was cool and hip. Free public CVS server to host your open source cool project was cool. Probably went downhill as the ad market fell apart post dot-com, and the only way to get revenue was big green download buttons.
It also varies wildly in different jurisdictions. My local police department's "main line" advises calling 911 even for non-emergency calls. I wanted to make a noise compliant one night but chickened-out because I didn't think it was appropriate to call 911 for that.
Weren't all of the new M3 Macs announced the same price as they previously were or lower? Same with the recently announced iPhones? Or am I mis-remembering? Seems like prices not increasing given all the recent inflation are actually a price decrease pretty much across the board not an increase on the average selling price?
It's pretty fast, but pretty well required because once you lose pressurization you want to get down to a normal pressure level quickly as staying at a high altitude is not particularly comfortable and everyone in the aircraft needs to have supplemental oxygen until you get under 10,000 feet. If anyone doesn't get a mask on they could be in trouble due to lack of oxygen.
I wish Apple Maps had a North Up mode. Unfortunately it doesn't and I had to abandon Google Maps because they made some algorithm changes that make it do dumb things like try to take you up a blocked private road and generally avoids the simpler routes in favor of a more "efficient" one.
Back when I used google maps, I especially hated its insistence on making unprotected left turns. If I knew the area it was taking me to, I would scan ahead for those and try to avoid them, but there were some terrifying times where I pulled up to a busy 5 or 6 lane stroad expected to turn left. I invariably turned right and took an alternate path, for the safety and comfort of everyone (except my map, which would scramble to figure out why I had done something so stupid).
It's healthy to have a skepticism of "rich" people, but I think it's really uncharitable to view Chouinard's career as mere wealth accrual for wealth's sake. To not view him as a role model for how business can be ethical is, IMO, a missed opportunity.
Chouinard's goal was for his mission (the raison d'etre for Patagonia – to make high quality goods for outdoor activities, and to use the profits from this venture to protect outdoor spaces) to outlive his personal stewardship of Patagonia's control.
When that's your goal, the set of options available is rather narrow. You have to pass on control to people you trust, whom you've developed strong relationships with, and whom you trust to evolve and pass that mission down to the next generation. Most importantly, you want to avoid the kind of grifters that Patagonia has been allergic to in its history.
Plus, Patagonia already has a rich synergistic history of funding activism. It's not at all comparable to Gates, Carnegie, or Rockefeller who made their money and decided what "good" to spend it on in two discrete steps. For Patagonia, the most important thing is effective stewardship over an already-sailing ship
Chouinard has written a lot of material that you can read for yourself and form your own opinion on. He's remarkably direct and transparent, there aren't really smoke and mirrors to navigate.
That being said, anything he does with his "wealth" (itself an absurd idea, as he would never liquidate Patagonia shares and still never has) is going to rhyme with what other powerful people do with their wealth. You have to judge the people, not just the structures they're working within.
The human eye has an approximate pixel resolution of 120 million pixels per eye. On top of that, our brain constantly processes and integrates the output of our eyes. This creates an even higher perceived pixel resolution of about 480 million pixels per eye. Some estimates are even higher.
I'm not saying Apple created a bad product...but I wouldn't expect a mere 23 million pixels to be indistinguishable from reality.
The human eye actually has terrible resolution. We only see in high resolution in the fovea in the very center of our eye -- basically the single point of primary focus. Resolution beyond that drops off dramatically (1/7th and much worse).
I've seen people claiming on sites like Reddit that people who watch with CC on simply read it in their peripheral vision while focused on the action, and that just isn't possible in most situations for the reason I mentioned. You actually only see high resolution in the middle 1 degree of angular view.
So to come up with such a number someone took the entire FOV of the human eye and assumed that you focus your fovea on each and every angular degree of it.
That's neither here nor there are your point is as valid -- where you're focused on will have a pixel density below "reality" for your fovea, however it presents lots of optimization potentials in software (e.g. no need for fine rendering outside of the focus) and in hardware. There are already devices which use tiny mirrors and optics to basically concentrate the pixels wherever you're looking and render a distorted view to match.
It will definitely not be indistinguishable from reality, but might be good enough to fool us after a short getting used to, similarly to how even 24fps is enough for continuous motion. Of course you will see 60fps as more “fluid”, but only in comparison. And afterwards the differences quickly plateau and not many people can see any difference between 120 and higher.
It is probably similar with this as well, the question is where apple stands on this scale.
I can't really imagine it will be a job long term. It's more of a skill you use for some other task. Not that different from having good google search skills as a programmer.
It’s a real job for “raw” transformer models, where the model is just playing “follow the leader” to whatever kind of text you prompt it with – but depends a lot on how the model is trained and fined-tuned.
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