The Azolla Event. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event. I mean it is cool and the major climate shift it helped create certainly caused some extinctions. But plants can change the world, never forget!
A cranky biologist who means well. My hobbies include long walks off short piers and anything science related.
The Azolla Event. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event. I mean it is cool and the major climate shift it helped create certainly caused some extinctions. But plants can change the world, never forget!
Keep sharing the tapes.
It is so true. As a gay man I had to leave the Mormon cult but it meant committing complete social suicide. It’s not an easy thing, by far the most difficult part of coming out.
I meditate as part of a dedicated yoga practice. When I am doing a group practice, i arrive early and perform a physical warm up and then spend ten minutes in a seated meditation before the class begins. It makes a huge difference in the quality of my workout to get my mind firmly rooted in the immediate experience.
Back when Perl was the language of choice for bioinformatics, I found a huge performance boost pre-processing large (~1Tb) text files using built in unix tools like sed and awk with regex. So while it might take me a full hour to peck out the correct incantation, the task would then run in an hour, compared to four hours or more for the same task using Perl.
So many pipes…
They need a fifth man. Let me check my calendar…
I heard that in Sheldon Coopers voice.
You sound like you mean well, but this is not helpful advice. You are essentially telling someone who is obviously a conscientious person and struggling that they have a character flaw.
Whew, thanks for not being a knee-jerk about my ‘mental prosthetic’! It takes real skill and understanding, I think, to even write the pseudocode or plain language description of a working script. After all, describing the problem and the outline of the solution is usually the hardest part. Pecking out the syntax takes the bulk of the time, but if you can avoid that step, what is lost? Very little in my experience.
I’ve begun collecting an assortment of custom python and shell script utilities to accomplish routine or one-off tasks for which system utilities don’t exist. You bet you are still learning when doing it this way. After all, you have to understand the code well enough to tell if the output is what you need.
I agree.
Does it count if one uses an LLM to help compose the shell script? I mean, I can and have written gnarly scripts by hand but it can take half an hour to work out a single line sometimes for a simple task versus 10 minutes describing it in plain language.
This is sad news. He was deeply influential and at the same time a somewhat obscure author. At least, in my experience, he didn’t have the name recognition other - dare I say lesser - authors had.
One lesson I learned as a young person from reading A Fire Upon the Deep was to never believe anything just because it was on the internet. That alone makes his legacy worth remembering.
Move over bacon. Now there’s something meatier!
You are correct. People these days are idjits.
‘Shopkeeper’ implies you might actually own the shop you keep. Modern retail provides few such jobs.
That’s exactly right, you have to know enough about the subject to smell a bullshit answer.
It’s great as a mental prosthetic. When I am tackling a new complex topic like say a new cloud platform I’m learning, i can test my understanding of the implications of a change to the console settings. I tell it what i think and ask it to check my understanding. Really speeds up my learning, but I don’t rely on it exclusively. I will write my own dang emails, thank you.
Thank you for the pointers. It was a sincere request and the literature somewhat scattered.
I would genuinely like links to some of these studies. Do you have any specifics?
Ooh, since this is a safe space for dorks, I would like to be pedantic myself. Thank you for the opportunity. The oxygen catastrophe was caused by cyanobacteria-like organisms, which are photosynthetic, but are not plants. But it’s true, all bio-mass matters!