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What's the TLDR on how to compile the C code to run in the browser?


Emscripten. If you use something like SDL porting is trivial.

Working on a project to port a 20 plus year old c/cpp code base to the web. The tooling was like 98% there but I've had to upstream a few fixes or find a workaround every now and then.


Good on you man. If I got an email that said “opportunity: port 20+ cpp app to web” I would chuckle and close that sucker real quick. Modern cpp I maybe can deal with. That 90s stuff is real bad.


It's actually a purely voluntary endeavor. I'm attempting to port a game engine called Zelda Classic to the web. So far, so good!


Here's a little template that uses Raylib: https://github.com/nikki93/raylib-template


The Economist is also like 100+ pages per week. Very hard to consume without significant dedication.


Don't read every article?


"The New York Post (NY Post) is a conservative[8] daily tabloid newspaper published in New York City. The Post also operates NYPost.com, the celebrity gossip site PageSix.com, and the entertainment site Decider.com."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Post


The NY Times and Washington Post also had silly articles that presented this as a serious debate.


I don't remember WaPo's article, but the NYT article that I read didn't mention any ethical issues or the recipient's past[1].

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/10/health/heart-transplant-p...



Thanks for linking that. I hadn't seen that article, and I'm disappointed to see them highlight his past in that manner.


The https://twitter.com/DougJBalloon tweets write themselves. "This felon was given a pig heart. Here's why that's a problem for ..."


What was the purpose of posting this?


I try to avoid NY Post, but sometimes forget. Still, it's a true story afaik.


[flagged]



Most posters who use the phrases "newsflash" or "wake up" are not posting in good faith.


Yes, absolutely. Next question?


Does it not anymore? Or is it like KFC?


In my experience, ALL designs at $corp are "IP protected."


Deciding to culture the samples, versus just destroying them without analysis, must be accompanied by an interesting risk/benefit analysis.


They were transported to the existing, single approved location for processing these samples before being cultured. So the risk may not have been any more than existing research at that facility.


I was always under the impressions, that they keep the samples frozen in some big "freezer", and that they don't poke them around and "play" with them... so opening an unknown vial of an unknown sample of possibly smallpox, having the sample analyzed, and all the procedures needed for that, seem (to me) more risky than just keeping the freezer running.


People make mistakes under pressure. So it's a good idea to induce limited pressure from time to time. Having to go through the proper preparations to analyze these samples was probably a valuable and rare training opportunity.


Analysing unknown samples is part of the mission of these facilities, think about studying a new pathogen from human or animal samples for example. It’s fairly routine for them. They have the equipments and know how to do it safely.

In this case, I think it was done to assess the risk of this kind of discovery in the future. If these samples had failed to be viable that would have been a huge relief for everyone.


If you’re trying to decide how big a risk it is that there are other vials out there, definitely. Especially since we’ve stopped wide spread vaccination as it’s considered eradicated.

If some gov’t lab deep in Siberia has some samples - how big a problem would i be? actually?


> If some gov’t lab deep in Siberia has some samples

That's not an if. We know that the Vector Institute has smallpox samples and they are headquartered in Siberia.

let's use this source maybe: https://slate.com/technology/2014/07/vector-institute-in-nov...

or maybe this one: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/17/blast-sparks-f...

It's really not a secret, and definitely not an "if"


It is also pretty secure place and there is a detachment of the Russian Army nearby just in case.


Spritz it on some freshly laundered towels in a 5-star hotel (lots of international travelers) and you have a hot mess fast. Same thing in a Motel 6, you get longer dwell the in the first country before it spreads overseas.


That was the 80’s and 90’s ‘wake up in a cold sweat’ nightmare, when one wasn’t having it about nukes, the Cold War, and MAD anyway.

One can hope that anyone with the resources and intelligence to pull that off, would 1) have something better and more useful to do with their lives, and 2) would have someone they care about somewhere and realize it would almost certainly blow back on them too.

Definitely not guaranteed, but so far seems to be panning out. Let’s hope it stays that way.


I've always thought the smart move would be a first strike with nukes followed up with aerial application of weaponized smallpox over non-nuked areas. The nukes would slow down and hamstring efforts at containment and let the biological agents get a good foothold.


For months, almost the entire Western world just watched slackjawed while Covid spread outward from China - presumably hoping it would just go away.

I wouldn't worry too much about hamstringing containment efforts.


Wasn't that because the virus has hit some kind of local maxima of morbidity and human-fear?

If it was some kind "new ebola," I could imagine a much more aggressive response, with much less political polarization.


Can't blame them (us) too much. It was unprecedented, and all previous dangerous fledgling pandemics in the past 10 years did just stop in time somehow. H1N1, MERS, SARS, Ebola etc.


The scarier thought is some kind of gene-targeted virus that avoids the blowback


I don’t think that people understand how relatively practical this is, and it wouldn’t even have to be a dramatically or overtly “bad” virus to have very useful economic effects. Just a virus that dramatically increases the chance of cancer, or screws with nuerons low key causing early onset dementia after years, or whatever.

The incentives that support this type of research will be (or are) too high to ignore.


Honestly I am more concerned with the transport. If I had found the samples I would consider burning down the lab.

Sorry, but the end of Smallpox is one of the greatest medical success stories ever. I am not going to be the one who reopens that particular Pandoras box.


I suspect transporting sealed samples intact is much safer than burning down the lab and hoping they get anihilated.


Nuke'em! Nuke'em from orbit! it's the only way to be sure.


Nuking from orbit works better if you're in orbit.


a matter of personal taste, Sir.


Fire on position!


Don't we have vaccines?

I mean sure an outbreak would be pretty horrific. But once the pictures start circulating, I suspect vaccine hesitation would evaporate pretty quickly.

Yes, yes, we should go far to avoid an outbreak, but would it really be so world ending? Wouldn't we just contain it, vaccinate widely and be done with it?


I'd maybe buy this comment a few years ago.

We are barely able to vaccinate against a global pandemic as it is. Our society would honestly probably crumble if you brought in a really deadly virus like smallpox to the fold.


Not for lack of people being willing to take the vaccination though.

People look at risks and benefits and generally make their minds up pretty rationally, if you account that not everybody values things exactly the same as you do.

Covid is really not that much of a risk if you're otherwise healthy and the vaccines are not highly effective as the smallpox one is (in fact stated definitions of vaccine had to be revised so it would not be excluded). The absolute risk reduction is just not all that high, and some people are disinclined to jump to getting new therapies without much long term data.

You see the rational behavior play out when you look at vaccinations by age. 98% of people over 65 in the US have had one dose and 86% have had two. Because that's where the risk gets higher. Elderly people are not vastly better educated, smarter, less susceptible to propaganda, or lean toward political ideologies that are more inclined to take it, or have significantly easier access to it.

It's just that they get more benefit from the vaccine and they understand that and act accordingly.

If there was an especially transmissible smallpox epidemic killing 30% of people who contracted it and a vaccine that provided lasting immunity to 95% of people who took it, 99.something% of people would take it I bet.


A comment like this got me banned from reddit, stating I was downplaying the risk of Covid. Not saying covid is not dangerous, it really is, but just looking at numbers even diarrhea kills 10M people yearly. It's just not visible to us in the western world and not picked up by the media.


A lot of people can't cope with hearing about different peoples' perspectives or learning about new ideas that might contradict their own beliefs. They don't go on the internet to be challenged, they go on it to be comforted and assured that their beliefs are right and that other people believe the same things.


> People look at risks and benefits and generally make their minds up pretty rationally, if you account that not everybody values things exactly the same as you do.

But what about when how they value things is not rational?

Consider for example people who are rejecting COVID vaccines because they believe that they contain luciferase (they don't, BTW, although luciferases were likely used in the development of the vaccines). Why, you might wonder, would someone care about whether or not the vaccines contained bioluminescent enzymes?

I've seen two reasons. (1) somehow the bioluminescent enzymes are supposed to make it so the government can track you, and (2) the name comes from the word "lucifer" when clearly means that the vaccine is the work of or promotes Satan.

If someone truly believes either of those things then arguably it is rational for them to decide that the risks of the vaccine outweigh the benefits, but nevertheless I would not call their overall behavior rational.

Quite a few of the reasons for rejecting COVID vaccination given by people who end up as the subjects of /r/HermanCainAward or /r/CovidAteMyFace posts would apply just as well to smallpox vaccination, and quite a few of those people are in high risk COVID groups or situations.


I don't know, what about them?

I'm talking about the vast majority of people who are not vaccinated because they just aren't inclined to rush to get new medical treatments of little benefit to them.

Do the stats for the over 65 group honestly not make the situation clear to you? Focusing on the 0.1% lunatic fringe doesn't help your understanding, and it's the reason so many people are utterly baffled by what is easily explainable. Life is not the 20 loudest and most obnoxious twitter accounts.


There are many people who don't make their vaccination decisions out of a mystic adherence to the very concept of a vaccine, but based on what they perceive to be a cost-benefit analysis (with the level of rigor varying wildly, naturally).

Unlike covid, there's no large cohort of the population for which smallpox is a fairly negligible personal risk, and smallpox outbreaks provide much more dramatic and visceral evidence of their harms than covid does (not sure if you've ever seen an image of smallpox).

The lessons of covid vaccine hesitancy are barely applicable to a hypothetical smallpox outbreak.


Highly disagree. Most people make their vaccination decisions, like most other decisions, based on highly biased information that they have obtained from others around them. There is little "cost-benefit" analysis being done when you aren't actually comparing the real costs and benefits, but rather an extremely skewed interpretation you hear from the bubble you're in.

Given that, regardless of the actual risk or visceral evidence provided, almost anything can be spun as a positive or negative with enough determination, and on the heels of a major anti-vax campaign with Covid, there would be sure to be major overlap between the two were a smallpox outbreak to occur right now.

The first vaccine hesitancy campaign literally was against the smallpox vaccine in Stockholm, so I don't see how you could say that there would be no hesitancy to it. History has already shown that to not be the case over and over again.


> based on highly biased information that they have obtained from others around them. There is little "cost-benefit" analysis being done when you aren't actually comparing the real costs and benefits, but rather an extremely skewed interpretation you hear from the bubble you're in.

You're talking about the quality of the cost-benefit analysis, which I alluded to in my charitably-phrased parenthetical about rigor. That doesn't mean it isn't a cost-benefit analysis, and doesn't make it the same thing as religious adherence to pro- or anti-vaxxing. While some portion of the population engages in this approach, my point is that it's a lot fewer than most people think. That doesn't mean I think the cost-benefit analysis is high-quality, but that modeling these people as dogmatically irrational instead of very bad at being rational is misleading.

In stark contrast to Covid, the nature of smallpox outbreaks makes it so that even an extremely dumb person nominally engaging in cost-benefit analysis would have little trouble making basic inferences about the outcomes faced by people they knew who contracted it vs people they knew who didn't. I got vaccinated because I estimated that my low risk of a bad time after contracting Covid was higher than my low risk of a reaction to the vaccine. If for some reason, I didn't have access to the vaccine, it very likely would not have materially changed my young, healthy, no-comorbidity life.

There's another trivial rebuttal of your hypothesis, outlined in a sibling comment:

> You see the rational behavior play out when you look at vaccinations by age. 98% of people over 65 in the US have had one dose and 86% have had two. Because that's where the risk gets higher. Elderly people are not vastly better educated, smarter, less susceptible to propaganda, or lean toward political ideologies that are more inclined to take it, or have significantly easier access to it.

In your model of most people as not considering the cost-benefit tradeoff of vaccines, how do you explain the significant age disparity?

> The first vaccine hesitancy campaign literally was against the smallpox vaccine in Stockholm

This was _literally the first vaccine for a contagious illness_. You'd have to be irrational _not_ to have some degree of skepticism about being infected with a contagious disease, especially in an era with a population accustomed to a state with infinitely lower capacity and infinitely lower reach into everyday life. A quarter of a millennium later, in a society where the state licenses and ensures our safety in a trillion different publicly-known ways, the reactions of 1750s Swedes could not be less applicable.

Again, the pivotal difference relative to my framing is the approach to vaccines as an all-or-nothing tenet of religious faith, to be rejected with prejudice or embraced with devotion. This is obviously a fairly popular (implicit) perspective on public health, which makes it easy to lose sight that most people do not think like this, even the dumb ones.

> I don't see how you could say that there would be no hesitancy to it.

Kindly don't put words in my mouth. I said that Covid hesitancy is a different enough context that it's not usefully-applicable to a hypothetical future smallpox outbreak.


Shows how vain society is. If COVID was a harmless and flu-like, but causes a permanent mole on your nose, then I can promise you everyone would get the vaccine.


Hehehe, I bet that's true :)


Covid and smallpox are very, very different.


Smallpox is actually dangerous, and the smallpox vaccine is like 200 years old. Not even 1% of people would refuse that vaccine in that scenario.


Once again, two years ago I would have believed it. But considering a sizeable amount of people think that the Covid vaccine "allows governments to track you", "has 5G" or whatever other nonsense has permeated that discourse, I'm not as confident.

Especially if it happened right now with all the controversy around the Covid vaccine, it'd surely be spun as the Covid vaccine in disguise, or the government forcing its way into tracking us all with nanotechnology.


or bird flu. That stuff gets me scared, almost 100% lethality


All it takes is one to get away on a subway near an airport. Some of the original vaccine hesitancy was about the smallpox vaccine when it was endemic, so not everyone would take it.


Wait fees seem pretty reasonable. Maybe the solution is to have them subsidized by the government for qualified individuals.


This is my personal opinion.

If society decides that a sacrifice should be made in favor of a disabled Uber customer, society should incur that cost and compensate the Uber driver the market rate for their time.

Wait fees, in this case, are not being used (in the abstract) to discriminate because there is an time cost inherent in this business model that somebody needs to inur.


When a private business has to meet the legal demands set out by laws governing serving disabilities, it is up to the business in question to shoulder those costs, not society.

Don't like it? Close down shop. Someone else's business will replace you, you won't be missed, and life will go on.

It's outrageous to suggest that private businesses have to be bribed so that they follow the law.


It's not about "bribing". It's about using positive incentive-based economic policy instead of outright bans if certain regulations aren't met. Requiring companies to support certain things doesn't suddenly make them free.

Either way, society eventually shoulders the costs. It just comes down to which members shoulder it more.


> Either way, society eventually shoulders the costs. It just comes down to which members shoulder it more.

Right. In this case, the question is: should Uber riders as a whole shoulder the cost of accommodations for disabled people (presumably Uber could make the price of every ride slightly more expensive in order to compensate for the added cost for disabled riders), or should society as a whole bear this cost (via taxes and subsidies), including people who don't use Uber?

I think a reasonable argument could be made for either, honestly.


>> It's outrageous to suggest that private businesses have to be bribed so that they follow the law.

> It's not about "bribing". It's about using positive incentive-based economic policy instead of outright bans if certain regulations aren't met.

And, to be very clear, this is done constantly. If you leave your home to go anywhere but a nature walk, I guarantee you you pass within close range of at least entity that is getting/generating some sort of rebate or similar for following a regular. Energy rebates alone are everywhere you look.


Should society also pay grocery stores for lost throughput when someone with a disability takes longer to check out? Where exactly does this line of logic end?


Good questions. Are they going to lose business because of lower throughput?

Ultimately the nature of codifying altruism in the law is that someone must sacrifice for someone else; the sacrificer and as well as the recipient of the sacrifice are subject to an Overton window.


I think people feel differently about Uber's situation because unlike a grocery cashier who must spend extra time assisting a slower customer, an Uber driver isn't getting paid in the meantime.


Uber will need to pay them, otherwise drivers will have grounds for a lawsuit next.


Uber is a marketplace not an employer. They're like an Ebay but for car rides. Does Ebay owe you money if you wasted your time listing an item that didn't sell?


So far all of the signals observed by LIGO are from sources that we expected would exist.

The most exciting thing would be to observe an unexpected signal.


Wikipedia lists S200114f (on page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gravitational_wave_o...) in a way that to me makes it sound like there’s substantial uncertainty about the cause of it; is that maybe because Wikipedia is out of date and people figured out the (not unusual) cause since, or is maybe just wrong, or maybe I misunderstand what you mean, or I misunderstood what the people who labeled the entry for it on Wikipedia meant?


did you model how an alcubierre drive would look like on the waveform? (only half joking ;))


The original solution field equation is for a constant speed drive, which I believe does not emit any gravitational waves. I’m not sure how much work has been done on the formation of the bubble and what effects that would produce, or indeed how a ship could change its heading, which are events that I think should produce gravity waves.


There is no upper limit to the wavelength of gravitational waves. However, the lowest frequency that we can currently detect is around 10-100 Hz. Diving the speed of light (3e8 m/s) by (10 Hz) gives 3e7 meters. 30,000 km. The upper end of our frequency range is currently around 8 kHz which corresponds to 37.5 km if I did the math right.

LISA will be sensitive to much lower frequencies (longer wavelengths). NanoGrav also searches for these lower frequency signals.

We expect most gw's to be of very low frequency. High frequency g.w.s require tremendous mass and acceleration to generate. They are only generated in the final moments of black hole collisions as far as we know.


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