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Comment Re:This is the practice since 2019 (Score 1) 68

Pretty sure whatever he died from came from bats. Or hamsters

  1. 'She', not 'he', AIUI. I can assure you from personal experience that anatomically Russians are indistinguishable in all important respects from other humans.
  2. Or more likely marnosets. The commonest vector for plague in this region is the mamoset. I'm not even sure hamsters are found within several thousands km of this area.
  3. The disease has a long history in this area. A recent article : "Lethal plague outbreaks in Lake Baikal hunter-gatherers 5,500 years ago" https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdoi.org%2F10.1038%2Fs41586... Nature Vol654 697, 18 June 2026
      "Here we describe early plague strains that are associated with two phases of outbreaks among mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers near Lake Baikal in southeast Siberia, beginning from about 5,500 years ago. These outbreaks occur across four hunter-gatherer cemeteries, with a 39% detection rate for plague infection. By reconstructing kinship pedigrees, we show that small familial groups were affected, consistent with human-to-human spread of disease, and that the first outbreak occurred within a single generation. The infections appear to have resulted in acute mortality, especially among children (aged 8 to 11 years)."

Comment Re:We're all slightly resistent anyway (Score 1) 68

We're all the descendents of the people who for whatever genetic reason survived the plagues in the past and thats why plaque hasn't reoccured as an epidemic since the middle ages.

Except - that was our (mostly) ancestors acquiring a degree of immunity to a strain of the bacterium circulating 250 and more years ago.

It's fairly unlikely that current wild-type strains are the same strain.

Bacteria do evolve in the wild, you know. (Everything evolves in the wild.)

Comment Re:Something is not completely adding up (Score 1) 68

Yes, and this statement:

Russia's public health agency said Shipilova had "pneumonia of unknown etiology" and that further testing found no microorganisms linked to her work.

Which I assume was meant to be reassuring, is the exact opposite. It tells me that it is very probable that whatever was actually in the test tube is something they don't even have the ability to test for or identify.

Comment Starship booster? (Score 2) 50

This doesn't make sense on the surface for a number of reasons. The Starship second phase cannot launch most of the things that Falcon 9 launches. I'm assuming they are going to have two large shuttle-like doors on a Starship eventually that can release larger payloads?

The next thing that doesn't make sense is simply payload size. Certainly it is not more economical to use the Starship stack to put something into orbit that is only a small fraction of its cargo capacity? And yes, I know it could carry multiple satellites / spacecraft at once, but it is very rare those things all need to be in the exact same orbit at the same time. So it seems Falcon 9 would be more economical for launching a single smaller thing?

Maybe the economics of the Falcon 9 second stage not being usable totally makes the case for Starship? It's estimated a second stage costs between $7 and $10 million. So perhaps right there economically it makes more sense to fly a 100% reusable Starship even for a small payload. I guess the liquid methane Starship burns is a relatively cheap, being derived from natural gas that the USA already has in abundant supply.

Comment Re:AI never lies, it just has bad human data? (Score 4, Interesting) 286

In 2001 supposedly it really was "human error". Some humans told Hal 9000 to lie to the astronauts and not reveal that an alien artifact had been found on the moon. And that was a mistake as they probably either knew or could test what would happen to Hal.

This is remarkably similar to things going wrong with AI now, actually.

Comment Training (Score 1) 216

I live in a very rural area. We have no military bases within hundreds of miles, but we are on a military training flight route. We see all the fighter aircraft on a weekly basis flying over (very low), and a very small rural airport somehow got set up to refuel Osprey's on their flight routes. So we see Osprey's nearly every day flying over.

My point is that scheduling a plane to fly over a game at a specific time is pretty much inconsequential because these things are flying CONSTANTLY around the country for training. They have to rack up the hours one way or another.

Comment Why would an LLM know what humans want? (Score 2) 74

Why in the world would anyone think that an LLM would know what products humans would want to buy? To the LLM, all the products are merely words. Just descriptions. It cannot perceive anything about these products, but only knows of them indirectly via words. Further, all the LLM knows about what things are appealing to humans is also from words.

The whole thing is absurd really. It reminds me of something like Futurama where Bender is trying to cook food for humans. Or Star Trek and Data is trying to do something human but failing at it. Just not nearly as entertaining to watch this store fail though.

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