Biomedical research in the US has taken an absolute nose-dive several times over the past decade or two. This was my field for the past 20 years, so I'm fairly familiar.
It requires enormous capital investment and a very, very long time to turn out meaningful results, so it's only available to those with corporate-depth pockets or government subsidies. It also requires a broad and deep skill set.
With the FDA, USDA, NIH, CDC and DoEd all being gutted, the subsidies are gone. Academia can no longer support a huge swath of biomedical research.
> US has taken an absolute nose-dive several times over the past decade or two
This is also my field... and if the nose-dive is what has delivered in these past two decades RNA-seq, induced pluripotent stem cell generation, CRISPR-mediated genome therapies, CAR-T therapy, single-cell RNA and DNA profiling, spatial transcriptomics, targeted GLP- and incretin-modulation therapies? Then that's a wonderful nosedive.
The capital investment has always been true if you want to do R1 research. But you don't have to do that at all! There's also Oxford Nanopore, tons of open data through NCBI and other resources, more open papers than ever.
> It also requires a broad and deep skill set.
Yes. Like anything, being good takes time.
> Academia can no longer support a huge swath of biomedical research.
Maybe. I think there will be money for things that affect the rich (incurable cancer, longevity) and for things that are sexy to the unsophisticated (CZI Biohub 'OpenCell'). But there is money in this, so I don't think academia (to wit, people who know how to do research) will go away, just will change.
You report an error and exit cleanly with a proper operating system error code. Crashing is a quick hack, acceptable for throwaway projects but not in software used long-term.
I think you're using "crash" to mean "exit early". I am using "crash" in the sense of "this program did something causing the OS to terminate it externally". I suppose that's a real point of difficulty in communication across different programming languages.
We agree that the program should exit early. I think we agree it should do it cleanly and intentionally. I'm adding the constraint that "crash" doesn't necessarily mean "cleanly and intentionally", especially when talking about a C program.
There's a position in between "exit cleanly" and "general protection fault, core dumped" where the process essentially does the internal equivalent of SIGKILLing itself.
I.e. either intentionally (e.g. tripping an assertion failure), or accidentally due to some logic-failure in exception/error-handling, the process ends up calling the exit(3) syscall without first having run its libc at_exit finalizers that a clean exit(2) would run; or, at a slightly higher runtime abstraction level, the process calls exit(2) or returns from main(), without having run through the appropriate RAII destructors (in C++/Rust), or gracefully signalled will-shutdown to managed threads to allow them to run terminating-state code (in Java/Go/Erlang/Win32/etc), or etc.
This kind of "hard abort" often truncates logging output at the point of abort; leaves TCP connections hanging open; leaves lockfiles around on disk; and has the potential to corrupt any data files that were being written to. Basically, it results in the process not executing "should always execute" code to clean up after itself.
So, although the OS kernel/scheduler thinks everything went fine, and that it didn't have to step in to forcibly terminate the process's lifecycle (though it did very likely observe a nonzero process exit code), I think most people would still generally call this type of abort a "crash." The process's runtime got into an invalid/broken state and stopped cleaning up, even if the process itself didn't violate any protection rules / resource limits / etc.
It's a very language-dependent meaning. In C, the only type of crash is the OS shutting it down on some sort of trap. Everything else is the result of an explicit code path. Since we're talking about C, it's the definition I'm using. In other contexts, other definitions will apply.
Definitely! An interesting distinction. I spend much of my time in the BEAM these days, where "let it crash" is a common practice with a very distinct meaning (green threads under supervisor trees, etc). Different strokes.
Yes, polar regions are reliably colder than equatorial regions. Lytton, BC hit the temperature you cite for one day on Tuesday, June 29, 2021. That's a sign of warming, and we should expect more warm days than in the past at any given lattitude. But it is not evidence against the general case that polar regions have colder climates than equatorial regions.
Complexity doesn't necessarily mean it's suboptimal. Lithography and nanofab are usually doing a whole range of disparate and wildly exotic processes with extreme vacuum, plasmas, electron guns; any number of crazy and dangerous process gases like H2, HF, or silane; and occasionally raw materials like iridium and rhodium. And that's all without the actual lithography. When your margin for error is measured in single atoms and your number of features per die outnumber the planet's population 2:1, physical laws start to stand in the way of simplification.
The one 'machine' encompasses more disciplines than most universities offer. It's really a whole bleeding edge factory compressed into a room.
It didn't, but the advent of spellcheck and autocorrect has made everyone completely give up on proper grammar or word selection as long as no squiggly line appears.
Maybe that’s part of it, but I’ve also noticed autocorrect on my devices often correcting incorrectly. As in, I type the word correctly and it decides “oh, surely you meant this other similarly spelled word” and changes it. Sometimes I don’t notice until after sending the message.
I use MS SwiftKey on my android phone and it will often autocorrect my correctly spelled, correctly used, words, to words that probably don't exist in any language (recently it corrected "blow" to "blpw").
I have French installed on my keyboard as well so sometimes it will randomly correct English words to French words (inconsistently, but at least they're words), but blpw is not a word in either of those languages.
Unfortunately, I think me typing blpw three times has officially added it to my dictionary :)
Don't worry it's no better on iOS, where I too have a English+French QWERTY setup, and where it too frequently decides to "helpfully" correct using an English dictionary several words into a unambiguously French sentence; or the other way around depending on wind direction and age of the captain.
Even more damning is that there seems to be three independent layers to the feature ("three suggestions" area above keyboard, autocorrect-as-you-type, correction popup as you touch a word) and neither agree with each other about which language it should be using.
Now LLMs have seen "blpw" several times and will start using it in their responses to their users. Next: Oxford dictionary word of the year 2026: "blpw".
Could also be non-native speakers .. Even as a former grammar nazi, now that English isn't my daily driver language I find myself making basic mistakes .. (two, too, to / its, it's / etc.)
Having grown up around immigrants and other folks who learned English as a second language, I always attributed "loose" for being a signal that perhaps English isn't the writer's first language.
I think what you say is partly true too, but it's not a new phenomenon. Some examples
Language evolves. The English we learned in grammar school is likely not going to be the same English our kids or grandkids learn. At the end of the day, written communication has a single purpose — to communicate. If I can understand what the author is trying to say, then the author achieved their goal. That being said, I wish my mom did use spell check or autocorrect because her messages often require a degree in linguistics to decipher, but because of typos, not spelling. Maybe she'll influence the next evolution in typed communication :)
Well, no. Some common plastics like polycarbonate aren't biodegradable, and will basically never break down without application of significant heat/water/enzymatic activity/etc. For some of these, the half-life could be a great deal more even than 10s of millenia:
12" viewing distance?! It sounds like you should be spending more at the optometrist and less at Best Buy. I cannot even imagine sitting that close to a screen--don't you have to turn your head just to see both sides of a document?
It's probably more like 18" currently. I don't know, what's your reading distance to a book page? I use FancyZones to dividede the screen into 3 vertical areas (like having 3 monitors). For coding and longer reading periods I use the middle area. But yes, to look at the side areas I have to turn my head or even slide the chair a little. The angle could be better, like I said.
Regarding reading distance: For me the important part is to sit straight and avoid hunching. Choose a combination of distance and screen scaling factor that works for you...
TVs generally have more input lag, poorer color fidelity, and except at the high end like 8k the pixel size is often inappropriate for viewing close up.
There's less of a gulf now than in the past, but TVs are generally made for media watching at a distance.
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