MillironX

When the article brought up the cancer drug analogy, I thought roughly the same thing. We still don't know why certain drugs work (take gabapentin as a prime example), but we're still comfortable using them on a regular basis.

I very much have had the same experience as the author with research libraries. I have learned so many life-changing techniques and derivations from books that were two or three down from the book that I was looking for. When I became a research associate, I would often have my librarians ship the books to the branch closest to my office, and I stopped browsing the shelves myself. It wasn't until I went to the main library that I checked out a book several over from the one I had found in the catalog that I had a major breakthrough. Now that same library has collapsible shelving that makes browsing feel like a chore, and it makes me think we lost something valuable.

That said, I had high hopes for the catalog that the author had put together, but for my technical fields, I found it lacking. Trying to find books that would be close to van Soest's Nutritional Ecology of the Ruminant or van der Werf's Animal Breeding: Use of New Technologies, yields a whole bunch of pop-sci titles. The joy of finding these titles at the library in the past was how remarkably understandable and engaging they were while remaining scientifically rigorous. I immediately feel that the pop-sci titles that I was recommended are going to try to sell me something or some idea, rather than letting me explore ideas myself. I guess that means I need to go back to browsing library shelves myself.

We covered yew extensively in toxicology class in vet school, but I didn't know about any animals that eat the berries. My favorite fact about yew is that the Iowa State Lloyd Veterinary Center is named after a toxicologist, yet has yew planted for decoration all around the building.

Of the communities mentioned that I recognized, most were retirement-aged communities. In that case, wouldn't age demographics alone explain the population differences?

My college has replaced textbooks with internet resources and "current academic literature," but I'm shocked at the number of people who can't interpret a scientific article, nor properly search a database like PubMed or CABI. It can't be for lack of training: we have entire semester-long courses dedicated to research and library use. Maybe the distractions of text messages and TikTok are to blame like the article suggests.

In the animal world, the genomic vaccine revolution has led to two new types of vaccine being produced.

1. The Autogenous vaccine, where a veterinarian submits swabs of offending organisms to a lab that cultures and produces a vaccine specific to that strain to sell back to the clinic. Genomics play a role in determining if the currently circulating strains match the culture that the vaccine is based on.

2. The prescription platform vaccine, where genomic sequences are used to create a custom antigen that is produced in a microbial factory.

The efficacy of these types of vaccines is hotly debated because they do not have to go through clinical trial before distribution. The development of "commercial" (i.e. clinical trial-burdened) vaccines appears to have slowed based on my observations. While I think some of these new vaccines show promise, many autogenous and prescription platform vaccines are just more expensive versions of vaccines already available, or they package organisms that are suspected commensals and market it as something that no one else has done.

It's hard for me to call today a "golden age of vaccine development" in that light. I hope that the article is only taking human vaccines into account and that there is appropriate efficacy data for every vaccine shown in the last chart.

The first argument actually leans in favor of LaTeX or Typst as a better replacement for Docx.

A LaTeX or Typst document can contain both the content and formatting together within the same file. This isn't idiomatic for either language, and my experience is that this is more common for Typst than LaTeX, but both can do so. All of those formatting rules like small caps, table widths, margins, page numbering, etc.? Those can be rigidly defined in either LaTeX or Typst and are better guarded aginst accidental formatting rules breaches from double click, copy/paste, or table cell insertion than in Word.

I'm more sympathetic to the network effect argument. It's hard to envision a reasonable redline system compatible with both Docx and LaTeX/Typst.

> I don't think Julia really solves any problems that aren't already solved by Python.

But isn't the whole point of this article that Matlab is more readable than Python (i.e. solves the readability problem)? The Matlab and Julia code for the provided example are equivalent[1]: which means Julia has more readable math than Python.

[1]: Technically, the article's code will not work in Julia because Julia gives semantic meaning to commas in brackets, while Matlab does not. It is perfectly valid to use spaces as separators in Matlab, meaning that the following Julia code is also valid Matlab which is equivalent to the Matlab code block provided in the article.

    X = [ 1 2 3 ];
    Y = [ 1 2 3;
          4 5 6;
          7 8 9 ];
    Z = Y * X';
    W = [ Z Z ];

I'm not sure I understand your point. You're saying that channels are like apt/sources.list or yum.repos.d, and flakes are like the Apple App Store? Or the other way around?

One thing that probably didn't help my understanding of channels was that I run Nix on non-NixOS systems (primarily MacOS and Fedora). If I'd stuck to NixOS, then thinking of a channel in the same terms as apt/sources.list or yum.repos.d would have been an easier mental model.

> The flakes were the main UX/DX improvement for me. Before them I honestly could not do anything.

Agreed. I think flakes are far more intuitive than channels. In a flake everything is declared in the repo it's used in. I still don't understand channels.

For someone who's used to thinking in channels, I suppose flakes would be jarring. For someone (like me) who came from the world of Project.toml and package.json, flakes make a lot of sense.