n0rbwah

Fun fact, Syncytin-1 is the syncytin used by primates, other branches of mammals have other forms of syncytins, meaning that the event of being infected by a retrovirus that gives mammals proteins necessary for the placenta happened several times in history following the original event and replaced the original syncytin.

(Not sure those proteins are also called syncytins in other mammals but I'm not a biologist so I'm using the limited vocabulary I have)

Saying that before the Top 40 music was reduced to people singing songs badly in pubs and the few who could afford an instrument is a pretty reductive view of musical history.

No, they made a big deal of giving a ten-years period to developers to port their code before depreciating python 2.

But honestly, there are more breaking changes between two versions of ruby than between python 2 and 3. And during the time python 2 was still supported (until the last day of 2019), most features that made it into python 3 and could be backported were backported into python 2.

It will be a pain for those who aren't used to python 2 encoding errors and other nice stuff that they got rid of in 3 to make it a nicer and more robust language. And the will miss the new and shiny features that will make it in new python 3 version after python 2 EOL.

But apart from that, it's almost the same language, they just made the transition from 2 to 3 to be able to introduce some breaking changes in places that unfortunate design choices had made their way into the language and couldn't be rolled back because people running python 2 in production depended on those. So they upped the major version, introduced some breaking changes (but not that much really) and gave developers 10 years of support for the older language so they could port their codebase to the new version.

And porting a python 2 app to a python 3 app isn't such a hard task. But! If you've got a big app that's working now, even if the changes aren't that drastic, you can't be sure that the port won't introduce some hard to find bugs that will be a pain to debug. Hence why plenty of companies are still running python 2 versions of their apps and will do so for the forseeable future.

But, throwing a python 3 dev at a python 2 codebase is totally doable, it's just that the guy or gal will miss the shiny stuff that didn't get backported into 2 and will break their teeth on some behavioral changes between the two languages.

Well, the ultimate achievement when building an LFS system is to plug it to an existing package manager so you don't have to keep updating stuff manually.

In 50 years, I bet they'll still be looking for python 2 developers to work on old python code...

Or not... it's not like you can't throw a python 3 dev at an old python 2 codebase and tell them to work on it. Even if that probably wouldn't make them very happy about it, they wouldn't be lost.

But I'd bet an arm that there will still be python 2 codebases running in production in the next decades with companies very unwilling to do the work of migrating it.

Bah, even if the vaccine was 100% safe and 100% effective antivaxers would claim that it's a death shot that does nothing for your immunity.

But yes, we should definitely be as sure as possible that the vaccine is reasonably safe and effective before getting into large scale vaccination campaigns.

Not because of the antivaxers though. Because it would be incredibly irresponsible not to do so and it could hurt many people.

How that problem can be solved by an IBM 5100, a computer that has never ran any flavor of unix is a mystery though.

I guess we'll find out when we have to send someone into the past to retrieve one so we can fix the bug.

Arwen isn't that weird though, a quick search says it can also be of welsh origin rather than LotR geek origin.

I think it's pretty clear from the scientific data that the covid-19 virus is a recent zoonotic infection that jumped from bats to humans (with possibly another animal in between). How could it possibly have caused any human illness before that?

BTW, covid-19 is the disease (same as the flu). The virus is named SARS-Cov-2.

Yes, people here aren't that eager to make sacrifices for the greater good. Unless it's other people doing the sacrificing.

IMO, this virus isn't as deadly as that. It was reasonable for China to implement such measures because 1) at the time they didn't know how bad it was and 2) their people are actually quite compliant with what their government asks them.

But now, we know this virus isn't ebola's death rate combined with measle's R0. Large scale quarantine like in China is probably overkill and quite risky if your population isn't as docile as populations in authoritarians regimes.

Closing schools, cancelling mass events and asking people to work from home if they can is a more measured approach. Even without that, the apocalypse isn't coming anytime soon.

I can't speak for all western countries but in my country (France) if the government tried to impose quarantine on the same level as China, I'd expect riots.

People here aren't as docile as Chinese people and don't fear their government. If a city was quarantined like Wuhan with the situation turning to shit, many people would take to the street to protest instead of staying nicely confined at home.

And if the government's repression got too harsh there, you'd get protests all around the country in support.

That's why I haven't heard anything from my government about potential large-scale quarantine. They know that here it probably would make the situation worse.

I've heard that their border with China is pretty porous and that people cross it on a daily basis to get contraband into the country.

So I'd say b) is most likely. People are criticizing China's release of information but compared to NK, they're pretty transparent.

Even if the situation on the ground was disastrous, I'd bet that the government would do everything to hide it.

Jehovah Witnesses trying to find out the identity of one of their members who badmouthed them on the internet...

Good thing it didn't go through.