Notices by That Would Be Telling (thatwouldbetelling@shitposter.world)

@sun @Neo_Dolus @LordMordred Indeed. They lead in specifics with "Protect the Wayback Machine" while anyone who's been following this knows they've been poking the bear hard in other areas, thus risking their one unique "product" no one else is systematically doing.

See their "unlimited lending of ebooks we made ourselves because of the COVID emergency!!!" stunt. That was entirely unforced and it's hard to argue against the rights holders suing in return, whereas prior to that their limited lending of those books was not provoking a response.

Anyone know the real details of 78 RPM archive issue and lawsuit(s)?? As the prior stunt showed, we can't trust their side of the story.

Clearly colorable, despite (((Eugene Volokh))) protests:

"Plaintiff Alleges Her Children Were 'Trafficked by Members of the Democratic Party's Babylonian Talmud-Adherent Ashkenazi Jewish Cartel-Controlled Foster Care Sex Trade'"

https://reason.com/volokh/2025/04/21/plaintiff-alleges-her-children-were-trafficked-by-members-of-the-democratic-partys-babylonian-talmud-adherent-ashkenazi-jewish-cartel-controlled-foster-care-sex-trade/

@sicp @p But at some point, by the time of V6, ed allowed you to not rewrite a whole line.

Like ignoring positioning details, to change the type of b, you could do:

Which in this case is more characters to type, but that gives you the idea. The pattern "/char/" can then be used again without typing it all, just "//"

You could also find a line with /[search pattern]/ and that saves the pattern to then do a substitution, or another search.

There can be issues of picking the unique set of characters, but at least the anchoring '^" and '$' beginning and ending of the line worked.

I can't remember when full regular expressions were added to the pattern, ex has them today, but they weren't something I delved into when I was exclusively using ed on V6 and V7, at least for a while in the latter. But I expect these sorts of things to have been added as soon as they were thought of, K&R and company having a very direct interest in editing efficiency.

As quickly as possible I installed an ersatz Emacs on that V7 system, but ed/ex are still handy to get around terminal issues and for quick changes, especially if you've got it wired into your brain. And no surprises like fucking nano having a default of breaking lines at 80 characters or whatever :cirnoForReals:

@p @sicp Some of dc's popularity has to be related to the HP calculator phenomena starting in 1968 for the customer. RPN is just plain popular for calculating for a lot of people, I too use dc by default, but first started with HP handheld calculators.

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

@sicp @p "K&R style (along with the old C syntax) I figure makes the most sense if you consider writing stuff line-by-line on a teletype with ed; it keeps the lines short."

And there we have it! :cirnoSmile:

Ed was my first editor (not counting the punch card game), and some of it was on a DECwriter, plus I used a real Teletype for international communications a while later.

There were extreme penalties in both time to do a mechanical line feed (and carriage return to a degree) and paper use if you'd for example written "} else {" in three lines. K&R and crew just wouldn't have done that, in the same way they found the CR-LF?CR-LF an entirely acceptable single error message in ed.

Of Bell Labs code I've only read the V6 kernel examples in the Lions' Notes, it was pretty nice although maybe Lions touched it up, or ran it through a pretty printer, I think there was one by the time of V6.

"When I look at Bell Labs code I usually get the idea that whoever was writing it cared more about just getting the program out than getting it to look nice."

There was a lot of work needed to make UNIX™ usable for normies writing technical documentation, I can entirely believe a "get it done" attitude without worrying so much about code formatting elegance in the process.

Especially outside of the kernel where you had it to catch so many mistakes semi-elegantly.

@p @sicp I recognized the Allman style since I find the balanced braces to be much more legible and clear. Although I didn't change to that until my terminals had a lot more than 24 lines.

@sicp @p (Eric) Allman style, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentation_style#Allman_style

(Any of us buy a Scroll of Sendmail back in the day: https://www.amazon.com/sendmail-4th-Bryan-Costales/dp/0596510292 ?? My goodness, it got up to a fourth edition printed in 2007, increased to 1308 pages and 3.84 pounds!)

@BowsacNoodle @Shadowman311 OK, I understated the requirements for BSL-2 lab facilities; per the CDC and common sense:

"All procedures that can cause infection from aerosols or splashes are performed within a biological safety cabinet (BSC)"

Which is evidently "just a hood," all labs should have one anyway for dangerous chemicals work, and per Wikipedia there's a bunch of hood designs that avoid sucking in lots of unfiltered air which could contaminate what you're working on.

Per that article, gloveboxes are a BSL-4 thing (along with a lot else!), although I think I remember some people claiming they had "enhanced" BSL-2 labs due to their having gloveboxes.

In all these BSL-2 cases, the big problem is will the researcher actually use a BSC at all times it's required? Which could be beyond the "infection from aerosols or splashes" cited above. Drag their stuff off their lab bench area to the BSC, maybe even including mice, then back?

And if you're testing your mad scientist respiratory disease gain of function creation like COVID on humanized mice (transgenic with human cells in the important places), after inoculation you need to keep them in a negative pressure system so they don't spread it.

The PRC is notoriously lax in doing the needfull, multiple SARS-COV(-1) escapes in Beijing, Steven Mosher even reporting that pre-COVID one Beijing lab worker was selling dead animals for food instead of burning them....

The WIV notoriously, after building their first Official civilian BSL-4 lab with the French, kicked out as soon as it was done, violating the agreement they French would then teach them out to use it. And long pre-COVID the State Department was reporting they were sloppy. See also the picture with a freezer that had seals which weren't where they were supposed to be.

Also worth reading up on Feynman's cargo cult science concept if you've not heard of it before, he first observed it while on sabbatical in Brazil. Heh, when he gave them a lecture on their failings, he cited two students who'd escaped it ... both of whom later told him they'd learned science basically outside the system of this university when their professors were too busy with WWII work to do normal teaching and supervision.

https://www.cdc.gov/training/quicklearns/biosafety/

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

https://search.brave.com/search?q=cargo+cult+science

@Zardoz @BowsacNoodle @Shadowman311 99.999% sure SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab leak of a gain of function experiment. Almost certainly done by "The Batwoman" in a Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) BSL-2 lab.

That is, a normal lab bench with minor precautions, not in the two levels up, highest danger and most booked for use BSL-4 lab the WIV has.

That is, she was not in an uncomfortable, much less productive moon suit you see in a photo or two. BSL-3 is the absolute minimum that's sane for gain of function research, obviously BSL-4 is not too much, but really BSL-"we will kill you if you try this shit" is what's required.

From my knowledge of the biology angle, Alina Chan did some of the first good work on this while locked out of her lab by looking at full genomes.

Unlike SARS-CoV(-1) early on and which died out it is was remarkably well adapted to humans, did not mutate a lot to get better as of when she did that work, start with "SARS-CoV-2 is well adapted for humans. What does this mean for re-emergence?" in May 2020.

She then wrote two papers every couple of months which gets us to the first sample of the first significant variant, Alpha. That is, the first one seriously more adapted to humans, much more transmissible, albeit also with a higher death rate.

She later wrote a book, that should be a good intro. See also reports on the DRASTIC team, like "The Lab-Leak Theory: Investigating Fauci's COVID 'Can Of Worms'" by Katherine Eban, published in of all places Vanityfair.com in June 2021

They do good, highly technical for the MSM work upon occasion, see also for example the one on Steve Ballmer's catastrophic HR policies while he lead Microsoft.

@BowsacNoodle @Zardoz @Shadowman311 We wouldn't be trying to eradicate poiliovirus if it had a known animal host!

And the campaign would be providing evidence of such a host; getting to the recent very small numbers of known infections in some years is implicit evidence.

Per Wikipedia, monkeys can be infected with it in the lab, and transgenic mice were constructed for a small animal model. Per the below paper found with Brave AI, the former requires direct inoculation into the central nervous system (CNS), and there is as common a "specific cell surface molecule" to get into cells.

Wikipedia credibly claims "Because of its short genome and its simple composition—only a strand of RNA and a nonenveloped icosahedral protein coat encapsulating it—poliovirus is widely regarded as the simplest significant virus." With a claim of only "about" ten viral proteins, that's not many at all.

For example, no N for nuclecapsid structural protein like with coronaviruses that packs up the RNA, mutations in that did better and better jobs for the Alpha and Delta variants, I forget about Omicron. The crunchy protein shell crudely does that.

The "about" depends on how you count them, for example the melts in your mouth gut outer shell starts as one protein, which is cleaved into two parts which are each cleaved again into a total of four. As usual, the host cells provides various proteins etc. to do a lot of the heavy lifting.

Seriously wild, except this sort of thing is routine I think, its RNA folds upon itself, and a lot of that is conserved (mutate one of them and the virus can't virus).

All sorts of wild things naturally happen starting with "junk" DNA that is defined by not directly coding for a protein, instead has other functions including regulation and shaping what exits the nucleus a mRNA, m for messenger from the DNA to the ribosomes that use it as a literal control tape to make proteins.

Or TL;DR: especially with the help of viruses including bacteriophages we understand a lot of this at the molecular level.

Or insight into what DNA had to do biologically is why Watson and Crick figured it out its structure, while chemists like the sainted Franklin and Linus Pauling, the best 20th Century one, were barking up a triple helix which makes no biological sense.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3859295/

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

@BowsacNoodle @Zardoz @Shadowman311 The poliovirus, having a hard crunchy protein shell on the outside instead of being an enveloped virus (outside is fragile cell membrane stolen from the host cell, with proteins sticking out), does survive in water for extended periods of time, per a Brave AI search 75 or more, but declining rapidly by the end of that period.

So not forever, water is kinda hostile in various ways (extremely hostile if it's totally pure, will grab atoms from most anything it's stored in, this is a real problem for certain scientists). And drinking water is treated with chlorine or chlorine compounds, which keep killing all the way to the faucet, important for suppressing cholera.

While the story was suppressed or is strongly denied for the obvious reasons, the Greens convinced Peru to stop chlorinating the water in Lima (the Greens actually want to completely outlaw that vital atom (really)), and that gave them a cholera epidemic in 1991....

Bacteria vs. virus, but chlorine is mighty effective. Still need to add UV to get Giardia which is a protozoa and thus much more sophisticated than a bacteria.

So I submit that if we don't see any polio cases for a decade in the whole world, we'll be able to stop vaccination like we did for smallpox and rinderpest. If we can fucking do the latter even in Darkest Africa, which has a zillion alleles (genes) for lactose tolerance vs. one for the rest of the world....

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

@p @charlie_root @sicp @JoshuaSlocum @mangeurdenuage @mischievoustomato "> And the trade off of a 31-63 size register bank, register 0 always returning 0.

"I didn't know 68k did this...."

Sorry I wasn't clear, that's because it doesn't!

It's CISC, in the first generation addressed the maximum number of gates problem with a 16 bit microarchitecture, like the lower end System/360s, one of which had an 8 bit microarchitecture.

Slow in principle, but gets the job done with speed from putting it all on one chip. Checking just now (I barely used any for serious programming) it does have 16 registers (including the stack pointer), but they're divided into data and address ones, and I recall one or two assembler/compiler people I knew not being happy about that.

@Zardoz @BowsacNoodle @Shadowman311 I'm indeed angry, because you're a fundamentally dishonest interlocutor and representative of the potentially terminal decline of the mind in the Right, which I'd like to be part of.

See for example how you move the goal posts from "4 vaccines" to "72 injections."

And you continue to ignore rhinderpest, again a disease wiped off the face of the earth.

But you did make me curious, I would have had a minimum of childhood nine vaccines, and thirteen inoculations as a child, not counting the third smallpox booster for travel.

Perhaps ten of the former if I got both types of polio vaccines, the inoculation count depends on how they were formulated back then, I checked MMR and measles and mumps. On the other hand, I wouldn't have gotten vaccinations for either as a baby because of when they were licenced in the US.

TL;DR: If you have to lie to make your case, you don't have a case.

@Zardoz @BowsacNoodle @Shadowman311 "Small pox was pretty much not a thing anymore long before the 'vaccine' came out...."

You are so completely ignorant and determined to miss the point it's breathtaking.

The "vaccine" started as a 1796 thing! It killed hundreds of millions of people in the 20th Century, and I was required to get a booster before one trip outside the US in the early 1970s.

And it's gone. That's not "pretty much not a thing," that's "not a thing at all!"

And you're completely ignoring the rinderpest animal disease.

Where the indeed very significant, greatest in the First World (and maybe Second? (Communists)) gains in mortality rates were made from potable water and sanitary sewers or the like, and real public health, is not relevant.

That you didn't even check it out tells us your a tribal NPC parroting what you've been told. You're no better than the other side's extremes.

@BowsacNoodle @Zardoz @Shadowman311 And these people have no explanation worth anything about how smallpox and rinderpest (measles was a zoonotic jump from it ~500-1500 AD) were wiped off the face of the earth.

Smallpox used to kill 30% of populations already culled by the first wave(s).

In a way, I'm glad I'm old, because my parents members of the early Silent Generation. They know in their bones all sorts of harsh realities from pre-antibiotic infections, and my father's life was saved with first generation, an injection in the butt every four hours penicillin. Ditto a cultural Boomer friend who's mother was completely freaked out because rheumatic fever had been a death sentence (actually, I think she might have gotten a next generation form, but they did dose her up to the gills).

As well as the realities of hard times, the Great Depression and WWII. Not quite obsessed with food, but it is very very important to them, and reading between the lines while they grew up on farms, they must have had malnourished peers. Per the USDA that was a quarter of the population before WWII, when the draft confirmed their estimates.

@CoQ_10 @BowsacNoodle @Shadowman311 In my reading just now in Wikipedia (I know, I know) a problem with maternal antibodies to RSV was mentioned for infants.

Sounds like the dengue vaccine problem which is an archetypal example of ADE, although they only should be given to someone who's already had it. Which sounds like it was a Phase IV post-marketing discovered problem, vs. the Phase I for RSV which was also much more severe.

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

@BowsacNoodle Coronaviruses are yet another special case.

We were warned at the beginning the four wild type endemic ones, one perhaps from the late 19th Century Russian "flu," weren't good at providing long term sterilizing immunity.

Per one paper I skimmed and my vague memory, a third of the people they checked appeared to have gotten that, to regions common to all coronaviruses. That is, very conserved. which tends to mean very vital to a virus.

Which could help explain the weird patterns of wildly different COVID outcomes, comorbidities including age were much less strong in predicting bad outcomes than expected. My hypothesis being these people had already gotten at least one coronavirus "common cold," and their immune system did a fantastic job of targeting.

But for most people, COVID sterilizing immunity didn't last, wild type virus and/or vaccine, although statistically much better outcomes were seen in people who'd previously gotten one or both forms of immunity. But the virus being a lot more lethal, per one study of VA data including a terrible 8% delayed mortality rate after six months for those not hospitalized (see link for details, and that population wasn't very old).

By the time of super-super-super transmissible Omicron, per local hospital reports none vaccinated were dying, although as far as I know it wasn't though to be inherently less lethal than classic, Alpha, and Delta, which were sequentially more lethal.

"I wish COVID hadn't brain broken so many people."

Indeed; the US Right has turned out not to be fit for purpose in existing in a technological world with, you know, competition like the PRC, or running one. Being systematically excluded from STEM is no excuse for not learning the essentials anyway.

Looks like the @Shadowman311 is not going to reply to me, so I might as well call out the stark insanity of making life and death decisions about your children purely on opposing "anything Elizabeth Warren or Chuck Schumer supports."

They are merely as tribal as he is and the rest of the Right has become, and, heck, why did we even bother to walk out of the jungles to up north of the Sahara? Literal niggers....

https://www.unz.com/isteve/when-will-biden-finally-shut-down-flights-from-india/#comment-4613645

@BowsacNoodle @Shadowman311 "Antibodies injections over vaccination — things like RSV have antibody injections that give a few months of coverage when baby is most vulnerable. These are good."

Do we have the money to give that to every baby, especially as you note, when it only works for a few months? And in practice this doesn't work for adults after they get a bug.

We don't have a RSV vaccine for neonates because it turned out to be damned hard to make any that was safe. In the '60s a simple inactivated whole virus one was tried, and, damn, this was a challenge (Phase I) trial per Wikipedia (which otherwise matches my memory)! As in, the subjects were exposed to the virus, 5% of the controls hospitalized, 80% on the vaccine arm, including two deaths.

The problem turned out to be a floppy protein, stabilizing it resulted in a vaccine that can be used on adults, and this lead directly to a similar path for the better SARS type coronavirus vaccines.

The anti-vaxxers screamed endlessly the original SARS vaccine test, again a simple inactivated virus, killed all the animals it was tested on!!! Like scientists weren't problem solvers. Per Wikipedia a 2013 paper pointed out the stability problem for RSV, and per the second link below a solution was found for SARS type coronviruses in 2017.

Which all the US authorized vaccines used, except Janssen added a third stabilization to it's ultimately too high severe adverse effects single dose vaccine. The Oxford clown show didn't for some reason, their efficacy was lower with two quick back to back doses, adverse effect rates were't good, and both used adenovirus vectors.

A family which had never made it past a European sized Phase II trial, and produced blood clotting problems, per a paper I glanced at for Oxford's, due to something on the (chimpanzee) virus' surface. Not of much interest, AZ which was strong armed into making the vaccine (not previously a business line for them) tried a US sized Phase III trail but didn't submit an application to the FDA.

Although maybe part of that was the criminal clown show of a notorious grifting company, though multiple administrations, W, Obama, Trump 1.0, that wasn't competent when it came to spinning up production of it and Janssen's in their US facility in Baltimore. Among other things they tried to make both in the same facility and got cross contamination.

Sputnik V was also of this type, and their claims of no adverse reactions were an obvious lie, all vaccines have a small rate of anaphylaxis. One reason my pediatrician's office in the 1970s maintained a portable kit that included epinephrine for injection and a small oxygen bottle, why today Walmart etc. asks you to hang around for fifteen minutes so they can Epipen you if needed.

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

https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/vaccines/tiny-tweak-behind-COVID-19/98/i38

@BowsacNoodle @Shadowman311 And that, along with expense, is why we don't try so hard to give everyone a flue vaccine dose every year. You must always think about these things from an ecological viewpoint, different strains, virus families, etc. fighting it out in whatever domain. See how the 2020-2021 flu season basically didn't happen in the US.

And so we focus on the most vulnerable, the young (not sure how young until it's not such a big deal), the elderly, and the otherwise extra vulnerable. And it still kills a fair number of reasonably healthy adults, and hits others like a freight train as happened to me in very early adulthood once.

And we don't try super hard to get all of those; it's a "best effort" vs. EXTERMINATE!!! EXTERMINATE!!! That will have to wait on a sterilizing vaccine, assuming one is even possible.

@BowsacNoodle @Shadowman311 Influenza immunization is a particularly special case:

Nothing, wild type virus or all vaccine attempts to date provide sterilizing immunity. You get that when the adaptive immune system recognizes one or more "conserved" parts of a virus, things that can't change or the virus won't virus.

Its genome is divided into a handful of segments; you, a pig, a duck, whatever can get two strains at once, some cells will get infected by both, and hybrid viruses will result. Thus is has mutation patterns you don't see in other viruses.

Even if we were to move entirely to the faster grow in bug cells in reactors Protein Sciences method instead of some companies still using eggs (or rather, the membrane cells of chicken eggs), it take a while to make a season's worth of vaccine. So you have to guess ahead of time which strains will be prevalent every six months (northern and southern hemisphere).

For the first reason, there's no point in trying for long term immunization, so one simple dose of surface proteins is all we try. (Seniors in the US get quadruple doses because their immune systems are getting less effective, and last time I checked there was one US licenced alternative with an adjuvant for them.)