• 0 Posts
  • 47 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
cake
Cake day: February 8th, 2024

help-circle
  • So do I understand correctly that a certain hox gene is activated in basically all cells which are in the “domain” of a certain vertebrae and they all activate some subset of homeobox genes which in combination with the original hox gene cause them to start turning into all the different parts associated with that vertebrae (so organs and other structures)?

    Would we then need an entirely new hox gene to produce even a single gill? (I know you basically just laid out most of a response to this question.) Because I would assume although the exact point at which the development of our arms and legs begins is part of the whole hox gene “superstructure”, but couldn’t we ‘basically just’ highjack this same system and duplicate this gene to produce at least a single gill in the region where the current hox gene for our neck is expressed?

    Long story short: what is the biggest reason why we can’t just hack into a later part of the sequence and continue on from there with what you said?

    Or would your proposed plan also just end up like this in the final product and you laid it out like this because it’s already the most viable route into this mess? 😅


  • And that’s the thing:

    Assuming it did, you couldn’t see it approach until it hit you because it’s moving at the speed of light! It could also have happened, but just super far away such that it will never reach us due to expansion between its origin point and us being faster than c!

    Also just because the universe is frickin old doesn’t mean it is statistically bound to have happened. There are plenty of ways of making it even more astronomically unlikely but still possible…





  • The thing is Randall already kind of did something like this in his “What-if?” which talked about a diamond meteor hitting the earth…

    And basically it boils down to: Either Galileo/Newton/whoever was the smart fuck that discovered it was right and the meteor would only create a crater roughly as deep as it was itself. (This if it could touch the core it would be at least the same size as the earth and the picture would look different)

    Or it would be going fast enough to ignore most of all that classical physics stuff, phase through most solid material and blow apart every piece of the earth because it would have enough energy to completely overcome the gravitational force holding everything to everything else here on earth.

    (Now granted, those were the two extremes and there might just be a perfect balance in between, but I’m sure as hell not going to look for it! At the very least because getting funding for the experiments is seriously difficult for some reason…)







  • Welcome to Greece! No, not our modern Greece, the old timey write philosophical questions into the dirt with sticks and argue with your best homies about it kind of Greece!

    Want to compute something? Hope you got all your steps in linear order so you don’t have to remember too much in between other steps!

    /s (but not really so I totally am on your side, original formulations of math problems are a pain…)






  • Uff this started out for me as being “easy! Minecraft, Factorio and a third one!”

    And then quickly and only devolved into an abyss of deliberation…

    • Do I take EU4+DLC+Anbennar because then I would finally have an excuse to actually learn and play this damn game? (Plus having base game and Anbennar basically doubles the replayability)
    • Do I take VintageStory so I can finally learn to actually play it well and start creating meaningful mods for it?
    • Should I take Noita or Caves of Qud? Should they be replacements for DF?
    • Is either of Civ V or Civ VI replayable about for me for this much time?

    And from there the more basic questions:

    • Does any of the three games need to be entertaining enough to basically always run or could/should it suffice to simply rotate between them?
    • How much time would I reasonably want to spend playing vs creating?
    • Also am I allowed to spend some time basically daydreaming every day (aka the games are meant more to actually keep me sane rather than get people to recommend good games they have given thought and time to?) or should they/would I want them to keep me occupied basically 15/7?

    So yeah, Minecraft probably still stands as there are way too many mods and building ideas for it to (probably?) become truly stale in a lifetime!

    And Factorio because I still want to actually finish an AB run for once, or a SE run, or … You get the idea. Buut the third slot would likely be a make or break for this whole endeavor and now it’s back to square one again!



  • Okay first of all this message is really nicely written to explain multi collision attacks! (I knew some stuff about hashing and collision attacks before but not about multi collision and why that would be really useful here.)

    However, I first thought they were looking for inputs which basically preserve a known state and then generating an alphabet with those kinds of blocks (basically have one for each symbol and up to n additional blocks to “reset” the state to the known value) because that could shrink the size of stored blocks by a lot (I’d imagine).

    But now I am wondering if that’s even possible currently (even with an algorithm as “broken” as MD5 has become now)?


  • Except you already have that update installed, the box is not checked and the entry is still respected, nobody could possibly tell you why because that’s not how it’s supposed to work and everyone else works as stated! And now you have to live with the knowledge that your system is in some unobserved quantum superposition with a critical fix in place which may stop working at any moment for any reason and nobody can tell you how you even managed to get into this situation…