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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • What Macron has lately been calling “far-left” would have been considered middle of the road leftism only a couple years ago. Macron has pulled such a massive shift of the Overton window --what with calling himself a centrist when all of his policies are right-wing, and constantly calling anyone that’s left of him “far-left”-- that it’s no surprise right-wing extremism is totally normalized now. LFI is not far-left, and I wish the media would stop repeating and thus normalizing that idea.



  • That there are such wild variations in price between countries shows how little that subscription is correlated to any actual costs.

    At best subscribers in richest countries are subsidizing poorer ones, but most probably, Google is just trying to maximize the amount of money they can extract from everyone’s pocket. The repeated seemingly random price hikes seem to confirm this hypothesis. It’s just the MBAs enforcing terminal stage capitalism and ruining everything that is good.



  • According to the paper this article is based on, the family of viruses they study, called NCLDV (for NucleoCytoplasmic Large DNA Viruses), are about 1 μm in diameter, which would indeed put them up there with the largest viruses like Pandoravirus or Pithovirus, which are also around the micrometer mark, and I believe are also part of the NCLDV phylum.

    Those viruses are about the size of a bacterium. In fact they are so large that they weren’t immediately identified as viruses. Here’s something to give you a sense of the size of common viruses :

    However, I don’t know how they come up with that 1500x factor (which doesn’t appear in the source paper), since in size, it’s more like 10x bigger than your average virus (~100nm). Even considering genome size, common viruses genomes are about 10 kb or so, wheras Pandoravirus is the biggest at 2.5Mb. So that would be closer to a 250x factor at best.

    For reference, SARS-CoV2 (of COVID-19 fame) is about 100nm in diameter and has a genome size of 30kb.














  • It works by using the processing power of your device (it can utilize both GPU and CPU) to run scientific calculations when you’re not using it. It can detect if you’re using the device or not and use its processing power accordingly, and you can customize what fraction of your device it can use and when. You can also decide what scientific endeavors (astronomical surveys, protein folding, etc.) are allowed to use your compute power.

    That makes BOINC a great way to heat a room in winter provided you’re not annoyed by the eventual fan noises (or if you’re not in the room), since the energy used will also help scientific research at no extra cost for you. This also means that depending on your settings, it can melt a mobile device battery in no time.