Should have funded the entire GIL-removal effort by selling carbon credits. Here's an industry waiting to happen: issue carbon credits for optimizing CPU and GPU resource usage in established libraries.
I wonder about the total energy cost of apps like Teams, Slack, Discord, etc... Hundreds of millions of users, an app running constantly in the background. I wouldn't be surprised if the global power consumption on the clients side reached the gigawatt. Add the increased wear on the components, the cost of hardware upgrades, etc...
All that to avoid hiring a few developers to make optimized native clients on the most popular platforms. Popular apps and websites should lose or get carbon credits on optimization. What is negligible for a small project becomes important when millions of users get involved, and especially background apps.
If we go by Microsofts 2020 account of 1 billion devices running Windows 10 [0], and assume all those are running some kind of electron app (or multiple?) you easily get your gigawatt by just saving 1 watt across each device (on average). I suspect you'd probably go higher than 1 gigawatt, but I'm not sure as far as making another order of magnitude. I also think the noisy fan on my notebook begs to differ and maybe the 10 GW mark could be doable...
There are 30,000 different x-platform GUI frameworks and they all share one attribute: (1) they look embarrassingly bad compared to Electron or Native apps and they mostly (2) are terrible to program for.
I feel like I never wasting my time when I learn how to do things with the web platform because it turns out the app I made for desktop and tablet works on my VR headset. Sure if you are going to pay me 2x the market rate and it is a sure thing you might interest me in learning Swift and how to write iOS apps but I am not going to do it for a personal project or even a moneymaking project where I am taking some financial risk no way. The price of learning how to write apps for Android is that I have to also learn how to write apps for iOS and write apps for Windows and write apps for MacOS and decide what's the least-bad widget set for Linux and learn to program for it to.
Every time I do a shoot-out of Electron alternatives Electron wins and it is not even close -- the only real competitor is a plain ordinary web application with or without PWA features.
Many times this. Native path is the path of infinite churn, ALL the time. With web you might find some framework bro who takes pride in knowing all the intricacies of React hooks who'll grill you for not dreaming in React/Vue/framework of the day, but fundamental web skills (JS/HTML/CSS) are universal. And you can pretty much apply them on any platform:
- iOS? React Native, Ionic, Web app via Safari
- Android? Same thing
- Mac, Windows, Linux – Tauri, Electron, serve it yourself
Native? Oh boy, here we fucking go: you've spent last decade honing your Android skills? Too bad, son, time to learn Android jerkpad. XML, styles, Java? What's that, gramps? You didn't hear that everything is Kotlin now? Dagger? That's so 2025, it's Hilt/Metro/Koin now. Oh wow, you learned Compose on Android? Man, was your brain frozen for 50 years? It's KMM now, oh wait, KMM is rebranded! It's KMP now! Haha, you think you know Compost? We're going to release half baked Compost multiplatform now, which is kinda the same, but not quite. Shitty toolchain and performance worse than Electron? Can't fucking hear you over jet engine sounds of my laptop exhaust, get on my level, boy!
The solution is ironically, LLMs. You can construct a set of Claude skills to walk you through a code review, or understand code (anything, even course) fast.
This complexity to understanding compression will be a big market going forward.
Great art isn't necessarily about popularity / wide appeal, though. In fact, the art that isn't of wide, general appeal, is what stands to benefit the most from this kind of benefit.
Both are broad spectrum antivirals, but completely different mechanism.
DRACO "is a chimeric protein with one domain that binds to viral double stranded RNA (dsRNA) and a second domain that induces apoptosis when two or more DRACOs crosslink on the same dsRNA." (Ridder et al 2011). This article is about packaging mRNA for a set of 10 interferon-stimulated genes that express multiple proteins that target various stages of viral replication.
When you get a viral infection, immune cells make a signalling protein called a IFN-1 (Type I Interferon) cytokine, and this flips a boolean flag to True on a bunch of genes (interferon-stimulated genes or ISGs) that produce a bunch of proteins (hundreds) that control the infection. ISG15 is one of them and its role appears to be to downregulate and to limit the inflammation.
The paper title refers to a ISG15 deficiency, meaning if you are dificient in ISG15 that inflamation limitation goes away. But the paper is actually about how in people that naturally have a ISG15 deficiency, there is an always-on low level expression of some of these pro-inflamation genes. So they take that as a safe level.
The did RNA sequencing on experimental ISG15 deficient cells and from heatlhy individuals, identified the mutations, narrowed down to 10 genes (antiviral ones not inhibitors) that in combination significantly inhibited viral replication. They stuck the RNA for such genes in lipid nanoparticles such that they enter host cells, whose ribosomes happily read the RNA like a turing head reads a tape in base 20 and produce proteins encoded by these genes, similar to how the mRNA vaccine works.
So why not dose with the IFN-I directly? Three referenced papers show its "poorly tolerated with significant side effects" and all those downregulators that get expressed limit the inflammation response.
Disclaimer: IANAB (not a biologist) corrections might be due..
This is typical of "why not just one drug/treatment" for something big like viruses, cancer, etc.
I think we'll never have this "one shot," but continue to find tailored treatments for individual conditions. There's no way out of this complexity with "one simple trick," which seems really appealing to the people who determine what gets popular in social media and seemingly politics now. Its just going to be boring and grueling academia and medical trials that are hard for the layperson to understand, hence the important of funding these programs. The recent right-wing election wins and thus a right-wing government cutting all manner of medical grants is supported by the "one weird trick" crowd. Hopefully, the USA will have better leadership in the future to get us back to actual science and to find actual new treatments.
Already, even on HN, the top comments are conspiracy-culture coded, "but, but this one company bought the patent and disappeared with it!" Sigh.
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