A Sense of Doubt blog post #1546 - Slashdot news
Newsy bits I have been saving up just for this occasion.
https://science.slashdot.org/story/19/05/05/044234/end-to-aids-in-sight-as-huge-study-finds-drugs-stop-hiv-transmission
End To Aids In Sight As Huge Study Finds Drugs Stop HIV Transmission (theguardian.com)
The Guardian reports:An end to the Aids epidemic could be in sight after a landmark study found men whose HIV infection was fully suppressed by antiretroviral drugs had no chance of infecting their partner. The success of the medicine means that if everyone with HIV were fully treated, there would be no further infections...
"It's brilliant -- fantastic. This very much puts this issue to bed," said Prof Alison Rodger from University College London, the co-leader of the paper published in the Lancet medical journal.... Dr Michael Brady, the medical director at the Terrence Higgins Trust, said: "It is impossible to overstate the importance of these findings.
"The Partner study has given us the confidence to say, without doubt, that people living with HIV who are on effective treatment cannot pass the virus on to their sexual partners. This has incredible impact on the lives of people living with HIV and is a powerful message to address HIV-related stigma."
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/05/05/0255230/pornhub-expresses-interest-in-acquiring-tumblr
Pornhub Expresses Interest In Acquiring Tumblr (theverge.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes the Verge:Verizon is seeking a buyer for Tumblr, the blogging platform it acquired along with other Yahoo assets in 2017... The platform hosts 465.4 million blogs and 172 billion posts, according to its about page... On Thursday evening, Pornhub VP Corey Price claimed in a statement to BuzzFeed News that his company is "extremely interested" in buying Tumblr and "very much looking forward to one day restoring it to its former glory with NSFW content..."
Price is referring to a major change implemented late last year, when Tumblr took the controversial step of banning porn on its platform. The company has been using AI to detect and automatically block images and videos that contain certain adult content. Existing posts containing porn were made private and are no longer publicly accessible.
Both Fortune and TechCrunch warned the acquisition might actually have bad consequences for adult content producers, since PornHub's owner MindGeek has been accused of ignoring piracy on its streaming sites, "a significant factor in the deflation of salaries for performers in the industry."
In a thread on Twitter, Engadget's senior news editor added "I guess the good news is that things PornHub announces as a publicity stunt don't usually happen, so..."
https://developers.slashdot.org/story/19/05/05/0015208/why-i-prefer-go-over-python-or-java
Why I Prefer Go Over Python or Java' (yourbasic.org)
Stefan Nilsson, a computer science professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, recently explained "why I prefer Go to Java or Python," arguing that Go "makes it much easier for me to write good code."Go is a minimalist language, and that's (mostly) a blessing. The formal Go language specification is only 50 pages, has plenty of examples, and is fairly easy to read. A skilled programmer could probably learn Go from the specification alone. The core language consists of a few simple, orthogonal features that can be combined in a relatively small number of ways. This makes it easier to learn the language, and to read and write programs. When you add new features to a language, the complexity doesn't just add up, it often multiplies: language features can interact in many ways. This is a significant problem -- language complexity affects all developers (not just the ones writing the spec and implementing the compiler).
Here are some core Go features:
- The built-in frameworks for testing and profiling are small and easy to learn, but still fully functional. There are plenty of third-party add-ons, but chances are you won't need them.
- It's possible to debug and profile an optimized binary running in production through an HTTP server.
- Go has automatically generated documentation with testable examples. Once again, the interface is minimal, and there is very little to learn.
- Go is strongly and statically typed with no implicit conversions, but the syntactic overhead is still surprisingly small. This is achieved by simple type inference in assignments together with untyped numeric constants. This gives Go stronger type safety than Java (which has implicit conversions), but the code reads more like Python (which has untyped variables).
- Programs are constructed from packages that offer clear code separation and allow efficient management of dependencies. The package mechanism is perhaps the single most well-designed feature of the language, and certainly one of the most overlooked.
- Structurally typed interfaces provide runtime polymorphism through dynamic dispatch.
- Concurrency is an integral part of Go, supported by goroutines, channels and the select statement.
The professor points out that the Java® Language Specification is 750 pages, and blames much of its complexity on feature creep (for example, inner classes, generics, and enum). And he also applauds the strict compatibility guarantees of Go 1 for the core language and standard packages, as well as its open source, BSD-style license, and Go's code transparency.
"There is one standard code format, automatically generated by the fmt tool," he writes, arguing that "Your project is doomed if you can't read and understand your code."
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/19/05/04/2339224/uk-nuclear-lab-achieves-americum-generated-power
UK Nuclear Lab Achieves Americum-Generated Power
Long-time Slashdot reader nojayuk quotes World Nuclear News (a publication of the World Nuclear Association):The UK's National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL) and University of Leicester have generated usable electricity from the chemical element americium in what it believes to be a global first. The achievement is seen as a step towards potential use of americium in so-called space batteries, which may mean future space missions can be powered for up to 400 years.
Americium is an element not found in nature, but which is produced by the radioactive decay of plutonium -- which itself is produced during the operation of nuclear reactors. A team led by NNL has extracted americium from some of the UK's plutonium stocks, and used the heat generated from this highly radioactive material to generate electric current, which in turn lit up a small light bulb -- all within a specially shielded area of NNL's Central Laboratory in Cumbria, England.
The breakthrough means potential use of americium in radioisotope power systems for missions which would use the heat from americium pellets to power spacecraft heading into deep space or to challenging environments on planet surfaces where other power sources, such as solar panels, no longer function. In this way, NNL said, such space missions can carry on sending back vital images and data to Earth for many decades, far longer than would otherwise be possible.
Tim Tinsley, NNL's account director for the work, calls it "recycling something that is a waste from one industry into a significant asset in another," though he adds that the plutonium is not exactly being recycled. "We 'clean' the americium from it, which would have been a waste. With sufficient applications, all of the UK plutonium could be 'cleaned' of the americium. The returned plutonium is in a better condition, ready for further storage or reuse as nuclear fuel."
https://developers.slashdot.org/story/19/05/05/0532257/python-creator-guido-van-rossum-blames-his-resignation-partly-on-social-media
Python Creator Guido van Rossum Blames His Resignation Partly On Social Media
"Swapnil Bhartiya, the founder of TFIR, sat down with Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python, to talk about the origin of the language and why he stepped down from the leadership of the very project he created," writes sfcrazy.
In the interview, van Rossum emphasizes that he still remains one of the core developers, and provides this update:"We're going to set up a new form of governance. We haven't decided yet what that will be. There is actually an interesting time ahead where we currently have about five of six different proposals for new governance systems, and in November there's going to be a vote among the core developers about that. And then there will be another vote that will actually determine specifically who is going to form the leadership. So we're starting out by choosing a constitution, and then using the rules set out in the selected constitution, we're going to vote for a leadership..."
He talks more about his resignation when asked if there's ever been an after-the-fact debate about decisions he's made:"Well, that certainly happens too. What led to my resignation was a form of that, where on social media -- and I've got a feeling that social media are sort of getting out of hand... But for me personally, social media definitely sort of caused additional stress. And I did not enjoy it when core developers were sort of sending tweets where they were questioning my authority or the wisdom of my decisions, rather than saying it to my face and having an honest debate about things...
"It might just have to do with the fact that I've had this role for 28 years... And all that time, I've been sort of the final decider, the final arbiter. I'm getting older, I'm not always available... I just want to spend less time feeling stressed about what is the community -- I have this attitude where everything that was being said on some of the mailing lists, python-ideas, python-dev, touched me. I felt involved in everything, because ultimately every idea would end on my desk for deciding. And I just thought that that should be a responsibiity that should either be shared or transferred... Given that I've been on the project for such a long time, and some of the currently active core developers are good personal friends that I've known for 20 years or more, I am completely confident that the more experienced core developers that we currently have, plus the newer core developers that we have, together will be able to weather any kind of storm that might come Python's way. Yes I resigned from the title suddenly, but there were a lot of responsibilities that I had already completely delegated. I mean, I barely touch the code base, I barely reviewed submissions.
At one point van Rossum compares the future of Python to that of a grown-up child, in that "You're supposed to raise your child for independence..."
So what's he doing now? " I was and still am a principal engineer at Dropbox, which is actually where I spend most of my time."
https://slashdot.org/story/19/05/06/189257/the-future-of-work-is-remote
'The Future of Work is Remote' (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report:Facebook's F8 2019 developer conference dominated last week, with talk of AI and AR/VR and privacy. But the news and reactions were all largely expected, and frankly, I was disappointed there was no detail on end-to-end encryption messaging across Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. No, what really stood out for me this week was last night's Stripe announcement: Its fifth engineering hub will be remote. Stripe has decided that hiring 100 remote engineers makes more sense than hiring 100 engineers in one place. Housing and relocation certainly played a role in the decision, but not enough to just choose a location with a low cost of living. Stripe would rather hire the best 100 engineers, regardless of where they are in the world.
That's huge. It's also inevitable. Remote work is happening everywhere you look. Coffee shops and restaurants, temporary offices and co-working spaces, train stations and airports -- private and public spaces are full of people doing their job remotely. I've been thinking a lot about this, and not just because VentureBeat's editorial team is almost all remote workers. In my personal life, I've noticed a clear pattern. All my friends, and their friends, choose to "work from home" every chance they get. If their job allows once a month, they work from home once a month. If the maximum is once a week, they do exactly that. If their boss is on vacation or traveling for work, they work from home for as many days as the office environment permits. Whatever the maximum is, that's what they do.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1905.15 -10:10
- Days ago = 1411 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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