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Cake day: 2023年6月16日

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  • Accounts differ but most reports say a low number of years. Older flash memory is more stable than the newer stuff, because it only stored one value per tiny capacitor, so the charge had to drop by 50% for the bit to be lost. In newer flash memory they use each cell to store more than one bit, which means they need to make finer discriminations between charge levels, so there’s less tolerance for weakening charge levels. Many people report losing data after only a couple of years unpowered with modern devices. Some older devices can go for more than a decade. I don’t have any studies to hand but if you search for information about bit rot in flash memory you will find plenty of discussions online.

    If you power up the device and read all the data, this will refresh the charges.


  • It will. A pandemic response requires cooperation and coordination around the world. The USA will not cooperate with anyone, and the most deluded antivaxers are going to be the running US health policy this time. RFK wants to defund vaccine research, dismantle scientific institutions and withdraw even well established vaccines from the market. So any virus that starts to circulate will find a huge pool of unvaccinated people in the USA, where it can continue to circulate and mutate and reinfect other countries.

    And from what I’ve read, the bird flu has a human mortality rate of about 51%, compared to COVID which was around 1 or 2%. With luck, that will actually prevent it spreading too widely, but it could be very bad even if it becomes less aggressive. And clearly it’s capable of spreading widely in other species while maintaining a very high mortality rate. So the world needs to be very ready, not arguing about whether the medicines that have protected people from serious disease for hundreds of years should be abandoned because some guy’s brain worm told him so.





  • I take her point, but it’s naive to say things like, “That’s not something an Ivy Leaguer would say.” I’ve known many people from Ivy League and other prestigious universities, and they don’t all write well. There are still malapropisms and overly verbose sentence constructions, and some people fall into a habit of trying to sound clever or cultured out of insecurity (a common problem in a highly competitive and judgmental institution). For a while I used to edit people’s theses and journal papers and I’d constantly be rewording things to sound less clunky or just to fix basic grammar or word choice. Most of this “manifesto” is pretty plainly written, and the couple of clunky bits don’t really prove anything. I’ve seen worse from highly educated people.