AernaLingus [any]

  • 0 Posts
  • 37 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: May 6th, 2022
  • AernaLingus [any]toAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What's the dumbest argument you've ever had?
    4•3 months ago

    I feel like there’s not much to fight about. I can understand the latter perspective, but from a practical point of view it just makes sense to consistently assign it to AM/PM rather than creating an unnecessary edge case (lord knows there are enough of those with date/time systems). Also this is all made moot by the superior system: the 24-hour clock (now THERE’S something I bet you could have a good argument about!).

  • AernaLingus [any]toAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What's the dumbest argument you've ever had?
    7•3 months ago

    I can’t remember the specifics (both because it was dumb and because it’s so embarrassing I think my brain is trying to protect me), but from what I recall I got into a heated argument on the internet with someone because I felt that fans weren’t cheering hard enough for a band I liked at a concert.

    …yeah, I know. I’m grateful, though, because it was so colossally stupid and pointless that I had a come-to-Jesus moment and swore off internet arguments entirely. I can only imagine the countless hours of my life it’s saved me in the intervening years.

  • AernaLingus [any]toWorld News@lemmy.ml•Leading cancer scientist Sun Shao-Cong returns to China amid US investigationsEnglish
    5•3 months ago
    Full text

    After three decades of distinguished work in the United States, world-leading cancer researcher Sun Shao-Cong has returned to China to establish a new lab in Beijing, following what a source said were investigations of him by the US government.

    Sun joined the Chinese Institutes for Medical Research (CIMR) as a distinguished investigator in July, he told the Post via email last week.

    Known for his pioneering research on T cells – white blood cells that fight infections and destroy abnormal cells – Sun’s roles in the US have included director of the Centre for Inflammation and Cancer at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston from 2014 to 2022.

    Since then, he has focused on recruiting for his lab and a new immunology institute. He said his team will study the molecular mechanisms of anticancer immunity, autoimmunity and inflammatory diseases, with an emphasis on T cell function and regulation.

    Sun was removed from his position in 2022 after being investigated for his ties to China, a source told the Post on condition of anonymity.

    Details of the investigations remain unclear, but MD Anderson was among the first institutions to dismiss China-born researchers after warnings from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), one of their major funders, about potential theft of US scientific research.

    In 2018, the NIH and the Department of Justice launched separate probes into alleged economic espionage and technology theft from China. But the investigations sparked controversy over concerns about racial profiling.

    By April 2019, MD Anderson had expelled three unnamed Chinese researchers, citing conflicts of interest or undisclosed foreign income, the Houston Chronicle reported.

    During a career spanning decades, Sun has received more than US$24 million from NIH-affiliated institutes, including the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Cancer Institute, according to the NIH RePORTER website.

    In 2012, Sun was named a Cheung Kong Scholar, a prestigious talent recruitment programme supported by China’s Ministry of Education and the Li Ka Shing Foundation to foster student training and research collaboration at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

    Sun earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Hubei University and a PhD in microbiology from Stockholm University. He moved to the US for a postdoc position at the University of California, San Francisco in 1992.

    He then conducted T cell-focused leukaemia research at Pennsylvania State University’s Hershey Medical Centre, and rose to distinguished professor status in 2007 before transitioning to MD Anderson.

    Sun’s research employs cutting-edge immunological and molecular biology techniques, including mouse models, to explore T cell activation, functionality, and the impact of the tumour micro-environment, according to a July job posting on CIMR’s official WeChat account.

    “Professor Sun has made numerous far-reaching contributions to this field and is an internationally recognised leader,” the post said.

    Although the Department of Justice’s China Initiative was terminated in 2022, US government agencies have continued to scrutinise China-born researchers.

    Most investigations have failed to reach court, and a small number of prosecutions were for charges unrelated to the espionage the probes sought to address.

  • AernaLingus [any]toWorld News@lemmy.ml•In a grim mirror of Japan’s economic decline, the sex trade is drawing in foreign men and trapping local women in a cycle of desperationEnglish
    8•4 months ago

    Since the archive link didn’t help in getting the full article:

    Full text

    In the golden years of Japan’s economic boom, its men would venture to foreign shores, seeking the thrill of illicit encounters offered by women from poorer nations. But today, the tables have turned, with foreign men now flocking to Tokyo for “sex tourism” as the yen weakens and poverty rises.

    Yoshihide Tanaka, secretary general of the Liaison Council Protecting Youths (Seiboren), painted a grim picture of the current landscape.

    “Japan has become a poor country,” he told This Week in Asia at the organisation’s offices. Nearby, in a park that’s become synonymous with the city’s sex trade, young women wait for customers before the sun has even set.

    Tanaka’s organisation noticed an increasing number of foreigners frequenting the park as soon as pandemic-era travel restrictions were dropped.

    “But now we are seeing a lot more foreign men,” he said. “They come from many countries. They are white, Asian, black – but the majority are Chinese.”

    This influx has coincided with a troubling rise in teenagers and women in their early twenties turning to the sex industry to survive, Tanaka said, alongside an alarming increase in violence.

    “It’s getting worse. Much worse,” he said, shaking his head. “There are more kids here and more violence, but our organisation cannot do anything more than we are already doing.”

    Tanaka’s frustration is palpable as he reflects on his decade-long struggle to support the young Japanese women who wash up in Tokyo’s notorious Kabukicho district – a maze of bars, love hotels, and host clubs where the vulnerable are often preyed upon.

    Among them is Rua*, a 19-year-old who felt out of place in her high school in neighbouring Kanagawa prefecture. Arriving in Kabukicho in February with hopes of finding a cafe job, she quickly found herself overwhelmed by expenses.

    “I owed a lot of money to a host, so from April I went to the park,” she said, using a euphemism for standing on the narrow streets around Okubo Park, waiting to be approached by a potential customer.

    “I needed to pay off my debts and wanted to buy nice things, like clothes,” said Rua, her youthful features accentuated by a chic bob and a flair for “Gothic Lolita” fashion.

    To finance her visits to her favourite host at a local club every few days, she has also dabbled in what’s known as papa katsu – finding sugar daddies to help cover her expenses.

    She speaks of her work with startling nonchalance, detailing prices for an hour in a love hotel – between 15,000 yen and 30,000 yen (US$100-US$200) – like menu items. On slow days, she will meet around five men; on weekends, that number can double. Rua recently had her second abortion, a grim reality of her lifestyle.

    “There are all different types of men who come to the park, but I would say that about half are foreigners,” she said. “I’ve talked to girls who have been here longer and they say that is different, that it used to be mainly Japanese men, but this place has become famous.”

    Rua mentions “one English man” who is a regular customer, as well as others from Taiwan, mainland China and Hong Kong. “I’m popular because of the way I look so I am always busy,” she said.

    But the risks are ever-present. “One of my friends was attacked by a Chinese man on the street a few weeks ago,” Rua said, her voice steady but laced with fear. “They were talking about the price and he suddenly got angry and hit and kicked her. She hit her head on something and had a bad injury. It happens quite often, but I have been lucky so far.”

    Tanaka corroborated Rua’s experience. When she called him after her friend was assaulted, he rushed to help, taking the injured woman to the hospital. He said she was angry and wanted to file an official police complaint.

    But when it came time to confront her attacker, the police were far more interested in labelling her a prostitute than pursuing justice for her assault. Faced with the reality that reporting the crime could lead to her own arrest, she withdrew her complaint.

    “That is always what happens,” Tanaka said, his frustration evident. “The girls are assaulted because the customers know they will not go to the police … The men know this. They think they can do anything.”

    Tanaka remains cautiously optimistic about Rua’s future, though he is acutely aware of the toll that her work will take on her mental and physical health – he has seen it countless times before. Few who frequent Okubo Park emerge from the experience unscathed.

    As local police and government authorities turn a blind eye, Tanaka fears the spiral of young lives caught in a web of desperation and exploitation will only worsen, while the world watches in silence.

    “I think someone is going to get killed, sooner or later,” he said. “It’s inevitable. Right now, no one cares about these girls. One of them being killed by a customer might get their attention briefly, but I expect they will soon forget again.”

    *Name changed to protect interviewee’s identity

  • AernaLingus [any]toRust Programming@lemmy.ml•Would this be a correct syntax for error handling when making an http request?English
    4•5 months ago

    I’ll preface this by saying I’m working my way through the Rust book, too–just a bit further along–so don’t take my word as gospel.

    This exact scenario is what the ? operator was designed for: returning early with the Err if one is received[1], otherwise unpacking the Ok. As you’ve discovered, it’s a common pattern, so using the ? operator greatly cuts down on the boilerplate code. If you wanted to do the equivalent of you have here (panicking instead of returning the Err for it to potentially be handled in calling code, albeit without your custom panic messages[2]) you could achieve this with unwrap() instead of ?:

    let html_content_text = reqwest::blocking::get(&permalink).unwrap().text().unwrap();

    Both of these will be covered in chapter 9.

    If you want to avoid those constructs until later, the only thing I’d say is that some of the intermediate variables seem unnecessary since you can match on the function call directly:

    fn get_document(permalink: String) -> Html {
        let html_content = match reqwest::blocking::get(&permalink) {
            Ok(response) => response,
            Err(error) => panic!("There was an error making the request: {:?}", error),
        };

        let html_content_text = match html_content.text() {
            Ok(text) => text,
            Err(error) =>
                panic!(
                    "There was an error getting the html text from the content of response: :{:?}",
                    error
                ),
        };

        let document = Html::parse_document(&html_content_text);

        document
    }

    You could also eliminate the final let statement and just stick the parse_document call at the end, but that’s a matter of preference–I know having an intermediate variable before a return can sometimes make debugging easier.

    As for whether you should build something now or wait till you learn more–go with your gut! The most important thing is that you stay actively engaged with the material, and many people find diving into projects as soon as possible helps them learn and stay motivated. You could also use rustlings and/or Rust by Example as you go through the book, which is what I’ve been doing (specifically rustlings). It’s not as stimulating as writing a project from scratch, but it does let you write some relevant code. And if you’re not already, I highly recommend using the Brown version of the Rust Book which includes interactive quizzes sprinkled throughout. I’ve found them particularly helpful for understanding the quirks of the borrow checker, which is a topic it continues to revist throughout the book.

    1. There’s also some type coercion, but that’s beyond the scope of your question ↩︎

    2. edit: you can use expect to get the custom messages as covered in another comment–not sure how I forgot that ↩︎

  • AernaLingus [any]toAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•what addiction have you kicked? no matter how insignificant you feel it wasEnglish
    4•7 months ago

    Facebook (when that was still a platform young people used). I would obsessively scroll through it for hours each day, basically trying to look at and comment on EVERYTHING. On a whim, I decided to take a break from it for a month. By the time the month was up, I realized I didn’t miss it at all, and that was that. One of the big takeaways was that I thought that I was forming relationships with the people I’d comment back and forth with, but in reality these were people who I would never hang out with outside of school and barely even talk with in school (if at all); it was all just superficial, and I was better off spending time talking to my actual friends.

    It wasn’t that bad, but in high school I mindlessly got into the habit of drinking a few cups of Coke each day (I think it started because I would get a 2 liter whenever I’d order pizza). I quit it pretty much cold turkey, and not only did I stop drinking it at home, I no longer order it at restaurants either, which is something I did ever since I was a little kid. The idea of just buying a bottle of soda and drinking it is straight honestly grosses me out now even though getting a can or bottle from a vending machine was something I’d do without thinking. The one exception is when I’m pigging out at the movies with a bucket of popcorn, but that’s pretty rare.

  • AernaLingus [any]toUnited States | News & Politics@lemmy.ml•The Federal Reserve is now saying that the US shot itself in the foot with its export controls on China, as illustrated by Intel's recent staff layoffs.
    5•8 months ago

    In text form:

    Abstract

    Amid the current U.S.-China technological race, the U.S. has imposed export controls to deny China access to strategic technologies. We document that these measures prompted a broad-based decoupling of U.S. and Chinese supply chains. Once their Chinese customers are subject to export controls, U.S. suppliers are more likely to terminate relations with Chinese customers, including those not targeted by export controls. However, we find no evidence of reshoring or friend-shoring. As a result of these disruptions, affected suppliers have negative abnormal stock returns, wiping out $130 billion in market capitalization, and experience a drop in bank lending, profitability, and employment.

    Quote from conclusion

    Moreover, the benefits of U.S. export controls, namely denying China access to advanced technology, may be limited as a result of Chinese strategic behavior. Indeed, there is evidence that, following U.S. export controls, China has boosted domestic innovation and self-reliance, and increased purchases from non-U.S. firms that produce similar technology to the U.S.-made ones subject to export controls.