Agreed. One day I realized my computer was completely out of space, was barely still running. Turns out Microsoft store had dutifully downloaded many copies of a game until the entire drive was full. Uninstalling got rid of only one copy of the files. Store said it was no longer installed even though all the files of many copies were still there. Deleting them manually was a horrible mess of permissions issues, involving the need to edit the registry and things too. I think I ended up needing to boot into Linux from a usb stick to finally fix everything up. Anyways, steam for me if I have the choice. Let me just delete files if I need to Microsoft, geeze.

It’s true, electronic medical records range from garbage to totally broken in terms of usability for healthcare workers. Then you realize the actual customer is the hospital system, and all the design decisions start to make sense. Because the real purpose of the software is efficient billing, not patient care.

As much as I hate meta/Facebook, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think these laws are right either. I don’t think you should have to pay to simply provide a link to another website. This runs antithetical to the whole idea and structure of the internet. If they’re taking the article or photos and republishing it on their own website that’s different and they obviously should have to pay for that. The linking to news sites is actually good for news sites though and increases profit for publishers by driving traffic to their sites, it doesn’t take profit away. The news publishers are free to have a paywall or put advertisements on the page being linked too and get revenue from that. This feels like publishers wanting to eat their cake and keep it too, they want big search engines and social media to link to their articles so the news sites get traffic and revenue from advertisements/subscriptions, and then they also want the search engines who created that traffic in the first place to pay for linking too? I think publishers are shooting themselves in the foot in the long run lobbying for these laws all for a pittance of cash.

This idea could also affect things like lemmy too eventually and make them impossible, if you need to pay to simply provide a link to a news story or other website.

Thanks for posting that! The grant was interesting. Specific aims page is down on page 107 to save others who want to read it some time.

One of their main hypotheses they wanted to test was that covid viruses they found in animals in the Wuhan market would have greater fitness than those found in wild animals due to spillover between multiple species and other differences in the environment, which in light of current events seems a reasonable hypothesis.

https://www.factcheck.org/2021/05/the-wuhan-lab-and-the-gain-of-function-disagreement/

Above is a good summary. Here’s my personal take if interested:

Short story is an nih grant was awarded to a US based non profit research coalition, and the grant involved collaboration among multiple institutes. NIH funds are generally given to US based researchers primarily, but it’s also common if you have a good reason for the project to have international collaboraters on the grant as well. In this case they were collaborating with the Wuhan virology institute, who are obviously going to be very helpful in any collaboration to study corona viruses, since multiple novel corona viruses have been found or made the jump to humans in China before. So yes, a small portion of a much larger grant was sent to Wuhan, who helped provided corona virus samples for US researchers to study.

As an aside it’s also mentioned there was another corona virus 96% similar in genome to covid was previously isolated by that lab from bats. But saying that’s proof they artifically made covid from that virus is pretty ridiculous, altering genomes to that extent and still having a functioning virus is basically science fiction, would take an absurd amount of technology and resources that just do not exist currently. For comparison, humans and chimpanzees have 98.8% similar genomes, so 96% is really not that close. To get from 96% similar to covid even in the much smaller viral genome would still involve at least 1200 changes to different nucleotides across every gene and structural non coding regions and still have all the proteins it encodes not only somehow still work and be expressed correctly but do this even better than before. We’re struggling along with just slight changes to one gene at a time in genetic engineering currently.

Another point that keeps coming up, is research that was done in North Carolina (not China) that some people argue as gain of function research but by other definitions is not (if nih considered it gain of function research it would not have been funded due to a funding pause with that). This keeps being conflated with US funding gain of function research in China, which is not the case.

All in all, the NIH was absolutely interested in funding research into corona viruses because of the fear that something like this would happen after multiple novel corona viruses that started pandemics. I’m still very skeptical of the lab leak theory personally, when we already have multiple instances of novel corona viruses causing epidemics lately, like obviously it could happen again and still can. I suppose it’s possible this virus was found somewhere else, then brought to the lab, then leaked from the lab, but then it would have already been circulating and could have caused a pandemic anyways even without a lab leak. I think people just want to have an easy answer or someone to clearly blame, when the whole world is actually to blame for some extent with out terrible responses to potential pandemics and actually chronic underfunding to this problem that should be a high priority for the whole world. And probably will be happening with only greater frequency as we encroach further on habitats and become more and more densely populated and interconnected. Saying oh we just need to lock down viral labs even more (which hey I’m not even saying is a bad idea, keep that stuff locked up tight), is a much simpler problem to tackle so people would rather go after that than the true larger issues we’re facing with our poor abilities to surveil for and respond to potential pandemics.

Hope some found that interesting at least, sorry for the novel.