It was a poor reference to a quote from the TV show Community. The half Palestinian character Abed says that his father’s falafel restaurant had been struggling for a while because “9/11 was pretty much the 9/11 of the falafel business”

9/11 was the 9/11 of the Jenga business

During my graduate research, our lab space was next to the cell modeling department and I would catch a talk here or there. Always found it a super interesting approach because it really tries to make sense of what we’ve learned from traditional biology and generates really nice hypotheses/theories for testing out in biological models. I also love how you can apply so much abstract mathematics to biological systems for biologically meaningful findings. Most of these types of cell modeling papers go above my head, but I still really appreciate them from outside.

Cool! I used to work on molecular dynamics of viral proteins through computational simulations in undergrad, but had never heard it be called theoretical biology before haha.

The duck is theoretical biology? Like math modeling and simulation stuff?

All of that interest is from people making computers, or people who manage security. Not from people that use computers as part of their life/work (in contrast to those who’s work is entirely about the computer itself). From a usability standpoint, this type of sandboxing for every app is cumbersome and all it leads to is users finding unsafe work arounds. I used to be able to use my android phone much more as a regular computer than I can now. And I wanted to make a simple app for myself to allow me to automatically copy and catalog photos from my cameras sd card to an external HDD, and I literally cannot do this without jumping through a million permissions and API hoops on Android even though I never plan on publishing this app for others to use. It became such a pain to figure out how to get access to the folders I would need, I just gave up on the entire project. I essentially needed a tool to systematically copy and rename files, and it’s nearly impossible because of these nonsensical policies.

Sure except that we already have computers where every app uses the same folder structure, just with some files/folders protected with elevated permissions that aren’t accessible to every app. We already have a solution that works and every desktop OS uses. Why would mobile go for a solution that isn’t actually usable?

Yeah but there used to be hope for affording a house after you finished and got into a tenure track position. But now there are barely any tenure track positions and even those don’t always pay enough for a house