Crazy that despite their progress behind the scenes, they appear to have not touched this website since.
I probably spent a little too much time tweaking the CSS to get the mosquitoes to not overlap the text on various viewport sizes :)
The DEBUG utility was originally named DEBUG.COM in early versions
of MS-DOS, but it was renamed to DEBUG.EXE starting with MS-DOS 3.2
And yes, some of us are either old enough that we remember DEBUG.COM, or we got started way too young.
The debug.com binary only showed one measly ASM instruction at a time as I recall. Shudder.
My favorite thing about WinDbg is that many people pronounce it "Windbag".
So, no, WinDbg has nothing to do with debug.com.
Its assembler is sadly stuck in the pre-x86_64 era (and refuses to do arm at all), however it disassembles all of those fine.
Signed: someone who does pronounce it wind bag
I don't consider France to be part of the modern world, since I haven't visited Europe lately.
I say this as something who does all the things you described debug.com as doing, in this modern era.
edit: I see I simul-posted with u/modeless, but I can't remove it now that there's a (duplicate) reply. Maybe mods can remove or at least collapse mine (their ID is one lower so they were first)
So, no, WinDbg has nothing to do with debug.com.
Release a few thousand females carrying a gene drive that produces all infertile males, and all fertile females (who all also have the same gene due to it being a gene drive). Every generation, there are more and more infertile males, and more and more fertile females carrying this extinction gene. After several generations (a.k.a. a few years), the population collapses completely.
I vote yes.
https://www.nea.gov.sg/corporate-functions/resources/researc...
https://blog.debug.com/2019/11/singapore-collaboration-achie...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4k5xfrkR4Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cH57Oo-FYQ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAcxBNcAV00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGiCO_4EqoU
It's been so long since I've heard about Debug that I was afraid it was cancelled.
This is addressed in their FAQ as well: "The general consensus among scientists is that the ecological impact of removing Aedes aegypti mosquitoes from urban environment would be small. They are not a significant food source for other animals and are invasive to many areas. The main ecological impact would be to restore the ecosystem to how it was before the mosquitoes invaded. Debug team is committed to working with communities and regulators to ensure the safety and acceptability of our field trials and releases."
Google Mosquitoes - Debugging Florida
(probably the other way around, but what's the fun in that)
The Krogans got punitively infected with the genophage to drastically reduce successful births after their rebellion.
We should go out of our way to avoid spraying insecticides in our lawns and other spaces. The lifecycle of the mosquito is much more rapid than that of fish, spiders, dragonflies, bats, etc. If you regularly nuke an area with insecticides, the mosquito population will have a lot less pressure to deal with.
This isn't a project to eliminate all mosquitos. There are over 3600 species of mosquito - this project is only targeting one: Aedes aegypti, which spreads many diseases, and is in fact an invasive species. Anywhere you see an Aedes aegypti outside of North Africa, it was humans who brought it there in the first place. This project is just trying to undo that.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
Principal Skinner: No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Principal Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: Then we're stuck with gorillas!
Principal Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
Eliminating mosquitoes sounds great to me on the surface, but I wonder if it will have any adverse effects on any plants that rely on them for pollination, or if it's expected that there are plenty of other insects ready to fill any void they leave.
I think for the releasing-sterile-mosquitoes angle, it's actually more interesting to me to use some kind of molecular clock, I think I read about a genetic modification that resulted in a generation or two of fertile males, but then the Nth generation is sterile as a result of the molecular clock unwinding.
Linus's LinkedIn indicates debug moved from verily to google in Dec 2024 (I missed this at the time). Debug was always a passion project (unlikely to make a huge amount of money compared to ads, AI, and cloud) and Verily's transition to something that lost less money probably required them to move Debug back to Google.
Mosquitoes are a vector that spreads disease-causing germs to a population. The proposed solution is to use different mosquitoes as different vector that spreads a different disease-causing germ to a different population.
They won't harm then it sounds like, but they'll not fertilize the eggs.
However, it turns out the eggs are fertilized. Note that the FAQ says the males are effectively sterile and links here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytoplasmic_incompatibility
That wikipedia article says that there are embryos, but the embryos die.
However, the real question to ask, I guess, is whether the embryo is infected. As I read that article, it sounds like it isn't. Instead, the male parent is infected and this creates sperm which can fertilize the egg but in a way that creates an embryo that can't survive. In other words, the male parent has an infectious disease which causes the embryo to have a fatal genetic disease.
So this also brings up another question: what exactly is a vector? In this scenario, the embryo has a disease it would not otherwise have gotten, if it weren't for this germ. However, the embryo doesn't have the germ itself. Is being a vector defined by whether some disease is caused, or is it defined by whether the germ is spread? I don't know.
Don’t be so quick to rush to a verdict. We are still living with invasives we introduced with the same good intentions.
Unless there's been some new announcement that I don't obviously see here?
Google wants to release up to 32M good mosquitoes California and Florida
https://ktla.com/news/google-wants-to-release-up-to-32-milli... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48351077)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/01/google-pe...
(perhaps one of these should be the submitted link)
So...which areas is humanity native to?
Depending on how you define it, I could see "parts of Africa" as being "native" but that doesn't really help this discussion.
Some previous discussion:
We’re trying to stop bad mosquitoes by raising and releasing good ones (2016)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12657034
Google Has a Plan to Eliminate Mosquitoes (2018)
I might be an idiot.