The domain name reminds me of the venerable DOS "debug.com" command, which managed to combine an interactive and scriptable debugger, assembler, and disassembler into a program weighing a few kilobytes. I spent many long hours in my youth using it to reverse engineering copy protection on games. I really wish we had a similar tool for the modern era.
1 hours ago [-]
modeless 43 minutes ago [-]
WinDbg?
hackyhacky 38 minutes ago [-]
WinDbg is a cool, but debug.com predates it by quite a bit.
Thus making it "a similar tool for the modern era" as you were asking for, IMO.
My favorite thing about WinDbg is that many people pronounce it "Windbag".
hackyhacky 26 minutes ago [-]
WinDbg is just a debugger: it does not assemble or disassemble. It can't patch running programs in memory. Moreover, I don't consider Windows to be part of the modern era, as I haven't used a Windows machine for 20 years.
So, no, WinDbg has nothing to do with debug.com.
lucb1e 37 minutes ago [-]
Okay, but is it not what you wished for, "a similar tool for the 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 it. I'll check again in a few minutes if u/hackyhacky removes the reply, then maybe it allows me to remove this post
hackyhacky 26 minutes ago [-]
WinDbg is just a debugger: it does not assemble or disassemble. It can't patch running programs in memory. Moreover, I don't consider Windows to be part of the modern era, as I haven't used a Windows machine for 20 years.
So, no, WinDbg has nothing to do with debug.com.
LastTrain 4 minutes ago [-]
Fun! So how was OP supposed to know your very personal and weird definition of what is part of the modern era?
goda90 1 hours ago [-]
A less high-tech way to reduce mosquitoes in your own back yard is to set up an attractive nesting location, such as a bucket filled with plant cuttings and water with protection from the rain, and putting Bti(Bacillus thuringiensis subspecies israelensis) in it. Bti will kill the larvae after they hatch. You can buy Bti pretty easily, usually in a dehydrated form called mosquitoes bits or mosquito dunks. Make sure to remove other potential nesting locations or add Bti to them too.
adityamwagh 1 hours ago [-]
This is a great initiative. HOWEVER, THIS IS NOT NEW. This has already been tried and tested successfully in Singapore.
It's been so long since I've heard about Debug that I was afraid it was cancelled.
1 hours ago [-]
mihaelm 1 hours ago [-]
More generally, it's known as the sterile insect technique and you'll find plenty of campaigns with some googling.
adrianmonk 35 minutes ago [-]
The symmetry is amusing. This is really fighting fire with fire.
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.
barbazoo 22 minutes ago [-]
> raise sterile males and release them into wild insect populations. When a wild female mates with a sterile male, her eggs won’t hatch. The population gets smaller with each generation.
They won't harm then it sounds like, but they'll not fertilize the eggs.
king_zee 2 hours ago [-]
Is this safe? I hope it doesn't affect the ecology in worse ways we won't foresee, it has happened before
frankus 1 hours ago [-]
In the FAQ they discuss how in most of its range this particular species is invasive, feeds almost exclusively on humans, and is not believed to be a major food source for predators.
dekhn 1 hours ago [-]
It's impossible to prove this (or really anything in human health/global ecology) is safe. We cannot reliably predict what the true short and long term outcomes will be, but by and large, this seems like one of the less unsafe ecological modification projects based on the underlying technology.
ventana 2 hours ago [-]
Cool project! And, surely, absolutely not what I expected to see when I clicked the domain "debug.com".
rcv 1 hours ago [-]
I was about to ask how the mosquitos survive long enough to make an impact if they can't "bite". I looked it up, and apparently male mosquitos survive off of nectar and are actually pollinators.
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.
jaggederest 1 hours ago [-]
It's more the latter - as far as I am aware, eliminating specifically the human pathogenic mosquitoes will still leave plenty of other mosquito-adjacent species that can't or don't bite humans, or can't / don't transmit the critical diseases.
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.
mihaelm 1 hours ago [-]
Less mosquitoes, more bees please :)
oersted 1 hours ago [-]
This must have been inspired by Mass Effect :)
(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.
This is cool, but wasn't this a "Verily" project about 10 years ago? What is new here and what has happened since then?
dekhn 1 hours ago [-]
It looks like the project has been decoupled from Verily (based on my poking about on the website) and is hosted within Google (the project lead, Linus Upson, worked for both Google and Verily simultaneously; he was mainly an eng manager/project lead, but had some historical experience with biology in school). Linus played a critical role at Google and built an awful lot of goodwill with the leadership.
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.
s3graham 1 hours ago [-]
(2017)
Unless there's been some new announcement that I don't obviously see here?
(perhaps one of these should be the submitted link)
1 hours ago [-]
SilverElfin 1 hours ago [-]
No thanks. I’m very concerned some short term thinking behind a plan to alter the biology of our environment will have various side effects no one anticipated. It has happened many, many times before. Same with geo engineering in general - hard to trust the incentives, competency, and long term side effects.
modeless 40 minutes ago [-]
The species is not native. Surely we can agree that eradicating non-native species is a good thing?
SilverElfin 29 minutes ago [-]
Yes but you’re assuming that whatever they put into our environment will target that perfectly. I’m concerned there’ll be other effects and that such releases aren’t reversible.
scubbo 36 minutes ago [-]
> Surely we can agree that eradicating non-native species is a good thing?
So...which areas is humanity native to?
dekhn 7 minutes ago [-]
If you mean that seriously: homo sapiens came into existence in Africa, existed solely there for a long time (generating lots of genetic diversity) and then spread throughout the world in multiple waves. It's complicated by the fact that there was no single location and population that became homo sapiens- it was more like a network of locations and populations that evolved concurrently (there was genetic exchange between them as they evolved from their predecessor species).
Depending on how you define it, I could see "parts of Africa" as being "native" but that doesn't really help this discussion.
righthand 1 hours ago [-]
This is a Google project?
ChrisArchitect 1 hours ago [-]
This project has like 10 years of history behind it right? Originally powered by Verily Life Sciences (inside Alphabet's Google X research div)
Some previous discussion:
We’re trying to stop bad mosquitoes by raising and releasing good ones (2016)
For too many seconds I really did think this was an initiative using the metaphor of good/bad mosquitos to make the case that they were going to release "good" malware (bonware?) into the internet ecosystem in order to disable bad malware or install security patches, or something.
I might be an idiot.
Rendered at 22:57:50 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debug_(command)
My favorite thing about WinDbg is that many people pronounce it "Windbag".
So, no, WinDbg has nothing to do with debug.com.
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 it. I'll check again in a few minutes if u/hackyhacky removes the reply, then maybe it allows me to remove this post
So, no, WinDbg has nothing to do with debug.com.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
Google Mosquitoes - Debugging Florida
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.
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)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18551465
I might be an idiot.