LostJourneyman

Even a dog that doesn't bark makes a lot of noise, and that's just part of living in an apartment. In my last place, my upstairs neighbor had 2 dogs and whenever they wagged their tails when sitting, they would knock on the floor in a way that sounded exactly like someone knocking on my door. They also ran around and crashed into furniture fairly often, but it was hard to tell when it was the dogs or the children. I would counter that if you're not willing to live with a little noise, you shouldn't be living in an apartment building in the first place.

One of the stated goals is to have long-term support and maintainability. Adding in a dependency like an IDE is already a large step away from that goal, and to include a dependency on a LLM's non-auditable output actively steps away from that.

Comments in source code are always going to meet the maintainer's intention and will much more likely cover the use cases that comments are meant to cover - unintuitive cases or decisions, unclear algorithms, general usage to point maintainers in the right direction, and so on. More importantly, comments in the source code require no additional tools or other dependencies and as such are more dependable.

Telephone-based sampling is hardly random sampling, given that most people don't answer calls they don't recognize the caller ID for. Those who do might be pre-disposed to certain sets of political ideology. What we may be seeing is a shift of people who are willing to answer the telephone and take a survey, not a net shift in political opinion.

A practical example, given in good faith: It may be that in their "random telephone sampling" they are only connecting with older people (who are usually more likely to answer calls from an unknown number), leading to unintentional selection bias. In this example, the confounding factor is age, and as such the gallop graphs could be simply showing that younger (ostensibly left-leaning) people are growing less willing to answer the phone (as opposed to the claim that Americans are moving right, idiologically)

This is a call from Memphis TN with a badly formatted ANI. The format that you would recognize would be +19011700119 or (901) 170-0119. 111 or 011 are country code prefixes in the North American Dialing Plan. The "V" may mean verified (which would be an artifact of STIR/SHAKEN, ironically), if you're using XFinity/Comcast... but likely is just an artifact of a bug in the code used to set the headers. The fact that the 901 is prefixed with a 0 hints that the PBX/SBC used to place this call was configured for international use and they missed some localization settings, which could be the culprit for the weird formatting.

STIR/SHAKEN has barely started to be rolled out, and most major carriers don't fully support both protocols. Realistically the reason you've not seen a difference is that... well there's not been a change. The TRACED act stipulated that large carriers have to have it implemented by June 2021 (and several have... mostly) and that smaller carriers have a 2 year extension until 2023. The problem is that "smaller carriers" has a much looser definition than you think, which includes the phone systems used by most corporate businesses and most cheap/easy SIP providers (like NICE inContact, OnSIP, RingCentral, etc). That said, it'll be a couple years before you see the silver bullet you're looking for, and even then it'll be a couple more before all the kinks are worked out. (There's still some unanswered questions about attestation in smaller regional/local carriers. Also international partners aren't complying with the standard, so that increases the complexity.)

That's a counter example in the same way that someone responding to "Stop depicting all humans as spread eagle with their hands over their head, they don't naturally stand like that!" with a picture of a basketball player's arms straight up would be a counter-example. Most lepidopterans are capable of that pose especially in active flight, but it's still unnatural.

I'm afraid you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what the "burden of proof" means in this context. Let's clarify a few things:

1) there is adequate and persuasive evidence that adding a barrier across the nose and mouth will impede particulate spray during speech and normal bodily functions like coughing or sneezing. It will not act as a micron level filter. To say that cloth masks "haven't been shown to help do anything" is demonstrably false, but trying to treat masks as a full respirator is equally misleading.

2) Using a mask when you have or suspect you have a cold shouldn't be stigmatized, as you are literally helping to make sure that you are minimizing other people's exposure to whatever is making you ill

3) Social distancing is not the same as quarantine. Asking you to stay home as much as possible during a pandemic is a measure to help slow transmission rates. Stopping all travel into our out of a designated area is quarantine. If you're staying home after travel and unable to leave your home, that's quarantine. If you're avoiding restaurants, that's social distancing.

4) the burden of proof test is a legal test in determining who is responsible for providing evidence to back their claim, and the innocent until proven guilty standard is limited to criminal trials. To conflate that with assuming someone is healthy during a pandemic until they show symptoms shows a gross misunderstanding of how communicable disease transmission works. In many viruses, this included, the incubation period comes without symptoms and is fully communicable. You can be actively infecting other people without symptoms. Surely you can understand the reasonable difference between the two.

5) your claim that the standard in the last century has been "survive infection, you should be good until proven otherwise" is also false. This is true for some diseases but not others. Again, flu comes to mind as an example.

I want to address your last point separately. It is well acknowledged and understood that resource, income, healthcare, and access disparity have played a large role in how this pandemic was handled and mis-handled. We have much to learn from our experience here. That said, you cannot simply hand-wave "funny paper" and say that public health doesn't matter. Sure, the society that we live in is heavily reliant on exploitation. Yes, that's a problem, and not a simple one. Yes, because of that people have to work, and people have to take those risks when it shouldn't be necessary. That's all the more reason to place caution over pride and comfort. They are forced to bear undue risk, why should anyone have the privilege to add to that burden of risk when much of it is easily mitigated by limiting how much time we spend in public spaces and by wearing a face covering?

I'll assume your line of reasoning is in good faith and answer it as such.

To OP's point, leading research actually has answers to the questions you're asking and backs up your friend's behavior. The fundamental difference is that this isn't in the same families of viruses as your typical one and done vaccines of childhood. This is a coronavirus, which are known to have a high mutation and variation rate and tend to be vaccine resistant. This is why you have a flu vaccine every year, but chicken pox once. It's somewhat rare, but it would have been possible for your friend to have gotten a different variant, or act as a carrier for a different variant. He chose to follow expert advise to keep himself and others safe.

I would like to point out also that wearing a face covering is a small price to pay for public safety even if it wasn't needed for every individual. As an example, even fully vaccinated and having had the virus, I wear my own mask constantly. It would be unkind of me to force people to choose if they trust my judgement and my word just to feel safe around me. If we discuss it and they feel safe, often I'll remove the mask for ease of conversation. But the point here is: we should care about other people, we should strive to make the world we all live in as safe and comfortable as possible for everyone around us, and we need to weigh the risk of slight personal discomfort against the benefits of interpersonal relationships, public safety, and the well-being of those around you.

To conflate

  “You know what? Let’s slow down for a second, and find out what’s what, because for the past year everyone’s been lying” 

With

  “Oh because I’m waiting for the vaccine.”

As equally reasonable positions is disingenuous at best, but it's worth checking your motivations.

Edits:grammar

There's an entire dialect of English that has evolved just to handle expressiveness in text formats. There's a standard and reproducible grammar, and most people (who do or have spent any time on the internet in the last 15 years) use it a second language. Messenger services allow the flexibility of asynchronous communication with the added benefit of synchronous communication when it's important (that's why it's preferred often to email, for example).

Voice notes, like email, are fully async and require actually listening to someone talk, which changes the communication media that you're working in.

Messaging has risen to the prevalence it has because of the features it brings to the table, not in spite of them.

It's somewhat apparent just reading through the python that you are self-taught. Some of the idioms used, especially around file handling, are outdated.

For example: you should open files using the with context handler, or at the very least wrap the file open in a try/except block and put file close in the finally block. Garbage collectors will clean up if you don't properly close, but it's better to be explicit.

I would argue that even if the resume passed through to a hiring manager, they would be reticent to hire based off a single code sample in a language listed as a technical skill where there are red flags like this.

Edit: please note that my comments are for Python only, as I'm not proficient in any of the C family languages. Also, as a Biology major who finally broke into dev myself, I'm completely rooting for you!

So, a more complete example might help:

  def myFunc(par=None):
    if par:
      # do whatever is needed when the parameter exists
    pass
    #finish processing

This allows you to pass in [], {}, None, '', or omit par all together, which will all behave as if par=None, or pass in data and use it appropriately. You can also use

  if not par:
    pass

if you want to do the inverse.

Quick note, the more pythonic way of checking par in this case would be just to:

  if par:
    do_stuff()

Python does some really cool, if slightly unintuitive, checks for "truthiness" where 0, [], {}, false, '' and None (could be other cases too, brain's a little foggy today) all evaluate as false. This controls for:

  if par = None:
    do_stuff()

not catching empty lists, empty dicts, etc.

There's some subtle irony in that the linked site is not in fact a WayBackMachine link, but instead a direct link to the site.

That's not necessarily true, especially in consulting firms. I am drug tested somewhat regularly.

You have NO IDEA how tempted I've been to add that! I've literally had printed this out and pinned to the wall of my cubicle for years!

It depends build to build. The standard approach is one of 4:

1) The bot initiates the conversation and your initial message gets sent directly to an agent. This is the older model that's in most common use today.

2) The bot initiates contact and based on your responses does some simple keyword matching and delivers help article links where possible or asks for more information IVR style, then when it hits an "I don't know" point or if the agent option is selected, offloads to an agent.

3) This is my favorite style, honestly: The bot initiates the interaction, and does some machine learning backed AI chat, all the while the interaction is monitored by an agent who can take over at any time. Similar to #2, if the bot hits a sticking point, it'll just queue to an agent. This unfortunately is the least common of the implementations.

4) This is the most modern and is becoming the industry leader: Fully AI bot trained against a veritable Everest of chat conversations for that entity/industry, only offloads to a human when you shout "HUMAN" at it enough times or if it gets really stuck and confidence intervals start falling rapidly.

NOTE/DISCLAIMER: I design and implement these systems for a living, and we don't often get much say in the customer-side UX, so I'm sorry if you've gotten stuck with an arguably bad build!

(Edit: formatting)

I think OP means that you have to make sure you don't forget to/neglect to renew it and make sure you don't accidentally lose the domain for any reason.

Free speech means that you won't be prosecuted/persecuted by the government, not that you're free from social or societal ramifications. Hate speech is one of the exclusions (see Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire decision, ca. 1942) of Free Speech, but again: no legal action is being taken here so this is irrelevant.

In medicine, at least in my experience, the terms are used fairly interchangeably.

GDPR is not enforceable in the US, so this is applicable only to the EU. In the US AFIAK Google can collect anything that you consent to.

Disclaimer: I'm a telephony engineer, and while I understand and will below present the motivations and logic of enterprise-level companies, I don't always agree with it.

On the enterprise level, this is actually pretty common. I've personally implemented this several dozen times for VIP lines. For enterprises, though, it's important to understand that almost anything that happens in a call center is a cost to the company and rarely makes revenue. The company sees the call center, often, as a necessary evil. Having customers that could potentially have figured it out themselves talk to a human is really just taking time away from agents helping someone who couldn't "self-serve". You only really see this feature in cases where is almost always worth it for the company to have someone talking to an agent immediately.