684 karma · joined June 13, 2014
Words are fuzzy, most people don’t look at dictionaries, let alone OSI or FSF definitions. A word changing usage often just indicates the meaning was never as precise as you thought, the distinction just hadn’t yet mattered.
Countries where people are multilingual from a young age clearly have some major differences to those where they are not, and even in those countries many people are not multilingual.
Cool your own use of language, I don’t think it’s at all appropriate or within HN guidelines.
I think a journalist writing about a country is a special case though, that doesn’t get affordancee.
Language evolves.
The fact the brain reaches decisions before we are consciously aware of them does not mean the brain does not tag decisioms with motives and other information necessary to explain them, though obviously we have to trust this information, and it may sometimes be wrong, but it has a pretty good track record and there’s no equivalent facility for AI today.
This holds especially true for the kinds of actions taken by AI today which are usually deliberated thought processes for humans.
This isn’t the same thing is saying all actions are explainable, but it is quite different to being a black box. In general, one only needs to question the explanations of a person if there is a good objective reason to do so.
> It is well known with experimental evidence that when people justify their decisions with the reasoning leading to it, it does not necessarily have anything to do with the actual reasons for the decision
Out of interest, what’s the highest quality evidence you are aware of in this area?
Where perhaps the first wraps, the second copies and the third may wrap and avoid sorting the input. This would all of course depend on some conventions on meaning within the codebase.
If a device can tell you something is maybe poisonous, a positive result is going to lead to very different behaviour than a negative one, even if they’re equally likely to be accurate. This is especially true when your priors (ie research with accurate devices and knowledge of combustion) lead you to expect (prior to measurement) that it will indeed be poisonous.
My limited research suggests the most affordable and reliable gaseous measurements like NO2 want a metal oxide sensor, which you don’t see on consumer grade equipment but is available affordably from commercial sources. It’s more hassle though so I gave up on measuring NO2 for now. Particulates seem to be readily measured with suitable accuracy by consumer grade equipment.
The uHoo was tested some time ago and found to not be that great, but not for NO2 (which wasn’t tested)
http://www.aqmd.gov/aq-spec/sensordetail/uhoo
Indeed, as far as I can tell uHoo’s own website does not list an NO2 sensor as part of the equipment, despite listing it as a pollutant it reports:
https://getuhoo.com/blog/business/performance-precision-and-...
But once you arbitrarily declare somebody didn’t have flu if they weren’t sick for three or more days, or didn’t get a high enough fever, well then I don’t think that’s valid either in common usage or scientifically.
Since you brought up people misusing terms, I think that’s a pretty valid response.
> typically characterised by
What are you basing this on? I have only found estimates of asymptomatic infection, but do you have any studies that performed a random sample of the population looking at disease severity by positive PCR?
Covid was a much more severe illness with very little endemic immunity and we still saw dramatic variation in outcome. It seems to be estimated that a third of influenza infections are asymptomatic - do you propose that the distribution is entirely bimodal and that everyone else had severe symptoms? This seems implausible given the broad (and highly differentiated by prior variant) level of population immunity.
The only studies I could find (with an admittedly cursory search) look at people already suffering from ILI and testing the likelihood that the ILI is influenza, which does not tell you what proportion of people experience mild symptoms with influenza infection. It does however tell you that many of these people are not suffering from influenza, but would have likely said they had “flu” and met your criteria.
My point therefore is that “flu” doesn’t mean influenza, since there’s no common definition that is either sufficient or necessary to correctly identify an influenza infection, and we do not require a PCR test to use the term. It therefore means a severe non-specific viral illness, or perhaps an “influenza like illness”
It also means criticising people for using the term for a mild illness is probably fair, but not because it doesn’t meet the criteria of being influenza, and I really wish people would stop using this kind of argumentation about it, as though they have any idea what a specific influenza infection looks like.
Colloquially flu is often reserved for a non-specific viral infection that makes you very unwell, but that could be a “common cold virus”, while somebody with a “cold” might be suffering from influenza!
I’m surprised that this belief still holds despite the wide exposure to higher quality information on this topic during the pandemic.
Since it’s less useful for Cassandra (as those conditions won’t be met in most cases), I hope other databases with more to gain have also thought to implement this when they offered UUID types.