brownbat

> which the Jitsi developers apparently consider to be fine

I expected the devs in the link to get caught saying something like "Yolo! Move fast and break things!"

Instead they had a pretty reasonable response considering the circumstances.

You don't have to use the app stores you don't like to use the service, they don't actually seek or store personal data, they don't use any data they do have for marketing, the use of those services falls under an identified GPDR exception, the other services they rely on for the service also have GPDR obligations with respect to any data they should collect, etc.

But even after all that, the devs realized they aren't professional lawyers. So what do they do? Ignore it all? No, they hire some. What did those lawyers say? Looks good, looks compliant.

So you've hired counsel, they say, "Good job, green light." Then someone on GitHub says, "But I have a different legal theory than the people you specifically hired to tell you how the law works!"

What do you tell someone in that situation? Fire your counsel and instead rely on advice from random strangers on the internet? Or... there are a lot of people with crazy theories on the internet.

I thought it was big of emcho to, even seeming pretty confident Alvar was mistaken, still put him in touch with his legal team. Because, I'm not a professional GPDR expert, maybe the random internet stranger is right this time? But if Alvar's right, GitHub isn't really equipped to figure that out. This has to be a conversation with lawyers.

Backing up a step...

Zoom rolls their own crypto, routes calls through China, and has a mysterious 10 char hard limit on passwords. They're also massively more popular.

Zoom's CEO has been admirably up front about how they're fixing some of these issues, but I'm not sure why a speculative GPDR complaint about a much less common service should get the same prominent media coverage.

> because WE are unsafe

Totally agree, a system is only as safe as it's operators, so it's totally reasonable to compare worst case scenarios.

But if you run the numbers on those terms, that still doesn't fully explain why nuclear is treated so differently.

Extending your point, WE are the ones responsible for coal and hydro safety related deaths too. An unsafe hydro project in China killed somewhere between 80,000 and 240,000 people in 1975 after a whistleblower was ignored.

With coal mining, we don't even have to look at "worst" cases to get to serious issues. Coal production leads US industries in fatal injuries, often leading to litigation alleging unsafe conditions. Miners often suffer permanent scarring of the lung tissues. Coal's output, not unlike radiation, is a silent killer. The fine particulates from coal pollution can cross the blood brain barrier, and lead to 10,000 early deaths in the US from coal's "fallout" each year.[0] Coal ash is also, perhaps unintuitively, MORE radioactive than nuclear waste.[1]

Chernobyl directly killed around 50 people, with higher indirect deaths. The Soviet government compounded the failures by keeping contaminated food in the supply chain, leading to a lot of new thyroid cancers. Even taking that into account, and expelled radiation into the atmosphere, UN estimates of early deaths projected all the way out to 2065 are only around 9,000. Some people put that a bit higher. 15,000 would be a fair estimate.[2]

The UN projection means we could have a Chernobyl disaster every year and it would still be safer than coal. Maybe the estimates wrong and we cut them in half in coal's favor, and should just talk about a Chernobyl disaster every other year comparing more favorably. At that rate, it would take 30 years to equal the deaths due to equal the damage done by one hydro disaster.

Now, I don't think we should judge hydro harshly based on its worst accident in a poorly run communist country. You can choose to do that for nuclear, and it still comes out remarkably safe, even under the worst possible cases.

I absolutely think its fair to judge coal harshly based on its continuing track record, and have no idea why someone would move from nuclear to coal after running the numbers.

> Nuclear will forever be shunned

I fear you might be right. But it definitely feels like some sort of cognitive bias, the availability heuristic or something making nuclear deaths more scary than coal deaths, but I don't know, can't figure it out.

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-coal-kills/

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

[2] There's a great discussion of the science behind these estimations on the More or Less podcast. Recommended listening. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p07dtfxp

P.S. -

> Potentially "forever" contaminants...

I already droned on long enough, but superfund sites related to coal tar are good reading here. They usually have to entomb the whole site in a giant concrete barrier to never be opened again. We treat radiation like it's the only hazardous thing we need to seal off forever, it's not really accurate, other forms of power generate similar hazards as or more frequently.

VSauce tweeted a playlist of Conway's appearances on Numberphile, including that one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8kUJL04ELA&list=PLt5AfwLFPx...

I found the one you posted especially moving, but the others were good too.

Sure, yeah. I actually studied in an advanced humanities program and have read most of the people he references. I worried a bit about the characterization. But since the labeling didn't really matter for my point I didn't sweat it too much.

I was really into stuff like this for a few years. After a while, this argumentative style just stopped landing for me.

To each his own though. I go back to the blue/gold dress. I can't explain my issues with it without just making people angry, advocates can't explain why it resonates without frustrating the other side.

So... I just want to say sorry if you thought the link was some kind of offensive misdirected attack on something you like.

If you like this stuff, go for it, knock yourself out.

Feels a bit like it came from a markov postmodernism generator: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

Postmodernist arguments and critiques are like the blue/gold dress. Some people see it as pure obscurantism, just all white noise. Other people see it as full of interesting ideas.

I've never seen these two groups successfully hold a conversation about it without getting progressively angrier at each other, mostly devolving into insulting each others' intelligence (like many of the replies to your comment).

Add a layer of politics on top of that, to really rile people up, and this whole thread is just a recipe for disaster.

In the third video in the series he talks a bit about death, making his peace with it, understanding he won't get to see the solution to many difficult math problems, and the idea of unfinished business.

Conway is fascinating to listen to anytime, but I found this series especially moving right now.

I posted and deleted a few comments. I don't know what to make of this and it's getting controversial. If it could be helpful, I'd love to improve it. I just don't know where it fits in ongoing discussions by prominent researchers on analysis of strains and types.

Three things that jump out at me:

a) You'll get more credibility from having a thorough lit review than from listing credentials. Linking to magazine articles from journalists on genetic variations, when there's academic research to cite, is a little bewildering.

b) You don't identify something harmless by just testing asymptomatics. This is counterintuitive, but a great example of the Wason selection task:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task

You would probably want to survey the rate of variants in asymptomatics in a certain community, then compare that with the rate of variants in fatal cases in the same community to look for significant differences (and be fully prepared not to find any significant differences beyond chance, a real and likely possibility).

c) I'm still not sure what the author is specifically recommending we do next. Researchers are looking for functional variants, we don't have one to distribute yet, so we should do more sequencing. Ok, great. From what populations? How many geographic areas? Where do we get the samples? There are bottlenecks in sample collection, how do we overcome those? Given (b), how can we get more samples from fatal cases, to compare virulence to those in the general population? Task overloaded hospitals to send us additional samples from dying patients? Is there another way we can get this info?

I don't want to dismiss this out of hand, this might be a good area for additional focused research. I do think there are some key unanswered questions though, and currently a worrying disconnect with the current state of research on variants.

EDIT: Daniel, I know you're going through the comments here, and some of them have gotten pretty harsh, sorry for that. I genuinely hope you're on to something, and are able to continue to refine the post into a more robust and specific proposal using all this feedback, despite the tenor of some of the comments. That's really the best case for all of us, so good luck.

Not exactly, but the rebuttal includes:

"As of 2nd March 2020, there are 111 nonsynonymous mutations that have been identified in the outbreak, these have been catalogued here in the CoV-GLUE resource 504 and can be visualised in Figure 1. At current, there is no evidence that any of these 111 mutations have any significance in a functional context of within-host infections or transmission rates."

The premise that there is an "asymptomatic strain" is still theoretically possible but unsubstantiated, despite ongoing investigation.

> "I can’t believe that a month later, this bad science is still being circulated, by a purported PhD and former professor. "

That strikes me as a bit harsh, given that the posted article doesn't actually rely on two-strain to make its case, just the idea of functional variants possibly being out there somewhere. MacLean's rebuttal didn't definitely exclude the possibility that there's some functional variants out there somewhere, we just don't know, haven't seen it in anything we've catalogued so far.

Science is often about calibration. I wouldn't say a search for functional variants is completely worthless. That's why researchers continue to look at variants. On the other hand, completely agree it's overselling to pitch this as a silver bullet for the whole crisis though. Research can be important even when it doesn't solve for everything.

Robin Hanson and other public intellectuals are engaged in ongoing debates about variolation, with several variations on that theme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFnP5TK61aI

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/04/wh...

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/04/reply-to-cowen-on-vari...

I know your proposal is not exactly that, but it has some overlap with those ideas. I'd recommend joining those discussions on those blogs.

If yours significantly improved the safety of their proposals, it would be a welcome addition to those discussions.

Note though that it shares some obstacles with widespread vaccinations, in that safety and efficacy testing is the major delay, not the chemistry.

We could alternatively do low dose variolation on the young with technology today, with infectious strains administered through a cut on the shin to encourage lower severity progression. We might lack implementation capacity and social will to try very experimental approaches. If so, "found strain" vaccination will face similar capacity issues while also introducing new questions about safety and effectiveness and requiring significantly more research.

So I'm not sure it's a silver bullet, or how it fares against existing proposals, but seems an avenue worth exploring in parallel, and raising first with others generating policy ideas in this space.

N.b.- Tyler Cowen has a foundation that is actively providing grants or prizes for work on COVID-19, he's not Gates, but not just some random blogger either.

Dick's version of the Man in the High Castle has a good meditation on forgeries.

Mostly when people buy art, they're buying provenance, proof that a celebrity artist in history touched this particular object.

Forgers have gotten incredibly sophisticated, finding ways to duplicate the texture of historical paints and style of brush strokes of masters.

I think we'd do a lot of good for the world by commissioning as indistinguishable fakes as possible for all famous works, putting them in a room where the originals are all shuffled in, then sending them out into the world so any museum or private collector can have one, with some chance it's actually the real thing, but mostly the value would collapse to however sublime it is to actually look at the work.

The intentional misspelling comes off as mocking and derisive, which risks undermining the point.

But to that point... I'll admit I have been there. At times, if I'm just relaxing, constant corrections can feel pedantic, endless, tiring, and uncharitable.

I see the other side too though. Other times, I really need a place for careful discussion of ideas, where we all try to contribute what we know and learn from each other, as a refuge from all the places dominated by anti-intellectualism.

So I know it can be draining, but I'd hate for peer pressure from a vocal minority to chill useful intelligent contributions in other threads. I don't want anyone to feel like they'll be made fun of for simply trying to contribute to a discussion.

Unimportant "well actually" posts can be downvoted or ignored. There's no equivalent workaround for overcorrection, no way to save the insightful addition someone never posts to avoid the risk of getting made fun of.

Sure. It's a really bad idea to try to time the market on a day to day basis. There's two sides to every trade, so you're generally playing poker against professionals with armies of quants.

But this game really just proves that you can't time the market while knowing nothing about the outside world.

Headlines sometimes matter.

Not all the time. Talking heads generally overstate how much one random speech matters, "politician X says Y, therefore stocks are reacting" is generally just over-analyzing noise. It's annoying to see post hoc rationalizations the norm in financial... in all news. People claim causation for anything they happened to read.

But occasionally, once a decade, say? Headlines do send a strong signal. "Crisis on Wall Street as Lehman Totters" was a headline that came just before the biggest cliff in 2008.

In February 2020 we didn't know as much as we do now, but people already started talking about difficulties in containment. China--which likes itself some economic growth (if only to keep the Party going)--decided a near total economic shutdown was necessary. The virus was already in a few dozen countries and Singapore was surrounded by container ships that couldn't dock.

So let's split out two separate claims:

1) The weak efficient markets hypothesis: you can't time the market blind.

2) Strong EMH: you can't time the market, not even once in a while, with your eyes wide open.

In defense of (2), the housing crisis really started in October 2007, and ended in February 2009. You can delve for headlines for those moments, but they are way more specious. Here's the real test: what will be the best signal of the rally after the pandemic?

1) China hitting zero active cases, reassuring the world it can be done.

2) Global new case "growth rate" below 1 for two straight weeks? [Growth rate being the ratio of today's new cases to yesterday's new cases, with lower than 1 a tipping point away from exponential growth, and probably the halfway point in the crisis.]

3) China keeping no new local cases even after reopening its economy?

4) Some decision about how to keep airlines solvent?

5) Unemployment nearing historical normals after skyrocketing beyond anything we've ever seen?

Any of these seem plausible. But who knows which will be right? However, if we are attacking strong EMH, we don't really have to time things maximally, we just have to do slightly better than the index. So maybe just wait until the S&P 500 has recovered a quarter of its losses and get in then?

Maybe the general problem with active investing is the financial sector's approach: hire people to study market signals full time and generate algorithms that can trade more and more actively. Full time people are expensive, and tuning algorithms is expensive. So that means you burn through fees (on top of probably not outperforming the market, because you're competing against noise).

If you hire people to do something full time, they will find ways to justify their time. If you hire someone to play rock paper scissors full time, and give them some of the highest bonuses in the world, they will come up with some very nice models. And usually not outperform a random thrower, but give you lots of reports on why and how they'll do better next time.

But if all the daily signals are noise except for one really blaring foghorn once a decade, maybe the better solution would be to hire a part time market hobbyist on a contingency fee. "Hey, if you see a signal that the entire market should be shorted, maybe short the market. You get two trades per decade max. Otherwise, just index and hold."

Probably also wouldn't work, but I really like the idea of some plumber in Poughkeepsie controlling billions of dollars in hedge fund money, you know, just as a side hustle.

> i havent heard of anyone commuting to work via paramotor

Well, now you have:

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/paramotor-daredevil...

Article proves your point though. 10 miles in 30 minutes, required licensing, flight clearances, only works in very light wind, and requires total concentration the whole time. And then he carries the equipment once he lands in what must be a very heavy "briefcase."

Seems fun once or twice, but it swaps out the inconvenience of traffic with a ton of other inconveniences.

Self checkout is nearly ubiquitous in US grocery stores, where I barely ever wait at all for checkout. It's rare in places like convenience stores or the large pharmacies (would you call it a chemist if it sells overpriced groceries too?)

Judging from visits to London, our grocery culture is different mainly in that we usually buy weeks of food at once. Some people still use checkers to help them efficiently get through a giant cart of food. And our grocery stores are often gigantic, maybe dozens of lanes of checkout side by side, where in Europe I often see maybe... two?

I've waited in lines in UK and European stores, (Fortnam during the holidays?), but rarely waited in grocery stores over there, even in places without self check. There's just much less foot traffic in any individual grocery because they're so much smaller.

But maybe I'm just comparing US suburbs with UK cities, not sure.

Just watched the 3brown1blue video today, which talks about exponential growth and fixes it to the latest actual COVID-19 numbers. Really helped it all click.

https://youtu.be/Kas0tIxDvrg

Edit: separate HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22520152

Does Schuyler Towne read hacker news?

He made the point in one amazing talk (that included references to centaurs and American exceptionalism and possibly ancient sumerian) that we've long used locks not for security, but as a social symbol of security.

Anyone can just put a cinder block through your window and steal your car. The barrier isn't technological, it's social. Locks are a great defense against the kid or confused person who is wandering around and forgets that we have social mores against making off with thousands of dollars of other people's property on a whim. They are not designed to defend against dedicated thieves.

We defend against dedicated theives by hiring detectives and prosecutors and making it in general more hazardous as a profession than other professions that one might take up. We defend against theft by just generally making it more lucrative to apply the same amount of ingenuity and dedication to other endeavors, like giving amazing talks about perfect security and American centaurs.

I'm probably butchering or overextending his point though, would love for the man himself to weigh in.

> Navy vet here

Article blithely suggests that support to the Navy is tantamount to mass murder. Vet calmly ignores that nonsense and simply provides an update for accuracy of ship and hull designation references.

By the way, thank you for, among other things, keeping shipping lanes safe, which in turn makes global trade a possibility, which in turn has lifted millions out of poverty worldwide.

These greenhouses and all the complicated local politics that go along with them are the subject of a great episode of Outside/In:

http://outsideinradio.org/shows/ep45

It's interesting what HIBP reveals about both attackers and defenders.

HIBP held a long randomly generated password I used exclusively on tvtropes. It was in plaintext in a pw dump, suggesting they weren't even hashing at the time.

I contacted tvtropes a few times but got ignored with no announcement.

It's not a banking site, not sure what we should expect. But given compelling evidence of a breach and making no announcement to users seems irresponsible.

Dr. Fauci's iceberg theory, that the cfr will decline as we identify more mild cases, is disputed by some in the WHO and some Chinese scientists, who argue the CFR is well supported from comprehensive testing of quarantined populations, which identify and account for mild and asymptomatic cases. One such study:

http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/02/study-720...

While the specific r0 and cfr are still under debate, there's no doubt this has rapidly absorbed hospital resources in hotspots in ways other coronaviruses haven't.

I don't think panic is the right answer, but people should prepare for the possibility this impacts their lives, judging from regions with cases and the continued spread to new regions. Quarantines, social distancing, fewer public activities, and extended hospitalizations of some older family members are all realistic scenarios.

> It's quite possible you had a terrible gym

Yeah, it's just anecdotal, and I don't want to take away anything from anyone's great gym memories, but I think there's something systemic, or at least common and broader than my own experience, for a few reasons.

I went to multiple schools with different teachers that all used the concept of modules to expose kids to a bunch of activities in rapid bursts without practicing or developing any skills.

Let's play badminton for a week, then football, then dodgeball, then baseball. Now let's administer the presidential fitness test without any warning or prep. No attempt to work on those measurers after the test, making it unclear how important they are.

I might have drawn all the bad teachers and was just unlucky, but my experience seems to track with most people I meet and also with portrayals of gym in popular media.

I've had people refund entire purchases and let me keep the item after I complain about a real defect, all just to avoid a low review. The most surreal instance was when I just asked a completely innocuous question and was offered a refund--clearly misunderstand my curiosity as a complaint.

I love imagining the surreal consequences of a world where reputation is far more valuable than the products themselves... but that must be unsustainable.

Was fun zooming out and comparing stars to the cubic area. If it's a sphere, we're at about 250 cubic light years per star at both 12.5 lt yr out, and at 20. It heads to around 900 ly^3 per star when you look at everything within 5000 lt yrs.

Makes sense, given that the Milky Way--while 150-200 kly wide--is only about 2000 light years thick.

Of course, we could rapidly zoom much, much farther out, like in this intergalactic redshift survey:

https://www.universetoday.com/21914/the-closest-galaxy-to-th...

Space is incomprehensibly big.

Languages and gym stick out to me as the most astounding educational failures in high school.

When I later actually wanted to learn about those on my own time, it became obvious that those initial classes were not only not helpful, but actively harmful.

High school language courses might just be overinfluenced by academic linguists-- obscure grammar is probably the right focus if your main interest is comparative linguistics and you've already studied six other languages. That just doesn't apply to many high schoolers.

High school fitness education is like a bad daycare with spontaneous expectations for you to run a couple miles, despite having never been trained in how to build up capacity slowly over time. It's as if the goal is to teach people that fitness is unlearnable and out of reach. It's exactly the opposite, it's one of the domains where it's easiest to measure how much consistent practice improves performance.

I feel like we could redesign both from scratch, based around how people grow up and actually learn these things, and we'd be way ahead.

Earth is essentially populated by bacteria,* which in turn allows a handful of temporary mutated offshoots to live for a few moments alongside it.

* Looking at species count, mass, count of individuals, or species longevity, or probably eighteen other factors.

Yeah, the DOT has some value to baseline effectiveness of programs: if they have $30,000 they can improve some intersection or stretch of highway and save one life a year. They can always turn extra cash into lives saved, so they use that to measure the effectiveness of spending. (Preventing malaria deaths is much much cheaper, maybe the conversion rate should be lower, but let's go with 30k for now.)

If someone says they don't want $30k because they live comfortably, even though they could immediately donate it to GiveWell, it's like saying they don't value saving other lives because their life is fine.

Substitute in anything else you value. You could sponsor modern art competitions, or film preservation, or buy land for ecological preservation, or help fund policy research on key issues from think tanks...

People reflexively associate money with consumptive hedonism, so it can seem like a negative, but it can also support almost any value you have.

Money can build you and tacky gold lined apartment and buy you a loud sports car, but money can also cure the sick, feed the hungry, and house the homeless.

The argument is very weird.

1. Free speech leads to obsession with texts.

2. Textualism is responsible for ills like the San Francisco housing crisis.

3. As the author has personally ranked favorite cities, the best ones are in China.

4. Therefore free speech will doom Western society.

On the bright side, if an argument isn't valid, it doesn't matter as much that your premises are false.

"A project board was created to manage all the different, related schemes and product management. We delivered this project in two sprints — a sprint is a chunk of time allocated for a particular phase of a project."

I guess the About page is the joke. It's ok I guess. Solid 5/10 silly.

If we're killing garbage in garbage out, that's going to take us some weird places.

Yeah, fairly compelling, I appreciate your points. I might still quibble in a couple places, but I think we're not actually that far apart overall.

> As an immigrant to the USA from a Soviet controlled satellite state, let me say that just because corruption is so endemic that from the outside it looks like their "culture", does not negate the fact that it is still corruption.

I appreciate hearing that. I had previously endorsed a more black and white view here, but faced some pushback from Russia scholars. I'll hold my ground more next time.

I had originally found the Ikea experience pretty compelling:

https://www.rbth.com/business/2016/08/29/losing-the-good-fig...

I was a little more taken aback at your description of the essay as...

> overtly partisan

He notes that divided government with opposing parties controlling different levels of government contributes to combating corruption.

I could see a narrow reading of it as him saying "we need Republicans to police these Democrats!" But having read him previously take shots at both sides, I don't think that's what he was going for. I think he just meant that having a competitive political environment helps prevent the consolidation of power generally.

> Corruption has nothing to do with markets

This point was hard for me to understand. It's like saying that the moon has nothing to do with physics. Sure, you can exclusively look at the moon poetically if that's your preference, but there are tools in physics that are going to help you understand some phenomena related to the moon. Same for economics and various human activities.