confeit

4Chan has been very involved with these intelligence ARGs since after Project Chanology. Pedowood morphed into Pizzagate. "Seth Rich murder" was pushed hard on 4Chan, to detract from the fact that the Russians hacked the democrats. And it works: Instead of being insulted and angry that a foreign nation state so polutes the brains of your country and riles up the population to the level of riots and extreme polarization, some like to think that Hillary had Seth Rich assassinated for leaking. With so much smoke, who knows what to think? All the while you see artificial KONY2012-style meme campaigns accusing Mueller of being a deep state fixer, synced on Twitter, Facebook, and 4chan.

Leaves me mere speculation: I believe Q was initially conceived in case Trump had lost the election. It was to be a group of useful idiots/unwitting agents protesting about the "rigged" election, maybe even riled up to the point of taking up arms. Then when Trump won it was repurposed to sow disinformation about child sacrifice and child porn rings by the elite democrats. 9/11 saw the same thing: Massive efforts by Russia and Middle Eastern countries to seed inside job conspiracy theories. With the result that many Americans now believe 9/11 was an inside job, and can't really trust their government anymore (social cohesion damaged).

I believe some of these unwitting agents are so impressionable and gullible, that they can be made to act as "manchurian candidates", doing the bidding of foreign intelligence agencies (spreading propaganda, muddying the waters with disinformation and conspiracy, picking up a gun and going out to free children from a basement of a pizza parlor). I believe these intel agencies are able to infiltrate grassroots movements and subvert their ideals to be hostile to their host countries. I believe these agencies are able to create fake online realities, where unwitting agents are made to be believe they are part of something big, and everyone agrees with them, while they are psychologically manipulated.

Low-quality noise cancels out and leaves the high-quality signal. In the limit, the internet offers the true sequence probabilities for compression of natural text.

You can also put more weight on authoritative data sources, such as Wikipedia and StackOverflow, but even uniformly weighted: It is possible to sequence-complete prime numbers, despite the many many pages online with random numbers.

GPT-3 is trained on a filtered version of Common Crawl, enhanced with authoritative datasets, such as Books1, WebText, and Wikipedia-en. Moderation is done automatically, with a toxicity classifier/toggle. If GPT-n becomes good enough to be accepted in authoritative datasets, then it is perfectly fine training data, a form of semi-supervised learning.

Bias is going to be a double-edged sword: I believe it will be impossible to prescribe common sense, nor to sanitize common sense to remove, say, gender bias, and still be able to understand a sexist joke about female programmers, or male nurses. We want an AI to be human, but we don't want it to associate CEOs with white males, dark hair, wearing suits. That will conflict.

The military wants: automated chat agents/web users that can be sent to dark web markets and hacker IRC channels and report back intelligence. Common sense inference from security and drone footage: predict who the killer is when watching a movie. Author deanonimization and cross-device tracking. Global-scale 99.9%+ accurate face detection.

The Dutch Intelligence Agency organizes a yearly competition with difficult codes to crack. [1] It is rare for someone to answer all questions correctly. The answers require logic, creativity, common sense, linguistics, causal inference, spatial reasoning, expertise, analysis, and systematic thinking. I bet the military would be mighty interested in an automated problem solver for that. And mighty scared some other country gets there first.

[1] https://www.aivd.nl/onderwerpen/aivd-kerstpuzzel

The police is not secret: They are from the Federal Bureau of Prisons (DoJ), called the Special Operations Response Team, specialized in disturbance/riot control and to assist local police in case of emergency.

Don't play the semantics game: Even rioters are protesters. It makes as much sense for a SORT to arrest innocent protesters than it makes sense for a taxi driver to sweer onto the pavement and hit people.

> By posting GPT generated text we’re polluting the data for its future versions

https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1284660899198820352

Sometimes I forget that, while this model was created by scientists, and released with a scientific paper, it is essentially a for-profit business product, and such cheap tricks deserve harsh criticism.

Coursera courses on your resume, is like listing your Microsoft Office skills. It would be noteworthy, if for some reason, you can't find your way around MS Office, or can't pick it up in a weekend.

> Python! I learned it last night! Everything is so simple! Hello world is just: print "Hello, world!"

> SyntaxError: Missing parentheses in call to 'print'. Did you mean print("Hello, world!")?

> I dunno... dynamic typing? Whitespace?

> Come join us! Programming is fun again! It's a whole new world up here!

> But how are you flying?

> I just typed: imports antigravity as ag

> TypeError: imports() takes 2 positional arguments but 3 were given

Yes, Python, I meant exactly that! I've never seen this error message in error. Now you know what I mean, please fix it automatically, I know you can do that. Heck, throw a single warning if you really want to enforce this. I can ignore warnings that I don't care about.

Already in 2009 it was known that coronaviruses can survive and remain infectuous in sewage water for up to two weeks.

Early covid wastewater research mostly focuses on waste water and stool as a possible infection vector, and in March 3rd the WHO suggested that COVID patients use their own toilet, to avoid spread through aerosolization during flushing, and to increase chlorination efforts of sewage systems.

From the first outbreak of SARS-CoV, it was found that apartment plumbing can be an infection vector, and due to this, in Hong Kong, people suggest closing the toilet lid before flushing.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10796569

Vitamin C deficiency makes you more susceptible to the cold and severe infections.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16988135

Vitamin C has shown inhibitory effect in chickens for avian coronavirus.

https://academic.oup.com/jac/article/52/6/1049/731701

Chinese are testing intravenous Vitamin C for treating COVID-19 with promising results for reducing cytokine-induced damage to the lungs.

https://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=2...

I am really not sure why news organizations all around the world feel the need to debunk Vitamin C usage for novel coronavirus. For instance: https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/03/09/coronavirus-its-time-... . Their conclusions all amount to: washing hands is better, you may get a tummy ache, and don't believe folk remedies.

https://grapevine.is/news/2020/03/15/first-results-of-genera...

The Professor of Clinical Immunology of the University of Florence, Sergio Romagnani

> Asymptomatic infection has been reported, but the majority of the relatively rare cases who are asymptomatic on the date of identification/report went on to develop disease. The proportion of truly asymptomatic infections is unclear but appears to be relatively rare and does not appear to be a major driver of transmission.

https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-chi...

> Clinical and epidemiological data from the Chinese CDC and regarding 72,314 case records (confirmed, suspected, diagnosed, and asymptomatic cases) were shared in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) (February 24, 2020), providing an important illustration of the epidemiologic curve of the Chinese outbreak. There were 62% confirmed cases, including 1% of cases that were asymptomatic, but were laboratory-positive (viral nucleic acid test).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK554776/

Weird discrepancy on the order of 75x. I'd love to trust the experts, but who? I am leaning towards truly asymptomatic spread being rare, since you get infected by SARS-CoV-2, not COVID-19 (COVID-19 is the disease), the level of uncertainty of 25% is higher than for other reports, and the main reported mode of transmission is through symptomatic cough droplets.

Australia, NZ, U.S., Italy, they all see sustained local community spread. Australia is still exponentially increasing. Shutting down flights when there is local community spread is show politics, something to point to afterwards and say: We took decisive action. It is purely symbolic.

Sure, U.S. could pass emergency law and use their military surveillance systems to track, tag, and contact trace all of their civilians, as if they were Chinese spies.

But is this desirable in a free society? And what difference does it make when there are 100.000 infections in a single state, of which you will miss a 100 and start all over again 2-3 weeks later, but now with 99.900 angry citizens with guns?

One of the reasons that SARS-CoV is deemed a useable bioweapon is exactly because isolation security methods are very expensive and invasive at scale. The cultural damage would be enormous if people receive letters from the government after they had a private chat on Facebook about symptoms.

Community viruses mutate to see a lower mortality, severity, and infectiousness, since there is no selective pressure to have an r0 much higher than 1. For a community virus there is also no selective pressure to mutate to a vastly different strain, so the antibodies for other strains don't help, whereas if the virus is confined inside a city like Wuhan, the only way to reinfect is to mutate to a vastly different strain.

> estimated projections of as many as 96 million cases in the US, 4.8 million hospitalizations, and 480,000 deaths associated with the novel coronavirus.

All Western countries moved to fase 2 of epidemic control: Stop testing and contact tracing, since you have many many clusters of local community spread and no idea where it is coming from. They are hesitant to come out and outright say it. Some do, but not with permission of their superiors:

https://nypost.com/2020/03/13/ohio-health-officials-believe-...

Mild cases continue to spread, and don't self-isolate, because they may not even realize they are infected.

China and South Korea have laws that allow for containment: If you message your friend on WeChat and say you have a cough, then you can expect a visit from the Chinese containment crew. If you buy cough syrup in the drug store with your credit card, then South Korea health officials know this.

Containment is pragmatically impossible with an r0 > 2 in the West. Just slowing down is possible.

Harder to detect I would see in a strain that has a longer asymptomatic spread period. The only way for a virus to escape a strong quarantine and survive is to survive on surfaces longer, be asymptomatic longer, cause more severe illness (spread through cough and sneezes, especially in hospitals), linger in the air longer, etc.

> This is because coronavirus antibodies do not last for a long time. Also, the antibodies for one strain of coronavirus may be ineffective against another one.

> The general trend of IgM peaking at ≈1 month after symptom onset and IgG peaking at 2–4 months was consistent among different studies.

Herd immunity will be hard, since antibodies for coronaviruses last only about 4 months.

Even the strictest quarantines possible in the West don't compare to the mild quarantines in the East. The laws don't allow for contact tracing with GPS coordinates and credit card purchases, like they do in Singapore.

Quarantine methods put selective pressure on the strain types that are more infective and severe, since such mutations and recombinations are the only ones able to escape quarantines.

So the plan seems to be to turn this into a community virus, much like herpes or HIV. Then the selective pressure is for the mortality rate to drop and the disease becomes manageable. It would seem silly to damage your economy with heavy quarantine methods when local community cluster spread continues to pop up.

Of course, the UK government can not come out and straight up say this, but they seem one of the few governments that is realistic about facing this virus and its impossible to contain infection rate. I am guessing they ran the numbers from the Italy quarantines and based their decision on that.

Please see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcJDpV-igjs for Dr Richard Hatchett on the (long-term) dangerous effects of SARS-CoV-2. "Spanish Flu" and "WWII" he says.

3 weeks ago the first Italian got infected. 25% of Italy is now quarantined, no way to go out and buy tinned foods, without risking a 3 months detention and 200$ fine. U.S. hospitals seemingly prepare for 96 million Americans infected, 4.3 million needing hospitalization, and 480.000 deaths, or, to explain to their bosses: "10 times a flu season from hell" on top of their regular work. [1]

Italian hospitals are proposing an age limit for admission to the ICU for viral pneumonia / breathing problems, so they can focus on the young people who will have more years to live.

In China we read that those people go home and take their last breath with their family, watching or hearing their old ones take their last breath, maybe some anti-virals if still available, maybe an open-source pandemic ventilator made by citizen scientists?

Or can we all work together, to reduce the community spread of this virus by just 1% by taking a pro-active scientific approach? 100s of thousands of Americans (or even world citizens) could be saved or improved, if we stop talking about a "carona flu" now.

[1] CDC estimates that influenza was associated with 490,600 hospitalizations, and 34,200 deaths during the 2018–2019 influenza season.

Evidence of permanent lung damage and psychological damage and kidney damage well-established. The others are by comparing SARS-CoV-1 with SARS-CoV-2.

The WHO telling you it is serious and concerning is from their latest report and findings after returning from China.

Europe is going exponential. There is now a more severe and more infectious strain identified.

- Fully educate the general public on the seriousness of COVID-19 and their role in preventing its spread;

For the public:

- Recognize that COVID-19 is a new and concerning disease, but that outbreaks can managed with the right response and that the vast majority of infected people will recover;

So the WHO tells you it's serious and concerning. Not that it is as severe as the common flu. Did we see proper management of outbreaks in the West? Well...

> "The incompetence has really exceeded what anyone would expect with the C.D.C.," said Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at Harvard University.

About hoarding canned foods:

> We're asking folks in every sector, as well as people within their families, to start planning for this, because as we've seen from the recent countries that have had community spread, when it hit in those countries, it has moved quite rapidly

> Dr. Theresa Tam: Prepare ... Some of those steps include stocking up on needed prescriptions ahead of time so there is no need to do so during a possible pandemic. She also recommended people stock up on non-perishable food.

Both Canada and US CDC have told people to prepare, including stocking up on non-perishable food. What's the worst thing that could happen when this turns out to be a tempest in a teacup? You eat from your pantry the next few months, or you donate it to a homeless shelter. What's the worst thing that could happen, when you don't prepare, and this turns into quarantine-levels bad? You'll have to live with the guilt of ridiculing people for preparing for one. The other bad things are unspeakable.

The data you gather may not bear out the panic, but can you think of a reason for that, something to do with social order and public policy in light of a global pandemic?

CFR is not everything, you may survive the first round, with neurological damage, bone damage, lung damage, testicular damage, heart damage, psychological damage, and kidney damage.

> it’s by no means the apocalypse

This may be how you cope, but you can't say this for sure. There is a proper chance at a global crisis, with the impact of the Spanish Flu or WWII. There is too much uncertainty to be complacent and factually discard this. This novel virus is from extremistan, and we "just don't know the damage this virus can do".

> Nevertheless, all CFRs still need to be interpreted with caution and more research is required.

Like the cruise ships:

> The ministry has tested 4,061 people so far, of which 705 were positive, including 392 people who were asymptomatic.

So seems your estimate of "huge numbers of asymptomatic" is not far from the mark. Apologies. See also:

> Asymptomatic infection has been reported, but the majority of the relatively rare cases who are asymptomatic on the date of identification/report [due to contact testing] went on to develop disease. The proportion of truly asymptomatic infections is unclear but appears to be relatively rare and does not appear to be a major driver of transmission.

https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-chi...

> huge quantities of people with nCoV are completely and totally asymptomatic.

From 72.314 cases, as of February 11, 2020, only 889 asymptomatic cases (1%).

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762130

15%-25% have severe symptoms. 5%+ critical. Of the first 100 cohorts in Wuhan with critical symptoms, 49 died (2.5% mortality rate). Patient-1 in Italy is a 38-year-old marathon runner. He is unconscious, intubated, and fighting for life. Doctors say they need "luck".

Doctors and nurses are dying from this. They did not die from treating patients with the garden variety flu. Conservative estimates put the mortality rate at 2.3%, with only room to grow as people die years later.

If you have severe symptoms, but are send home to self-quarantine, because the hospitals are over capacity, death rate is estimated at 80%-85%.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762130

There are four steps to the Feynman Learning Technique:

1. Choose a concept you want to learn about

2. Pretend you are teaching it to a student in grade 6

3. Identify gaps in your explanation; Go back to the source material, to better understand it.

4. Review and simplify (optional)