jlebar

It's ironic (or maybe not?) that the comments section here is filled with exactly the kind of anti-vax misinformation that YouTube is trying to take down.

To respond to one point I keep reading in here over and over: Getting and recovering from covid does not necessarily give you better protection from disease than getting the vaccine.

1/3 of people who get covid develop no antibodies at all, as compared to 0% of (non-immunocompromised) people who get the vaccine. https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/574284-natural-covid-...

Also, of course, if you get covid...you got covid which was kind of the thing that we were trying to avoid. Not just for ourselves, but for our communities.

Another point I keep reading is, we don't know the long-term effects of these vaccines. And, it's undeniably true that we don't know with the certainty of evidence what will happen in ten years. But:

- 2.5 billion people have gotten at least one covid shot. This is one of the most-studied medical interventions in the history of medical interventions.

- There is no known and plausible mechanism by which the shot suddenly has bad effects years down the line. Historically, any side effects from vaccines show up within a few weeks, https://www.muhealth.org/our-stories/how-do-we-know-covid-19...

- We also don't know what will happen in ten years to people who caught long covid, and we do know that people who die from covid will not be alive in ten years.

Stay safe, everyone.

A compelling theory! If only it were so simple.

In practice it doesn't actually work out that way. 1/3 of people who get covid have no antibodies at all, whereas everyone (who is not immunocompromised) who gets the vaccine develops antibodies.

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/574284-natural-covid-...

The immune system is very complicated.

> If you believe vaccines have no potential negative effect beyond 1 week, you'll have to give a serious thought as to why you believe Covid can have long term effects.

I mean, covid can kill you, which is kind of a long-term negative effect? Surely you're not arguing that the vaccine is equally likely to have that particularly long-term effect, so then I'd ask why you think it's equally likely to have other long-term effects?

> Also past vaccine history means absolutely nothing. You can't assume the next bridge is built safely just because you have never seen a bridge fall before.

Really? I mean, do you...generally avoid bridges where you live?

It seems to me that if bridges don't collapse frequently, that would indeed be evidence that whoever is building / designing / approving them is doing something right, and that "the next" bridge is also unlikely to collapse?

It's not true that people get stronger immunity by catching covid. 1/3 of people get no antibodies at all, as compared to 100% of non-immunocompromised people who get vaccinated.

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/574284-natural-covid-...

It appears that you too have been a victim of the misinformation that youtube is attempting to mitigate!

> Months ago he was insisting that the people who had contracted COVID-19 and who had antibodies in their system may not need the vaccine. Now, we have a number of studies coming out to support that. But months ago that was "anti-vax" (employing the slanderous use of the term).

I'm curious what his evidence is, because I find this argument compelling: https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/574284-natural-covid-...

Others have recommended Mozart's Requiem if you like music with singing. If you haven't heard Robert Levin's completion, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=457pvjOo9Hw, I think it takes the cake.

For a neophyte, I think it's good to start with the war horses, for which there are lots of high-quality modern recordings.

- Bach Brandenberg concerti (I like the Netherlands Bach Society, they have tons of great Bach recordings on Youtube. If you're into Bach, highly recommend you check them out.)

- Goldberg variations (I like Glen Gould's later recording, but Kimiko Ishizaka is also a great libre recording, and Netherlands Bach Society has a great recording on harpsichord)

- Mozart Symphony 40

- Mozart piano, violin sonatas

- Beethoven Symphonies 3,5,9 (I really like https://www.youtube.com/user/hrSinfonieorchester)

- Chopin waltzes, etudes, nocturnes

- Rach piano concerto 2, Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini

- Sibelius violin concerto (I like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0w0t4Qn6LY)

- Bruch violin concerto

Personally I think watching videos helps bring the music alive in a way that listening to recordings doesn't. And maybe it's heresy to some, but I think modern recordings are, in general, a lot more pleasant to listen to.

HTH!

Haha thanks. Not my pun, I just saw it somewhere on the internet!

My mind was also blown when I got to demo this a few years ago.

You sit down and you forget that there's technology happening. The person is there, in front of you. I don't know how else to describe it.

The testimonials in the video aren't exaggerating compared to my experience.

I guess I should have been more clear.

I think the argument "all consumption of food kills animals, therefore no food is truly vegetarian/vegan, therefore there's no moral distinction between quote-unquote vegan food and factory-farmed meat" is a no-true-Scotsman fallacy.

In other words, I agree with you. :)

"If Materialism is true, the United States is likely conscious."

http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconsci...

> Ask yourself if that's a possibility, and if you think that there is a zero probability of anyone maliciously weaponizing accusations of sexual misconduct.

As a straight, white man: False accusations of sexual assault are extremely rare, but they do happen. It's not a zero probability event.

I guess my response is, right now there's a nonzero chance of someone assaulting someone else, and then a nonzero chance they'll away with it. And there's a nonzero chance of someone making a false accusation and another nonzero chance of them getting away with it. We as a society have to weigh the likelihood of each of these four things occurring.

All experience (and you can look this up) is that sexual assault is perpetrated relatively frequently, and people frequently aren't held accountable in the criminal justice system, for a variety of reasons. OTOH the evidence is that false accusations are vanishingly rare in comparison.

So we should just...keep this in mind, is all, before saying that this kind of public statement is counterproductive. Maybe it protects someone from him, or maybe it protects someone from someone like him. Sure, I'd like him to be in jail, but maybe in the flawed system we live with today, the best we can hope for is he's kicked out of the Scala community. Maybe that would be productive?

@dang: Bad headline. Tweet says it will hide the number of dislikes, but you'll still be able to dislike a video.

The tweet is clear that you can still downvote videos to tune the algorithm. Dislikes just won't be shown.

> If this is fairly standard practice, then an afternoon birthday surgery would be an emergency situation and, hence, more deadly.

TFA says they're only counting emergency surgeries, to avoid exactly this bias.

> I don't think reducing crashes is anything but a marketing ploy

For what it's worth, I wouldn't be working at Waymo if I didn't believe self-driving cars are very likely to save lives.

> In general, it's my belief (I don't have facts or research, just a hunch)

Indeed.

> the Turing test, in the "standard" interpretation (rather than Turing's original formulation)

Goalposts: moved!

This is exactly my point.

Since the article calls out Waymo engineers:

I'm a software engineer at Waymo, speaking for myself.

I agree with the premise of the article. Humans are remarkably good at driving, and making a computer better will be hard.

Where I may disagree with the author is, I think the project is both feasible and worth doing.

It's worth doing because we drive a remarkable amount. Even at human safety level, more than a million people die every year in car crashes.

As far as feasibility, Waymo is, today, running a fully autonomous, no-human-behind-the-wheel ride hailing service in Arizona. It's not a dead-end demo, it's there. I know, a Phoenix suburb is not the same as NYC or Mumbai. Trust me, I know -- probably better than you! Nonetheless, what we accomplished was impossible a few years ago.

The history of AI is a history of moving the goalposts and then blowing past them. AlphaGo solves what was considered one of the hardest problems in AI, but now that I see how you did it, eh, it's not that impressive. GPT-3 passes the Turing Test and can almost pass a coding phone screen, but come on, nobody really thought that a machine that passed TT would be intelligent. It was just a few years ago that respectable people were saying we'd never solve protein folding. Now that we have, the goalposts have moved again. Don't worry, we'll blow past those, too. Except this time people will yawn.

So give us some time. This too will happen slowly, and then all at once.

>>[Linus has] also made a lot of people's lives worse.

> Utter bullshit and baseless allegation. Why would you say such a thing without providing any shred of evidence?

Are you actually saying, without irony, that it's bullshit and baseless that Linus Torvalds, one of the most famously abusive OSS maintainers in history, had made people's lives worse by way of these actions?

Linus himself has said that he recognizes he hurt people.

> [RMS] awkwardly hit on some women because he is a bit of a social retard. Big fucking whoopdie-doo.

Not a big deal to you. Cool.

Suppose it was a huge deal to other people. I mean, it's not a hypothetical, I've provided citations.

Are the feelings of other people illegitimate when they disagree with you?

I recall I left Mozilla before the same-sex marriage fight, but I'm familiar with it.

Just as I wouldn't call Brendan or gerv a psycho-sadist, I also wouldn't call the people who called for their resignations names, nor group them all together.

I think name-calling, especially of a large group which shares only one thing in common is antithetical to building inclusive human communities. Literally we're excluding people and calling them Stasi members because we disagree with them.

If you want people to be kind to each other, and if you're against cancelling people for their opinions, it's got to start somewhere.

I also want to speak to your two other examples, Linus and RMS.

WRT Linus, I personally know many talented people who wouldn't touch Linux development specifically because of him. It's cool that Linus has made your life better. He's also made a lot of people's lives worse. Where's their due process?

WRT RMS, I take issue with the idea that he was not given due process. In fact he was allowed to stay for years, despite harassing women and acting inappropriately in his position. The Epstein email was a last straw. But also: What makes you think he wasn't given due process? He says he was "pressured" by MIT and resigned. Do you think he couldn't have fought it? It sounds like he decided not to fight it. That's different than not being given due process.

Again with RMS, it's clear that his behavior was deeply upsetting to a lot of people. https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-appendix... Where's their due process? How do they factor into your calculus of who's worthy of our compassion?

I would be extremely surprised if Bazel were 4m faster than cmake+ninja with the same build config.

If this really is a correct result, I bet the ninja people would want to hear about it. (And, kudos to the Bazel folks!) But I think it's more likely measurement error. Maybe the build flags or host compiler aren't the same in the two configurations?

> This whole CoC thing is sadly fraught with virtue signaling psycho-sadists who enjoy playing tribunal. > > The people who actually cared about fostering inclusive human communities got bullied out of positions of power long ago, so that aforementioned people could run their own little Stasi

It sounds like you include yourself in this group of people who care about building inclusive human communities?

Generalizing to whole groups of people who support an amorphous thing, calling them "psycho-sadists", and saying they want to "run their own little Stasi" is...not exactly how I would foster an inclusive human community.

Like, it sounds like you very much do not want "those people" in your community.

Just saying.

My favorite (not actually horrible) switch statement trick:

Instead of

  string x;
  switch (y) {
    case 0: x = "foo"; break;
    case 1: x = "bar"; break;
  }

try an IIFE!

  string x = [&] {
    case(y) {
      case 0: return "foo";
      case 1: return "bar";
    }
  }();

Once you get used to reading it, there are a bunch of advantages. Among them, you can't forget a "break", and you can't forget to assign into `x`.

So you're saying, (WLOG) women who happen to disagree with the prevailing (male) viewpoint are better off in offices which disallow discussion of politics. Because by telling everyone that they can't talk about political issues relevant to women, they don't have to shoulder the burden of the majority disagreeing with them?

But...by assumption, the majority disagrees with them? I don't get it.

I mean, just hypothetically, suppose some group was discriminated against at work. Women, Black folks, LGBTQ folks, folks with disabilities, whatever. This discrimination is "political", in that Serious Politicians disagree about whether it's right. I hope you don't think this is a stretch. You're saying that in a world where they couldn't advocate for themselves by talking about the issues they face, they'd be better off?

If this is about what's best for them, why not let them choose? Do we have to be the gatekeepers of what's good for them or not?

> they are better off in a place where they're not allowed to advocate for their own rights (inside and outside the workplace)?

Sorry, I think I was unclear. I meant, discussing inside the workplace issues that are relevant to their lives inside and outside work.

> As for your question, everyone is of course allowed to ask for more pay. This is not what I'd call politics, but simply salary negotiation.

OK. Let's take it a few steps further?

Are women allowed to say, "you know, women are paid less than men for most jobs in this country, let's advocate that this not be the case at our company?" Are they allowed to say, "you know, our company shouldn't be supporting X politician, because they're not in favor of equal pay for equal work?" Are they allowed to say, "you know, just as our company advocates for laws and regulations that we think are beneficial to our core technical business (software or whatever), we should also advocate for laws and regulations that are good for our people, like paid maternity leave."

And, just step back: Does it give you any pause that we're having a conversation about what what women are allowed to say?

So for example, you're saying that in workplaces where women are in the minority, they are better off in a place where they're not allowed to advocate for their own rights (inside and outside the workplace)?

Wouldn't they be better off in a workplace where they could, you know, ask for the things that they think would make them better off?

OK, and where should we draw the line?

If LGBTQ benefits are an acceptable topic, is it acceptable to talk about same-sex marriage? Is it acceptable to advocate for pro-LGBTQ policies more broadly? If not, why not? It's all part of the same thing, no?

If H-1B visas are an acceptable topic, is it acceptable to advocate that our company should support the removal of a politician who is anti-immigrant? Again, it's all part of the same thing, no?

When I start thinking about it, a lot of these workplace issues are connected to broader issues...

OK, that's your view on the gender pay gap. I disagree, but set that aside for a moment.

We were talking about whether it's appropriate to discuss one's opinion on the pay gap -- among other things -- at work, despite its being political. Seems like you're saying it is appropriate? Like, if a woman who reported to you came to you asking for more money to reach parity with a male colleague, I guess you'd say, "I am a hiring manager etc etc and the emperor has no clothes, here's why you make less"? If you think that's OK, then we're in agreement on this point that this is an acceptable topic for work.

As someone who has managed people myself, I think it would be highly relevant to my business function to know where my fellow managers stand on this issue.

> Workplaces are a neutral environment. You want activism, do it outside of work.

Equal pay regardless of gender is a political question. In the name of "leaving politics out of work", should we disallow women and nonbinary folks from advocating at work for equal pay?

Equal opportunity for people of color is a political question. In the name of "leaving politics out of work", should we disallow people of color from advocating at work for equal opportunity?

Accommodation for disability is a political question. Paid time off for pregnancy is a political question. What rights we grant to older employees is a political question. Whether LGBTQ folks can be fired for being out is a political question.

The system as I've seen it works pretty great for youngish cishet white men like me. From my perspective, things at my workplace seem quite "neutral". But when I get to know people who are at all different, I find that the workplace is not at all neutral towards them.

We did this in XLA. It runs as part of CI, which I always found pretty amazing. https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/bd2608178bca1b...

Found a lot of bugs this way.