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kaiabwpdjqn

169 karma · joined March 4, 2020

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kaiabwpdjqn··on S&P 500 triggers 15-minute trading halt for the second time this week
What’s been going on in Shanghai? How serious has the lockdown been?
kaiabwpdjqn··on S&P 500 triggers 15-minute trading halt for the second time this week
So here’s my question. China seems to have done a good job locking down Beijing and preventing an outbreak there. They did not do a good job in Wuhan. Per what you have described above, doesn’t it seem probable that Beijing will see a resurfacing given that relatively few people were exposed to it in the first bout?
kaiabwpdjqn··on Covid-19 is now officially a pandemic, WHO says
Spanish Flu disagrees with you
kaiabwpdjqn··on S&P 500 triggers 15-minute trading halt for the second time this week
And what if China is wrong, lying, or only temporarily correct, causing the virus to resurface when society resumes?
kaiabwpdjqn··on Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat
There’s not much right vs left yet. It’s just the Democrats figuring out who their candidate will be. The pandemic has a very small effect on the US right now. Things are closing but mostly in anticipation of the near future. Almost none of it is in the middle where the right lives.

There’s been some yelling at trump over his poor handling but it’s mostly just virtue signaling at this point. When the elections come around for real we will probably see something of this if/when it has evolved into something more serious here.

I say this in Boston, just a few degrees of separation from some of the COVID confirmed individuals.

kaiabwpdjqn··on U.S. will suspend all travel from Europe for 30 days
> Do you really think some moron bumbled his way into the most powerful office in the world?

Yes, and in light of anecdotes of how decisions are made in the current administration: double yes

kaiabwpdjqn··on The flying taxi market may be ready for takeoff: study
The sky is mostly empty space when, and only when, there are not flying taxis at sufficient scale for society to bat an eye
kaiabwpdjqn··on Covid-19 is now officially a pandemic, WHO says
CFR in Italy is lower in every age category than in China.

It’s Simpson’s paradox

kaiabwpdjqn··on Covid-19 is now officially a pandemic, WHO says
It’s a stupid concern. The reason the government is incompetent is that the government is incompetent. That’s not uniquely American, and there’s no evidence that race has played into any of this. We didn’t exactly change our tune when Italy freaked out. Does that mean we’re racist against Italians?
kaiabwpdjqn··on Covid-19 is now officially a pandemic, WHO says
As an Asian American... no, I don’t think racism played into this at all. Would have been exactly the same if it started in London.
kaiabwpdjqn··on Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country
I think the real takeaway is from all this is that death rate is a pointless metric. It is highly dependent on the local demographics, it requires precise information which is rarely available, it is biased by the level of care available, it has numerous ways to estimate it all of which are hard to explain and not actual estimates but upper or lower bounds, it tends to naturally decrease over time, etc.

The death rate is lower in China than Italy, but the death rate is lower within each age group in Italy vs China. Most people are too innumerate to understand this statement.

As an aside, I REALLY hate how this guy on twitter says “it could be 5.0%, look at this spreadsheet that assumes 5.0%!” Then refers to a paper as a good analysis which claims 1.6% and a set of facts which differ greatly from all of his assumptions.

kaiabwpdjqn··on Flatten the Coronavirus Curve
There’s an important bit in this that depends on age. If you’re young and healthy, in addition to being less likely to die from the disease, you’re also less likely to acquire the disease (exposure level being held equal). If you’re older, you’re more likely to acquire the disease.

This implies the disease will spread much faster in areas with more old people, because more people are vulnerable to it and they are more likely to become infectious themselves. A similar statement could be made for how well integrated the older generations are in a given society.

I don’t live there and have no particular horse in this race, but I would predict the Bay Area will not look like Italy right now for this reason.

Edit: do be careful though. The takeaway is not that young people can ignore this.

kaiabwpdjqn··on Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country
well it’s a good thing I didn’t suggest that
kaiabwpdjqn··on Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country
what is the treatment then?
kaiabwpdjqn··on Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country
My point is that medical staff are trained to respond to many things. Training newbies to respond to one thing would probably be easy and fast. Especially if most people just need fluids, oxygen, and aspirin. Burning out doctors to maximize survival rates up front is... bad
kaiabwpdjqn··on Italy is extending its coronavirus quarantine measures to the entire country
What do the healthcare workers actually do while caring for these people? Is this something that actually requires significant medical knowledge?

What does arrest mean? Is that cardiac arrest? Is that how people are dying? If they’re dying and people aren’t attending, should they even be there at all?

kaiabwpdjqn··on “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
I doubt it would be a game changer. Grocery stores already collect this when you use a card for discounts

(They’ll never say no if you ask to put on the store card though...)

kaiabwpdjqn··on “Just walk out” technology by Amazon
anyone know if this tech can handle adversarial images? Is it even computer vision based?
kaiabwpdjqn··on Why does the coronavirus spread so easily between people?
The data was small but seemed to be worse for former smokers. That’s hard to judge though, because former smokers are likely to have quit due to health problems. I haven’t seen any useful stats on infection rates but I think that’s an interesting idea.
kaiabwpdjqn··on Turn down the quantum volume
Ok but what I’m looking for is an actual example of an intractable problem.

Breaking crypto is one, I guess, but it’s also one that makes everything worse, so I don’t take that as a useful outcome.

kaiabwpdjqn··on Why does the coronavirus spread so easily between people?
I noticed this smoker effect early on! Data from China was showing about 20% of the infected population was smokers, while smoking is closer to 60% in Chinese men (by cursory google search). The death rates were much higher for infected smokers, but they were curiously underrepresented.

This has a really interesting double effect if you think about it. In places with lots of smokers, fewer people will get the disease, but a larger proportion will die from it. Both of those effects will magnify the death rate.

Edit: assuming the protection is additive and not proportional to existing rates across ages

kaiabwpdjqn··on Improved chess game compression (2018)
> It took hundreds of hours of human review time to find a single OCR mistake from this process!

This stands out to me as improbable. Not in that the error rate could be that low, but in that they actually had humans spend hundreds of hours checking the accuracy of difficult character recognition. How did that happen?

kaiabwpdjqn··on Trading halted as U.S. stocks plummet
That makes a lot of sense to me, but it doesn’t seem to be the case and I don’t understand why.

Is it oil prices down -> large oil based economies at risk due to vastly lower margins -> global instability from inability to make payments?

kaiabwpdjqn··on Adjusted Age-Specific Case Fatality Ratio During for COVID-19 in Hubei [pdf]
That was my point of confusion on the charts for symptomatic people. I’m assuming that the relatively high rates of non symptomatic individuals implies they’re testing people without symptoms in a somewhat random sample style
kaiabwpdjqn··on How I survived being a $220k/year intern
I feel like all of those concerns are nullified if you just don’t quit your job before lining up another... which is what people usually do.
kaiabwpdjqn··on How I survived being a $220k/year intern
I feel like I acknowledged that in my post. Most relevant concerns for “why don’t you just leave” are around having enough money to pay for basic needs, having other jobs, or finding a place that works for your geographic situation.

This guy got a huge salary in a market with tons of demand while working from home. There was no particular urgency to leave, so he could have casually looked. It also seems like he would have stayed there if he wasn’t let go.

And from the look of it was still writing about it years later.

kaiabwpdjqn··on How I survived being a $220k/year intern
I find this post to be relatively unimpressive. He spends a great amount of time complaining about how the company was shit in a way that implies he was personally offended, but the title says he got a generous salary for little expected work. It’s not clear to me why he is bitter about anything. I have no doubt that the company was genuinely poorly run. His observations about problems in the sales culture are likely true. But he could have left any time and instead chose to stay there for 3 years. And I get that leaving a job isn’t always an option for people but those reasons don’t feel relevant for his situation.

Author reads as overly entitled and arrogant imo.

kaiabwpdjqn··on Adjusted Age-Specific Case Fatality Ratio During for COVID-19 in Hubei [pdf]
Death rates aside, it looks like younger people are less likely to even get the disease (not especially surprising). If you exclude the really young people, even the 30 year olds would likely be under represented (I think). One implication of this may be that societies with more socially engaged older people will be more vulnerable to this. E.g. countries where people who serve as frequent touch points to strangers like frontline retail jobs are likely to be older might do worse in this circumstance.
kaiabwpdjqn··on Exploding Head Syndrome
Hmm. I think I get this on occasion. It sounds like a heavily distorted electronic crunchy buzz like if you touched a guitar jack to some random metal while hooked up to an amp.

I had previously thought these might be “brain zaps” that people describe after stopping anti depressants, even though I never started

kaiabwpdjqn··on Turn down the quantum volume
I guess. But we already optimize these things. Without any specific domain in mind, I wonder how much better we could get. Like maybe amazon could find the global minimum cost to route, but right now it’s getting pretty darn close.

Or maybe that’s entirely naive and the potential for finding faster solutions to real time problems is huge

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