maxander

That’s still a metaphor; how processes actually occupy space isn’t relevant to the distinction. If the backend is running on a laptop right in front of you, it’s still a backend. The frontend is probably on the same machine, nether in front of or behind the backend “really.” But we see the frontend’s display, just like we see things that are in front of other things (and not things that are behind other things,) thus the metaphor.

Surely, if you’ve been putting up exhaustive evidence many times before, you could take a second to link to one of these studies you mention? Otherwise your comment carries much less weight, and you should expect the sort of response you just got.

As with bizarrely restrictive FDA regulations on, e.g., face masks, the famous conservatism of IRB committees is another thing that the COVID19 story should motivate us to re-examine.

That is extremely Hieronymous Bosch.

For some reason, though, the oil industry is one of the most technologically advanced sectors that exist, and employs some dominating fraction of all PhDs in geology and related fields. Even though they’re just “pumping oil from holes in the ground.” I guess they just really like their toys. :)

Most easily accessible oil resources are long gone. What we could get to if we were reduced to 1800s technology is extremely limited.

If some great catastrophe someday flattens our civilization, these reserves (and others of the sort, globally) will probably be the only oil sources accessible to civilization as it tries to rebuild. They may even be enough - we use oil at an absurd rate now, but for most of our technological development (excepting perhaps the world wars) I'd imagine it was much less.

It's also interesting that the Roman Army apparently ate five times as much as the entire city of Rome. Resource allocation was clearly very different back then (and apparently in our favor.)

> (Submitted on 15 Mar 2020)

I feel like if this would work, it would mean one could inhale vaporized alcohol efficiently enough to get drunk on the vapor alone. And if that were a thing people could do, one would certainly expect it to be familiar from some terrible frat culture shenanigans. ...On the other hand, should be simple enough to get a trial together.

Has anyone looked at the equivalent numbers in the US? Or South Korea, or other places with outbreaks?

Herd immunity kicks in when a large fraction of the people you encounter were already infected, giving you fewer chances to infect new people. So incubation time doesn’t matter there (though certainly it doesn’t help, for other reasons.)

People are probably downvoting you because it's generally frowned upon to make baseless "just-so" claims, especially in something as difficult to make credible claims in as geopolitics, and especially when it asserts the superiority of some groups over others (or appears to.)

That all being said, there have been studies of how "meritocratic" different societies are (albeit I don't know how that is operationalized) and there will be very quantitative measures of how well each country weathers the pandemic; someone could certainly (when the data is in) check to see how those features tend to relate.

"As long as the health care system is under capacity" is about a week or so at best, in much of the U.S., and not much longer (or already past) in many other places. And it's going to stay that way for awhile - outside China and Korea, the best news we have so far is the rate of new cases in some places has stopped increasing exponentially.

In many cases, people aren't available; they're sheltering at home, social distancing. Even for those who can work remotely, the disruption to routine is going to reduce productivity. And worse, many assets are going to be destroyed- for instance, restaurants that go under while distancing is taking place are just going to be gone, and while the brute equipment can be reused later, the "organizational capital" (the habits and knowledge of how to run that particular business in that particular context most effectively) vanishes.

Various governmental interventions (stimulus, rent freezes, etc) can ameliorate this, but I'm not confident (and the financial sector isn't confident, I think) that the government is presently competent enough to get too much mileage out of implementing these; stimulus needs to be done correctly and promptly to have much effect.

If you're in (or your customers are in) an industry that can hunker down and "weather the downturn," the eventual return to normal will be priced in and you'll likely be fine. If you're in (or ditto) an industry that will suffer attrition, the uncertainty will be priced in and you're liable to suffer. Give some thought as to where you stand.

If it’s just for yourself, a regular thermometer will do, certainly?

I wonder if dealers in fraudulent art/whisky/whatever have started purchasing samples of 13C or 14C to try to fool this kind of analysis. I don't know what the cost would be, but it would only need very small quantities (and very, very careful measurement.)

Strong social ties can exist without an overarching authority, or even without any sort of authoritative structure at all- I think the best thing to look at in this regard are modern subcultures (punks, hipsters, hippies, goths, burners, etc) particularly as they exist in decently-sized cities. A bunch of like-minded and like-lifestyled people with an excuse to get together; that’s at least 90% of what the old conservative/religious structures offered.

At least one company is working on that general concept: https://www.ctrl-labs.com/

This is perhaps the first time I had heard of China's "Greater Bay Area" (according to wikipedia a "megalopolis" consisting of 11 cities besides Shenzhen) and, particularly in the context of this article on Shenzhen's SF-like woes, I can't help but be struck by this masterstroke of English-language branding on China's part.

It’s a pity that the common annotation for a “surprising” move is to follow the move code with an examination mark (or two) rather than preceding it; otherwise we would have a simple way of making the model generate surprising moves on command. :)

Was halfway expecting a GPT-2 model trained to act like a bash shell.

That’s because you’re concerned with the laptop still being usable afterwards. :)

Not just the desire, but also the ability- the cultural context for an industrial base potentially far more powerful than what we have. That may be extremely difficult to sustain over such timescales.

You know, I your heart of hearts, you’re not going to generate a plan on this site and stick to it... but, likewise, you’ll remember roughly what the plan would have been, giving you a slightly better idea of the boundaries of a “good” diet and when you’re in which side of them. And that could add years to your life!

Dump more money into mining and more mining will happen (much as what happens with farm subsidies.). This probably wouldn’t achieve the reduction in suffering you’re looking for.

Since each hand beats two other hands, you only need three possible outputs to beat any opposing hand.

Perhaps they could get a grant from OpenAI or some similar AI research firm; someday, when the technology arrives, the Internet Archive will be the ultimate corpus.

“Technology to get an individual from anyplace on Earth to any other place in less than an hour” ... so, a mobile-platform-launched ICBM that you can climb into. I’d believe that the military would have developed that for that sake of some capability or other. It’s not relevant to any plausible civilian application, however.

(The speculative SpaceX suborbital rocket thing, IMHO, is not credible evidence against my point. :) )

> Switching transportation in the middle of a trip even once wastes a ton of time and adds hassle.

Does it? When driving into Boston, I’ve found it almost always better to park in a big garage on the edge of town and ride a bus/subway in, rather than spend ~20 minutes looking for parking near my destination (or paying for one of the massively more expensive in-town garages.)

From jellyfish’s pypi page: “ a library for doing approximate and phonetic matching of strings.”

Huh! Hadn’t realized. That adds an ironic spin to the whole thing.

So they caught the guy using a cliched I-vs-l typosquatting scheme and lazily writing the malicious code in Python; we can presume they haven't caught the guy who took the trouble to put their malicious code in a pre-compiled C extension.

Reminds me of the fraudulent scientific papers that get caught using really dumb fakes (e.g., microscopy pictures that are copies of one another re-zoomed and rotated); we catch the dumb ones, but presumably not all malicious actors are dumb, so there must be a lot more fraudulent work out there.

For that matter, isn't there a reasonable systematic way to catch out typosquatters simply based on text analysis? Any library name that's a short edit distance from a popular library should have been carefully reviewed from the start; there's no excuse for "jeilyfish" to have lasted more than a couple of days.