strangeloops85

Well, a lot of the same people are involved in both..

I think NYC almost certainly has much large prevalence than LA given hospitalization data alone.

One factor could be the nature of transmission. Regions where transmission occurs with high viral loads entering at the point of infection (for example, hospital-acquired infections) could see more severe disease progression. You would therefore expect a high hospitalization rate relative to prevalence. It's possible in other regions, including CA, hospitalization rate as a function of prevalence is lower because acquisition is largely at lower viral loads resulting in less rapid and severe disease progression. This is, of course, a hypothesis and very likely not correct. Time will tell.

Other important factors include age distribution of infection, as well as weather conditions and prevalence of pre-existing conditions.

Some more information about the study here: https://pressroom.usc.edu/what-a-usc-la-county-antibody-stud...

Population is supposed to be representative of LA county. Tests are from Premier Biotech with some preliminary data on false negative/ false positive rates shown. I suspect assumptions related to the test itself, rather than population, may be a bigger factor for any inaccuracies. There's also the question of whether antibody response implies immunity for SARS-COV2

Another interesting aspect of the result was 6% of men showed antibodies but only 2% of women tested.

Also: --2.4% of people between the ages of 18 and 34 had antibodies to the coronavirus --5.6% of people between 35 and 54 had antibodies --4.3% of between 55 and older had antibodies

Edit: The key assumption that really, really needs to be triply checked here is the specificity of the test. They're assuming 99.5%, similar to the Stanford study I believe. If it's closer to 98% then prevalence estimate confidence intervals should include 0%, I believe. Also should be noted that the same PI on the Stanford study, Jay Bhattacharya, is also involved in this. Same criticisms likely apply here - more caution needed!

Second edit: On further reflection, I think these studies could do serious damage based on how the results are being announced by press-release - in this case, afaik there's no pre-print. In our current environment this isn't just science. Policy is being enacted and people may die because of poorly framing results. Everyone involved needs to take a step back and think through this carefully. Also - did anyone figure out why a hedge fund guy was an author on the Stanford pre-print? And why that same guy then published a Wall Street Journal op-ed about the study without identifying himself as a co-author? Shady stuff.

Something like this will get rolled out, piece-meal, throughout the country. As has been the case since the beginning of this, a lack of federal guidance and leadership means every jurisdiction will have to get ahead of this as much as might still be possible.

This is completely unwarranted fatalism. Taiwan and Singapore bent the curve, and Korea is doing it now as well. Learn from them and implement! Really don't understand this logic at all - containment is possible.

And, right on cue: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/a-second-case-of-coron...

Here we go...

Unfortunately, it will be a very small signal relative to the total number of respiratory illnesses at this time of year. Moreover, there's often a multi-week lag-time between it spreading and getting cases that get severe enough for hospitalization. Until there's a critical mass of enough infected to get sufficient number of patients with ARDS (like the woman at the UC Davis Medical Center), it may be hard to notice. The problem is, once it's noticed through this method, it's likely spread to a significant number of people. This is what happened in Northern Italy and Iran (and to some extent in Wuhan as well).

Once testing actually ramps up in the US... I'd expect similar cases to pop up all over the Bay Area. The Fairfield case was infectious starting weeks ago.

The CDC site shows only 8 more tests having happened in the last few days (aka: preposterously low!). We're really flying blind until we have more data and testing. When the history of this epidemic in the US is written, it will be noted that the entire month of February was wasted diagnostically and critical opportunities to still attempt containment lost.

When you're buying for your kids, particularly in the newborn -> infant -> toddler range, Amazon is a nightmare and we're steering clear of it. Especially since pretty much everything will end up in the kid's mouth. I even ordered formula a couple of times, figuring it was regulated, but something seemed off in the packaging and consistency.. had to throw them away. Just completely unacceptable! Brick and mortar it is.

As many public health experts and virologists are now pointing out (and as I am sure many at CDC have long realized), there's no way to know if there's community spread without actually testing for it. Current testing capacity is severely limited - which is baffling really, given that Korea is running like 6000 tests/ days now. Part of it is a logistical / technical screw-up:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/20/cdc-coronavirus-116...

For example, if you're a doctor with a case of atypical pneumonia, there's no way to actually test a patient for it unless there's clear China (possibly Hubei!) travel history. And that could take 3-7 days. However, consider the Canadian ER doctor who a few days ago decided to ask for a test for a woman who had traveled back from Iran recently - turned out she had it, and it revealed to us unexpected, but very real vectors of transmission.

These technical issues have to be solved, otherwise there's no way to distinguish this from regular seasonal flu cases and pneumonias, until - like in Wuhan - the atypical cases bubble up. At that point, it's really too late to do much containment.

X seems a strange blend of overly ambitious and overly critical/ constraining (which is partly related to conception of what is "big" enough). It's also unnecessarily secretive and would benefit from being more open, especially in the energy and climate space.

A lot of interesting ideas get shot down quickly, which is not necessarily a bad thing.. but I'm not sure what the false positive vs. false negative rate is in this process. But for those ideas that develop, it seems like perfectly solid technologies that could form the premise of an interesting startup don't get out the door because they don't meet an internal bar of "worthiness". Maybe let the market and external funders decide that?

Their internal process is not intrinsically good or bad, but what's unfortunate is that they don't really publish. I know they're not looking to be Bell Labs, but if they think a lot of these ideas aren't going to pan out, but many person-years of research effort goes in, they really should share the learnings and lessons as opposed to locking it up internally. When these projects don't pass their internal bar for being commercially viable (which seems rather disconnected from what that bar would be if the idea/ tech stood on its own outside), it's basically like academic research. Truly is a shame that a lot of smart people working on interesting non-commercializable ideas don't get to share that. Others might pick up on it, if not now.. maybe a decade or two down the road.

To be clear - selective solar absorbers that absorb the solar spectrum well and have low infrared emissivity (so they don't radiate heat well), are a mature concept and can be achieved by multilayer coatings pretty well. This is a nice manufacturing process and could also be a competitive approach compared to conventional thin film deposition. However, I don't think the specific performance is dramatically different from things that are used in commercial solar thermal systems.

Yes, I suppose the more salient thing here is that they did take out a large loan to meet their opex while (likely) trying to raise a rather large round to keep going and release the next device. I wonder if softbank's current precarity is causing some general difficulties, independent of Magic Leap's viability. The scale of their cash needs going forward are.. rather large

Some important context is in this other post and thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20757879

As a follow-up to the Harvard connections that remain under-scrutinized, here’s an alarming tweet from a Caltech professor:

‘Around 2007 I attended a dinner at @Harvard during which someone told me about a professor who was flying to New York, and to some island, to visit a millionaire. With that millionaire, I was told, he was raping girls. "Everybody knows" they said..‘ https://twitter.com/lpachter/status/1163608101443928064?s=21

As others pointed out, this goes beyond mere association. It involves being present at his houses (and private island) where multiple underage victims of sex trafficking may have been present. Some of them had extensive and repeated contacts with him, and a few (so far) have been named (though of course this is as yet unproven) in private lawsuits as having participated in sexual assaults. So yeah, given the scale of the potential crimes involved, some scrutiny is well deserved.

It’s also depressing how all these prominent men (and yes, it’s all men because Epstein didn’t like having women around for their intellects, and because they may have figured out something was amiss) never questioned any of this, because Epstein was rich.

Yes I agree as well - did not mean to diminish this news. MIT Media Lab and Joi Ito are definitely more prominent. And the timing (post-2008) is rather damning. His history was a google search away..

The related Epstein-academia connection which deserves scrutiny is with Martin Nowak at Harvard. Certainly far more money involved in terms of donations. And many articles referenced him visiting with Epstein extensively, including his island.

Recommendations, and autoplaying videos in particular based on them, clearly drive growth and profits. But they are clearly the crux of the problem.

Sure, defining harm is not straightforward. But it's possible, and frankly as a private platform, it is their choice.

One could, for example, take a broader definition of harm, and use that to limit recommendations, but still host the video and allow it to return in search results. Is this the right answer? I don't know. But it's silly to just throw up your hands and somehow take recommendations as some sacrosanct part of the system, when it was clearly a choice to have them to begin with.

I would suggest looking through that previous link regarding examples of where one can quickly end up in white nationalist content through recommendations. Again, recommendations are for Youtube's own growth-related ends. However, it is emphatically a choice to have them.

Regarding kids, this has been very well documented: https://www.ted.com/talks/james_bridle_the_nightmare_videos_...

https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...

The alternative is that Youtube could choose NOT to recommend videos for large categories of videos, particularly those related to kids or other categories (for example, Rohingya-related videos in Myanmar in the current time period). You need not censor the videos, however you can choose to make their discovery less easy.

There's no law that says they have to recommend videos. There is however sufficient evidence at this time around the rabbit-hole effect causing real-world harm. This isn't 2005. It's about time Youtube, and social media properties adopt the medical principle: "first, do no harm". Perhaps they will do this willingly, but somehow I doubt it.

To wit: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2018/10/11/memes-in...

Between their enormous scandal in South Africa, the rather reprehensible work in Saudi Arabia that likely got some dissidents killed and all of this, it does feel like many shoes are yet to drop. The article details some pretty obvious conflicts of interest that are simply not viewed as such:

"McKinsey says it has no knowledge of any collusion between China and Mr. Najib. It said that of course it would discuss China’s sweeping Belt and Road plans but rejected the notion that, by representing both sides involved in the project, the company had a conflict of interest in any way."

As with Silicon Valley, their model requires recruiting reasonably talented and intelligent people on a regular basis. I suspect that, if anything, may be the most at risk from the behavior these articles are highlighting.

The CIS is a dubious source, at best, on immigration matters. If not an outright hate group: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/grou...

Also! As Kim-Mai Cutler pointed out on Twitter, Silicon Valley's positions are not new!: "Andy Grove gave to reproductive rights, Gordon Moore to conservation, HP was one of the very first employers to offer healthcare coverage, to hire Asian & African Americans like Art Fong & Roy Clay."

Silicon Valley has always been different from the rest of the U.S. The "H.P. way" was in its time a radical and progressive thing.

Yeah I don't get it either, especially the "feeling alienated" part. Does that include being feted and having a respectful discussion with your liberal friend and old colleague, Reid Hoffman, on the Stanford campus on Jan. 31 of this year, moderated by a very sympathetic Niall Ferguson? With laudatory words and praise from the President and Provost? https://news.stanford.edu/2018/02/01/cardinal-conversation-r...

Look, if you're going to speak at the RNC and actively support Trump, you will be on the opposite side of a super-majority of college-educated people in this country at this point. And definitely a large super-majority of people under 35, women, Asian Americans, Latinos and African Americans. So if you're surrounded by such people, and are loudly promoting such views, don't expect your interlocutors to not criticize them, or necessarily want to hear them ad nauseum.

The evidence however suggests that Mr. Thiel is certainly being given PLENTY of platforms to continue expressing his viewpoints in a respectful manner in front of influential crowds of people, including students. Who is pushing this whole narrative?

I find the notion that this topic is NOT being discussed and being suppressed somewhat hilarious. Find me a single women in STEM who has not read or heard extensively about the idea that men are biologically predisposed to be better than women at 'abstract reasoning' etc. Historically, the notion that women might be just as capable at men at technical disciplines is what's NEW! I personally know of at least a dozen gifted young women scientists at the very best institutions in the world quitting the field because of advisors and others explicitly belittling them based on their gender. While these are anecdotes, they're representative for the question of who becomes faculty in STEM since that's my world: These were people who were identified from a young age as being likely to be future faculty in the sciences, performed off-the-charts well on every metric you can think of, publishing papers in journals in undergrad, and you know what? They heard this discussion ad nauseam, and in combination with the random sexism thrown their way, decided to bail (as frankly I would have in their shoes).

A related read that I found quite illuminating: http://www.minnesotalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05...

(I run in fairly left-leaning liberal circles and you know what I hear about? NOT actually being PC (whatever that is -- define it, I dare you) but people complaining about something being PC. This has been going on since the year 2000 so much that I'm pretty sure jokes about something being PC are PC, while actually being PC is not PC..)

This is explicitly racist: it will primarily only apply to Indians on H-1B seeking permanent residency, some of whom wait 10-15 years for their green cards. I would say that Indian-Americans working with the Trump administration with any decency should resign in protest of such actions, but I'm not sure they have a sense of self-respect to begin with.

Ahem, 'moonshots' anyone?

This elegantly captures something I think I've always observed, but been unable to articulate, in all of the superintelligence literature and the AGI / AI safety line of thinking: There is an implicit set of unarticulated underlying assumptions, and biases, that form the foundation from which the rest of the argument is "logically" progressed or extrapolated/ inferred.

I cannot think of a similar trajectory for a company that is today a large platform. The big companies of our, and previous, eras began with small products, targeting markets and grew organically and gradually. Stealth had a purpose, but there was a technology serving a market at a relatively early point. Even in semiconductors. There's no precedent for this degree of fundraising, lack of product release and opacity. I can't think of reasons that this is justified when product/market fit is so unproven.

Even if the experience is fantastic, the product flawless, the content engaging -- none of that means that there'll be product/market fit. Iterations will likely be needed. I'll be delighted if it's a big success, and hey it's not my money. But, the systemic signaling (and actual) risk posed by a potential Magic Leap failure on the larger AR/VR community is being sorely underestimated by everyone. And that is worrisome.