throwaway189262

If you read the trial data this is a foregone conclusion. The Moderna vaccine produces antibody titres over twice as high as an actual infection from the data I've seen.

My theory is that these companies knew they only had one chance to make a working vaccine, so they did everything they could to make it not fail. Double doses, 5x what was needed in monkeys, gold standard adjuvants.

I would not be amazed in the slightest if they decide to half-dose the vaccine or do away with the second shot or even both. They probably didn't have time to run the trial any other way

I have a feeling the ML community is going to pivot focus to faster and smaller training before larger advancements are made. It's simply too expensive for much AI research to happen when state of the art models take 500k of hardware to train.

For all the mathematician hype around ML research, much of the work is closer to alchemy than science. We simply don't understand a great deal of why these neural nets work.

The people doing math above algebra are few and the scene is dominated by "guess and check" style model tinkering.

Many "state of the art models" are simply a bunch of common strategies glued together in a way researchers found worked the best (by trying a bunch of different ones).

An average Joe could probably write influential ML papers by gluing RNN/GAN layers to existing models and fiddling with the parameters until they beat current state of the art. In fact, in NLP models, this is essentially what has happened with roBERTa, XLNET, ELECTRA, etc. They're all somewhat trivial variations on Google's BERT, which is more creative but yet again built on existing models.

Anyways, my point is, none of this required math or genius or particularly demanding thought. It was basically let's tinker with this until we find a way that's better, using guess and check. No equations needed.

We are a long way from the type of simulations done for protein folding and materials strength and basically every other scientific field. It's still the wild west

> I am wholly against imposing my own personal virtues on other people though. Why are you so comfortable doing so?

I'm only explaining the world as I see it, just as you did in the comments above. You shouldn't be so dismissive of dissenting opinions.

In my opinion, your viewpoint that you should be able to choose everything you want to pay for will never work. A sizable portion of the population will decide to pay nothing while still receiving benefits, leading the rest to stop paying.

It's not like you can deposit a nickel for every street light you pass, or every crime prevented by the police. Some services must be paid by everyone if they are to exist at all because their value is not directly tangible.

Education is a good example. You may not go to a school and say "well, I don't go so I shouldn't have to pay for it". Yet you still reap most of the benefits of the rest of the population being able to read and write. If most of the population couldn't read or write the affect on GDP and job availability would be terrible and definitely effect you directly. The value is provided to some extent to everyone in society. The only way to avoid any personal benefit is to live isolated from the rest of society in the middle of nowhere.

Another clear example is government provided healthcare for infectious diseases. The government does a lot of vaccinations and it's impossible to avoid benefitting from that without cutting off all interaction with other humans. You directly benefit from others being vaccinated by having a lower personal risk of getting infected.

I think your view is too narrow and focuses on transactional exchanges, like buying gas or paying a toll. But it doesn't capture the larger benefit to everyone including yourself for things like having less criminals, illiterate people, and junkies running around. Which is the societal benefit to a lot of government programs and why everyone is expected to pay for them.

Your idea of not paying for services you don't use falls apart when considering that many of these services directly benefit you even if you don't directly consume them. And the only way to avoid the benefits is to avoid society completely.

This still doesn't make any sense. Every single government service provided services to people besides you. You're essentially saying there should be no government.

The government plows the streets. Provides police and fire service. Makes sure street lights and sidewalks exist. Handles deeds for property. Handles court cases. If you had to "consent" to all these services providing benefits to other people the entire government would cease to exist.

"I have to consent to anything that doesn't directly benefit me" means a ton of things aren't even going to exist when you actually need them.

> Well, I personally haven't consented to socializing the cost of anything.

This is a strange take. If you had to "consent" to laws there would be utter chaos. The places where you can pick and choose which laws apply to you have no real laws. And all of those places are dangerous and destitute. That's why laws are decided by the majority, there will always be dissenters for every law out there. Some harmless, but others that want to pillage, burn things down, and worse.

There will always be laws that you don't like, unless there's no laws at all.

> I agree that the healthy should not be compelled to subsidize the costs of healthcare for the unhealthy. Can you tell me why it's ethical to force my compliance?

Because it makes health insurance impossible to get when you need it most. It makes health insurance a scam because any serious illness and your company will fire you and you won't be able to get any other insurance. Insurance becomes cheap because it's useless.

Wealth inequality is a problem because money = power. Extreme wealth concentration is not compatible with democracy because eventually these people and corporations are so wealthy they can just buy votes. Spiraling wealth inequality gets you a Russia situation, an Oligarchy in everything but name.

Your argument is not a far stretch from "why don't we just let poor and sick people die". It's pretty much equivalent to "why don't we allow anyone to discriminate however they want", which got us great things like slavery

More accurate isn't always good because creditworthiness is all about stereotyping people.

Consider this example: lesbians are statistically more likely to divorce. The ML models decides that lesbians are a higher mortgage risk and raises their interest rates. It does this indirectly by raising interest rates on married couples with different last names and owners of Subaru vehicles.

In another, the model sees that people who follow NBA players on twitter are more likely to default. It then assigns then higher interest rates. Well, it turns out that poor urban black people are far more likely to be interested in the NBA than the average person. Probably because it's one of the only sports you can play in a parking lot. The model decides to raise interest rates and cut lending to most black people.

"Perfect" credit worthiness modelling is only going to be beneficial to rich white and asian people. Essentially favoring the stereotypically richest ethnic groups.

This is extremely problematic for any sort of equality initiatives.

Treating everyone the same regardless of means is definitely socialist. It's the same as removing the pre-existing conditions exclusions for health insurance. It favors the unfortunate at the expense of the fortunate.

I'm not going to go into whether that is good or bad for society but I ask you to consider the extreme, historic level wealth inequality in the US where 1% of the population has over half the money.

Reminds me of the complete skeletons produced using things like jaw fragments. Especially for popular species like dinosaurs and ancient hominids.

Like 20 years ago we didn't even know that most dinosaurs had feathers. Most reconstructions are just wishful thinking IMO

Ah just like the 80's

Java is very methodical about what features they add. Some of the sluggishness is intentional.

As far as threading, Java is adding userspace M:N threads which will be far superior in most use cases to C#'s async. And unlike async it gives an automatic performance boost to most existing code

C# has a long history of breaking changes. One of the reasons Java is more popular is 90% of decades old code runs fine on the newest version. Java's backwards compatibility is absolutely unmatched.

Very true. Go is an exception, and some day Java will be as well. They're both going route of userspace threads instead of reactive API's, thankfully.

So dumb, but typical Intel. I smell fear.

Rule of thumb, any time you hear a competitors product mentioned in ads you know it's unbeatable. Like, which smoothbrain at Intel thought it was a good idea to spend millions of dollars telling people about Apple's M1?

Intel has so little to say about its own products that it's redirecting ad money to the streisand effect

Makes sense. Better than Ruby I guess. It's still not really concurrency, it just handles being single threaded better.

JS is strange because of all the optimization. It's technically multi threaded with IO but in a way that you only control the "main thread". Reminds me of old UI work

He said there was high db latency. This matters a ton when your language is single threaded and not using async io. 20 queries would tie up the whole server for a second at 50ms db latency.

You can get around it by using async instead of blocking, using fibers which don't block, or using a thread pool so other threads can keep serving.

I'm not experienced with Ruby but it sounds like Ruby doesn't do any of those

Java's concurrency support is quite good. One of the best language level implementations I've used. It supports OS level threads and async. And they're adding support for fibers. At that point it will be the only mainstream language that supports all three popular models

JS has an equally bad concurrency story as Ruby. Maybe even worse. There are no threads, you can only use a single core per instance. In practice the problem is ram. JS already uses a lot of ram compared to Java and running an instance for each core makes it way worse.IMO only crazy people run JS backends when there's so many other similar options

This kinda makes sense. A lot of people are asymptomatic carriers and there's not much you can do about it

Over 50% of the population has HSV 1, many never show symptoms.

I wouldn't worry about it , very likely you already had it for most of your life

The newest as of last year. I think 1.7 . Sorry I'm not on that team

I see more value. For some frameworks Techempower rankings have encouraged massive optimizations that save a lot of money in real world usage.

We upgraded an app from Spring 4 to Spring Boot a while back and it divided our hosting cost by 5.

I started caring about speed when I worked on an app that became much bigger than anticipated. If you start with a really slow framework your only option is a rewrite

This may not hold with today's youth. There's theories that people identify with the political party of their youth (much like they do with music) as they age. This is an alternate explanation for the increasing conservativism of older generations in the US that grew up during Reagen years. For nearly 20 years conservatives ruled and this lines up with the formative years of today's pensioners.

Another theory is that youth are not going through conservatizing life events like marriage or home ownership because they've been screwed by so many economic disasters. It's hard to argue against this theory, the question is how much of an effect this will have long term.

Yet another theory is more obvious. The anti immigration and anti gay policies of conservatives are wildly unpopular among those under 45. Some estimates I've seen are that less than 25% support either. The younger generations are also less religious, more urban, and more ethnically diverse. All traits that tend to increase left leanings.

I personally doubt school had much of an impact. Educators have been left leaning for centuries. I think it's used as an excuse by the conservative party in the US unwilling to admit their policies are unpopular for more based reasons.

I agree with you that deficit spending has become bipartisan. The fiscal conservatism that once defined Republicans is more of a libertarian aim now. Again I think this will play out in an interesting way. Without fiscal conservativism the Republicans are left with religious and cultural conservativism which are both wildly unpopular among younger generations.

More like "the way they used to be" which is what's causing friction in the US and UK.

Today's youth grew up with the dotcom bubble, financial crisis, 9/11, and COVID. They're far poorer with less opportunity than prior generations had. The government has failed them and they want change.

This is pushing younger generations hard left, and I don't think it's going to change. Most of the "conservativizing" life events like home ownership and building a family are being delayed or just never happening. Today's mellenials and gen z will likely lean democrat till they die.

There's also a social theory that older generations lean conservative because the conservative movement dominated their youth, not because they became that way with age. Today's boomers grew up during a ~20 year streak of conservative dominance. Today's youth are the opposite, it's yet to be seen what this will do to political beliefs.

We saw a similar situation play out in the US.

A large aging population of post war baby boomers unhappy that younger generations are more liberal and different looking voted in a hardline anti immigrant admin.

Just like in the UK, a very large fraction of youth is very much against "leave".

I expect this to play out interestingly in the next 5-10 years when younger generations wrest political power from the baby boomers. I fully expect "millennials revenge" with a hard left turn eand forced generational wealth transfer using higher estate and property taxes

Docker uses the host kernel. To get everything identical you need to use a VM anyways.

Some languages bundle all of their dependencies so you can be relatively sure they will run the same on prod. For others (Python, Ruby) that use many system libraries, containers may add value

Amen. Despite being 25 years old the average JS stack is janky as hell. I regularly do all kinds of nonsense to get JS to work properly.

With Java the code, dependency management, and build tools just work. It's very pleasant to maintain.

Maintaining a JS project over more than a few years is a nightmare. Forced rewrites as libraries, build tools, linters, frameworks, and the language itself are constantly being reinvented. It's a huge pointless drain on resources.

And JS is awful cross-platform. You have to check and polyfill every feature if you want to work outside latest Chrome and Firefox. And transpile the code down to ES5.

With Java it runs exactly the same on every platform. We develop on Macs and run on Linux and it doesn't even matter.

I say this every time, but individual targeting should be illegal. The ad industry thrived for thousands of years without ads that follow you everywhere.

Invasive targeting is only 20 years old, a blink in the history of advertising. If it was gone tomorrow these companies would just go back to targeting based on the ad placement rather than unique person viewing it. What we have now is the dystopian sci fi movie where ads shift as different people look at them.

If you don't think it's dystopian, consider that every ad your coworkers see when you're sharing your screen is based on the best targeting data advertisers can find. Your screen is disclosing your interests, wealth, medical history, kinks, etc to anyone looking at it. It's fucked up.

Snarky TLDR: half the JS load time was ad scripts. IMO Most of the performance increase was around specifying image heights, using facades for third party embeds, and optimizing around ad and analytics scripts.

Nice write up but not a big surprise to anyone that blocks analytics tracking, ads, and third party embeds.

Yeah that's what I'm realizing. I'm getting too old to gamble again. I think a remote FAANG job would be my best choice.

How high is L6? I've got about a decade of experience, I heard most don't make it beyond L6 but it's all rumors.

Semi unrelated, but is FAANG still a comfortable path to such income? I've been debating between doing FAANG or starting my own business for years and the wavering hasn't done me any good.

If it's still possible to make 500k+ working at FAANG now that stocks aren't increasing so rapidly, I need to get on that right away :)

I would say wait till Java 17. There's not a big difference from 11-15 and most of the new features are still in preview. Performance has been the big focus recently with new GC's, less memory use, and faster startup time

Most Java 1.1 code still runs fine on Java 15 too. You'll get a bunch of warnings though