xkapastel

> It should be stunningly obvious

> it should be equally obvious

Clearly it is not obvious, considering most people have never spent a significant amount of time thinking about how infectious diseases work.

> What's that? Do I hear the "There's no evidence for immunity to covid-19" crowd in the distance? I'm getting a bit tired of that line, but if someone wants me to dismantle that argument (again) I am happy to.

Why make a snarky, coy comment like this? If you have something to say about immunity then just say it. In fact the WHO are among those who make this claim[0], so "dismantle" away.

[0]: https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/immunity-p...

I don't think that's true, WIC is the one with restrictions like that. You can buy any food with food stamps. Certainly there is no restriction on any kind of milk.

So uh, as someone stuck on Android 8 forever, what am I supposed to do? Just get a new phone?

I live in NYC and they still do not give us plastic bags anymore. Was this ban really "reversed"? I've been using reusable bags for the whole pandemic, and a quick google tells me the enforcement has been postponed, not that the ban was reversed.

I'm seeing three different things in this article: "sunlight", "high temperature", and "humidity". They seem to be conflating all three of those. It's difficult to tell what the actual claim is. I wish I could read the original source.

> As many have pointed out, there is no evidence that the virus now plaguing the world was engineered; scientists largely agree it came from animals. But that is not the same as saying it didn’t come from the lab, which spent years testing bat coronaviruses in animals, said Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley.

This is a point many people seem to miss when discussing the origin of the current pandemic. It's not a "conspiracy theory" to suggest the virus escaped from a lab, and given the details in this article it seems pretty likely.

Thank you.

Off-topic, but:

> Reduced by 99%

> Reduced page load from original size of 2.4 MB to 26.7 kB.

This is absolutely incredible. The web is really a disaster these days.

> I find that the appeal of programming languages, their strength, fades away in the face of pure mathematics anyway.

The appeal and strength of a programming language is its ability to be executed, something that pure mathematics does not and cannot ever have.

Of course it can. You can do pretty much anything you like with software as long as you have the vision. A plugin/extension architecture can certainly make modifying a compiler easy. What makes you think it can't?

> As a model for computation, P systems offer the attractive possibility of solving NP-complete problems in less-than exponential time. Some P system variants are known to be capable of solving the SAT (boolean satisfiability) problem in linear time and, owing to all NP-complete problems being equivalent, this capability then applies to all such problems. As there is no current method of directly implementing a P system in its own right, their functionality is instead emulated and therefore solving NP-complete problems in linear time remains theoretical. However, it has also been proven that any deterministic P system may be simulated on a Turing Machine in polynomial time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_system

This is not as interesting as it sounds, since you're just trading exponential time for exponential space. It's still not practical or very interesting.

Did Fox News actually dump Laura Ingraham? I've never heard about this. She still seems to be on TV.

> All logic is really just intuitionistic logic.

> All logic is really just linear logic.

Who has said these?

Any barrier in front of your mouth and nose will protect you from droplets[0], as well as protecting other people from your own droplets.

[0]: https://medium.com/@Cancerwarrior/covid-19-why-we-should-all...

Aerosol is not any more likely to get out than not wearing anything. And a bad mask prevents droplets from getting in as well.

This has me very worried. Today I went out for groceries, and when I returned, put the groceries down, took off my shoes/sweater/pants and went to go wash my hands, I realized my cat is absolutely compelled to go over and sniff anything I've placed on the ground. If there are any droplets on my clothing or the items I've brought in, he might get infected, and then infect me later. An infection from a surface contact is mild, but an infection from a "generator" of virus (i.e. a human or a cat) can be life threatening.

Is this actually a real study? Why don't they link to the paper? Mindlab International calls itself a "neuromarketing" group...this reads more like an advertisement than a report on a real scientific study.

Masks do protect the wearer! And you do not need an N95 mask to do this. Even a simple homemade mask offers some degree of protection. This[0] was a good explanation of both of these ideas.

tldr: There is reason to believe that large droplets, not the tiny droplets that N95s are designed to filter, are the primary threat, and any sort of physical barrier between those and your mouth/nose will help.

I see a lot of people saying that we shouldn't wear masks in order to preserve the supply for healthcare workers, but I think this is ridiculous. You need a mask when you go out both to protect yourself and to protect others. A better message is, to preserve the supply for healthcare workers, make your own mask, or use a simple dust mask or a rave mask.

[0]: https://medium.com/@Cancerwarrior/covid-19-why-we-should-all...

The virus is generally contained within a much larger droplet that is expelled when a person speaks, coughs, or sneezes. So the 120nm number is not necessarily relevant.

Masks do protect the wearer! And you do not need an N95 mask to do this. Even a simple homemade mask offers some degree of protection. This[0] was a good explanation of both of these ideas.

tldr: There is reason to believe that large droplets, not the tiny droplets that N95s are designed to filter, are the primary threat, and any sort of physical barrier between those and your mouth/nose will help.

[0]: https://medium.com/@Cancerwarrior/covid-19-why-we-should-all...

OO is definitely not based on anything like set theory or finite state machines. OO has no formal backing, but it's often integrated with basic type theory in languages like Java and C#.

Sometimes I have a hard time believing that this gender stuff is really happening. That there are really people who want to divorce the words "man" and "woman" from a person's sex, and instead make them about personal identity. That they have enough political power to force changes like this with no discussion and no dissent allowed.

It is not in any way bigoted or transphobic to believe that a person being a man or a woman, and therefore the pronouns used to refer to that person, are determined by that person's sex at birth. This was the accepted belief of the vast majority of the human race up until about 20 minutes ago, when it suddenly became a bannable offense.

StackOverflow going all-in in support of social engineering on behalf of political activists is baffling to me. Where does this end? Is the goal really to force all of society to change to placate a small group of activists? A reasonable compromise would have just been to allow "they" to refer to someone in a neutral way, but I understand that this is actually not allowed if the person being referred to has stated they would like "he" or "she". This is what makes me think it's more about social engineering than actually protecting anyone from harm.

Stallman did not defend Epstein. This is clickbait that misquotes him.

"Presented as entirely willing [to Minsky, a person who is not Epstein]" is not the same thing as saying "Epstein's victims were entirely willing."

What is wrong about it is that Epstein is running a child sex trafficking ring. It's not clear what Minsky knew.

The hypothetical is used to argue that the phrase "sexual assault" has the wrong connotations, not that it was "totally fine". It's you who keeps adding this "totally fine" part.

The biggest problem I can see here is that Stallman should have posted it on his blog if he wrote it at all, not blasted it out to everyone on that mailing list. That was definitely the wrong thing to do as it's basically picking a fight with people who are organizing an event.

Do you think it's more plausible that she'd present as being in distress?

Not grammar, the connotations of the phrase "sexual assault". I don't think it's a cop out, I think it's clearly literally the case.

I didn't read this as RMS minimizing sex trafficking or defending rapists. I read it as him making an inappropriate argument about semantics in entirely the wrong place. These are very different things, and it seems like many people, including the author of that Medium article, really want it to be the first instead of the second.

I saw some allegations in https://meta.plasm.us/posts/2019/09/01/jdg-and-the-fp-commun...

All of this stuff is really mild. If this is the best they've got then I don't think John DeGoes did anything wrong. This deplatforming seems like a silly thing to do.

> This was an early factor in third-wave feminism accepting gender identity, which is why almost all millenial and gen-Z feminists accept trans and intersex people and why TERFs tend to be older

I don't see why this story would lead anyone to accept gender identity.

I also think there are many millenials and gen-Z's who would be classified as "TERFs", and in fact would view the term as derogatory.

What makes you think Flutter is in any way similar to Flash?