ckarmann

Interesting way to prevent your awesome colleague from being poached by competitors.

I am just speculating, but in many diseases like rabies and chickenpox you can give the vaccine after exposure to help the immune system fight the infection. It's because the period between exposure and symptoms is quite long, often more than a month for rabies for example.

HIV can stay in the body for years before developing AIDS. So you can actually recruit people that have been tested positive recently and have not developed the disease.

I don't know but these fossils are often very fragile and can even collapse under their own weight when unearthed. There is little chance something like this would have survived centuries.

Exactly this. Just google "infrared images of space", it's all false colors but still incredible pictures.

They likely were, and think of me what you like but I've noticed the same with most Americans I've known.

I am probably misunderstanding what you say, but Cornet has grown up in France, and is probably very aware that health care cost in the US is not a normal thing since he comes from a country where it is considerably cheaper if not free.

His naiveté was about the nature of Google and how he thought a giant corporation basing their revenue on ads and collecting information could be a positive force in the world and not abuse its power. It seems to me his gripe is about the hypocrisy, which in a sense make it even harder to fix the company: if people denies the company ethics problems, you can be sure they are not going to get better.

Twitter in that sense has never promised to not be evil. You can't be naive about its ethics because you just have to doom-scroll the app for an hour to feel bad about it.

Trying to translate in French, I came up first with "Il eût fallu qu'elle eût été surveillée", but mostly because of morphological similarity (it's almost the same amount of verbs, right?). It's also just a more literary form of the simpler "Il aurait fallu qu'elle soit surveillée".

That being said, I have trouble to parse the original english sentence so I may be missing subtleties.

Japan was never a colony, and Vietnam was a french colony for several generations. You are not getting your examples right.

Google (if you're not a work) "Anilingus".

Obviously the primary intent was not loss of life. But there are multiple possible intents, one being obviously to instill fear: "We didn't kill you this time, but we totally could have". Imagine living in the area now.

Anyway, it's better to wait for more information than to speculate.

No known ancestor of Hitler is Jewish. His paternal grandfather is unknown, and that led some people to speculate that he was Jewish.

Hitler had his minions try to clear that up to dispel the rumours, but nobody could find the real father. They concluded of course that he was a pure Aryan.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alois_Hitler#Biological_father

I don't think this one has a specific name. There are a lot of unnamed craters on Mars, even much bigger than this one. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_craters_on_Mars

2000km is the size of the whole Vastitas Borealis region. The photo depicts only a single unnamed crater inside it.

Well, that's the concept of the CrashCourse channel. This video is actually slow-paced compared for example to their World History series.

It's still interesting. After a while you learn to pause the video to let the information sink in.

The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin

Harry Potter - JK Rowling (re-read it all when the last book came out)

It's hard to get back to Plato's cave.

Does Amazon pretends to do AI? They are just offering a platform to do your own Machine Learning. I don't think they ever said their search engine was doing anything smart.

EDIT: scrap that, I didn't mean Alexa, which is doing AI obviously, but the search engine of Amazon's retail website.

Anyway, NLP is hard and everyone sucks at it. Think about it: just building something that could work with any <N1> <preposition> <N2> or any other way to express the same requests would mean understanding the relationships of every possible combinations of N1 and N2. It means building a generalized world model that is quite different from simply applying ML to a narrow use case. Cracking that would more or less mean solving general AI which probably won't happen soon.

At least in some European countries where COVID cases has submerged the healthcare system, it is a very bad time to have a stroke or a car accident since the ER rooms are full and a lot of hospital resources are diverted to fight the pandemic. So it increases the mortality of these other situations.

You also have to take into account the uncertainty in your risk evaluation. The fatality rate is largely unknown so it's a bit deceptive to quote numbers like 0.37% as if it could be measure up to the second decimal. The German study probably came with error bars that were larger than that. For the age group 50-59, maybe it's 1.3% according to NY state (for both males and females so if the person you responds to is male, it's higher), but it could very well be 2% (or 0.5%) without it being surprising.

There is also a big assumption in considering the risk to be front-loaded. This is not the flu, but it could very well come back next year or in ten years in a different form. We just don't know yet this virus with enough confidence to do this assumption. Anyway, it is a bit strange that the ability for this virus to mutate next year would impact the risk of dying by going out tomorrow which, I think, the person your responded to was thinking about.

Finally, you're saying the flu deaths this year is double what the coronavirus has done, but again the uncertainty is high: the CDC estimation for the flu is from 24,000 to 62,000 deaths this season [1]. So it could be the double, but it could be actually lower. Let's not do things like chosing the estimate that better suits the argument without saying it's a high end of the estimate.

[1] https://www.kcrg.com/content/news/Americas-2019-2020-flu-sea...

Ah, I understand what you mean. Well, if you know variable X is a proxy for Y, but Y is a lot longer to measure than X, then I guess it makes sense to optimize X knowing that it will increase Y (if you are sure X will bring Y).

While you watch Netflix, you don't watch a competitor. In a way, this autoplay feature removes a friction for the customer that doesn't have to decide what to watch next. This removes the "danger" that the customer think about that cool show that is not provided by Netflix.

At the end of the month, the customer may think about how much they use a TV provider and not the other, and decide to keep Netflix and ditch any other subscription they may have.

It's true that it burns through Netflix content but they made 1,500 hours of original content in 2018, content that they have to create anyway for other reasons, so a lot of your free time is already covered.

Off the top of my head:

- Only take a plane when absolutely necessary.

- Live in a city, sell your car and take public transport

- Reduce meat consumption (at least beef and lamb which are a lot worse than the others). You don't need to eat meat every single day. Also try tofu, tempeh and seitan; you may find you like them.

- Vote with this topic in mind, even if it might hurt you financially.

I don't know how people hired and paid by the government in place are automatically less suspicious than volunteers who just want to help the community. Yes, I have the opposite bias :)

In France the counting process is open and anyone can observe it and report any irregularity. Also the way it is done, you have to have a conspiracy of a least 6 people if you want to meddle the result.

In practice, I've observed that rather than fanatics, volunteers are usually mild people who are just doing the work as a nice sunday activity who doubles as a democratic tradition. They are the same people you see picking up trash or doing other menial work for the community. Of course, my sampling rate is quite low, so take that as a grain of salt.

Stupid question: can you watch it if you have arachnophobia yourself?

For me one of the weirdest use of this book was a vegan (and animal rights supporter) friend who copy/pasted on Facebook the speech of Old Major, the eldest pig who incite the Revolution, who was explaining to the animals how bad the farmer was treating them. For her it was perfectly expressing her feeling that farming animals was a monstrosity and she was completely ignoring that the speech was designed by the pig to manipulate the listeners (the other animals) and that it was a metaphor of communism. So for her, the issue was indeed the farmer, not as symbol of capitalism, but simply as a farmer exploiting living beings. All symbolism was evacuated and all that remained was a rousing speech for animal rights.

I suppose all book interpretation eventually shows the ideology of the reader. It doesn't even have to respect the presumed intention of Orwell who, from what I know, never expressed any support for veganism or actual animal rights.

I'm French and when I hear about this kind of things in the USA, I wonder why this data even exists? Why do people register as Democrat or Republican in the first place and why do the laws even allow it? I understand that it facilitates the organisation by the state of the primary elections. But it so obviously goes against basic principles of confidentiality of vote that it far outweighs the purposed benefits. And why don't the parties organize their own primaries?

I team up with two colleagues and we get one such box every month, delivered at work, that we share. It's not very expensive (10$ per month per person, where I live that's the price of one takeout) and just a bit too much candy.

An actual lottery is usually low-effort: you buy a ticket, scratch something or pick numbers, that's all. So even though you'll probably never win, you don't lose much. Working thousands of hours is not like that.

The equivalent of lottery with video games would be spamming app markets with shitty games made in a week-end, hoping it catches up somehow. One day someone will make another Flappy Bird, but it will probably not be you.

Stars that can produce elements up to iron and spread it through a supernova are massive and have relatively short lifespans of 10-30 million years. Since the Universe is 14 billion years old, we have had already more than a hundred generations of such stars before a 10-billion years-old planet has formed, so the necessary elements are probably there.

I lived one year in Sweden (in Lund, near Malmö). Easily one of the two nicest places I ever lived in. People are warm and welcoming. And in my experience at least, you can delve into arguments about society and politics like anywhere else, or even better because it doesn't end up with people mad at each other for having a different worldview like in the USA or in France (again, my experience).

I find strange this assumption I sometimes read here that having a sense of collective means losing your individuality.

Actually at this time, when Haussmann started its transformation of Paris, people though that the circulation of air was very important for health, and that was one of the reasons of widening the streets and limiting the height of buildings, but the main reason was for allowing traffic of goods and people, and to improve security and control of the population (revolts in Paris had made 3 different political regimes collapse in less than 70 years before that).

Today people still value seeing the sky and freedom of movement. I have not been everywhere in North America but usually I saw that big buildings mean wide streets around them.