The words "contact" and "tracing" didn't even appear once in the article. Are people outside of Asia not even considering test'n'trace as a possibility? Privacy concerns aside, it seems like an effective way to save lives without forcing everyone to stay home indefinitely.
Contact tracing is great for diseases like SARS and MERS, but it just doesn't seem to work adequately for this coronavirus Even Singapore is being forced to enact stricter and stricter lockdown measures. Also, you're not even going to get it to work as well as it did in Singapore unless the virus is coming from a known, external set of sources that allow you to narrow down the pool of potential cases.
(Public Health England in the UK had a fairly competent, though not totalitarian-level, contact tracing program. They stopped a while back because it became evident that despite their best efforts, the disease was becoming so widespread that it was reaching the limit of their contact tracing resources and most of the infections were probably unknown community spread that couldn't be found via contact tracing anyway. Other countries are likely similar.)
Contact tracing was happening at the start, and it'll presumably happen again once caseloads become manageable. As you'd expect with such a quickly moving story, coronavirus predictions have a huge splintering problem; most people writing about it don't have all the facts.
Contact tracing is, as far as I've read, the very first strategy initiated by most Western governments and health organisations. In the early stages of reported cases.
As it stands, my country is still in relatively early stages compared to many others, and contact tracing became unviable as a first defence well over a week ago. Over 60% of our cases are community transmission.
We're still doing contact tracing, it's probably worthwhile, but it's not going to be a major factor in mitigation.
What about contact tracing apps?
Tracing won't work unless you know who was nearby each infected person. It's difficult to find that info unless a big portion of people are using a tracker app. Is that sort of thing happening where you are?
It's been announced here (Ireland), though the official government contact-tracing app is as yet unreleased. It's believed to be a based on Singapore's BTLE one.
It's largely irrelevant though. As much as it may help a little, this just isn't manageable through contact tracing. While Singapore are being lauded for their CT approach, they've still largely been successful in their efforts due to social distancing (and a culture of widespread adherance), along with things like widespread testing, and effective govt. communication of data.
It's happening here in Israel. The government is promoting an app which claims it stores the location history on-device and fetches known-disease-vector data from the server to compare it locally. (For good or bad it doesn't use the device's existing location history if it's already stored...)
They just announced it's had 1M installs (in a country of 8.7M) in the last week.
Is that the term for tracing and alerting people who were near people who positively test for covid-19? If so, it does seem to be done local to me, but probably not with the same rigorousness.
When are they going to just seal off an area so it's self-driving vehicles only, and test them there? In a 100% self driving environment, edge cases are probably much easier to reason about. And if the future is 100% self driving, they should probably get some training data from that environment anyway.
With bicycles and pedestrians sharing the common roads, a 100% self driving environment anywhere but the freeway is never going to happen though. They need to be able to handle the chaos.
Not to be a total smartass, but if your Python codebase is not that big yet, then the correct answer is none of the above- rewrite in a compiled language if you find the lack of static checks disturbing.
I have been using "type checked" python for a year and let me tell you, it is not even 10% as good as having a real compiler. Python type checkers are not even close to 100% accuracy.
If you're going to use a python type checker, use the one that has the most dev resources behind it. Which probably means, whichever company has the most internal python code, which is probably Google. So pytype.
But bear in mind, these things are only sensible when you've written so much python code that it's too late to rewrite in a better language. If you're in that situation, even though these checkers are far from perfect, they are a massive improvement over plain python.
I agree. When I'm dropping someone off, I often drive past the intended drop point, let them out across the street, etc, because there is an unreasonably high cost to hitting the exact drop point. It sounds like self driving cars are only allowed to do exact drops, which is an irrational constraint IMO. Clearly there's a trade-off between trip time and drop accuracy, and time is usually 10x more important than accuracy.
Possible explanation: because this guy doesn't spend his day looking for patents to challenge; he read about that particular one on the news due to Waymo vs Uber case, and decided to take a look at it, only to notice it's bullshit.
That's the official story, but it also sounds pretty plausible.
Apparently they do considering they hadn’t submitted their own reexamination request of the patent in question that inevitably led to Waymo dropping the patent claim.
He visited two of [Uber's] buildings in San Francisco before being directed to its headquarters, where he was met with skepticism by a security guard.
“I explained that I had filed an ex parte reexamination on my own and Waymo had had it for two weeks already and it didn’t seem fair that Uber didn’t have it, given it was going to trial,” explains Swildens. “But I felt the guy thought I was some crazy person who just came in off the street.”
In most cities, especially in America, there's a vicious cycle:
0) Cycling is dangerous because there are too many vehicles on the road
1) There are so many vehicles on the road because everyone knows it's dangerous to cycle
2) Go to 0
Breaking out of that loop requires building safe infrastructure for cycling, like indestructable cement dividers between bike lanes and vehicle lanes or no-vehicles-allowed-in-<large area of city> days
And creating the infrastructure is wildly unpopular, because typically it involves either taking lanes away from cars, or slowing them down.
The initiative to reduce car-pedestrian collisions in LA has stopped because the drivers put pressure on politicians to stop slowing traffic down. Advocates are implying (and sometimes outright saying) that a few dozen deaths a year are an acceptable price to pay for a shorter commute. That's how far we are from solving this problem.
I don't know LA enough to comment on that project, but my experience with similar projects is the bike trails created like that are a beautiful ride to nowhere. A great trip to take on a nice Saturday, but nobody will use them to get anywhere. (other than the bars that happen to be near the trail)
That's my experience as well. My town converted an abandoned rail line to a biking/walking trail. It does run through downtown, but beyond that it basically goes noplace very desirable. It gets recreational use by a small subset of the community, but it's not a big difference-maker in making cycling practical.
> Advocates are implying (and sometimes outright saying) that a few dozen deaths a year are an acceptable price to pay for a shorter commute.
Why are you implying that this is faulty reasoning? I mean traffic deaths would be virtually eliminated if the speed limit across the board was 15 mph. But I know I would rather drive 65 because the risk is worth it -- and over a large population that increase in risk turns into real tangible deaths. Same with any risky behavior that we all engage in every day.
Let's do the back of the napkin calculations, take Columbus Ohio as the example of an everycity. Columbus had in 2014 750,000 commuters and say your average person makes $25/hr ($55k annually).
Say you were able to shave on average 1 minute off their commute.
Theoretical/in-a-vacuum numbers like this always make me suspicious; it isn't as if workers would have $163m less at the end of a year any more than companies would have $163m less in accounts. That isn't how life works.
EVEN if it did - what if, as traffic were slowed and bike lanes and walking lanes were put in, commuter life improved? Society appreciated the new living space and they got healthier and spent less on fuel and cars? That new economies were enabled by new, healthier, cheaper forms of transport?
Assuming we're still going with 1 minute a day saved which was an intentionally low estimate we're still talking about 12 years worth of time saved over the course of a year. Those minutes add up.
It’s all BS because the people who are saying “this is fine” know they’ll never face the risks personally. It’s a psychopathic way of running a community, and anyone who advocates this way is incredibly suspicious to me.
Anyone that says “someone else should face high risk and cost for my convenience” is not to be trusted.
It seems weird to argue this when your average driver has a much much higher risk of death than the pedestrian even in the worst case. It's not so much drivers offloading risk to someone else but recognizing that when human life is involved our estimation of risk is blown out of proportion.
There’s more to it than that. China was a cycling nation for most of the 20th century. They went from safe cycling nation, to now, where the most populous cities with good mass transit are clogged by cars and some motorcycles.
Affluence is a factor. Later on post-affluence may permit a social signal to again take up biking becuase it’s a choice of the upper middle class and become aspirational..
Agree--there's a sweet spot in distance and terrain as well. I bike to work every day because the round trip is a smooth 6 miles on dedicated bike paths. If this were any longer, or on the city streets with traffic lights every block, I'd think twice. Perhaps part of China's situation wasn't just the prestige of owning cars, but that most people's commute ranges expanded alongside the economy, beyond practical range for (pedal) bikes?
Yeah, I too wouldn't want to cycle in that level of air pollution. There's a sweet spot to hit for level of comfort & safety while cycling. I just think safety is the bigger issue, because even if the surrounding environment is comfortable and the terrain is flat and the weather is nice, if cars are making it unsafe to cycle, you're not going to cycle. And further, if we solve safety, that might actually help the environmental side of things too- less air pollution.
This aligns with my experience. I would bike (in SF and now NYC) but I don't because it feels too stressful and dangerous.
It annoys me how entrenched car culture is and how defensive some people get about it (and the amount of anger that is directed toward cyclists, many of whom legitimately fear for their lives on a daily basis).
Almost all the big cities I have been to in America have gotten way better with biking infrastructure in the past 10 years. When I went to school in philadelphia I can't remember a single bike lane or any form of infrastructure. Now in philadelpha there are over 200miles of bike lanes and other bike paths ( including buffered bike lanes !!!! https://bicyclecoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Bike...), and its easier to get around the city on bike then any other form of transportation.
I bought an e-bike. Because I can keep up with car traffic on most roads within the city, I am usually in the far right lane of the road and haven't had any problems really. You do have to be extra careful when changing lanes though.
The only problem I find is drivers don't expect you to be going so fast, especially up hill. I actually had a police car pull out right in front of me yesterday.
While I agree with your general premise, you might as well start picking your favorite hat condiments.
H-E-B is a wildly successful grocery store chain in Texas, and also the in-house brand for many of the products sold in that store.
The marketing slogan is "HEB: Here Everything's is Better!"
The reality is that, while it is often better than the competing chains (sometimes sadly so, killing Krogers and other chains in my area), HEB are the initials of the founder.
And B stands for Butt.[1]
It didn't even start as HEB - the original name was "C.C. Butt Grocery Store".
I only use Lyft for personal reasons but FWIW Lyft almost certainly uses this type of predatory regularly trip pricing. As I mentioned in another comment, I take the same trip at roughly the same time 1-2x per week. After doing that for awhile, I noticed the price went up 10-20%. When I adjust the locations just a few hundred meters from my usual endpoints, the real time price drops 10-20%.
Lyft is definitely doing it too. I take the same trip at roughly the same time 1-2x per week. After doing that for awhile, i noticed the price went up like 10-20%. When I adjust the locations just a few hundred meters from my usual endpoints, the real time price drops 10-20%.
I'm not sure if it's more expensive either. The first correct algorithm I can think of, expressed in the programming equivalent of pre-K level English, usually is less buggy and 10X easier to maintain than the advanced-language-feature-filled code that certain engineers love writing. And it takes a fraction of the time to write because it doesn't require much refinement. Is it slower than finely tuned C++? Yes. Does that matter? michael-scott-NO-GOD-NO.gif
It boggles my mind when people who are just building an everyday website decide that querying models from the DB means we need a multi-level class hierarchy that requires a 5 page paper to explain. Or that anything remotely related to math means we need to start overloading operators. Congratulations! Your brain recognizes patterns! Wow, someone should make you the President of all Engineers Everywhere.
The code you're writing now will likely not survive another 2 years, especially if every time there's a bug or even a question like "how does feature X work under condition ABC?", everyone shrugs their shoulders and has to read 1000 lines of horribly nested abstractions.
> The first correct algorithm I can think of, expressed in the programming equivalent of pre-K level English
If I can think of it, then I hope it already exists and I can just reuse it. The tricky stuff that needs a lot of thought is the same stuff that you can't just reuse off the shelf.
> It boggles my mind when people who are just building an everyday website
If it is something so routine that it doesn't need to really be designed, then I guess you can do it right the first time from memory (shame you just can't reuse some functionality if it is so routine though).
> The code you're writing now will likely not survive another 2 years
I work in research where your code is lucky to survive 2 months. I don't disagree with you, but you can't crank out perfectly simple code on the first go if the design space is clear. Those abstractions usually don't exist because the programmer was trying to be clever, they often exist because the programmer was trying to solve the problem. Its only with hindsight that we can often see a better more simple way (and hopefully have time to go back and do the simpler way).
> If I can think of it, then I hope it already exists and I can just reuse it.
There is also a cognitive load of 'using it' for simple algos and packages, like left-pad. Some end up the de facto standard of a community (Python's `requests` package), but other communities fracture (Node's SuperAgent, Axios, got, Request, reqwest, ...).
I like to think of code I write today as automatically being 'obsolete' 12 months from now. I might not replace it +12 mo, but if I _were_ to replace it, what comments, patterns, and hints might I leave my future-self to make that easier? Simpler code is easier to test and replace. Less magic code is easier to swap out with other languages. Verbose code is easier for my new team of +N engineers to digest, even if it takes twice as long to read.
