Chronic fatigue syndrome has long been known to often start with a viral infection (for example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21756995/). Other issues can arise as a consequence of viral infections as well (e.g., thyroid problems). I don’t think this is well known amongst the general public, even if it is known in the medical field. This may be a reason why people are surprised about “long-covid” as if long term effects are something unique to the SARS-COV-2 virus.
Patients test negative on PCR tests for the virus afterwards, so presumably the cause is no longer the virus directly, but some kind of irreparable damage.
I think no one really knows. My thought is given the number of known serious autoimmune disorders that are possibly triggered by viral infections, wouldn't be a stretch that there are milder ones that aren't easily observable. A lot of brain <--> hormonal stuff is poorly understood.
I’m in the same boat. Due to security restrictions of my employer I can’t use cloud services to store work related stuff. I was really bummed when I discovered that a lot of the interesting features of my RM2 require their cloud service. I’ve dug through the GitHub repos of RM2 hacks and open source tools that are available, but it still feels like I’m missing out.
Yep! When you plug it in to your machine through a USB-C cable, it attaches as an ethernet device and answers to `ssh root@10.11.99.1`. You can also activate an http UI that you can then use to upload files with `curl --form "file=@\"$1\"" "http://10.11.99.1/upload"`.
Reinventing known things and claiming that they’re novel is sort of his shtick. That said, he often does do interesting work - it just takes quite a bit of patience (which many people don’t have) to wade through the fluff and self-congratulating to get to the interesting technical meat of his writings.
I wish someone would provide a Cliff's Notes to Wolfram's 20,000 word blog posts. I'd like to see what he's figured out, but not at the cognitive load cost of having to wade through all that crap.
Like the shortest axiom for classical propositional logic using NAND in the Chapter 12, which is the last chapter, on page 773 in New Kind of Science with no proof or references?
Part of me wants to disagree since some of these features make my code shorter, but I have to agree since they commit a sin of language design that I dislike - implicit magic. Decorators are useful because they can help you shrink code by letting the decorator generate boilerplate for you. The code gets smaller, but now it’s harder to know what’s going on since you need to know what magic happened behind the scenes due to the decorator. It feels very much like issues I ran into when I used C++ meta programming libraries - my code shrank, and at the same time my understanding of what it actually did also shrank. Same with the walruses - my code gets smaller because now there’s some implicit stuff happening.
Comprehensions are a little less magical - if anything, they are more explicit. If I want to create a list where each element is generated by some function over another list, I just say it. Doing so with loops is obscuring what I wanted to say in the first place. The problem with comprehensions isn’t so much the comprehension, but the obtuse ways people can use them to eke out performance by avoiding explicit loops.
I’m all for things that are closer to what a programmer means, but less keen on features that entail obscuring details that may come back to haunt the programmer later (I see this most often with decorators).
I don't really agree that it's so magical, especially the walrus operator. Sure, a beginner may be confused by it, but it's really easy once you learn the difference between `=` and `:=` IMO. Python is not a language designed to be only used by beginners. Decorators may be a little more "magic", but it makes little difference in practice if you do @bar or foo = bar(foo), the former is just a cleaner syntax (and stops linters wanting you to put two blank lines between the function and the "decorator").
Oh c'mon with the walrus. Assignment being an expression is the case in so many languages. They should have made it the case in Python and just be done with it.
"But someone will make a typo one day resulting in = instead of ==" argument is nonsense as that hasn't been an issue since forever in other languages. You can either require parentheses if you want to use the value (the way C compilers want it) or just make it := to begin with.
I’m getting a little tired of articles or chats with people where you get the impression that people think the vaccines will create some sort of covid-proof bubble around them. This is the only explanation I can find for people acting surprised that vaccinated people get sick. The whole point was to prime the immune system so that when exposed, the likelihood of extreme effects would be drastically reduced. That’s it.
(E: I don’t get why people downvote this - all of the benefits of vaccination are precisely due to what I describe. Lower likelihood of individual bad outcomes, which reduces burdens on healthcare, and ideally, reduces community spread by reducing the amount of virus that replicates in an individual and can be passed on. This is why I was one of the first in line when I could get the vaccine. Perhaps daring to critique people with unrealistic vaccine expectations is unacceptable?)
But all the regulations around us create this covid-proof impression.
Eg. where I live, hospitals consider introducing vaccination requirements for visitors. But that somehow defies logic. The vaccine only reduces symptoms (and might thus save yourself, or others, when extended with the hospital-bed-limit-thought), but it wouldn't stop you from transmitting the disease if you are infected (and vaccinated) but you aren't aware.
So I don't even blame the public, but rather the regulators. They ought to know better.
Edit: I might need to support this claim.
The most trustworthy source I found was this article by the JHU [1] (2021-08-02). While there are many that claim different numbers (ranging from stopping roughly 60% to 0%), for transmission, no one claimed that virus infection is influenced.
> The vaccine only reduces symptoms (and might thus save yourself, or others, when extended with the hospital-bed-limit-thought), but it wouldn't stop you from transmitting the disease if you are infected (and vaccinated) but you aren't aware
Are you sure about that? Even this article refers to a study which says that vaccinated people are 5 times less likely to test positive than non-vaccinated. _Some_ asymptotic transmission will still occur in the vaccinated but it's reasonable to expect that it happens to a lesser degree. I'd be very curious to see studies that claim that there's no difference in asymptomatic transmission between the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
Correct. Whenever people talk about the vaccine not slowing spread they forget that vaccinated people are 5x less likely to catch covid to start with. They only seem to focus on viral loads of break through infections.
Those stats are all point-in-time and the result of very brittle analysis. Not surprisingly, you can therefore find stats that state the opposite.
In the UK this weekend there was a little blowup on Twitter because a TV journalist had his own breakthrough case, which caused him to do some journalism and download the data tables from Public Health England. He was surprised to discover that in the UK the proportion of vaccinated people getting infected is now higher than the proportion of unvaccinated people, i.e. the UK is experiencing the exact opposite of what your stat claims. Actually he was so surprised by this he posted it on Twitter and openly wondered why there was no debate about it, at which point he found out why not: he was mobbed, shouted down and ended up posting a grovelling apology.
Part of the problem was that his Twitter followers are innumerate. They assumed that this stat was overall percentage of people getting infected, but it's not. It's proportions of both groups. Therefore, the fact that more people are vaccinated than not in the UK is irrelevant. The vaccinated are - at this point in time - getting it more often than the rest. And journalists are afraid to report on it because they get attacked so you just don't know about it.
Reasons? Unclear. Scientists also seem to mostly refuse to do studies that might undermine vaccine messaging. Most likely the vaccine protection wanes so fast that it simply split the delta wave in two, with the unvaccinated getting it first, leading to lots of headlines about "pandemics of the unvaccinated" etc, and then the vaccinated wave coming second, leading to stats like this one which are simply ignored.
But those numbers don't account for severe disease, hospitalization, and death which are the whole point of the vaccines. You're latching onto this dramatic exchange because of some stupid idea that vaccines are this magic shield against any infection, and while they do reduce risk of infection they are mostly meant to prevent severe disease, hospitalization, and death.
Also you don't account for possible explanations for the UK data. For example, maybe unvaccinated people in the UK are more likely to have previously contracted COVID. More likely I think, the vaccinated are taking much more risk than the unvaccinated, leading to their higher case counts. Many unvaccinated are immunocompromised (or know that they are at higher risk for severe complications from COVID because they are unvaccinated) so I assume many of them are taking higher precautions than the vaccinated, i.e. wearing N-95's, not leaving their houses while many vaccinated people I know in the UK are going to 50k person festivals.
OK, a few points here. Firstly, reducing hospitalizations was not the point of the vaccines. That's this week's narrative that was retrofitted onto events when the vaccines failed at their actual goal. We know this because:
• The vaccine trials didn't use "severe disease" or hospitalizations/deaths as their target metric. They used PCR positives.
• The original protocols don't include boosters.
• The pre-2021 definition of vaccine is something that makes you immune.
What's happening now is grotesque: dictionaries are actually changing their definition of vaccine to try and cover up that the COVID vaccines have failed on their own terms. Compare Merriam-Webster before [1] and after [2]. The definition at the start of 2021 is short and to the point, a vaccine is administered to "produce or artificially increase immunity". The definition today is that a vaccine merely has to "stimulate the body's immune response". No actual immunity needs to be created under the new definition, which has been rewritten because the COVID vaccines fail to meet the normal definition of vaccine. We already have a word for what the COVID "vaccines" are doing, the word is prophylactic. And there's nothing wrong with those! They're just different to vaccines.
"some stupid idea that vaccines are this magic shield against any infection"
This idea is not stupid. It is the conventional expectation for vaccines up until this point. Vaccinations against diseases like smallpox, measles, mumps and so on do provide you a magic shield, which is why vaccines were taken so seriously and seen as so important previously. That's also why pre-2021 discussion of vaccines were dominated by discussions of herd immunity thresholds and whether vaccination could achieve zero COVID, a topic that's now vanished. Once again, this new narrative is made up in the last few months as it becomes clear the COVID vaccines aren't working properly.
"Also you don't account for possible explanations for the UK data. For example, maybe unvaccinated people in the UK are more likely to have previously contracted COVID"
I provided a possible explanation in the final paragraph. The one you're proposing is literally the exact same alternative explanation I posted in reply to nradov. I think this is quite possible.
If everyone wears seatbelts then 100% of the vehicle crash victims in hospitals will be seatbelt users. But seatbelts are still highly effective at reducing injuries and deaths.
That's not what the stat is saying. You seem to be mis-interpreting it in the same way some of the other people were.
Take 1000 people who are vaccinated. Measure how many get infected in a time span T. Calculate the ratio.
Take 1000 people who are not vaccinated. Measure how many get infected in a time span T. Calculate the ratio.
In the UK the infected:non-infected ratio is higher for the first group than the second. That should be impossible as it implies effectiveness is now negative. Possible root cause - the (relatively small) group of people who refuse to take the vaccine are refusing because they know they already got it, and thus have natural immunity, but the vaccine doesn't build immunity that lasts, so as time goes on the vaccinated group ends up getting infected anyway and having to fall back on building their own natural immunity. That's just speculation but otherwise it's hard to explain what is going on here.
"after an outbreak among vaccinated and vaccinated workers at the Singapore airport, tracking studies suggested that most of the spread by vaccinated people happened when they had symptoms"
The vaccines substantially help to reduce spread. Doesn't eliminate it, but obviously something a hospital would want to require.
The vaccine does a reasonable job at reducing transmission in the aggregate. It lessens the average viral load, shortens the average time a person is infectious, etc.
Treating transmission as a boolean ignores the large-but-not-100-percent improvement. Better to treat it as a distribution.
Ditto. My family and I are all fully 2 dose vaccinated, and I didn't go out from my house for nearly a month. I caught COVID(via my mother) last thursday.
The facilities are long overrun since a few months ago, so my symptoms which are:
blood coughing, nausea, chest pain, ~93%SpO2
are considered "quite mild" and "home quarantine only".
In the wake of other variants like Delta, I doubt that people who didn't/can't get the vaccine can be protected by herd immunity alone.
A few of my friends are getting breakthroughs too, which seems like a lot in comparison to the global statistics, so it might be just anomalies.
I don't think that's true. The vaccine still reduces the likelihood that you'll be infected so only allowing vaccinated visitors reduces the risk that COVID enters a hospital through visitors. I think the vaccine also reduces the likelihood that people with breakthrough infections infect other people
"Evidence demonstrates that the authorized COVID-19 vaccines are both efficacious and effective against symptomatic, laboratory-confirmed COVID-19, including severe forms of the disease. In addition, a growing body of evidence suggests that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines also reduce asymptomatic infection and transmission. Substantial reductions in SARS-CoV-2 infections (both symptomatic and asymptomatic) will reduce overall levels of disease, and therefore, viral transmission in the United States. ... Data from multiple studies in different countries suggest that people vaccinated with Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine who develop COVID-19 have a lower viral load than unvaccinated people.(41-44) This observation may indicate reduced transmissibility, as viral load has been identified as a key driver of transmission.(45) Two studies from the United Kingdom found significantly reduced likelihood of transmission to household contacts from people infected with SARS-CoV-2 who were previously vaccinated for COVID-19.(25, 46)"
"Two studies1,2 from Israel, posted as preprints on 16 July, find that two doses of the vaccine made by pharmaceutical company Pfizer, based in New York City, and biotechnology company BioNTech, based in Mainz, Germany, are 81% effective at preventing SARS-CoV-2 infections. And vaccinated people who do get infected are up to 78% less likely to spread the virus to household members than are unvaccinated people. Overall, this adds up to very high protection against transmission, say researchers."
"COVID-19 vaccines appear to help prevent transmission between household contacts, with secondary attack rates dropping from 31% to 11% if the index patient was fully vaccinated, according to a Eurosurveillance study yesterday. The population-based data looked at the Netherlands from February to May, when the Alpha variant (B117) was dominant and the available vaccines were by Pfizer/BioNTech, AstraZeneca/Oxford, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson."
"There has been good news, too, on the subject of viral load in breakthrough cases. Researchers in Israel studied vaccinated people who became infected. The viral load in these breakthrough cases was about three to four times lower than the viral load among infected people who were unvaccinated. Researchers in the U.K. reported a similar result. They also found that vaccinated people who became infected tested positive for about one week less than unvaccinated people."
> I’m getting a little tired of articles or chats with people where you get the impression that people think the vaccines will create some sort of covid-proof bubble around them. This is the only explanation I can find for people acting surprised that vaccinated people get sick.
No, it’s because until the Delta variant became the most common variant, the vaccines essentially did create a covid-proof bubble around the recipient. The trials for Comirnaty and the Moderna vaccine both showed >90% effectiveness against PCR positive infections, not just against hospitalization and death.
> The trials for Comirnaty and the Moderna vaccine both showed >90% effectiveness against PCR positive infections
I don't believe the official trials for Moderna and Pfizer measured PCR positive infections at all. (They involved thousands of people, it was a time when PCR test were difficult to obtain; they remain expensive at that scale).
I have not heard of Comirnaty, not sure about that.
There may have been pre-delta studies that showed PCR infection effectiveness (Cite?), I don't think they were the official trials.
> The first question is whether the right endpoints are being studied. Contrary to prevailing assumptions (including those of a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner8), none of the vaccine trials are designed to detect a significant reduction in hospital admissions, admission to intensive care, or death.9 Rather than studying severe disease, these mega-trials all set a primary endpoint of symptomatic covid-19 of essentially any severity: a laboratory positive result plus mild symptoms such as cough and fever count as outcome events (table 1).
To the contrary, I don't think that's plausible. In the whole COVID-19 decision the question of the initial load has not been discussed well enough, IMO.
If you think about the virus passing your various layers of protection it is clearly a numbers game, IMO. A mask, even if imperfect, might reduce your initial viral load below a threshold that allows your immune system to kill all infected cells very quickly so you don't develop strong symptoms. The same goes for distance.
So I don't see any reason to not expect a certain "sterile" immunity after a vaccination. The way I see it, the vaccination should prevent some of the low-load infections completely, regardless of the virus variant.
The details of Windows executables are all well documented and open - it's very easy to parse a windows executable and run it. The part that's missing to run it without Windows is the implementation of system calls and system libraries. Without those the executable will run into dependencies that you are missing. This is the whole reason for things like WINE - the executables are easy, but the runtime environment that Microsoft hasn't opened up is hard.
I'm not sure it's a question of FOSS OS vs non-FOSS OS. Working with MacOS has always felt similar to working with other non-Linuxes -- it's different. When OSX first came along with Rhapsody, while it was a form of UNIX it was definitely painful - stuff rarely built out of box, and there was lots of breakage. It surprises me when people talk about how wonderful OSX used to be that they forget how absolutely painful it was for the first few years of its existence. There was a brief period between 2005 and 2013 when stuff worked reliably (the "golden age" you refer to) - and it wasn't a matter of OSX becoming more open. It was just popular, so OSX was a first class citizen in most configure scripts and the OS didn't really put up any barriers to using it like a Linux with respect to the Linux security/permissions model.
The added restrictions of recent times (e.g. SIP, the move to a non-GNU build toolchain, hard read-only restrictions on the OS region of the filesystem, etc) aren't so much a FOSS issue as them just adopting conventions that aren't present on the Linuxes. The breakage of packages and porting efforts feel very similar to when we used to have to worry about how a package would work on HP-UX, Irix, Solaris, and the various systems that were all similar but not quite identical. That was never a function of FOSS or not - it was just a function of not being all the same.
I find it very frustrating that people try to treat OSX as a Linux - it's not, and it never will be. If you want to support macOS, then support macOS - don't try to bash Linux-isms onto it since they will always feel like a hack since it isn't and never will be a Linux. If that's important to you, there's an easy solution - use Linux. I do that - I have my MacBook that I use as a Mac, and for the stuff that's simply too awkward to use natively there, I just ssh to my Linux workstation and carry on.
Oh come on. Even before the pandemic your typical anti-vaccine person also wasn’t universally against all vaccines. They usually had some subset that represented their favorite rationale for not getting it: those containing substances they don’t like, those developed with a process that had a fetal cell line somewhere nearby, those given in clusters in early childhood instead of spread later on, etc. Anti-mRNA vaccine sentiment is just another instance of the same thing. Sorry if they feel sad for having that label, but it’s the same behavior.
If they aren’t universally against all vaccines, then why is the term “anti-vaxxer” applied in deragatory ways? I was under the impression it meant they were afraid of all
Portions of what you mentioned seem like reasonable concerns to the average layperson
Competitive programming is fun. It’s amazing that some people seem to think everything is about career path optimization.
Are we not allowed to do things for fun or just to pass the time anymore without someone writing that we’re wasting our time since it isn’t boosting our career?
I wouldn’t overthink the tools. I found a mostly minimal toolset was sufficient when I did my PhD: actively used repositories to make sure I never lost my work (private repos so I didn’t have to care what I put in them), plain old emacs for editing, and a mix of Mathematica, Matlab, and Python for my numerical and plotting needs. Used physical sticky notes and cheap legal pads for notes and keeping on top of todo lists. I printed papers to read since I never found a digital method to maintain the deep focus I needed to fully read the papers. I generally discourage students from worrying much about tools: at the end of the day if you’re thinking more about a tool or workflow process than your research work, you’re not making progress towards the degree. Use whatever tools and methods allow you to be productive without thinking about the tools or methods.
