Comment Re:This is nuts (Score 1) 100
The parent said "I WAS taught the basics of patent law" - not that he taught it. Passive voice.
The parent said "I WAS taught the basics of patent law" - not that he taught it. Passive voice.
As someone whoâ(TM)s donated to them over 20 times, I think this is marginally ok, but I donâ(TM)t approve of them saying itâ(TM)s opt-in when itâ(TM)s opt-out. Lying just makes it look like Mozilla is scummy. They need to stop shooting themselves in the foot.
The biggest generator of technical debt in my experience has nothing to do with exotic language features or cleverness. It has everything to do with developers' inability to anticipate future requirements. This goes in two directions: One, under-engineering, and two, over-engineering. Under-engineering is by far the more common problem, where someone designs a system to meet a specific sprint goal without considering that there's a 99(.9999)% chance that the product stakeholders will decide to expand the feature in a few months in a such way that completely invalidates the code they wrote, and requires a more general solution to the problem. Over-engineering does happen, and specific instances of it can actually be harder to fix than the worst under-engineering. The unholy grail is when a project is cursed with over-engineering extremely general solutions to solve problems that the requirements are unlikely to ever demand, while under-engineering in areas that have all but been explicitly requested to be expanded.
Still waiting on your closer look offering a breakdown of the flaws of the proposal and what should be enacted instead. And don't say "have faith; the companies will do it on their own." No, they won't.
As a 100% work from home software engineer with a team that also works 100% remote, I don't see the need for frequent (i.e. weekly) office visits. We make a practice out of regular working sessions and open and frank communication. That said, I like my team members enough to say that it's probably worth our while to meet up once every month or so, just for the social aspect if nothing else. It's not possible for our entire team to meet anywhere that often because of geographical distribution, but we can have a "local area" meet-up semi-often. I don't think it'd hurt. But a weekly deal, or week-on / week-off type arrangement would just be counterproductive, especially for those who don't live close to the office and would have to suffer through long commutes.
If the NT kernel is so modern and well-designed, why doesn't it have proper support for a *high performance*, bootable, tiered storage filesystem with FS-level data checksums, like ZFS? ReFS was supposed to be this, but they made it so bloated that it was too slow and buggy to be useful, so they're killing it. Nice.
If the NT kernel is so modern and well-designed, why are so many drivers absolute dogshit that think it's funny to grab a big kernel lock and sleep for 200ms, causing audio and every damn other thing you're doing on the system to drop out?
If the NT kernel is so modern and well-designed, why does Windows Explorer take approximately 70,000 times longer to extract the files from a
If the NT kernel is so modern and well-designed, why does a barebones install of Windows Server in a VM use about 7 GB of RAM and constantly eat a CPU core, while a barebones install of RHEL uses about 200 MB and only eats CPU when you run actual applications?
What the hell does Windows DO with all the terawatt-hours of energy it wastes on the world's computers every year? Does it just have an infinite background loop constantly scanning your filesystem over and over?
I have FIVE desktop systems -- four of them running Proxmox on Ryzen Gen 3, and one of them running MacOS on Apple Silicon -- that use less energy under load, combined, than my lone Windows laptop (10th gen Intel CPU + Nvidia GPU + Windows 10) uses while "idle". The fans on my laptop are constantly going like a jet turbine, even when I close my browser. I look in Task Manager and "System" (the kernel) is always doing something.
And before you say "you have malware," I've repeatedly scanned the box both while booted and out of band, and nothing comes up. It's just Windows' inefficient ass bloated boat anchor of a platform. The malware is the operating system.
"Never let programmers program your software"? What in the living hell are you TALKING about? Who the fuck ELSE would code the browser, if not programmers? The managers who don't know a lick of C++ or Rust? The UX designers, who would have to go back to school to learn something other than HTML/CSS?
The fact that this comment is modded insightful is terrifying. Who out there actually thinks this makes ANY sense whatsoever?
Don't let programmers program your software.... Jesus Christ. What kind of backwards place is this? Are you and the mods who modded your post insightful all PHBs at Microsoft? Good grief... they're taking over the world...
Lenovo has acknowledged the problem on their forums and is releasing a fix later this week. Funny how that happens less than 24 hours after it hits
The industry standard in the US is even for "unlimited" plans, you get "network management" or throttling after 22 GB. So... you blow past your 22 GB soft limit in a few seconds/minutes with your 10 Gbit connection, then you either get 256 Kbps for the rest of the month, or your data is deprioritized below customers who have used less than 22 GB this month, usually resulting in you getting approximately 3G speeds.
The tech is years ahead of what the carriers are prepared to actually sell us in terms of service offerings.
The whole basis of what it means to be a "Con Man" is to trick other people by appearing extremely confident in what you are stating. People tend to take the confidence of others to suggest that they are authoritative, so they are prone to buy into whatever it is the confidence trickster has said.
Elon is definitely a confidence trickster, whether or not his products and companies demonstrate actual results. His public communication has been full of confident-sounding nonsense for years.
What makes you think that no one is green? I think you've been drinking too much Exxon kool-aid, or you've just given up on trying.
Renewables have been proven time and time again to produce much more energy than the cost of manufacture, saving carbon emissions in the end. The only studies that seriously draw this into question are funded by the fossil fuel industry, and even then, their argument is that renewable sources yield less energy than we thought, not that they are a net carbon loser. As a society starts to increase the percentage of their energy generation from renewables, they become more green. QED. It really isn't that hard.
While EVs are greener than conventional vehicles, they're not perfect. A perfect solution to dealing with the carbon emissions of your commute is to stop fucking commuting. That's what this proposal would do. It doesn't require anyone to go out and buy an expensive Tesla or get solar panels on their roof. Staying where you are is 100% efficient compared to going somewhere in a vehicle that requires energy.
Also, if those who "manufacture concern" are often the worst offenders, why do I see people in huge black pickup trucks waving Confederate flags riding around town "rolling coal" -- i.e. they've deliberately modified their vehicle to put out many times more emissions than it did even out of the factory? Considering these trucks already have poor fuel economy, saying that people who are genuinely concerned about the environment are the worst offenders sounds like gaslighting to me. There's no way you can claim that someone driving a Civic getting 40 mpg pollutes more than these conservative wingnuts who think that deliberately polluting is a symbol of support for their brand of politics.
The only valid argument you might have is that people who make a lot of money end up polluting more, because the products and services they buy ultimately require fossil fuels to provide. While that's true, by numbers only a tiny percentage of environmentalists are rich. Only a tiny percentage of *any* category of people are rich, because our society is designed to make the 1% and the 0.1% astronomically wealthy compared to the rest. The 1% of conservatives are just as polluting as the 1% of progressives, if not more.
Thing is, if you have two families making the same salary, and one of them invested in solar panels and a hybrid car while the other invested in a full-size pickup truck, a full-size SUV and a boat, the carbon footprint difference is obvious. It IS possible to be greener -- you just want to paint the picture that it's not so you don't feel guilty about polluting. Reality check: you're ruining the planet for future generations. Have fun living with that on your conscience, bud.
How would you hope to increase "transparency around who is doing the editing" in an online space? Are you OK with a site that would require each and every editor to submit a verifiably accurate Government-issued ID and birth certificate to get an account, and then make it mandatory that each editor account is uniquely identified as a citizen of Earth by (1) displaying enough unique identifying info on their profile to know which specific human being it is, and (2) making them constantly look into a retinal scanner as they type? Even that has flaws -- someone could hold a gun to their head and make them type something different as they look into the retinal scanner.
The point is, if you spend a moment and think about what the point of Wikipedia is, it's not to make sure we know which individuals are doing the editing behind the scenes. Verifying beyond a shadow of a doubt who wrote something in an article in a digital space is not a solvable problem with current technology and levels of expectation of privacy.
The point of Wikipedia is to build articles based on citations of external resources. Wikipedia's knowledge is supposed to be entirely contingent upon the content of publications that are not Wikipedia. When these third-party sources disagree, the fact that they disagree and the opposing viewpoints are supposed to be presented.
None of that has anything to do with who is doing the editing.
Also, to see you talk about "rigor around the whole editing process" when nearly any controversial article is semi-protected or protected from edit trolls, and there is already a very rigorous process in place to accept contributions, is laughable.
What it seems like to me is that you feel challenged by what's written on Wikipedia because you disagree with it, so you want the ability to easily go in and edit articles to be what you think is right, without putting in the work to maintain an article's neutrality and cite good references.
But if someone else disagreed with what you wrote and edited it, you'd want to know who they are so you can track them down in real life and attack their character, right? Always resort to mudslinging against the person if you can't defeat their argument.
If what you want is a place that strives to provide good references for the information it has, with a deliberate focus on capturing different points of view for the benefit of neutrality, then Wikipedia is already what you want.
If what you want is a cloistered organization with financially and politically motivated authors who do good "research" but have no accountability whatsoever for the information they publish as authoritative, go access one of the many traditional encyclopedias. They're fine, until the information becomes horrifically out of date (years or decades) or the stances of the authors/company behind the encyclopedia shine through without any acknowledgment of other viewpoints. You also don't get the "Talk" pages -- which are sort of the "source code" of the article, because they show the discussions that led to the current state of the page -- with other encyclopedias.
If you just want a political echo chamber for your personal ideology, you don't want an encyclopedia at all. Just turn on the TV and watch your favorite news channel.
The only stable environment with good features I've been able to find is KDE with the window manager from XFCE, xfwm4. The Nvidia binary drivers cause Xorg hangs every few hours on Gnome or Cinnamon, and with KDE using Kwin I get periodic flickering black surfaces on a long-running (e.g. 5+ hours) desktop. It's been this way for ~6 months, across multiple Nvidia driver releases, so I'm not optimistic that it'll be fixed any time soon.
On that note, let's fact check the CNN fact check.
"Give people back their goddamn freedom," Musk said, adding that the coronavirus shutdowns are taking a toll on his company's manufacturing and ability to source supplies
The call said nothing about Tesla's ability to "source suppliers". Musk talked about how Tesla would weather the storm fine, but some of their existing suppliers might not, and complained about how the policies are destroying such people's livelihoods.
I don't see how your summary of Musk's words makes any meaningful point in contrast to what CNN said.
The billionaire entrepreneur, heralded for years as a pioneer in space travel and transportation, has recently veered into disseminating coronavirus misinformation.
CNN kindly omits here the fact that they posted misinformation about Musk's hospital donations with doing no due diligence, then left it up after being corrected, then when called out by Musk on Twitter, their director of global communications went on a multi-post Twitter rant, including spreading misinformation about the efficacy of non-invasive ventilators.
Whataboutism.
CNN, of course, has the bully pulpit here, and can post whatever they want in articles like the above without anyone being able to comment.
How does CNN police all websites and publications worldwide and prevent people from replying to or critiquing their arguments? I mean, I'm reading your post here right now chastising CNN. They are under no obligation to allow people to post their political rantings on their own site; they're a news site, not a forum. Elon just chooses to post his stuff on a site that allows discourse on that site itself; but he doesn't own Twitter. CNN pays for the infrastructure and web developers to run their website, and you are not in the position to tell them what they should do with it.
And he's repeatedly urged the end of the stay-at-home policies, despite public health officials' continued insistence that social distancing remains necessary to avoid a second wave of infections that could again overwhelm hospitals
It is of course not true that all "health officials" support the same policies, as can be seen in the simple fact that health officials in different countries have adopted radically different policies (including health officials in my own country, which has nearly wiped out the disease, without a lockdown).
What CNN is doing here is manufacturing "false consensus".
CNN is a U.S. based publication, and there has been very broad consensus among U.S. based health leadership, such as Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci, that social distancing is necessary. They haven't once suggested otherwise. Note the use of the word "officials" -- that doesn't mean that there does not exist anyone with a medical degree in the United States who opposes social distancing; the compound noun "public health officials" means Government employeed leaders who have been appointed in charge of public health. Please learn how to read charitably; news articles are deliberately shortened to be more legible to the common man. If they had to spell out every single noun with every single possible qualifier necessary to eliminate any flanking attacks from political opponents, each article would be 700 pages long.
Also, consensus is very nearly irrelvant when the people being characterized are "public health officials" -- when you are summarizing the statements of that specific group, all that matters is that the leadership is advancing a given statement. The Executive Branch of the US Federal Government is not a democracy, and it doesn't care what "the people" think, either. It is a top down organization run like an authoritarian corporation. What the leaders say is effectively law, unless the Legislature or Judiciary block them from doing something or bind them to do something differently by way of a law. So CNN's characterization is correct.
Zillow (Z) is allowing all staff the option to work from home through the end of 2020, even as some offices may begin to reopen in the coming months.
CNN, in an attempt to contrast Musk and Tesla with other companies, neglects to mention that Tesla enacted work-from-home weeks before it became mandatory, for those workers capable of doing so. Indeed, the two Tesla workers diagnosed with COVID-19 had been working from home for weeks at the time of diagnosis.
True; I'm not sure what CNN was trying to say there.
In late January, Musk tweeted about the virus, saying: "There is considerable conflation of diagnosis & contraction of 'corona'. Actual virality is much lower than it would seem. I think this will turn out to be comparable to other forms of influenza. World War Z it is not." He later added that he "meant to say other forms of 'the cold,' not influenza." Health experts believe coronavirus is more highly contagious, and deadlier, than the seasonal flu.
In late January, IFRs of over 3% were being bandied about as official numbers. Current IFR estimates range from 0,12-0,2% in Santa Clara to 0,55% in New York City. Influenza is generally around 0,1%. Musk was certainly far closer to accurate.
Far closer to accurate than whom? The health experts CNN cites? They didn't give numbers, so we can't directly compare there; but if we read what CNN actually said, they wrote that "coronavirus is more highly contagious, and deadlier" than the flu. Last I checked, values of 0.12-0.2% ~ 0.55% are greater than 0.1%, so the statement holds. 0.2% is also double the quantity 0.1%, so while I agree that it is technically "comparable" in the sense that mathematically the numbers are capable of being compared, a doubling of a debilitating viral infection that can result in death is quite an alarming statistic. That is to say nothing of the figures in New York.
In early March, he claimed, "The coronavirus panic is dumb," while public health officials were scrambling to convince the general public of the seriousness of the threat the virus posed.
Musk later also followed up stating that all panic is dumb. Is CNN saying that panic is a good thing? This tweet was made around the time that reports of people hoarding toilet paper were filling up the press.
"Panic" is dumb; I agree with Musk on a very technical basis. But I haven't actually seen anyone literally panic. Panic is resorting to animalistic behavior; discarding rationality in its entirety; best characterized by running around screaming uncontrollably and flailing one's arms, or something like that. Some people panic by resorting to uncontrolled violence until they themselves are physically restrained or eliminated. What's actually happening is people are increasing their stockpiles of necessities, but I don't equate this with panic. It is actually somewhat understandable, because there is a very real chance of the pandemic temporarily disrupting supply chains. It has already vastly reduced selection in both brick and mortar and e-tailer stores.
The problem is that, when a public figure says something like "The coronavirus panic is dumb," many people will interpret this as meaning that Musk thinks the Coronavirus itself isn't worth taking seriously. They will use this little snippet of text as ammunition to justify doing nothing as a matter of public policy to combat the spread of Coronavirus. The only areas that are unlikely to be negatively affected by a public policy of "Do Nothing" are extremely rural areas. But people are reading into Musk's tweet to argue that cities should just pretend that Coronavirus doesn't exist, and continue on, because it's no different than the flu. If people listen to this and actually make this public policy, this will cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
He tweeted on March 16 that it is "maybe worth considering chloroquine" to treat coronavirus, and then said, "*Hydroxychloroquine probably better."
Musk - like probably a large minority of people on this website, and indeed, this website itself - frequently comments about research papers when they're published. CNN is attempting to conflate Musk making brief comments about drugs being promising when research first emerged - with Trump spending months encouraging people to self-medicate with hydroxychloroquine.
OK, but he's still on the wrong side of the evidence here. I agree that dragging this tweet back into the article makes it seem like they're doing a hit piece on Musk, but what I think they actually intended to do was just go through Musk's tweet history related to Coronavirus in any way and describe how off-base he's been. It's sort of a "catch-up" for those who haven't followed Musk's tweets since March. They're using today's knowledge applied to tweets that could be 8 weeks old, so maybe you can say that's not fair, but it just goes to show how Musk has been consistently misguided on Coronavirus, and I think they're right about that.
(snip)
Also on March 19, he tweeted: "Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April."
Musk's comments were around the same time as the infamous Imperial College report was published, predicting 2,2 million deaths in the US, with a peak around the end of 2020. Pray tell, who was more accurate in their forecast?
Not noted by CNN, but Musk correctly called that the inflection point was achieved in late March. The main difference between Musk's "based on current trends" statement and how US cases played out was that the US did not follow a Gaussian curve (the same slope model used by sources CNN promotes), but rather has a "long tail".
We aren't yet at the end of 2020, so unless you want to head over there with your time machine, then come back to the present and report on how accurate the report was, the book is still out on whether their report will be accurate. You might say, well, "We're not even at 100,000 deaths yet; there's NO WAY it could get to 2.2 million!" Or you might be looking at inflection points on these predictive models and say, "Look! It's going down!" But both of these statements fail to take into account that there are major metropolitan areas in the U.S. (like the DC-Baltimore-Annapolis-Philly area) that are still seeing rapid exponential growth in COVID-19 cases, and the number of hotspots that will emerge in the remaining months of 2020 is still completely unknown. There could also be a second wave in places like NYC and cities in California.
Since we're not yet through 2020, I have no way of knowing whether the "infamous" (why is it infamous? Because you have a politically motivated agenda to downplay the severity of this pandemic?) Imperial College report is more accurate than Musk. What I do know is that Musk was objectively wrong, by a huge margin, and every day where there are major metropolitan areas in the U.S. with exponentially increasing cases of COVID-19 proves him that much more exponentially wrong. Meanwhile, the book is still out on the Imperial College prediction.
There's also such a thing as the "reverse Tinkerbell effect" in cases like this. If people take this pandemic seriously and exercise the appropriate precautions because they're afraid of the worst case outcome, then the worst case outcome won't come to pass, and the death toll will be lessened. If people think the pandemic is no big deal and go about their lives like normal, then the worst case outcome will come to pass, and the death toll will be maximized to the capabilities of physics and biology. I would rather that people go around with that "2.2 million deaths" figure in their heads when making daily decisions about whether to have parties, or go to the beach, or hold a sporting event. Maybe it'll scare them just enough that much fewer than 2.2 million people die.
The same day, he also claimed that "kids are essentially immune" to the virus
CNN omits mentioning that Musk tweeted a graphic (research from Italy) along with that, the graphic making clear that he was talking about mortalities, not ability to be infected.
Though the elderly and those who are already immunocompromised are among those facing the highest risk of infection, health workers say young people should not underestimate their risk of contracting the disease or dying from it.
CNN is outright spreading misinformation here. As of 10 April. according to the CDC, the US had only had 15 pediatric cases severe enough to require ICU treatment and three deaths. Of the six ICU cases where information about underlying medical conditions is known, all six had underlying comorbid conditions.
CNN is spreading misinformation here. Young people (do not have a meaningful risk of dying from the disease.
Later in March, Musk tweeted that there is an "up to 80% false positive rate" in coronavirus diagnostic testing
CNN neglects to mention that Musk was citing a research paper. The paper has since been retracted, but again, CNN apparently wants Musk to own a time machine.
Earlier this month, Musk tweeted about another potential coronavirus treatment, saying, "Remdesivir is sounding very promising!"
It is. CNN again apparently has a problem with Musk quoting research papers - the very thing that CNN (and especially Slashdot) does. My god, how many articles has CNN run about promising antivrals? Tons. But apparently it's "spreading misinformation" if Musk does it.
The FDA has not yet officially approved any drugs for the treatment of coronavirus.
Despite CNN's implication, Musk has never stated that any drugs have been approved for treatment of COVID-19, nor encouraged people to self-medicate. He's commented on research papers. Briefly, in each case.
Last week, Musk shared a link to a YouTube video, saying, "docs make good points." The video, which has since been removed
Once again, CNN apparently wants Musk to own a time machine. Indeed, it was probably Musk's retweeting of the doctors that invited more scrutiny of their claims, leading to them eventually being rebuked and the video removed. CNN is however correct to point out that their claims, based testing COVID-19 testing conducted at their medical practice, do not hold statistical scrutiny and have been rebuked. Musk has not mentioned them or their statistical claims again since this happened.
What I am able to glean from the number of times that Musk quotes these "promising" research papers that downplay Coronavirus, is that he is setting his search filters when looking for research papers to only those that seem to indicate that (a) there is a promising treatment for the Coronavirus that's going to save us and prevent this from being a serious problem; (b) that Coronavirus doesn't kill many people, or is equivalent to the flu, or can be safely ignored. Sure, we can't expect him to have a "time machine," but why is it that he keeps on citing these resources over and over, only to have them shot down, retracted, or deleted not long after?
Is it even conceivable to you that he could have some motivations for trying to convince people to get back to work? He's a multi-billionaire and entrepreneur. He relies upon people being in business to keep his companies profitable. But if we assume that his recent tweet about his monetary wealth being irrelevant is true, then there's still a motivation he has that Coronavirus is impeding: He wants to get to Mars. He probably feels that this is an unacceptable delay in his schedule to get off the planet and bring humanity into an extraterrestrial future.
Honestly, I'm on board with us getting off Earth ASAP. A major cause of existential dread for the human race is our vulnerability, with literally 100% of our eggs in this one planetary basket. "One asteroid with our name on it," as they say. However, that is a long-term goal; a pandemic is a relatively short-lived phenomenon that we need to deal with here and now to prevent millions of casualties. Our chances of going extinct by asteroid strike or other planetary catastrophe are not meaningfully higher if we delay our Mars colonization by 1 or 2 years, because the chances of that happening in any given year are astronomically low, and are not affected at all by whether we are quarantined at home or not.
The downsides of this delay are much more severe for Elon Musk than the rest of the human race, because he is only going to live so long, and there is a very real risk that if we delay the Mars mission much longer, he will be dead by the time we get there, or too elderly to join the crew himself. But the rest of humanity honestly won't care whether it's Musk or someone else who is responsible for putting us on Mars. I applaud his ambition, but not when it comes at the cost of millions of lives. If he thinks that's an acceptable cost for his mission, he is a soulless bastard, and the comparisons of him to Bob Page from Deus Ex are spot-on.
I don't have the stamina to quote and respond to the rest of your points, but I will do one more:
People dying from seasonal respiratory illness is not an extreme figure. The open question is how extreme it would get under different policy scenarios - but the current numbers are not abnormally large, as CNN attempts to portray them.
--CNN's Brian Fung and Jason Farkas contributed to this report
I don't know Fung, but I'm not at all surprised to see Farkas's name here.
Even if Coronavirus were exactly and only "just another flu" in terms of its death toll, that's still the difference between 60,000 and 120,000 lives (because, presumably, people getting infected with COVID-19 and dying of it does not have any effect on how many will die of the flu.) Are you so heartless and so infatuated with downplaying the numbers that you don't recognize that we're talking about 60,000 goddamn lives here?! That's a lot of people. Why shouldn't we do everything we can to save those lives, and to prevent the numbers from being many times higher? I would argue that saving 60,000 lives is absolutely worth the economic hardship we have suffered through. Even if our efforts end up costing some lives due to the knock-on effects of a failing economy, I think it is absolutely morally reprehensible to look at those 60,000 potential deaths and just do nothing. We have to do whatever we can. It's our responsibility.
Mathematicians practice absolute freedom. -- Henry Adams
