Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Submission + - We're Building Neal Stephenson's Primer. We need your help. (github.com)

hherb writes: https://github.com/hherb/prime...

In Neal Stephenson's 1995 novel The Diamond Age, a device called A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer changes the life of a street kid named Nell. It doesn't teach her by lecturing. It teaches her by telling stories that respond to her life, asking questions that force her to think, and never once dumbing things down. It meets her where she is and walks beside her as she figures things out.

Thirty years later, we have the technology to build it. So we are.

The Primer is an open-source Socratic AI learning companion for children aged 5 to 14. It runs today as a desktop application and text REPL in Rust, holds real conversations with children, and is designed from the ground up to eventually run on a battery-powered handheld device with no internet required.

It's AGPL-3.0 licensed. Every line of code is public. And we need contributors: especially for languages beyond English and German. There is a fabulous manual for developers wanting to jump in: https://github.com/hherb/prime...

Comment competition unwanted (Score 2) 42

Corporates do not like competition. The USA (sort of a corporate muscle) wants to keep its monopoly on spying on the world's telecommunication, and the competition (e.g. the Chinese) want a piece of the pie too ... while the customers (citizens) remain defenseless victims of whoever spies on them (I don't care whether it is the USA or the Chinese, I don't want anybody to spy on my communication)

Comment Re:Directional antennas? (Score 1) 183

Plain old GPS is not accurate enough for aircraft which want accurate elevation and location data while traveling at high speed. Aircraft use a ground based supplemental signal known as WAAS to correct the natural errors in GPS. Without WAAS enabled GPS is not certified for primary navigation. I suspect that it is the WAAS correction factors that are being spoofed not the satellite signal.

Comment Re:That's socialized medicine for ya! (Score 1) 212

The US is ranked last among developed nations in terms of health care rankings, including health outcome: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/0...
https://www.commonwealthfund.o...

If you measure innovation as number of patents granted, then the US patent and economic system will almost invariably produce the highest number. If you measure it in terms of groundbreaking innovations (including those with no immediate commercial application or gain), the USA don't fare that well. Furthermore, do not forget that a substantial part of innovation including Nobel prices by USA citizens/residents were obtained by recent immigrants that had their schooling (often publicly funded) in other countries.
If you measure groundbreaking innovation / capita, countries such as Norway (which incidentally ranks #1 in health care) still beat the USA.

Comment Re:Trump will win (Score 1) 579

After we turn socialist overnight what then?

The joke is that those who are afraid of "turning socialist" are completely ignorant of what socialism actually is, let alone characteristics of other political/socioeconomic philosophies. In their world of alternative facts, all they know is a cartoon beatbox version of socialism, where no one owns anything and the government takes away everyone's freedom to do whatever you want.

It is not possible to have a rational constructive discussion with folks who don't care about facts and who do not care to learn said facts. "Biden hates America" and "Obama was born in Kenya" are opinions that are neither based in reality nor serious.

"Trump said he was going to build a border wall and make Mexico pay for it. He didn't do either" is based upon facts and reality.

Comment Re:Read the articles carefully before panicking (Score 1) 218

Indeed. T-cell mediated immunity might not only be more important than circulating antibody mediated immunity, it also seems that it is much longer lasting AND much more prevalent: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/2020... (Sekine et al: Robust T cell immunity in convalescent individuals with asymptomatic or mild COVID-19)

I wish this fear mongering sensationalism would stop and people would start a fact based discussion of covid-19.

Comment Re:No. (Score 1) 382

References?

Some medication trials and ventilation protocols suggest small benefits over others, but so far no breakthrough. None of those have been properly peer reviewed and verified in larger settings. If a family member was unlucky enough to get severe symptoms now as comopared to lets say February, I would not have any higher or lower hopes re outcome.

Bear in mind that the majority of Swedish cases that died where already close to the natural end of their life span - nothing will make much of a difference in those.

I am rostered periodically in the covid section in my ED as senior medical officer. I try and keep up to date with developments - what do you know that I don't? Please share.

Comment Re:No. (Score 1) 382

Wrong on many accounts.
1) the dynamics of covid are now better understood. It quickly "reaps" the most vulnerable, that is the elderly with few months to a couple of years projected residual life span. In Sweden, the median of the deceased had a residual projected life span of less than. year, the majority of the deceased being nursing home residents.
It means, that at the beginning of the infection you will always observe a very high death toll that seems scary, and then it drops off quickly because the number of vulnerable people has been reaped already.

Have a look at Sweden's covid deaths - even accounting for the delay between infection and death, there is an initial correlation between number of infections and deaths, and then the number of deaths plummets even if the number of infections might continue peaking: https://experience.arcgis.com/...

You cannot reduce the absolute number of deaths by much, you can only delay the deaths, in order to prevent a health system from becoming overwhelmed and thus causing preventable loss of life. At no time had Sweden's health care system been overwhelmed.

I believe Sweden had it mostly right. They could and should have isolated their nursing homes better, which would have more than halved their reported deaths. They openly admit that. But they are unlikely to be worse off in terms of loss of years of life, especially quality years of life, since their policy causes a lot less "collateral damage" - my educated guess is hat in 5 years time there will be consensus that they actually are better off by then unless they get bullied into joining the lemming stampede.

2) Belgium does NOT have a radical honesty policy for covid cases. They simply presume / report any death that could possibly have been associated with covid as covid casualty, even without testing, even without any reported symptoms (eg all nursing home deaths during covid). Their numbers represent a likely "ceiling" of covid casualties, and probably an overestimate - nobody knows so far by how much.

Sweden has one of the most honest approaches, since they automatically match their deaths registry with covid testing registry. They too might overestimate their covid deaths, because they report as covid death anybody who died and had a positive covid test, regardless of symptoms/likely causality - and they test very aggressively.

Slashdot Top Deals

You can bring any calculator you like to the midterm, as long as it doesn't dim the lights when you turn it on. -- Hepler, Systems Design 182

Working...