JohnStrangeII

It is very easy to find out whether someone is an expert, as long as you really want to and don't just fool around. For example, an expert on viral diseases will have a long track record of publications in highly acclaimed journals for the past 30 years or longer.

For the purpose of validation or expert testimony, there is no need to consider everyone who has a PhD and got tenure an expert. It is reasonable to set the bar very high.

The expert on catholicism example is a needless distraction. Of course, there are such experts on catholicism, and they can tell you best what catholic doctrine says. Their opinions about virology are obviously irrelevant, though.

Whether that's likely or not can be estimated by extrapolating case numbers from January back in time into 2019 and using a reasonable estimate for the R0 value without any measures against the spreading of the disease. Even if you don't trust the Chinese numbers, the estimate should be roughly in the right ballpark, since we certainly didn't have millions of deaths in Wuhan in January. The initial exponential growth phase is similar in all regions with comparable population density.

I haven't crunched these numbers, but a start in early September seems unlikely to me - call it a hunch, based on looking at the initial growth curves.

I find it hard to believe that a democracy is unable to create a law that gives their voters a day off for voting every four years. Realistically speaking, even half a day off would suffice.

In the context of HAM radio transmissions, encryption includes voice scrambling methods that we wouldn't nowadays consider secure encryption. There used to be a lot of analogue voice scramblers and voice inversion tools. I think you can still buy them. Generally, there is a prohibition against obscuring transmissions on HAM radio. (Or at least I think so, I'm not a HAM operator myself.)

In my opinion, there should be no CSS and no styling at all. The original idea of logical document markup and letting the client render the document is best. It shouldn't be the content provider's business if and how the content is processed on the client machine. Once you open that door, you just duplicate the kind of aberration we already have.

A good WWW provides linked documents in a format that is easy to display and process (e.g. extract links, text, headlines, images, etc.) and makes it impossible to hide content. If you publish a document, it should be publicly accessible.

I've been thinking about something similar for a while, but kind of disagree with Gemini's scope and implementation. I think that the lack of inline images is too limiting. In my opinion, a good replacement for the WWW should have the following features:

- ToS that strictly prohibits commercial use and advertising. We have the WWW for that, no need to duplicate it.

- Uses HTTPS or something similar. This allows use of efficient servers like Nginx.

- Based on a virtual display with fixed dimensions and orientations, 2-3 aspect ratios and vertical/horizontal orientation. Fixed virtual pixel solution. Every page is fixed in size and in the length of unicode text it can display.

- Uses a structured document format with a limited number of logical tags. The client displays the page as it likes (no styling directives in the document markup). Every page written in this format is compiled into an efficient and compressed binary representation for transmission.

- Limited number of links, overlays, and images per page. Input fields with validation should be allowed. Inline images and movies are limited in size.

I'm planning to implement something like this in my forthcoming virtual Lisp machine (z3s5.com), though it's going to be a bit less general and probably not be based on HTTPS.

Realistically speaking, if your scenario is that the US government might capture and torture you for encryption keys, then your number 1 priority should be physical security of your communication devices and the people who operate them. Your number 2 priority should be preventing other side channel attacks, e.g. the operating systems you're running on your endpoints and things like the Management Engine on Intel chips and the equivalent on AMD chips, as well as other possible backdoors in the hardware and your supply chain. Remember, the NSA intercepts mail-order hardware and modifies it and the CIA runs hardware companies.

Once you have taken care of these priorities, you can start worrying about the soundness of your encryption. Inventing safe encryption if you're not overly concerned about performance is really not hard, even experienced laymen can do that by using existing cryptographic primitives. You can even make it quantum safe. (It should be, in the described scenario.) If you think that is not within your capabilities, then you're probably right, but then you've already failed at task 1 and 2 anyway.

For the remaining 99.9999% of the population this is not a realistic threat scenario, and it's best to use a well-established cryptographic library with the recommended defaults.

I think you're missing the point. It's an opinion piece (aka editorial, or blog post in this case) and not a news article. Of course, you can disagree with his interpretation.

The article does have an ambiguous "and" in the relevant sentence but it's a bit of a far stretch to get from that to the paraphrase you provide.

Here is the literal quote from the article: "Calls to “dominate” marchers and ad-libbed speculations about Floyd’s “great day” looking down from heaven at Trump’s crisis management and new unemployment numbers (“only” 21 million out of work!) were pure gasoline at a tinderbox moment. The man seems determined to talk us into civil war."

Although I don't want to say that this post is not insightful at all, I'm always a bit wary of people who place themselves above everyone else and think they know so much better. One thing the author doesn't explain, for instance, is why getting your little dopamin kicks from time to time is so bad. The post generalizes from the extreme cases.

For example, I buy too many VST audio plugins, stuff that I don't really need as a hobby musician. I know that I don't really need them, but from time to time when they are on sale, I like to buy another one just for fun, for the immediate satisfaction of trying it out. I can easily afford this, it's just a part of spending my modest discretionary salary (most of which I save). The habit gives me a nice feeling. What's wrong with that?

Maybe the author needs to take it a bit more easy?

Sorry, I overlooked that passage. The link is in the last paragraph, after the main article. Should have read it more carefully. Anyway, it's a problem.

One problem that article does not address is that mist showers with warm water seem like a perfect recipe for breeding Legionnaire Disease, a very dangerous and deadly form of pneumonia. This is especially true if you store the water in a warm state for longer times rather than heating it on the fly. Unless this problem is addressed, mist showers are not a good idea.

The Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics is not "metaphysics", the theory is principally testable and falsifiable by empirical data. The experiments needed to test it are just not yet feasible. Sean Caroll has written a nice blog post about this in 2015 [1].

[1] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2015/02/19/the-wro...

I'm in philosophy, though personally working in formal philosophy, so this is quite different from CS. In my area practically all top journals reject more than 95% of all submissions, and if you get accepted, it takes about a year until the article is published. Many journals get so many submissions that they do not provide any reviews or feedback - not even a paragraph or line - if they reject a paper.

Although I have been able to stay a fully paid postdoc for more than 10 years without problems and get decent amount of publications out, I'd agree that the peer review system is broken and seems to be strongly biased in favor of mediocrity over originality. It's particularly bad in fields like philosophy in the humanities, where you could argue that there are no clear-cut criteria for evaluating the content other than merely formal issues. (Philosophy is not a science.) There are lots of people who game the system, I'd say many of my colleagues are doing it, though not (yet) the majority. By gaming the system I mean writing articles they barely endorse themselves, tailored to get past reviews. I've literally had a very successful colleague say "Who cares? It's one more publication!" when I raised doubts about a joint paper, because it involved too much hand-waving and didn't seem to work.

Long story short, I have the impression that in the humanities whether you're accepted or not mainly depends on the writing style and on whether you win the "reviewer lottery." One and the same paper can get accepted in one journal and rejected in another, for journals with similar reputation. I also believe that there are certain niche areas in the humanities that are (almost) pseudo-sciences and based on a small group of researchers colluding with each other and passing opportunities for publication to each other. I won't mention the disciplines, though.

I'm a bit dismayed that you describe CS in a similar way, I've always thought its much more rigid there and easier to evaluate CS papers.

Having said all that, I don't think there is any alternative to the peer review system. Any alternative I've seen so far or come up with myself seems to be even more prone to manipulation and gaming the system. I believe that it's not the peer review system itself, but over-reliance on objective indicators by university administrators that has led to most of the problems. But the humanities have certainly changed to the negative, at least in philosophy I'm certain that many seminal and famous articles from the 70s of last century and earlier would not make it past the peer review today.

Can you recommend any non-mainstream media that are also no "social" and online media outlets? Books would come to my mind, but these do not provide any recent news, so I'm always baffled when someone criticizes "mainstream" media as if they had some kind of premium access to better, but semi-secret news sources. LexisNexis?

Or is it just a way of talking and you don't want imply that there are non-mainstream media worth reading?

Why not? The name is easy to use and to pronounce and there is zero chance to confuse it with something else in the current context.

To add to this, what some people apparently don't realize is that those who get mild symptoms and ignore them or don't get tested and quarantined will almost certainly infect others who might die from it. It could be your elderly neighbor, your parents, grandparents, or an acquaintance with a compromised immune system.

No, the assessment is realistic. The conference is in about one month. If the coronavirus is transmitted there, which is not unlikely, then it can take several weeks until someone gets symptoms, then another month until that person is no longer a transmitter. Not showing up to events during such a long time is unfortunately not a good idea for someone who doesn't have tenure. Maybe this changes once the official evaluation of the situation has changed. Right now it is "There are no cases in Portugal". Our university hasn't even provided hand sanitizers yet, and there is no official or inofficial statement from the administration about Covid-19.

The problem are the people themselves. I have yesterday tried to persuade a colleague to cancel / postpone a conference in Lisbon with participants from all over Europe, including Milan in Italy. He didn't even take me seriously and other colleagues from Spain were making jokes about how all of their relatives are currently ill or they have Italian friends for a visit. Besides, half of my colleagues are from Italy, one of them just told me relatives from Piemont are planning to visit her next week.

With that attitude it is impossible to contain the virus. For all I know, I might already have it. I'm at a loss of how to react to such people, who seem to be the majority in Portugal. Working result-oriented in Academia I could in theory isolate myself for three months, but in practice this would be professional suicide.

Most people are also easily flattered and everybody is naturally opinionated. It's hard to keep your ego in check.

For example, you see respectable scientists and artists write a popular book, then the next one (because their publisher nags them), then a third one that is borderline unprofessional (no time, publisher send ghostwriter), and so on. Maybe some of them realize that a best seller can yield a lot of money and in no time time they appear in talk shows talking about topics they couldn't possibly know anything about (alien invasions, politics, the future of mankind). Finally, they appear to be nuts and everybody is angry about how "fake" they are and speculates about their mental problems.

If I would get book proposals and interview requests every day, I'd probably end up the same way.

It's because you can leave your phone at home but not your face.

Is there any "publishing service" for MacOS that takes a percentage of each sale and allows you to provide build scripts and source code, compiles and tests the application and distributes it on the app store?

If not, do the Apple EULAs prohibit such a service or is it not considered lucrative enough?

I used to develop for MacOS but have stopped supporting it entirely since Catalina, because I cannot be bothered with being locked into Apple's development tools, notarization, the Developer Network, and so on. It just isn't worth my time and money, but I'd still like to distribute native applications. Provided the EULA of such a service would be reasonable (e.g. good protection of the source code), I'd gladly use it, since otherwise all Apple sales are lost anyway. But there doesn't seem to be any such service, and it's IMHO weird that Apple don't offer that themselves.

There are no automated tests for this, since cryptographic randomness requires unpredictability. A statistical test can only tell you when a random number generator is broken, but no statistical test can tell you whether a random number generator is cryptographically sound.

I strongly recommend using Sqlite for your own document format. Sqlite is one of the most well-tested pieces of software on earth and ACID-compliant. You can even make it safer than the default if you don't need maximum performance only need it for storing documents. It is very crash and corruption proof, especially with the full sync option and if you use it from one thread only.

Yes, I've been programming in Lisp and Racket for the past twenty years and recently switched to Go. The main reason was the availability of a large number of packages and the general tooling for Go. So far, I'm quite happy with my choice. Productivity is slightly less than with Racket, but outweighed by the small size of the executables, easier deployment, and more 3rd party libraries. Of course, I'm missing a lot of features that pretty much any Lisp offers, but the simplicity and static typing does overall have many advantages.

Since you mention Clojure: That's useless for me, because it runs on the JVM. One reason to use Go is exactly that it produces static, self-contained executables that don't require any heavy infrastructure.

It's going to be dark when you wake up anyway, at least in areas like Canada or Northern Europe where people get up early.

You're absolutely right. It's going to be dark in winter anyway. The problem is that "sleep experts" have personal opinions and preferences, too, and use their expert status to push their personal agendas.

I find it hard to believe that this could have any significant effect, given all the other negative influences on sleep we already have that seem to be way more drastic.

In any case, our whole style of life has shifted from the mornings into the evenings, so summertime makes much more sense than having no daylight savings time at all. Summertime for the whole year is definitely my personal preference. To be fair, I live in Portugal, where wintertime for the whole year would be overall bad for the way we live and for tourism, because it means that it will be dark at 8 PM instead of 9 PM. People here mostly live in the evenings and start work at 9 AM and even later.

Or, keep adjusting for one hour twice a year. I've never had any problems or complaint about shifting time either. It is nothing, not even a nuisance. IMHO, there is no need to change something that works fine.

> Because of a single experience in 2015?

No, because it is basically a tabloid/yellow press version of Fox News and Fox News is already very low quality in terms of actual informativity - too much editorializing, combined with garbage interviews. I thought the latter was somehow implied, but should have been much clearer about it.

> This is the reason that the comments section of almost every news website was removed.

Breitbart hasn't removed theirs, though. I just checked and the first comment on the first randomly chosen story was that "Hussein Obama created ISIS" with the reply "This. We need to exterminate the enemy within" - talking about assassinating a former president.

The comments are atrocial, check them out for yourself. And these are Breitbart's readers.

> I think everybody should be aware of the potential for bias and/or incorrect news produced by mainstream media.

Your position is not very coherent, because you are (i) agreeing that there is no viable alternative to "mainstream media" (most of the time, you can only correct them on the basis other mainstream media), and (ii) everybody is biased, has always been, and will always be. It matters how you deal with your biases, not that you don't have biases. I can get my news from the most biased news site on earth - Breitbart or Fox News or CNN, if you will, and be fully informed, as long as I'm able to distinguish news from editorials. It's no problem nowadays, with access to multiple news sources on the Internet. That doesn't make the source high quality, though.

In the end, all the news comes from journalists who film, photograph, write news at the place where something happens or as close as possible to it. New agencies and a few larger papers/TV channels can afford a large network of correspondents and freelancers - the remaining news provider just copy&paste/paraphrase, including Breitbart, of course.

The one and only time I looked at Breitbart, because it was mentioned online, must have been around 2015 or so. The news site looked like a UK tabloid/yellow press Fox News clone, nothing special really. I then looked at the public comment section and users there were discussing how to best gas as many Jews as possible in the US. I'm sure they cleaned up the site a bit since then, but this is a true story.

Bottomline of the anecdote is that Breitbart cannot possibly be considered a "high quality news site."

On a side note, from the people who criticize "mainstream media" I have never heard a single halfway sane suggestion of where else you could get news. The best suggestion I've ever gotten was "Wikipedia", and the best wrong answer so far was "books." Most of them don't even seem to know what news are, they seem to confuse the term with "political opinions that I like." We live in crazy times.