commonturtle

More on this subject from Tyler Cowen: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/12/ho....

Apparently the FDA could review clinical data and make a call on the vaccine in 24-48 hours, without cutting any corners.

Surely by being forced to do lockdowns later on we are paying dearly for letting them stay open.

I think we can also have more fine-grained policies. In Scotland they simply disallow serving of alcohol in restaurants and pubs, and restaurants have to close by 6PM. Unsurprisingly Scotland seems to be doing somewhat better than England and has avoided a second nationwide lockdown.

The basic idea is if we can target the 5% of the economy that is causing most of the spread, you can keep the other 95% open.

I don't know why we're so hesitant to just close bars and restaurants everywhere, pay the staff generously, and leave the rest of the economy open. At least in the UK I think it would have stopped us from having a second lockdown.

My favourite kind of dumpling, Momos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momo_(food)) are missing from here, wonder when they came about.

Give it 20 years :)

Not sure if it was the medium of television that causes these problems. I remember reading Ben Franklin's biography a while ago. He was in the printing / newspaper business and what struck me was how polarized it was. Lots of hit pieces with absolutely no evidence, and papers heavily biased in one direction or another (a la Fox News).

Wow that's.. tiny. I was also surprised to learn that Twitter has just 187M daily users, even smaller than Snap (249M), which in my mind was only an app used by American teenagers.

Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death is also an interesting read. He talks about how TV is an awful medium that encourages even the most serious content to be treated as entertainment. I wonder what he would have to say about the media we consume today :)

My own view is there is some truth to what he says but overall he is too cynical. TV didn't have the damage on our society that he expected. I suspect people who talk about the damage social media and cellphones are doing to us today are also too cynical. We are incredibly adaptive creatures and while initially struggle with new technology we eventually learn healthy ways to use it.

Ted Chiang’s Exhalation. I didn’t like all of his short stories, but a few in this book were really great.

Scott Page's Model Thinking course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/model-thinking. Broad overview of how to think in models to understand the world around you.

Is this just the end of the beginning of the damage Covid will cause?

I ignore 100% of Medium, it's always low quality. As you say Substack is also heading in that direction. I like Atlas Obscura, even though it's just factoids and not information that I'll ever use.

Ignore most news outlets: NYT, Atlantic, Bloomberg, WSJ, Techcrunch, Vice, etc.

Will read: personal blogs, Substacks (for now), niche publications (e.g. Lapham's quarterly), twitter links.

Corporate life can be traumatic sometimes. I can only imagine how employees at IBM felt and they were asked to sing one of these songs.

Interesting, thanks for sharing. This idea of working in a completely different industry for a while is one of the things I'm thinking about. Might be more fun than aimlessly wandering :)

> Within Baghdad, the Al-Adudi Hospital's location was decided upon by its administrator, Abu-Bakr al-Razi. He determined where it should be located by "hanging a piece of meat in several places for a few days and deciding in favor of the place where meat was found to be least infected."

That is actually quite a clever idea. I wonder what factors would lead to one location having higher microbe density than others? Probably things like nearby sewers, meat / fish markets, etc.

Presumably secondhand-everything sales are booming, since so many people have less discretionary income during the crisis?

I've tried cricket bars before, they tasted quite good. I just wonder though, why not make them out of a vegetable protein like pea or oat protein instead? That way they could target the vegan market too.

How do they plan to take on modern social media networks with their massive network effects? This is like a corner shop claiming that they will be Amazon's replacement.

Almost every large tech company has offices in the US outside the Bay Area; in NYC, Seattle, LA, etc. What's stopping them from winding down their Bay Area offices over the next 10 years and slowly ramping up investments in other places?

I enjoy reading Fermat's Library (https://fermatslibrary.com/journal_club), a publication that covers one scientific paper of interest a week (give or take) with annotations by the authors. Papers come from a wide variety of fields: biology, computer science, physics, mathematics, anthropology, and so on.

There are parts I miss about the office and parts I don't.

Do miss: Face-to-face meetings, bumping into people you know from other teams randomly, dropping by someone's desk to ask a question.

Don't miss: High density open office environment (honestly don't mind open office that much as long as density is reasonable), commute (40 mins each way), free food / snacks (easier to eat healthy at home).

After weighing up the pros and cons though, I think I would probably choose to go back to the office after the pandemic is over, although I might optimize for a job where I get my own office or a low density open office.

I'm tech leading a small project (~5 people). How much time I spend coding varies quite a lot, usually 20-50% in a typical week. I spend more time than I would like in meetings of various kinds: interviews, 1:1s, planning for the next quarter, etc.

There's also a BBC Miniseries for And Then There Were None which is fantastic.

If you can get ~30% of the population to vaccinate (especially the more vulnerable groups, who will have more incentive to do so), things will already get much better. We won't be at the herd immunity threshold but I think all but the riskiest things could go back to normal.

This seems to be a common sentiment among developers today but honestly bloat doesn't bother me too much. I do want good performance from my websites, but with fast internet connections, who cares if it is 1KB or 1MB?

Also, if you can develop a website for half the cost with twice the size, isn't that the right thing to do? Developer time is the expensive resource, and bandwidth is cheap.

I imagine one of these milk-substitute brands will become something like the next Coke: a recognized and widely available brand across the world. Personally I hope it's Oatly, I really liked both their oat milk and their oat yogurt.

You should never, ever, install a MacOS update the moment it comes out. There is a high chance (> 30% from my experience) that something will be wrong with it. iOS too for that matter.

Wait for at least one week and check out other people's experiences first.

I've worked with an O(100k) line code base in Python that was pure torture. Honestly, I was so desperate for static-typing by the end that I would have preferred if it was all written in C++.

Large codebases are really hard reason about without types. I'm glad we now have projects like Pyre that are trying to bring typing to Python.

Pretty amazing collection, thanks for sharing. Ant Works 1 was my favorite.

I use a pomodoro timer, and try to hit a minimum of 10 pomodoros of focused work each day. Prevents the whole day from passing by and me realizing all I've done is reply to emails and have idle chat all day.