mcbits

Gowns and face shields (and gloves) are extra layers of defense, but the masks provide almost all of the benefit. People aren't getting infected in substantial numbers through their eyes or ears or skin, although we couldn't be sure of that at first.

China doesn't have widespread free (K)N95 mask use either. There's not enough production even in China. Yet they're still faring better than the US so far.

Adjusting for population, the US peaked at the equivalent of 15,000/day after vaccination was underway and most places got rid of mask mandates, followed by a peak at the equivalent of 8,500/day after more than half the population was vaccinated, and another one around 12,000/day with 2/3 to 3/4 of the population being partially to fully vaccinated. Now it's been steadily the equivalent of 1,200 to 2,000/day going on 9 months even though almost everyone should have plenty of immunity from both vaccination and repeated exposure. The numbers are lower than they would be without vaccination, but this isn't sustainable. We know what does work.

> The lab was located in Wuhan strategically because it's a very central transit hub but also very close to the bat caves where thousands of coronavirus varieties are believed to emerge from.

This alone is enough to explain a lab leak if they were sampling a lot of bats to look for viruses and someone was careless. Unless there's a genetic smoking gun or someone admits it, I think it's a big leap to assume gain-of-function research is to blame. But in the off chance it does turn out to be a result of such research, we should probably take another look at the original SARS and MERS and any other related outbreaks.

Not all the time and only for a few months. It would have worked in 2020 if people had access to real PPE (not bandanas and chin straps). And if we didn't have large employers like Publix and the NY Dept of Corrections prohibiting their employees from wearing the PPE that they already had. Many lessons are available to be learned by those willing.

Even with almost everyone vaccinated and/or repeatedly exposed to the virus to refresh their immunity, the virus killed over 70,000 in the US in that last 6 months and over 250,000 in the last year.

In the first months of the pandemic, healthcare workers spent 14-hour shifts surrounded by deathly ill patients and still only rarely caught it themselves thanks to their PPE, in particular the masks that were invented for this very purpose.

It's obvious what could actually eradicate this virus that has multiplied the flu (which was already an annual crisis) ten-fold. Maybe next time a rapidly developed and deployed vaccine will do it, but not this time.

N95 masks were going for upwards of $50 during the shortage, but even at a nominal $1 apiece (and not including emergency capital investment to increase production), it would have cost $182.50 to $365 per person for 1-2 masks a day for 6 months.

Moderna was given $1 billion for the vaccine development, or about $3 per person, and then $1.5 billion for 100 million doses, or $15 per dose, totaling about $48 for 3 doses at that rate.

You can dig into the other rounds of funding if you're still skeptical, but clearly the vaccines were much cheaper than 6 months of the type of masks that, unlike the vaccines, are actually effective at preventing transmission of the virus.

The vaccines, while "better than nothing" and much cheaper than giving everyone a 6-month supply of N95 masks, were mostly a flop. We have a long way to go before we can just print up vaccines to head off emerging epidemics, but hopefully the lessons learned through this failure will lead to faster progress.

I haven't described anything that can't already be done (well, reading a license plate in an eyeball was mostly an exaggeration). It just can't be done affordably in real time on a home computer. And it's just the first few out of many examples to come to mind.

I think people fall into the trap of conflating "this is what I do with my computer" with "this is what my computer is for." Obviously if computers are only for doing the things you can already do with them, then they won't benefit much from improvements.

Hmm, I'm going by memory but I distinctly remember reading they were recalled and that Dell among others were issuing replacements for their systems with the faulty chips. Perhaps it's true that it wasn't officially recalled.

Also your link mentions Lenovo did briefly offer repairs in 2010-2011, so I guess I could have taken part, but that was about 2 years after I ejected the company from my world.

My ThinkPad T61p suffered a different problem: It was bricked 1 month out of warranty due to the GPU, which was recalled by Nvidia but Lenovo refused to honor the recall. Instead they wanted to sell me an $800 replacement board with the same faulty GPU. There was a long thread on their support forums with hundreds of people complaining about the same thing. It has since disappeared. I've never given Lenovo another dollar.

This is more GPU than CPU, but I want to infer 3D models from my security cameras in real time so I can do some CSI "turn left and look behind it" shit. And use the overlapping textures for superresolution so I can shout "enhance!" and read the license plate reflected in the perp's eyeball.

As for reading e-mails and so on, yeah, we've pretty much reached peak e-mail.

Then I should be subject to increased oversight and scrutiny in case I start taking kickbacks to make up the difference or botch jobs out of spite.

If you pay me to work on a project, you can burn it for all I care as long as the check clears.

The birds around here don't stick around long enough to let me earn their trust, but I can get pretty close to the deer, rabbits, and squirrels just by pointing the camera off to my side so I'm standing perpendicular and appear to be focused on stuff on the ground instead of them.

You don't insulate the house; you insulate your body. If you're at the point of burning clothes to heat the house, heating the house is already a lost cause unless you have a lot of clothes.

I hope that doesn't mean I plug in my car at 80%, hoping to top it off for a long trip, but since everyone else is averaging 60% and there's peak demand, it decides to drain the battery and generously put a dollar in my account.

Assuming this[0] is accurate, it looks like solar irradiance reaching the surface is pretty flat from mid-blue up to red, including green. I would guess either there are other evolutionary reasons for reflecting green, or no reason at all and chlorophyll happened to be the first/easiest substance to evolve for photosynthesis.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#/media/File:Solar_spe...

It's a 1 cent item being sold for 22 cents, probably at least 30 cents with shipping. The 3D printer can't compete with the 1 cent but can compete with the 30 cents and definitely with the $15 if you really only need one clip and the "spare parts I may never use" drawer/closet/room is full.

Speaking of farms, 5 MW is enough to power LED grow lights equivalent to 5-10 acres of sunlight (napkin/google math) that could be packed in small-footprint building with hundreds of layers of hydroponics.

It still wouldn't be economical in the short term due to construction, water, nutrients, etc. But it's something solar can't possibly provide because there's only so much sunlight per acre. Long term, we could stop trying to farm every square inch of arable land on the planet, of which we're already farming about half.

How about Forth as a compilation target for other languages. But you can dig in and define words for common patterns and the higher level code will be compiled down to that custom vocabulary instead.

I suspect the 4th amendment would have been worded somewhat differently if the royal tax collectors in Boston had been clever enough to train tea-sniffing dogs to search cargo for tea smuggling without physically searching inside.

I can't point to specifics, but I do remember a lot of similarly bizarre beliefs on YouTube leading up to 2012, like people trying to prove that the sun is now orbiting north-to-south because we're in the middle of a pole shift. An enormous chunk of that historical record is now lost to all future historians because they said the wrong things when Covid came around.

Something like: This person gets put in my personal ignore filter, which over time will get better at predicting who and what I want ignored. I can always go back and review what's being ignored and make changes. Individuals and their content can be ignored separately, so "I don't like this topic" doesn't ban someone who I like to engage with on other topics.

I'll also tag this person as a flat-earther so my computer will learn to cluster similar content, so I can query "flat-earther" when I want a chuckle.

It has to do with the part that I quoted.

> We don’t have to declare the US as either 100% perfect and free

We can still demand it. And if they only achieve 90%, we don't have to lower our expectations to 90%, or soon enough they'll be achieving 81% and so on.

Looks like the law was passed in 1980 due to the 1970s energy crisis, but it was repealed back in 2008: https://www.twincities.com/2008/01/15/bill-would-allow-for-h...

Reminds me of the misguided pepper spray law that was relaxed a decade ago, but Amazon still won't ship completely legal pepper spray to Wisconsin and a bunch of sites still claim it has draconian regulations.

Physics and chemistry modeling, economic modeling, cryptanalysis, face/posture/gait recognition and behavior prediction, spatial inference and geolocation from video, autonomous drone swarms, war gaming, forest management, code enforcement, space object tracking, training simulations...

This is where video games may be in a few years when governments and cloud services buy 99% of GPUs at volume discounts while miners and scalpers bid up the 1% that make it to retail channels. It will be cheaper to play games at max settings on a cloud desktop's $2000 GPU for a couple hours a day than to buy a $200 GPU from a scalper for $2000.

It would help if "public transportation" wasn't used synonymously with disgusting and dehumanizing "mass transit". I want to sit alone or with my co-travelers in a comfortable, sanitary pod that picks me up where and when I'm ready to leave and brings me just as close (or closer) to my destination as a car would.

I think it's less that the parameters are the wrong way around and more that the file-reading feature in grep is redundant and could be deleted.