morepedantic

Edit: name checks out.

>It makes the pandemic deterministic

I don't understand why determinism comforts you, but you do you. Unfortunately, a lab leak is totally stochastic, and I hope this revelation doesn't keep you up at night.

>It's a popular topic ... because it moves the pandemic back into ... policy, etc. It becomes a human problem with human solutions.

Zoonosis is a wet market hypothesis, not a random encounter. China failed, and continues to fail, to ban or regulate the wet markets to solve the problem. Zoonosis is clearly policy and human problem.

>It appeals to the contrarian mindset.

The lab leak appeals to anyone who groks statistics. Wet market zoonosis could happen at any one of 40,000 Chinese wet markets. But a lab leak could only happen at one of ~2 Chinese laboratories. Zoonosis happens more overall, but lab leaks are more probable in the direct vicinity of the lab specializing in collecting and studying samples of this exact family of viruses.

>finding the source of spillover events is the work of decades

The reservoirs for both SARS and MERS were found quickly with much less interest. The probability of the lab leak increases every day that we don't the reservoir. Worse, at this point even finding a reservoir isn't definitive, because we would need to establish that the reservoir predates the pandemic, and that it didn't spillover into the animal population from humans.

Given all publicly available information, the lab leak is far more likely. The uncertainty is very high, because China destroyed or concealed the data. Unless someone's memoirs leak it in 50 years, it's unlikely that we'll ever know.

The risks don't change. Our risk assessment accuracy changes.

>Just think about it

This always proceeds a cogent point.

>what's the difference between negligence and malice?

Wrong, these are both theories of Chinese negligence. Did you mean the difference in culpability for positive and negative action? The lab leak is negative action by the Chinese government, and positive action by some subset of the Chinese citizenry. Zoonosis is positive action by the Chinese government. China (government U citizenry) are 100% culpable either way.

Malice only appears in fringe theories about intentional release, which isn't a lab leak by definition.

Anything fast in Python needs to be written in another language, and if your day job isn't multiplying matrices, then you're probably SoL.

Assume the author knows about BLAS, and that the point is to benchmark the language not the FFI. Most people don't actually spend their time bashing vectors together.

Because humans read and write the uncompressed code. Gzip will hide problems like copy paste.

Kolmogorov complexity is absolutely the wrong metric. It doesn't account for big-O, timing, and many other production requirements.

You'll never have a perfect metric here, but human readable size of code base is well justified. Do you write minified javascript?

IMO, uncompressed bytes is a better representation, because it can be used to compare relative expressive power for the particular problem. I'd bet Python cleans house here, but the write-only languages are a wild card.

It demonstrates that Python needs libraries like NumPy. Few problems are more heavily optimized than matrix multiplication in practice, so comparing matrix multiplication benchmarks across languages with NumPy is not representative of real-world performance for most programming use cases.

It also means that adding performance to an existing Python program requires dropping into a different language, which is not only complicated, but also requires engineers capable in both Python and C (or similar).