Benefits of Covid-19

[Xist]

If only there were a place where you were invited to discuss coronavirus and climate change...

[RedDevil]

We could discuss anything as long as it is civil.
I had to block people because they did not stop insulting people with a different opinion than their own.
We should cherish rather than fight our differences.

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

By Voltaire. Or maybe not.

I feel incessant insulting, direct or implied, compromises other people's right of speech by poisoning the channel used to a level where it becomes deeply unpleasant to read.
I will endure some of that, but would like to see moderation where it becomes repetitive. No need to destroy Carthage over and over again.

[oil pan 4]

Of course theirs benefit. The communist chinese seemed to think they would benefit more from letting it out than trying to contain it.
After all disaster and opportunity is the same charter. I would say that's a very morbid outlook when your government is a totalitarian repressive regime.

They kept destroying Carthage because it was fun, then it kept getting easier.

[redpoint5]

We scored a 4-pack of single ply TP at Target the other day, so we've bought another month.

[oil pan 4]

The toilet paper isles at both Walmart here are fully stocked.

[Fat Charlie]

Originally Posted by redneck

Benefit...???

Subsidized is cheaper to operate...???

The solar plant keeps generating power even if you walk away from it, and the coal plant doesn't.

You don't have to buy sunlight and pay someone to shovel it into the boilers to generate solar power, so yeah, once the plant is installed, it's cheaper day to day than coal.

[redpoint5]

Not having to shovel sunshine into it is the problem. When you need more power, you can't just have someone toss another shovel full of photons in.

[freebeard]

I got a four-pack of something that's so generic it's quilted. I really prefer bamboo toilet paper. Don't know if I'll ever see it again.

Originally Posted by Xist

If only there were a place where you were invited to discuss coronavirus and climate change...

If only there were a place where you were invited to discuss MAON (Mixed Aromatic Aliphatic Organic Nanoparticles). And carbon nano-buds (https://wikivisually.com/wiki/Carbon_nanobud

Not getting the part about Carthage, was it like the Library at Alexandria?

[Fat Charlie]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

Not having to shovel sunshine into it is the problem. When you need more power, you can't just have someone toss another shovel full of photons in.

I thought they preferred gas turbines for surge capacity.

[freebeard]

How is this a benefit? Hmmm...

More people will learn about code review. And GitHub.

https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-re...rgusons-model/

This is MacOS Summarize Text set to about 10% Sentences:

In issue 116 a UK “red team” at Edinburgh University reports that they tried to use a mode that stores data tables in a more efficient format for faster loading, and discovered – to their surprise – that the resulting predictions varied by around 80,000 deaths after 80 days:


...The explanation given is “It looks like historically the second pair of seeds had been used at this point, to make the runs identical regardless of how the network was made, but that this had been changed when seed-resetting was implemented”.

...Reports of random results are dismissed with responses like “that’s not a problem, just run it a lot of times and take the average”, but at the same time, they’re fixing such bugs when they find them. They know their code can’t withstand scrutiny, so they hid it until professionals had a chance to fix it, but the damage from over a decade of amateur hobby programming is so extensive that even Microsoft were unable to make it run right.


...Beyond the apparently unsalvageable nature of this specific codebase, testing model predictions faces a fundamental problem, in that the authors don’t know what the “correct” answer is until long after the fact, and by then the code has changed again anyway, thus changing the set of bugs in it.

...and set to parapagraphs*:

But Edinburgh came back and reported that – even in single-threaded mode – they still see the problem. So Imperial’s understanding of the issue is wrong. Finally, Imperial admit there’s a bug by referencing a code change they’ve made that fixes it. The explanation given is “It looks like historically the second pair of seeds had been used at this point, to make the runs identical regardless of how the network was made, but that this had been changed when seed-resetting was implemented”. In other words, in the process of changing the model they made it non-replicable and never noticed.


The Imperial code doesn’t seem to have working regression tests. They tried, but the extent of the random behaviour in their code left them defeated. On 4th April they said: “However, we haven’t had the time to work out a scalable and maintainable way of running the regression test in a way that allows a small amount of variation, but doesn’t let the figures drift over time.”


This bit of code highlights an issue Caswell Bligh has discussed in your site’s comments: R0 isn’t a real characteristic of the virus. R0 is both an input to and an output of these models, and is routinely adjusted for different environments and situations. Models that consume their own outputs as inputs is problem well known to the private sector – it can lead to rapid divergence and incorrect prediction. There’s a discussion of this problem in section 2.2 of the Google paper, “Machine learning: the high interest credit card of technical debt“.


Continuing development. Despite being aware of the severe problems in their code that they “haven’t had time” to fix, the Imperial team continue to add new features; for instance, the model attempts to simulate the impact of digital contact tracing apps.


My identity. Sue Denim isn’t a real person (read it out). I’ve chosen to remain anonymous partly because of the intense fighting that surrounds lockdown, but there’s also a deeper reason. This situation has come about due to rampant credentialism and I’m tired of it. As the widespread dismay by programmers demonstrates, if anyone in SAGE or the Government had shown the code to a working software engineer they happened to know, alarm bells would have been rung immediately. Instead, the Government is dominated by academics who apparently felt unable to question anything done by a fellow professor. Meanwhile, average citizens like myself are told we should never question “expertise”. Although I’ve proven my Google employment to Toby, this mentality is damaging and needs to end: please, evaluate the claims I’ve made for yourself, or ask a programmer you know and trust to evaluate them for you

*This is a typo, but I willingly and knowingly made it worse.