It is important to consider the context within which these suggestions were initially put forth. We had a president that claimed to have Coronavirus under control, that it was no worse than the flu and who openly and frequently cast doubt upon the only expert in the room. Perhaps had his behavior been a bit more tempered, he would have been taken more seriously.
I posted an article on HN at the time from a Chinese-born Harvard Public Health PHd who was writing in winter of 2020 he thought it could have come from the lab.
It actually wasn't downvoted too much - plenty of people here found it plausible - but the amount of people saying I was stupid and gullible has really stuck with me.
I was told I had no idea how viruses work (this is true enough - I don't have a degree in biology) but still felt extremely gaslit.
I first heard about the lab leak theory late jan 2020, but I also was considered stupid and gullible too for believing it. Also mocked for wearing a mask from singapore to london in Feb 2020. :/
I like this website. I feel like I learn a lot - mostly on discussions about fields I only have outside knowledge of.
Its not like I was personally offended but had the realization that it is possible for large groups of smart people to convince themselves of something even when it is not true (or at the very least, have no actual data to know if its true)
>I was told I had no idea how viruses work (this is true enough - I don't have a degree in biology) but still felt extremely gaslit.
Similarly, on New Year's Eve 2015 I saw mention of the Cologne mass attacks on women by refugees as they were occurring on, yes, 4chan/pol/, and checked /r/worldnews and /r/europe to find out more. I didn't see anything, and assumed that it was another /pol/ "it's happening" dank maymayism. I only later realized that German media and those subreddits' mods had all worked to suppress news of the attacks until they could no longer be ignored.
Was it confirmed these men were legitimate refugees?
> I only later realized that German media and those subreddits' mods had all worked to suppress news of the attacks until they could no longer be ignored.
It doesn’t really matter who was president. The whole western world has handled Covid poorly. Including the current administration. The issue is no one has learned to not trust ccp. They lied about sars and tried to cover it up, and they lied about Covid from day 1 trying to cover it up.
> We had a president that claimed to have Coronavirus under control, that it was no worse than the flu
Could you remind us who was that person who went to SF’s Chinatown to hug random people and was urging others to “come and visit and enjoy Chinatown” during the first critical months of unknown risk?
That makes the media look worse, not better. Their true inclination is to think one thing but they self censored so they wouldn't be seen as agreeing with the bad orange man?
Perhaps. That does not change the fact that when you bloviate, demean and deflect, as did Trump, you will be disliked and distrusted. Reputation matters when making a claim that--in that moment--could not be supported with real evidence. Was it a plausible theory for the origin of the virus? Sure. But, when that message becomes entangled with a larger xenophobic rhetoric, then it just seems like, well, xenophobia. Again, the context matters.
Oh man, I’ve used Pop exclusively for 2 years now. I run it on a Thinkpad X1 Extreme, and I love it. I switched from using Macs (for the better part of 20 years) after the whole 2018 keyboard debacle. I can’t imagine going back. Only downside is the terrible battery life on the X1 Extreme.
To an extent, you are correct: many countries participate in the cyber-spy/cyber-espionage game. Where, perhaps, you are incorrect is that this is normal. The GRU has lead exceptionally aggressive cyber-attacks on just about everyone, particularly Estonia and Ukraine.
That's already deflection. You brought unrelated things to the discussion.
What would you say about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet? I'd argue that Stuxnet is an example of cyberattack. Hacking email server to spy on it is rather a spying. If they were forging emails etc, that'd be an attack.
This looks really great. It's interesting to see that 99% of the source code is Prolog. I'm curious to know what advantage--real or perceived--did Prolog provide over some other, more mainstream language?
Also, @ggleason, based upon your experience with other languages, would you still use Prolog if you had to do the whole thing over again?
Prolog implementations are very efficient at implementing back-tracking, so if you end up using a lot of back-tracking it definitely makes sense. My first prototype was started in java and it was a nightmare. Secondly, for writing the query compiler, prolog was just such an elegant language.
SWIPL has a large enough and nice enough library that it makes it feel similar to other dynamic languages (python, etc.) in terms of implementing run-of-the-mill glue code.
I'm very fond of prolog as the implementation language for the constraint checking, and especially CLP(fd). I think CLP(fd) is such a killer feature, that once people start using it in their queries, they're going to wonder how they got-on before.
I would like prolog to be a lot more feature-mature for the current age however. It needs a bigger community to help flesh the language out! So many things could be made better - better mode analysis, better type checking and simply more libraries.
Thank you so much for your response. You may have convinced me to have another look at Prolog. I stumbled upon it 15 years ago, but never used it for any real project. I just remember really loving its declarative style.
Or, you could view this as being a developer addressing an inefficiency in a process. I, for one, view that as a positive trait for someone in this profession.
I’m not nuts about standups, Slack or the multitude of distractions dressed up as productivity tools, but I understand their value as a means for helping distributed teams feel some sense of camaraderie, even if that’s not the original intent.
I'm currently typing this response from a ThinkPad X1 Extreme, running Pop_OS.
I've been a faithful MBP user, and before that a faithful PowerBook user. My 2017 MBP was the last straw. While I appreciate Apple extending the warranty on the keyboard, it is entirely impractical for me to continue sending my primary work machine away for 5-7 days for repairs.
I'm curious to know what the key differences are between the modern western diet and the diet of our ancestors. Are you primarily speaking to our consumption of processed foods? Also, what was the diet of our ancestors, and how was this information about our ancestral diet ascertained?
"Are you primarily speaking to our consumption of processed foods?"
Primarily, although massive grain consumption is evolutionarily very recent, so that counts too.
"Also, what was the diet of our ancestors, and how was this information about our ancestral diet ascertained?"
Talk to the archeologists. However it doesn't require much research to determine very few people ate twinkies or drank coffee a thousand years ago. I would not recommend talking to public relations firms, or people collecting a paycheck from the food industry in general.
...and this is why we can't have anything nice. This should give all of our lawmakers, wanting to impose more and more restrictions on how we use the web, more fuel for their cause.
Who needs HBO? Let's create incentives for the writers/directors to disseminate their work via alternative channels. Why the hell should HBO have a strangle-hold on that market?
