Lukman's comments

In my experience Claude 3.7 is far superior for coding than Gemini 2.5. I tried it in Cursor and I wanted it to work, as a recent ex-Googler. I repeatedly found it inferior. I think it’s still behind Claud 3.5 for coding.

It would decide arbitrarily not to finish tasks and suggest that I do them. It made simple errors and failed to catch them.

>In the general population overall, Covid is undeniably more deadly than the flu, but only about 3-5x (and I think 3x personally right now).

I don't see how you get close to 3X more deadly than the flu. If 14% of New York state residents have been infected, 20M population, 15000 deaths + another 3000 that are infected now and will die (this disease takes a long time to kill people) you get an IFR of 0.64. If the IFR for flu is 0.05, that makes covid 12X more deadly than the flu.

Lots of people reporting an IFR of 0.5 based on the NY serological data; that is "right censoring" the deaths. It's got to be a bit higher than that. Either way you have covid with 10X the infection fatality rate of the flu. If worst flu years have IFR of 0.1 then covid is still 5X worse than the worse flu seasons. And as contagious as the worst flu seasons too.

So twice as contagious as the flu, 10X deadly. Much more likely to put you in the hospital, and thus overwhelm the hospital system, causing many ancillary deaths. This NYTimes article sums it up: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/well/live/coronavirus-doc...

At the peak in NY, hospitals stopped seeing heart attacks and strokes, because those people were too afraid to go to the hospital. Many of those people died at home, as supported by the overall death rates in NY.

The narrative put out there by those that look at the recent serology results and say "this proves that this disease was really just a bad flu all along; we can reopen the economy without fear" is just not supported by the data. An IFR of 0.64 and hospitalization rate of double that, like 1.2%, for a disease this contagious, shuts down the economy until we get a vaccine or effective treatment or a Korea-like testing/tracing regime in place.

And one more thing: the Great Depression was great for public health. https://www.pnas.org/content/106/41/17290

Yes suicides go up. But this is more than compensated for by other benefits. Overall, people may well be much healthier in a depressed economy. We will certainly see a decline in car accidents.

This is a wrong and dangerous message and it needs to be stopped. Both things are true: a) health workers need masks and b) people should wear masks when they go out.

There are no masks available to the public now. Realistically if you don't already have a mask your only option is to make one, which is not hard. Go to YouTube and find a video. A couple layers of cotton can work and is much better than nothing, at stopping your droplets from spreading if you sneeze or cough.

If you already have a mask wear it when you go out. No health care worker wants your mask. Wear goggles too.

And yes masks help prevent respiratory infection which is why health care workers wear them.

Stop with the "you shouldn't be wearing one" nonsense. It is false and dangerous.

Oh, sorry, just saw explanation below. In the US these studies equate 1 unit = 1 glass of wine or 1 beer, I could swear.

14 units per week is two drinks a day.

http://www.tynker.com. My daughter started with Scratch Jr. When she turned 9, we got her a chromebook for her birthday, and I read about this site in a WSJ article. She took to it right away. Kids can progress through extensive programming-puzzle tutorials and make their own projects, using a "block" language, python, or Javascript. They can switch between the three supported languages within projects. She is still most comfortable with the block style, given that it abstracts away free-form syntax, but has started working through the python tutorials. A year later she has made dozens of her own projects (mainly simple games) of increasing complexity, which can be published and shared with other kids. She now understands relatively complex concepts like generating random behavior, method calls, variables and even physics engines. Highly recommended.

Revealing quote from Baez in this article: "I’m ... eager to dig deeper into open reaction networks. They’re a small but nontrivial step toward my dream of a mathematics of living systems. My working hypothesis is that living systems seem ‘messy’ to physicists because they operate at a higher level of abstraction. That’s what I’m trying to explore."

Worth reading for this sentence (p.5): "The core obstacle to an integration of gravity in the context of quantum field theory is the occurrence of untreatable infinities in calculations of particle interactions due to the possibility of point particles coming arbitrarily close to each other." First time I've heard the problem of integrating gravity with QFT explained that way.

The ActiveGS Chrome extension required to run the games on this site is broken, and the code hasn't been updated in two years:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/activegs/nhndampaj...

Yeah, doesn't bother me. Never bothered by the sound of my own eating.

That sound is not the only one that triggers my response, but I chose it because of this argument: I don't think anyone would argue that there is something culturally wrong (at least in western culture) with eating apples around other people. And there isn't really a way to eat a whole apple without making a sound that makes me irrationally furious.

The attitude you express towards Misophonia is one of the reasons why having this disorder is such a burden. It has nothing to do with table manners. There is nothing rational, or for that matter culturally relevant, about the emotional reaction I have to someone eating an apple next to me. The visceral, angry emotional response I feel to that sound has nothing to do with culture.

Same here. I think this is evidence of genetic factors - i.e. my dad has a mild case and it manifested in him being very emphatic about training us not to make sounds while eating.

Turns out Murray finally called the reporter a few hours after this article was published:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/w...