catears's comments

"no-lockdown" is unfortunately "technically true but far from the truth". I consider poor journalistic reporting a major contributor to this...

I can't remember the exact date, but I think in march or april 2020 there were restrictions put in place by government to limit the number of people that could attend a public event. Organizers and event-goers would commit a crime if they attended an event with more than 50 people.

Sure infected people did not get literally locked into their own homes, but "lockdown" is clearly more of a scale where some governments effectively locked the doors to everyones homes and some told everyone to stay home.

I recently spent a full day trying to debug wifi on my dual-boot desktop with "newish" hardware. The wifi would occasionally drop 100% of packets, for between 5 seconds and 10 minutes, and then go back to normal. I tried installing different drivers and following some askubuntu forum posts, but nothing seemed to work.

I'm not an expert on hardware stuff so I haven't got the knowledge to dig deep and find what caused it. But on Windows this stuff "just works". My impression is that Windows has "solved" wifi.

In the end I just bit the bullet and connected the ethernet cable...

There are a whole slew of "advanced AI programs" out there that tells managers who to fire and who to keep, tells judges if someone should go to jail or not, etc.

There are a lot of systems out there where peoples lives are changed forever "because the machine said so".

I'd argue that since machine learning learns only from it's data (produced by it's human creator), it becomes a great tool for baking in unconcious biases in a completely opaque system and amplifying those biases.

Much easier to tell if a human seems to be biased than if the dataset fed to an AI algorithm is biased.

I really love this kind of thinking. This isn't the first time I have happen upon it, but I really like the idea that the work I do for a company is an exchange in which both the company and I get something out of it.

Certainly when I got my first job I felt like I was there to take a job, not seeing if the company was a good fit.

So I don't work as a security professional but what I remember from IT-sec class in uni is that in order to craft an exploit you need to be vulnerable and the vulnerability needs to be exploitable.

If I put a database with default credentials on the internet, there is both a vulnerability and it is exploitable. Bad. If I run a database with default credentials on my dev machine, it is vulnerable, but not exploitable. Perfectly fine.

For real security work you also need to think about impact. Hacker dropping production database = we all lose our jobs. Co-worker connecting to my computer and dropping database as a joke = no real harm done.

So three things to think about: - Vulnerability - Exploitability - Impact

What I really don't like about npm audit is how it presents itself as "security tool" and how vulnerabilities are presented. "6 critical, 10 high vulnerabilities" with a red color screams "fix me now!!!". This is not fair to users because npm has no idea of either the exploitability or the impact of the vulnerability.

Why present users with a prompt "please fix me now!!" and not even mention that exploitability and impact need to be measured first? Seems like they forgot that prompt...

Couldn't agree more. The article doesn't even mention sentiments like "I think the government is a moneywaster so I don't want higher taxes". Instead, the group that want small government is grouped under "not rich, but think they can get rich", which is a complete misrepresentation of their opinion.

This is why we underline our argumentation with sourceable facts!

This is something I have thought about before when it comes to Docker. "It's just a fancy chroot" is what people often say.

While there is some truth to that statement, the real "innovation" is getting millions of people to share and collaborate using the framework. How do make it easy to share and collaborate? Making the technology as frictionless as possible.

I don't see Dockers rise to prominence as a result of some spectacular technical innovation. It's a group of technologies which already existed but now with a great UX around it.

The article says the following:

"The Global Burden of Disease study looked at levels of alcohol use and its health effects in 195 countries, including the UK', between 1990 and 2016."

I don't know of a global mindset when it comes to drinking alcohol/wine that ranged between 1990 and 2016?

I think there is some truth to this. Obviously too complicated subject for me to understand everything, but I wanted to add my own experience.

One of the most motivating things I did to get a well-paying job and work hard to earn it was by having a deadend job as a kid. There is nothing that has motivated me to study hard as much as the realization that some people will be stuck stacking boxes their entire life.

Motivation makes a big difference, but obviously those who always think about how to make rent and still have food on the table don't always have the opportunity to live a better life...

I started programming at gymnasium and through uni. Throughout uni I did a lot of Competitive Programming. Most programs in CP are written and discarded within hours of each other. You also pretty much only use the standard library and no third-party tools. You never interact with the hardware of the system that the program runs on. Maybe reading files from the filesystem (depending on judge software) but definitely no networking. No threading or parallelism. No CI/CD. No Docker, K8s. No build systems. No project management & other "soft knowledge". No "Does it work on IE8?"-stuff.

Essentially you become an expert in writing 100-200 lines of code that reads data from standard input and prints data to standard output. Useful for CP, not so much in the real world. After doing CP as a hobby for a few years at uni I realized this and instantly looked to my peers. What were they doing? One guy was building something similar to IFTTT in golang. Another one was building his own window manager for Linux. Some were really good with constructing websites. But what except solve toy computer science questions could I do?

I don't come with any specific advice, but the way you described being down in the dumps felt very similar to my experience. I think that kind of experience is quite common and normal... Maybe more people have had such a moment than not? I hope you manage to find a way were you get to do what you love.

I think the argument goes something like this: if the state lends money to allow more people to educate themselves, then in the future those people will be earning more money and then be paying higher taxes. Therefore the interest on the loan does not need to pay it of, the increased income to the state from taxes need to pay of the loans.

I don't know about other countries but here in Sweden we have Lantmäteriet ("The land measurement agency") and they have an interactive map based on their data that is free to use. https://minkarta.lantmateriet.se/

The two main ways to get into university in Sweden is through your grades or through a national test (Högskoleprovet ~ The university test). From your grades you calculate a score and then people are accepted into programmes at uni based on that score.

The grading has seen a lot of debate over the last 10 years or so from when it changed (IG/G/VG/MVG --> A-F scale). The way things were graded in the old system had national guidelines, but I think teachers were supposed to take a holistic view on the students performance. Essentially, teachers gave an overall grade. With the new system there were two things that were rather unintuitive. MVG was the highest grade in the previous system, but this does not translate well to an A. Under the previous systems a few programmes required MVG in every subject to compete with other students. So as far as I know the new system required a grade "above" MVG. So that is one thing that makes it different. But also, the new grading system should grade you high if you scored high in ALL criteria for that subject. You were only supposed to be able get one grade higher than your lowest criteria. Of course, a lot of teachers thought "Well IG should translate to F, G should be E-D, MVG should be A. And then I'll just grade like in the previous system.". I think this line of thinking has created a lot of joy grades and unfortunately locked a lot of hard working kids out of their fair spot at uni while letting less hard-working people in.

I know some people who barely got into uni from their grades but turned out to be some of the best performers among their peers because they got fair grades while others got joy grades.

I can't remember which TV-series I saw it in, some kind of murder or "who dun' it?" show. But I remember that they had a pretty genuine and true role for a mathematician in that episode.

The mathematician was tasked with calculating the areas of manhattan that would be hit during stormy weather and give a rough estimation of the required drainage for the water to seep away.

That's the rough details, can't remember exactly. However, it always struck me as a job where the "mathematician as a job" fit really well.

I work in the med-tech industry and Jira is a very good fit for that industry. Most compliance issues are solved by defining a way of working that uses a project management system like Jira. Someone else read how to label a product with CE-label and HIIPA, and all I have to do is report my work in Jira. Don't have to understand CE-labeling or HIIPA.

For compliance it must be possible to find who made a change, why they made that change, and how they validated and tested that change. In a heavily regulated industry like medical, it is very useful to have a tool like Jira when the audit comes up.

I still accept your point tough, if you need to go fast and break things (you know, innovate and prototype things), jira is a real blocker and the "jira mentality" slows things down, for better or worse.

I don't think that lockdown is an instant recipe for covid handling success. There are many countries that "performed poorly" despite going into lockdown.

Also, I think you are missing the point. The swedish strategy was based on people following the recommendations over a long period of time. Locking down is not a sustainable strategy, especially when you believe that the pandemic might last for several years.

Reading the article I understood it like this.

~10 million residents from Wuhan (almost same size as Swedish population) got screened for covid. In ~30k people who recovered from covid, 107 tested positive for covid a second time. Roughly ~1000 people were in contact with asymptomatic carriers, but none (as in 0) tested positive for covid.

I know these countries are often compared. My point is that it is not a very good comparison to make in all cases. And mind you, the original claim was that a comparison between Sweden, UK, Spain etc. was not valid "because you should compare Sweden to Denmark and Norway". Where should you draw this imaginary line of which countries can and cannot be compared? Sure Saudi Arabia and Sweden are pretty hard to compare, but why not include the baltic states? Germany? US?

It's also very strange to me when people compare the nordic countries they forget that there are real differences between them. The difference in immigration policy is one plausible factor for a different response to Covid. I'm not claiming that the high death toll is caused by immigrants, I'm claiming that the lenient Swedish immigration policy adversly affected the death toll, compared to a more strict one like Denmarks. Is that a straw man argument because it doesn't fit a specific version of reality?

I did some simple google searching as well, and while it seems possible to transmit the virus without symptoms it also seems that a small minority of cases are transmitted by asymptomatic carriers. The numbers I find are ~20%. Sure, that isn't negligible, but I can understand why experts would base a strategy on those with symptoms.

To me, this sounds like Tegnell (who is an expert and has studied viruses and pandemics) knows what he's talking about. If you've ever seen an interview with him it becomes quite apparent that he's got a real scientidic mindset.