ckarmann's comments

ckarmann | 4 years ago | on: Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

I am just speculating, but in many diseases like rabies and chickenpox you can give the vaccine after exposure to help the immune system fight the infection. It's because the period between exposure and symptoms is quite long, often more than a month for rabies for example.

HIV can stay in the body for years before developing AIDS. So you can actually recruit people that have been tested positive recently and have not developed the disease.

ckarmann | 4 years ago | on: Google engineer who criticized company in viral comics on why he finally quit

> They likely were, and think of me what you like but I've noticed the same with most Americans I've known.

I am probably misunderstanding what you say, but Cornet has grown up in France, and is probably very aware that health care cost in the US is not a normal thing since he comes from a country where it is considerably cheaper if not free.

His naiveté was about the nature of Google and how he thought a giant corporation basing their revenue on ads and collecting information could be a positive force in the world and not abuse its power. It seems to me his gripe is about the hypocrisy, which in a sense make it even harder to fix the company: if people denies the company ethics problems, you can be sure they are not going to get better.

Twitter in that sense has never promised to not be evil. You can't be naive about its ethics because you just have to doom-scroll the app for an hour to feel bad about it.

ckarmann | 4 years ago | on: The Awful German Language (1880)

Trying to translate in French, I came up first with "Il eût fallu qu'elle eût été surveillée", but mostly because of morphological similarity (it's almost the same amount of verbs, right?). It's also just a more literary form of the simpler "Il aurait fallu qu'elle soit surveillée".

That being said, I have trouble to parse the original english sentence so I may be missing subtleties.

ckarmann | 5 years ago | on: Against Hickelism

Japan was never a colony, and Vietnam was a french colony for several generations. You are not getting your examples right.

ckarmann | 5 years ago | on: ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville

Obviously the primary intent was not loss of life. But there are multiple possible intents, one being obviously to instill fear: "We didn't kill you this time, but we totally could have". Imagine living in the area now.

Anyway, it's better to wait for more information than to speculate.

ckarmann | 5 years ago | on: CNO neutrinos from the Sun are finally detected

Well, that's the concept of the CrashCourse channel. This video is actually slow-paced compared for example to their World History series.

It's still interesting. After a while you learn to pause the video to let the information sink in.

ckarmann | 5 years ago | on: Shirt Without Stripes

Does Amazon pretends to do AI? They are just offering a platform to do your own Machine Learning. I don't think they ever said their search engine was doing anything smart.

EDIT: scrap that, I didn't mean Alexa, which is doing AI obviously, but the search engine of Amazon's retail website.

Anyway, NLP is hard and everyone sucks at it. Think about it: just building something that could work with any <N1> <preposition> <N2> or any other way to express the same requests would mean understanding the relationships of every possible combinations of N1 and N2. It means building a generalized world model that is quite different from simply applying ML to a narrow use case. Cracking that would more or less mean solving general AI which probably won't happen soon.

ckarmann | 5 years ago | on: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

At least in some European countries where COVID cases has submerged the healthcare system, it is a very bad time to have a stroke or a car accident since the ER rooms are full and a lot of hospital resources are diverted to fight the pandemic. So it increases the mortality of these other situations.

ckarmann | 5 years ago | on: California Covid-19 traffic report finds silver lining

You also have to take into account the uncertainty in your risk evaluation. The fatality rate is largely unknown so it's a bit deceptive to quote numbers like 0.37% as if it could be measure up to the second decimal. The German study probably came with error bars that were larger than that. For the age group 50-59, maybe it's 1.3% according to NY state (for both males and females so if the person you responds to is male, it's higher), but it could very well be 2% (or 0.5%) without it being surprising.

There is also a big assumption in considering the risk to be front-loaded. This is not the flu, but it could very well come back next year or in ten years in a different form. We just don't know yet this virus with enough confidence to do this assumption. Anyway, it is a bit strange that the ability for this virus to mutate next year would impact the risk of dying by going out tomorrow which, I think, the person your responded to was thinking about.

Finally, you're saying the flu deaths this year is double what the coronavirus has done, but again the uncertainty is high: the CDC estimation for the flu is from 24,000 to 62,000 deaths this season [1]. So it could be the double, but it could be actually lower. Let's not do things like chosing the estimate that better suits the argument without saying it's a high end of the estimate.

[1] - https://www.kcrg.com/content/news/Americas-2019-2020-flu-sea...

ckarmann | 6 years ago | on: New bill would ban autoplay videos and endless scrolling

While you watch Netflix, you don't watch a competitor. In a way, this autoplay feature removes a friction for the customer that doesn't have to decide what to watch next. This removes the "danger" that the customer think about that cool show that is not provided by Netflix.

At the end of the month, the customer may think about how much they use a TV provider and not the other, and decide to keep Netflix and ditch any other subscription they may have.

It's true that it burns through Netflix content but they made 1,500 hours of original content in 2018, content that they have to create anyway for other reasons, so a lot of your free time is already covered.

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