This is one of the best, funniest pieces of writing I have read in months - The utter detachment and cynicism displayed around this borderline Hunter S Thompson acid trip is breath of fresh air.
ML researchers would get a lot of interesting ideas from Ed Yong's book: "An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us"
It goes through the extraordinarily diverse sensory systems of all animals. In the push for at-the-edge, exteme-low-latency, low-resource "intelligent" agents, mimicking some of these system may lead to cool systems.
Does anyone have any experience in comparing Carta's comp and equity estimation tool to the reality? The cash seems aligned with what I see in the market but the equity always seems a little low
Is there a comprehensive white-paper anywhere with sample sizes and error bars? Otherwise this seems like an anecdote.
"The sera were collected from subjects 3 weeks after receiving the second dose or one month after receiving the third dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine"
How do we know this study isn't just measuring the effect of that additional week?
Also how many subjects was this sera pulled from? Are the subjects materially similar between the second and third dose groups?
Not exactly surprising the people selling the third dose conclude that it is needed. It's like when the waiter recommends the most expensive option.
I have no idea why you believe a third dose is just marketing. It is plainly obvious that immunity decreases over time, as is the case for all vaccines against flus and similar.
A booster is the normal way to handle it. If there were a way to avoid it, at least one of the many companies working on this would have created it. And one for the regular flu, too, while they are at it, which has not happened in decades.
I didn't say it was just marketing - I was asking for additional data to shed light on how robust (or frail) this result is. I don't think there is enough in this press release.
edit: (maybe you meant to comment on that other comment on this...)
Is every six months (and, keep in mind, "every" is one six month increment so far) really that different from every twelve months, the schedule I've received a flu shot on for some number of years?
My point is that this glowing report is from the same company trying to collude with governments to force the vaccines. It may be "optional" for some people (not at my company if I want to keep my office job!), but they sure are trying hard to change that. And you know that, which makes your statement disingenuous.
Fearmongering? I was literally forced to take it, with my company directly referencing Biden's order for companies > 100 to require it. I'm not sure where you get off calling it a conspiracy.
You're "literally forced" to do tons of things in order to participate in society in any major degree for the sake of public safety and standards of living. I don't know why you people get so obsessed about this effort to avoid spreading transmissible disease and not things like the requirement to not be naked in public, or requiring your vehicle to be considered safe to drive on public roadways.
Don't pretend like the government acting in the name of public safety is somehow completely unique here, and that governments have never made requirements to help prevent needless deaths before.
> Tell me what else I need to be injected with in order to hold a job.
If your employer is the US Military, there's an entire list.
Unless you've been home schooled your entire life, there's plenty of vaccines required to attend K-12, and it doesn't matter if it's public, private, or parochial facilities. One could argue that without schooling the job market would be quite slim.
you were not "literally forced". you were given an option. they didn't hold you down. if you want additional protections you should lobby for those, maybe form a union, but don't lie about being forced to do something.
Your comments are incredibly disingenuous and you're the type of person who would be crying fascism under Trump.
Having a gun to your head is technically a choice too. This is your argument.
Comparing actual violence to losing your job is far more disingenuous than anything I'm doing. My opinions about vaccinations are the same now as they were before Trump was elected.
>> Is there a comprehensive white-paper anywhere with sample sizes and error bars? Otherwise this seems like an anecdote.
It's marketing. When the vaccine effectiveness is waning the solution seems to be more of it
If it only took 2 days to create the vaccine, why do they not have an updated one? Is there another in development that targets more than just the spike protein? Why is the entire defense that vaccine?
> If it only took 2 days to create the vaccine, why do they not have an updated one?
There's a deafening silence every time somebody asks this.
From what I've been able to see, it's because regulatory bodies won't accept an update vaccine without 8 months of testing, and the manufacturers are doing the testing, but at those delays there isn't really any point.
Why regulatory bodies won't accept updated vaccines is the more interesting question.
The regulator is only tasked with approving the manufacturer's end results, I don't think they audit the production facilities or the design process. If the production process were fully transparent and the manufacturer could prove it didn't change anything except for "this one input tweak here", the approval process could likely be further streamlined -- but I don't think the authority of the regulator stretches that far, and manufacturers will likely claim trade secrets on their internal processes.
Besides, I don't expect the anti-vax crowd to be very forgiving about mistakes or unforeseen consequences of an updated vaccine. I'm perfectly happy with the regulator having very strict controls for what gets approved for rapid rollout to the entire population.
FDA absolutely reviews stated design processes and audits against these. See 21CFR211 - The perspective here is that even if we are actually pretty confident that it is just "one little tweak here", a one-letter change could have wide ranging affects when interacting with the human body.
Consider this ^^^ and the fact that it takes additional months just to distribute it. Then add in the fact that the virus has a very high and successful mutation rate and can persist in and out of animal reservoirs. Mass vaccination is mentally unsound but profitable.
Well, when each country does that it becomes economically unfeasible. Such fines work and work very well, once FB realizes that they lose more money from unethical behavior than they make, they'll stop it. I don't believe that any corporation is evil. I do believe that there are temptations to do bad things in order to make money, even if short term. This corrects such behavior. Hopefully.
Please provide any proof they work at all. Facebook has been fined larger amounts previously and continues to receive more fines for violations of user privacy. I would say there is currently very strong proof in the real world against what you’re assuming is true. Until a fine is ~10% of their stock value they won’t even consider it. This might as well be free for Facebook.
Did you study the work of Ralph Nader and the auto industry? Or the history of tobacco industry? There are multiple examples when it worked in the past. I am quite confident that when abuse goes too far, the pushback is even bigger. I just don't want to oversimplify the issue and say that any big corporation or any IT giant is bad by nature. It's growing pains in my book.
Yeah I know all about Nader. What you’re talking about took decades of fines after those companies lobbied endlessly to avoid blame. I think you just supported my argument. Big tobacco companies literally couldn’t be fined enough to make a difference for 60+ years. I’d guess sunshine is more correlated than fines to preventing large corporations from doing awful things. I’m not sure why you’re shilling the opposite.
Even if we assume Facebook's leadership makes perfectly rational decisions, the reasons behind their unyielding behavior could very well be non-financial - saving face, internal office politics, standing ground hoping the push from the regulators will fizzle out, waiting for legal loopholes to be discovered, or simply feeling of "we know better"
It's a clear demonstration to FAANG and others that nine-digit fines are on the table even in Ireland - the country that tech corporations love the most because of tax advantages, the country long criticized for pandering to said corporations instead of fulfilling their data protection obligations.
May be so, but that is not net cash assets. They expected 3 times less.
A better measure would be how long does Facebook need to set aside 225m net in the emea market.
Sure and that happens. Journalists will cherry pick data to tell the story they want. But there is a difference.
If the data is out there someone can dispute the journalists characterization. If Facebook controls all the data and presents the story, there is no way to verify their characterization.
>> Sure and that happens. Journalists will cherry pick data to tell the story they want. But there is a difference. If the data is out there someone can dispute the journalists characterization.
Does it actually happen though? The media controls most of the narrative, including what goes into legislative discussions. The "paper of record" becomes history while everything else goes into a vast firehose of tweets which get washed away by the dominant narrative.
Real recent example. NYTimes June 21, 2021:
"How Big Tech Allows the Racial Wealth Gap to Persist"
So according to the NYTimes, "big tech" allows a racial wealth gap. Consider that this is the only industry where Asians, Indians, and others are actually allowed to consistently and widely climb ranks into senior management.
The ultimate irony is -- this is coming from the NYTimes -- a small group of mostly white, rich, people in Brooklyn and the Upper West Side of Manhattan -- with almost zero diversity at the executive ranks -- is saying this.
Further, there is no discussion about the FAANG exams, hiring committees, etc -- or the fact that the authors hire on no objective measures themselves -- they are mostly hired based on which elite private school they attended.
So what happens? We end up with congressional investigations on big tech monopolies (worth looking into) but ignore obvious monopolies like my mobile phone provider, my healthcare providers, etc -- places that charge a pound of flesh and have no competitors.
> Does it actually happen though? The media controls most of the narrative
You can't be serious.
I can list a litany of topics--the dangers of sugar, smoking, carbon emissions--where corporations, through their vast war chests, lobbying connections, and pliant journalists, have more than successfully controlled the narrative.
Facebook isn't the victim here. Not by a long shot.
The problem that Facebook has compared to those other industries is that journalists blame Facebook for the decline of journalism and view Facebook as a gatekeeper. Those other companies on the other hand are valuable advertisers.
> attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument
but the parent has addressed the argument:
> Consider that this is the only industry where Asians, Indians, and others are actually allowed to consistently and widely climb ranks into senior management.
No one considers NYT a "paper of record" anymore. That may have been the case 8 years ago, but they have gone totally off the rails since, and everyone knows it.
Up to this day I am wondering for most social media sites how much of their daily active users is actually bots. I'd like to find a way to verify that.
> In the fourth quarter of 2020, we estimated that duplicate accounts may have represented approximately 11% of our worldwide MAUs. We believe the percentage of duplicate accounts is meaningfully higher in developing markets such as the Philippines and Vietnam, as compared to more developed markets. In the fourth quarter of 2020, we estimated that false accounts may have represented approximately 5% of our worldwide MAUs. Our estimation of false accounts can vary as a result of episodic spikes in the creation of such accounts, which we have seen originate more frequently in specific countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam. From time to time, we disable certain user accounts, make product changes, or take other actions to reduce the number of duplicate or false accounts among our users, which may also reduce our DAU and MAU estimates in a particular period. We intend to disclose our estimates of the number of duplicate andfalse accounts among our MAUs on an annual basis.
I believe Zignal (which is sort of CrowdTangle for Twitter) provides a variable in their API for "likelihood they are a bot" which is direct from Twitter -- so Twitter often knows the account is a bot, but much less often takes action.
It may be worth considering if you are naive in thinking that Putin doesn’t explicitly fund and direct the execution of cyber attacks against the west as a lever in improving Russia’s own relative standing.
Why do you think he wouldn’t do so?
American sponsors the same cyberattacks on Iranian and North Korean entities.
Define “fund”. I don’t think he directly funds most of those operations simply because there’s no need.
Imagine if Merrick Garland announced that he was using prosecutorial discretion to effectively decriminalize cyber attacks on foreign countries as long as they didn’t affect US interests and the best of its allies. The federal government wouldn’t need to fund the entrepreneurial ambitions of the US talent pool. They’d self-fund and make a mint in the process.
It’s privateering of the modern age. So Putin only “funds” them in the sense that he allows them to operate, providing them implied letters of marque.
