I disagree. He sounds like an excellent, intelligent, potentially attractive employee.
People who signal that MS is sh*t are always worthwhile to listen to. They have character and principles, and they know bad and good software when they see it.
Needless to say, in my company all microsoft products are banned and I would never hire microsoft fanboys.
A few simple measures to reduce chance of death will be accepted by most people.
Of course if you ask them to eat properly and exercise to reduce a larger chance of death, that's a problem, but filling in an address when buying a sim card takes way less time than exercise
> As for corona, it's more or less common knowledge by now that unless you're 60+ a common cold is more dangerous.
That's a lie. The reality is that Covid-19 is massively more fatal than the ordinary flu [1]:
> We take the comparison between Covid-19 and flu seriously by asking how many years of influenza and pneumonia deaths are needed for cumulative deaths to those two causes to equal the cumulative toll of the Covid-19 pandemic between March 2020 and February 2023—that is, three years of pandemic deaths. We find that in one state alone—Hawaii—three years of Covid-19 mortality is equivalent to influenza and pneumonia mortality in the three years preceding the Covid-19 pandemic. For all other states, at least nine years of flu and pneumonia are needed to match Covid-19; for the United States as a whole, seventeen years are needed; and for four states, more than 21 years (the maximum observable) are needed.
The reduction in CFR since 2022-ish can mostly be attributed to vaccines [2], but unfortunately it turns out that said vaccine protection only lasts for about 6 months - that is why we are seeing COVID "summer waves" [3] which hasn't been a thing for influenza... people get vaccinated in autumn and winter, which lessens the impact of Covid during the winter time, but once that partial immunity expires cases go up again.
The first one is sufficient to counter the completely unsubstantiated claim of the common cold/influenza being more dangerous than Covid, but I do agree that handing out exact numbers would have been better.
It isn't remotely sufficient. It cherry picks the first few years of COVID. Of course more people died because it's a novel virus. If you somehow genetically engineered an exact clone of the flu virus in every way except with it was completely novel to the immune system and released it, of course way more people would die of it in the first year.
Yeah, the common cold statement is just wrong. Also COVID is actually more deadly than the flu by about 3x from what I have read when it adjusts for all the relevant factors. The problem I have with the whole thing is that the media and government whipped everyone up into a panic over it. If you said to people, "there's a virus 3x as bad as the flu, what should we do?" I thik very few would say "lockdown everything non-essential."
So? Few people think things through systematically. Most countries would have desperately struggled to accommodate the increased demand on ICUs and skilled staff care. In fact, despite lockdowns and the provision of Nightingale facilities in the UK, the NHS was often overwhelmed as infections periodically peaked. We're still suffering the ongoing effects of urgent care that could not be provided in a timely fashion as resources got diverted due to Covid. See e.g. https://www.bmj.com/content/385/bmj-2023-075613
I shudder to think what would happen if we hadn't locked down.
Same here. On the other hand I think it is just how some people are. I do not appreciate art, and can live happily without music. Art in general, never gives me any profound experiences. Books on the other hand, now we're talking! Political performance art, also entertaining.
Idk if you ever shared this view with art people. It must have been hard because there is a sort of obligatory necessity that people MUST like art embedded into their worldview.
But also, there is a basic universality of art, and I wonder where it comes from, and what would make some people into it, and others, like you, not into it.
"may be aborted if a file contains content that appears to be binary, Unicode text, or text with CR/LF line endings unless the interactive user chooses to proceed. If there is no interactive user or these warnings should be skipped for some other reason, the --no-warnings option may be used."
I use fossil and checking in binaries works beautifully. You _do_ get a warning, but as seen in the documentation, you can use --no-warnings if you don't want that.
Note however, that you can't use diff on binaries, and since the entire history of the repository and the versions is shipped to all developers, storing large binaries quickly becomes cumbersome. I would in that case, store links to binaries, which themselves are stored in an archive, or switch to another scm program.
At least in politics, I'd argue that it is not shamelessness. It is a reaction to the fact that our political nobility have sunk so low in terms of achievement and results, that they made a mockery of democracy.
As a reaction, the public makes a mockery of them. As a bonus, getting a politicians that speaks his mind in the common way, is an added spice! Seeing the revulsion in the faces of the political nobility when Trump opens his mouth, gives many satisfaction.
So in politics, this is a sign of health. It is a kind of catharsis. Trump was one of the first in the modern era, and he'll get copy cats, and the strategy will then start to lose its efficiency, but, it will have recalibrated politics away from the previous state where it was a toy for the nobility and commoners were not welcome.
This is also something they fear. That commoners, not part of the nobility, might gain entrance to their domain.
True. The ambitious brains flee europe, the docile remain and love it. That is why the quality of life in europe is steadily going down, and taxes steadily increasing.
In the end, europe will be a historical museum with a tourist economy and nothing else. All industry will have moved to the US and asia.
It's sad, but, it is also a valuable lesson for other regions on how not to destryo themselves!
Why would I? It is boring and adds no value. Much better to work instead. If I need something, I ask. If people need something from me, they ask. I think the biggest increas in productivity for me was when we banned chatting and moved all communication to email. The amount of distractions was reduced significantly!
This is the truth! Added to the purely mechanical process, is an enormous psychological aspect. But... we can do even better! The above _assumes_ that fist fighting is indeed what we want to do, but perhaps the best (TM) solution is to avoid the fist fight alltogether?
Since ultimately, living, and living well, is about values, how do I choose to live, according to which values, science will never be able to capture that dimension.
I feel that scientists and technologists, and designers for that matter, should study more philosophy. It will open up their eyes to the fact that not every question is solvable by science.
Technologists in particular, taken as a group, have a very specific philosophical outlook that they don't tend to interrogate in themselves because it's so pervasive and intrinsic to what they work on and how they do so. Fish unaware of water, so to speak. It's a set of assumptions that make sense when you're programming software, but break down when applied to other things in the real world.
The tend to assume the universe is deterministic.
They tend to assume (incorrectly) that because it's deterministic a good enough model will be able to predict or explain.
They tend to ignore or not even be aware of the inherent bias towards available and measurable data, or that what we can measure must capture the essential dimensions of it.
The most naive tend to assume that given enough data, a model will get better, that the noise will "average out" (it doesn't).
I don't have a good name for this, but it has all the trappings of a good -ism otherwise.
Beyond philosophy, they should study art, music, literature, and whatever else interests. They should spend time with others who do and not only with people who work in technology. Unfortunately, increasingly college CS programs have cut out general education requirements in favor of questionably useful skills training, leaving graduates in a state where this seems daunting.
Computer scientists are building the world we all have to live in. Is it so much to ask that they be educated in the humanities before they're turned loose to do so?
I mean, I think that the universe is close enough to deterministic at a macro scale, but even in a deterministic world you can still get smashed in the head by a falling brick with zero warning. Whether the the sequence of events that led to the brick falling down is deterministic or random is irrelevant to your ability to predict its descent. You only have a feeble human brain, a soft pink organ that's incapable of fitting more than 5 to 7 items in its working memory even before the collision.
