Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media • Hacker News Board

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#411

Post by Erlich_Bachman » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 6:39 AM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #350

solarhoma wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that this statement from Bill is the most interesting. This statement shows Bill Gates, someone who has influence on legislatures, making a statement against encryption.

Everyone has a range of opinions and some of them will be factually/morally/logically/practically objectionable. The fact that Gates has an opinion that you, I or indeed everyone disagrees with is not interesting. What about "It’s insane how confused the trials here in the US have been."? That opinion is very important and has implications for how everyone here should act. The last 6 months have been expensively purc…

> The fact that Gates has an opinion that you, I or indeed everyone disagrees with is not interesting.

Evidently it is interesting to the HN croud, because this is how they vote.

Why argue about this? This is what we have a voting system on HN for. It shows us what is objectively interesting and what is not, we don't really need you or anyone else to tell us what should be interesting, we have real data to demonstrate what is.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#412

Post by sbierwagen » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 6:39 AM UTC

yeswecatan wrote: post #326

dr_ wrote: post #5

He points out that a standard nasal swab test is as accurate as a nasopharyngeal (deep) swab. This is readily available from labcorp, can be done at home, and the results are reasonably quick, within 48 hrs. It’s covered by insurance and includes overnight fedex shipping.

In this article? I didn't see that mentioned. Do _all_ insurances cover this?

The Families First Coronavirus Response Act requires health insurance cover "medically necessary" COVID-19 testing. So you need a doctor's note.

https://www.cms.gov/files/document/FFCRA-Part-43-FAQs.pdf

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#413

Post by Erlich_Bachman » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 6:43 AM UTC

waihtis wrote: post #408

freddie_mercury wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is as much of an echo chamber as any other internet forum. 90% of the time you can predict in advance what the top-voted comment is going to be. Most of the time it will be some pointless quibbling about how the subject line technically isn't correct somehow. The rest of the time it'll be about one of the three or four hobby horses of HN. "I don't use social media", "WFH has no flaws", "whiteboard interviews are w…

Any community will have an echo chamber, that's part of the basic human fabric. It's still a great forum (and you probably think so also.)

Exactly, while it is also an echo chamber, I would argue it is one of the better ones. It selects information to echo in a much more effective and useful way than many other platforms. This is why we are here. Not because we assume that it would be somehow 100% objective place where everything is true. Is that even possible? If you have to select, from the tons of info out there, a list of something that can be parsed by a human in reasonable time, you will automatically filter out, and thus create a subjective view of reality.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#414

Post by jlokier » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 6:44 AM UTC

kshacker wrote: post #307

panda88888 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they can analyze it in the app on user devices before it is encrypted and transmitted. The app on user decide need access to clear text in order to encrypt the message. Same on the receiving end. The app on user device can analyze the message once it is decrypted on user device.

Wow did I not read something similar last couple of days about on-device machine learning being better than in the cloud machine learning and how Apple got that right. That's where this may also be going then if we follow your train of thought.

On device is where you want it if it's going to analyse really private data, or something effectively your own (such as homomorphic encryption, or a link to your own computers elsewhere).

You're likely to feel so much happier, freer and easier sharing your most personal life datastream with an AI assistant, if you can be sure its most intimate analysis is just between the two of you.

It puts me in mind of the two kinds of AI in Manna: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel)

Coincidence or not, the dystopian AIs are somewhere in the cloud and work for someone else, while the utopian AIs are intimately personal to each user and work just for the user.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#415

Post by Erlich_Bachman » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 6:47 AM UTC

usrusr wrote: post #222

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It would be hard for WhatsApp to prevent people from spreading bogus videos, because they have access to the unencrypted information before and after sending." Facebook/WhatsApp claims WhatsApp messages are "end-to-end" encypted. For example, here https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:... Are the "end-to-end" encryption claims irrelevant if "they have access to the unecncypted information befor…

They could put a tiny truth ministry module in the app and remain e2e: "I'll be on my way home in five minutes!" [send] "Sorry, our algorithms have detected that you were about to spread misinformation. Please contact support to reactivate your account. Premium support is available to subscribers of our membership programme" I'm actually only half joking: while some local library code surely cannot tell truth from li…

> I'm actually only half joking: while some local library code surely cannot tell truth from lies

Hey, the way GPT(-2, -3, ...)s are going, maybe soon we can have an offline classifier of truth. /s.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#416

Post by rsfern » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 6:51 AM UTC

cranekam wrote: post #403

Buge wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your landlord might have immediately googled them and viewed some sites about them. And do you and your landlord have the same internet connection? How did you know gates are expensive?

Sharing an internet connection isn’t enough for ads tracking, otherwise everyone behind the same NAT would get the same ads.

I think this has started happening to me lately! I use pihole with the default block lists as well (in the US), which of course doesn’t get everything, but generally works pretty well.

So today my wife and I were looking at dogs that need forever homes using her laptop

Later I got a dog food ad on my laptop that specifically mentioned shelter rescue pets. I haven’t used any of my devices or accounts for dog-related searches for at least two months.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#417

Post by gambiting » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 6:51 AM UTC

cranekam wrote: post #402

philliphaydon wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. So my current apartment is on the 28th floor. It's common to have gates/grills on the windows here in Singapore. But this apartment, AFAIK the family didn't have kids so they never got it done. So I messaged my agent and said "i love the apartment but the windows don't have any gates or safety catches, my understanding is gates are pretty expensive, would it be possible to atleast get safety catches on the wind…

Are you sure you haven’t previously searched for window gates? Searching for things is so second nature by now that half the time we don’t even know we’re doing it. Also, WhatsApp is definitely e2e encrypted. I worked there and saw the implementation (and the difficulties it causes for things like blocking spam/nasties) myself.

Also, if your partner or anyone in your house searched for gates from the same IP, you will be getting ads for gates too, even if you never searched for them personally. That's a very common source of the "I never searched for something and now I'm getting ads for it" complaints.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#418

Post by numpad0 » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 6:53 AM UTC

ponker wrote: post #88

numpad0 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he’s like a bored nerd tremendous in managing Windows and using web browsers. So I’d think his accounts would be as easy and correct as some wiki articles or better, and at the same time would sound “irrelevant” to the public for the lack of emotional components to it.

The difference is that instead of Wikipedia he just calls the professor doing the relevant work and flies them out to brief him on topics of interest.

I thought Wikipedia articles are correct enough for most purposes

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#419

Post by blisseyGo » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 6:55 AM UTC

graeme wrote: post #388

matwood wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And yet, Government did nothing. That’s not true. GWB took it very seriously and put a plan in place. Obama modernized the plan. Trump is the one who ignored his predecessors and set the stage for the mess we are in. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/how-whi...

I believe you’re downvoted for mentioning politics but it is true. The US had an effective pandemic infrastructure, which got dismantled in 2018. This isn’t unique to the US. Canada had an extremely effective pandemic forecasting agency. This got dismantled by two separate governments since 2014. I can’t find the article but the globe and mail had a big exposé. The Atlantic article above is one of the top five articl…

The dismantling of pandemic infrastructure is false news being spread. That's not what happened.

Re: Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media

#420

Post by jlokier » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 6:58 AM UTC

cranekam wrote: post #403

Buge wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your landlord might have immediately googled them and viewed some sites about them. And do you and your landlord have the same internet connection? How did you know gates are expensive?

Sharing an internet connection isn’t enough for ads tracking, otherwise everyone behind the same NAT would get the same ads.

IP address is one of many signals used to build a statistical profile.

It doesn't match you exactly to the other persons behind the same NAT, but it adds some information, raising the likelihood of ad coincidences a little. I have no idea how much. It's likely to depend on which IP address, and other tracking statistics.

If you have diligently blocked lots of tracking state, then IP address will be a relatively stronger signal, and this might (ironically) increase the likelihood of ad coincidences.