Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Oh, 2022

antipope.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 557 posts

Re: Oh, 2022

#131

Post by TranquilMarmot »

supperburg wrote: post #120
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's specious to claim knowledge of things unmeasured? Dial it back a bit there - maybe 'somewhat undercounted'. And is that criteria made up too? Show me.

I don’t need to show you, go listen to the Stanford professor. Lex Fridman podcast in the past week or two. Am I an idiot for believing a current Stanford professor? Is it not a reputable source?

> Lex Fridman (pronounced: Freedman) I'm an AI researcher working on autonomous vehicles, human-robot interaction, and machine learning at MIT and beyond.

Honestly does not sound too reputable to me on this specific subject matter.

Edit: I realize now that you are saying to listen to the podcast guest, not Lex Fridman himself. Is this the episode? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIOGUYOPAsA

Re: Oh, 2022

#132

Post by patd »

elihu wrote: post #123

> "Looking further afield: it seems likely that the end of internal combustion engines will be in sight. Some countries are already scheduling a ban on IC engines to come in after 2030—electric cars are now a maturing technology with clear advantages in every respect except recharge time. Once those IC cars are no longer manufactured, we can expect a very rapid ramp-down of extraction and distribution industries for…

Some cities in Europe are already banning old petrol and diesel cars from driving through them. With plans to ban more over time.

Re: Oh, 2022

#133

Post by barry-cotter »

ErikAugust wrote: post #76

“If the SARS family of coronaviruses had emerged just a decade earlier it's quite likely we'd be on the brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinction by now—SARS1 has 20% mortality among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level. If SARS1 had gone pandemic we might plausibly have lost a billion people within two years.” That’s a sc…

Sweden exists. They never locked down. The Hong Kong flu of the 1950s[1] happened. It was a really bad flu season. Many, many old, very young and sick people died. Civilization was never in danger from COVID. Civilization survived smallpox. The Inca civilization came very close to surviving getting the entire old world disease package and being invaded by people with horses, iron weapons and gunpowder all in the space of a hundred years.

Civilization can survive an awful lot of people dying and even if COVID had a 2% fatality rate it would roll on more or less without a blip. The Spanish flu didn't lead to the fall of civilization anywhere and it killed a lot more people in the prime of their life. COVID deaths are highly concrentrated in the over 50s.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_flu

Re: Oh, 2022

#134

Post by HarryHirsch »

onychomys wrote: post #124
makomk wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with that thought is that having such high fatality rates is a problem for a virus that hopes to become a pandemic - it's hard for a disease to spread silently through the population if several out of every ten people infected end up in the hospital, even with a delay, and of course pretty much all developed countries have contact tracing systems in place even if that fact got downplayed after they didn't…

> is that having such high fatality rates is a problem for a virus that hopes to become a pandemic Somebody forgot to tell that to smallpox, which had something like a 25 or 30% IFR before vaccines came around. And there were lots and lots of pandemics of that!

People got sufficiently tired of deadly smallpox outbreaks to mount vaccination campaigns, eventually we managed to vaccinate enough of the globe to make the virus extinct.

Re: Oh, 2022

#135

Post by walrus01 »

VectorLock wrote: post #127
jeffbee wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that this would also be the observable effect of simply prioritizing ICMP while dropping other protocols. Probably a better thing to observe is loss and congestion on normal TCP sockets, using retransmit counters, congestion window collapse, etc.

Was going to mention that a lot of ISPs de-prioritize ICMP but I get a sense that OP might be aware of that. It'd be cool to see what a long running mtr in TCP mode says about Starlink.

I'm aware, this is through the isp to endpoint destinations, not pinging intermediate hops in the starlink cgnat path to internet.

Re: Oh, 2022

#136

Post by saalweachter »

supperburg wrote: post #120
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's specious to claim knowledge of things unmeasured? Dial it back a bit there - maybe 'somewhat undercounted'. And is that criteria made up too? Show me.

I don’t need to show you, go listen to the Stanford professor. Lex Fridman podcast in the past week or two. Am I an idiot for believing a current Stanford professor? Is it not a reputable source?

0.25% of the US has already died of COVID-19. It doesn't matter who said it, how can 0.02% be a reasonable estimate for the IFR of the disease?

Re: Oh, 2022

#137

Post by SECProto »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #114
ErikAugust wrote: post #76

“If the SARS family of coronaviruses had emerged just a decade earlier it's quite likely we'd be on the brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinction by now—SARS1 has 20% mortality among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level. If SARS1 had gone pandemic we might plausibly have lost a billion people within two years.” That’s a sc…

The extinction part is hyperbole though - with 7 billion humans out there it would need to hit fatality rates of 99.9...% for a decent chance of the human species to be completely wiped out. And also assuming that it would persist and/or spread well enough to also wipe out the various uncontacted tribes on 2-3 continents.

Modern society functions by virtue of a century of businesses cutting margins as thin as possible, trading supply chain fragility for lower labour and capital costs. We're already seeing wild economic issues from a much lower fatality rate disease and the labour shortages/supply chain blockages/etc it has caused. It's very easy to imagine a 30% fatality rate pandemic causing total worldwide economic collapse, causing famine, causing nuclear war, causing photosynthesis to fail, causing a mass extinction exceeding the P-T event. Whether human populations survived is (to be honest), a kind of irrelevant nitpick.

The species as a whole was much more robust when large fractions of the population were engaged in subsistence farming and we hadn't disbalanced the atmosphere and doomsday weapons didn't exist.

Edit: minor grammar correction

Re: Oh, 2022

#138

Post by twic »

JetSetWilly wrote: post #106

> (We don't remember how awful chickenpox was because (a) we're generally vaccinated in infancy and (b) it's not a killer on the same level as its big sibling, Variola, aka smallpox. But the so-called "childhood diseases" like mumps, rubella, and chickenpox used to kill infants by windrows. There's a reason public health bodies remain vigilant and run constant vaccination campaigns against them Don't understand that…

Although that theory has been questioned recently, and chickenpox vaccination is being considered:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/may/02/the-chickenp...

Re: Oh, 2022

#139

Post by zapataband1 »

barry-cotter wrote: post #133
ErikAugust wrote: post #76

“If the SARS family of coronaviruses had emerged just a decade earlier it's quite likely we'd be on the brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinction by now—SARS1 has 20% mortality among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level. If SARS1 had gone pandemic we might plausibly have lost a billion people within two years.” That’s a sc…

Sweden exists. They never locked down. The Hong Kong flu of the 1950s[1] happened. It was a really bad flu season. Many, many old, very young and sick people died. Civilization was never in danger from COVID. Civilization survived smallpox. The Inca civilization came very close to surviving getting the entire old world disease package and being invaded by people with horses, iron weapons and gunpowder all in the spac…

If a virus infects more people it has more of a chance of spreading and more of a chance of mutating into a deadlier virus that affects a different demographic. Bringing sweden up but not the vast number of countries or active measure still currently in place, including mass vaccinations, seems to serve a narrow narritive. Bringing up civilizations and cultures that did in-fact get destroyed by viruses doesn't really help your argument.

Re: Oh, 2022

#140

Post by ehsankia »

gman83 wrote: post #22
walrus01 wrote: post #12

Regarding spacex in this, my starlink terminal recently hit a milestone of 0.00% ICMP loss to terrestrial ISP things in the pacific northwest. Averaged over 5, 6 hour periods. 20 icmp pings every 60s, basically a default smokeping install set to once a minute. Previously it was running somewhere around 0.15% to 0.60% which was still totally usable... if you put a similar test setup on a noisy/oversubscribed coaxial c…

Last time I checked, there were dozens of commercial satellite ISPs ramping up their launches. Do these companies have a plan to deal with potential collisions and the potential space debris that would cause?

So is the earth, really. Reminds me of how all humans would fit in a ball of meat in Central Park [0]. The satellites aren't much bigger than humans, so even if there was a starlink satellite for every single human, it would still barely make a dent. Let alone the fact that the surface area would be larger 2000KM up, and without oceans.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/p0qws3/self...

Post reply on HN