I have the same problem in Argentina. Worse, I'm pretty sure that Google and other search engines decide that I don't deserve to receive good information because I live in a Spanish-speaking country, so they send me to terrible low-quality pages because often that's all that's available in Spanish.
It seems that the "covid trutherism" or "spreading covid misinformation" claim is unjustified. Here's Blow's original tweet:
> If a state entity does an oopsie in a lab, then forces its citizens to undergo an experimental treatment because of the oopsie, while suppressing news of side effects, and also denying that the oopsie is anyone's fault ... that's just abusive?
Unfortunately Blow was unwilling to come out and state his position here, relying instead on innuendo, so we have to kind of guess what he was trying to say. I interpret him as making four claims here:
1. The COVID-19 pandemic originated in a lab leak.
2. Some Chinese people were forced to accept experimental vaccinations.
3. The government of the PRC suppressed news of the side effects of the vaccines.
4. The government of the PRC worked to prevent investigations into the cause of the pandemic.
Claim #4 is plainly true; the WHO and several other countries have protested this at great length.
Claim #2 probably depends on your threshold for "experimental" and "forces". https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sinopharm_BIBP_CO... explains that emergency vaccination was available in China in July 02020, and there are plausible claims that Chinese state employees and students traveling abroad were required to take it. This was before results were in from clinical trials, which I think qualifies for most people's definition of "experimental"; the WHO wouldn't add it to its list of authorized emergency vaccines until May of the next year.
Claim #3 seems almost guaranteed to be true, but I don't have direct evidence. The government of the PRC routinely suppresses news, and there are numerous well-documented instances of this happening in connection with COVID, and there are always some subjects in clinical trials of vaccines who have major health problems such as death which may or may not be caused by the vaccine. BBIBP-CorV seems to have been, in the end, pretty safe, but it seems inconceivable that there weren't at least some news of people dying or having terrible health problems after receiving it which were deleted from Weibo or other media ("suppressed"), and that these deletions were carried out because of state policy of the PRC.
Claim #1 seems like the most debatable one, but even that isn't an open-and-shut case. At the time, the lab-leak case was fairly weak, and it certainly hasn't been proven, but it hasn't been disproven either; see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r... for an extensive summary of the debate. Because of the truth of Claim #4 it seems unlikely that it will ever be disproven.
More generally, I find deplorable the polarization on partisan political grounds of fields like puzzle games, genetics, and quantum physics. Artistic development, understanding the world, and extending technology are necessarily collaborative endeavors, and rejecting Blow's games because he criticizes the Chinese government seems akin to refusing to use the Schrödinger equation because Schrödinger sexually victimized teenage girls.
I think you are taking a very charitable view here - the tweet immediately before the one you quote is clearly talking about the US vaccine mandate (not China).
> There's a weird disconnect in this vaccine mandate debate: many are still pretending that Covid-19 is of natural origin, which gives such mandates a different feel than they otherwise have.
Contrary to your assertion, this is not clearly talking about vaccine mandates in any particular place. And the tweet I quoted previously is claiming (or hinting) that the same "state entity" had caused the pandemic and mandated the "experimental treatment". I'm not familiar with any versions of the lab-leak hypothesis that claimed that covid escaped from a US lab, so I don't think it's a reasonable inference that he's talking about the US vaccine mandate.
On the other hand, he seems to have worked pretty hard to avoid clearly stating any of his positions here, so who knows what he really thinks? Or thought?
Linus Torvalds is effectively a full-time code reviewer, and so are most of his "lieutenants". It's not a new idea, as you say, but it works very well.
No, they did not. They made it free to download, but open-access† licensing would permit third parties to legally mirror it on servers that don't block access from Algeria or Switzerland or privacy-focused browsers, and so far that licensing hadn't happened. I'm happy to see that apparently it's happening today.
> Making the first 50 years of its publications and related content freely available expresses ACM’s commitment to open access publication and represents another milestone in our transition to full open access within the next five years.
I wouldn't have understood that nuance without the context given by your comment, but in my developer mind I analogize "freely available" to a "source available" license that they took on, as a step towards going open access ("free and open source") over time. I'm also happy to see that that transition seems on track as planned.
Did they actually deploy GNOSIS at Tymshare? I hadn't heard that. I thought that the reason they spun out Key Logic was that Norm hadn't convinced Tymshare management to deploy GNOSIS.
> That was their [Derwent's] idea. I thought it was very clever and we
realized that we couldn’t do it with our current software but that software like that could
be written. And KeyKOS was the outcome of that. Tymshare and another company, Key
Logic, did not succeed in making that commercial. It would’ve been a high security
system with novel features.
Later in the interview, he says Tymshare timesharing on the 370 (the IBM machine) started out on VM/CMS.
If you have conflicting information, I'd love to see it!
At Satellogic, we famously flew mostly just regular cellphone parts on orbit. We did have higher rates of various kinds of failures than is usual on Earth, but hardware failure can generally be masked by software redundancy.
At today's prices perhaps, but pre ChatGPT you just have to run more of it + more error correction. Not great for the power budget but not anything significant in the grand scheme of things.
You need parity, which is cheap, or lockstep duplexing, which isn't. Or, you know, sometimes you can just restart malfunctioning processes and repair corrupted filesystems while you run the failed tasks again on another node.
It's hard to compare across countries. No other country has anything like the US's research-university system, although China is working on it. But foreign students in China probably aren't hoping to be able to live there for the rest of their lives—China's immigration policies are considerably more xenophobic. The UK might be the closest comparison?
Generally speaking, American exceptionalism is nonsense. The US isn't the only free country, the freest country, the only democratic country, the most democratic country, the richest country, the most diverse country, a city on the hill, divinely inspired, uniquely blessed by God, the only capitalist country, any of that nonsense. It was some of those when Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, but it hasn't been for decades. But the US's research university system is unique in the world, and nobody else even comes close.
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