lemire

yaneerbaryam, 7 months ago to whn

New paper on Masks:

Some claim scientific studies show masks don’t work, or that surgical masks are as good as N95s. Just released paper shows this claim is false. Masks work, and N95 respirators give a much higher benefit than surgical masks.

The controversy about N95 respirator and mask efficacy is based on claims that studies (RCTs and meta-analyses) have no observed effect. Our paper shows these claims result from the use of incorrect mathematical equations.

#covid @whn

lemire, 7 months ago to random

Moore's precept is doing well: computing power increases and gets cheaper over time. But the quality of software can either deliver these gains or cancel them. I am using a few mobile applications that have latencies of several seconds per interaction. Get better programmers.

Mer__edith, 7 months ago to random

Where I speak some advantages Signal has over the bigger richer rest of tech:

“We don’t have to be full of shit. We’re not a surveillance company. I’m not trying to pretend Facebook is good. I don’t have to toe a party line that is divorced from reality”

https://restofworld.org/2023/signal-president-meredith-whittaker-messaing-privacy/

artificialmind, 9 months ago to random

traditional compiler and language design starts with:

tokenization -> parsing -> semantics -> ...

radical idea:

blockification -> tokenization -> parsing -> ...

structure source code into nested blocks first, THEN start tokenization.

lemire, 9 months ago to random French

OpenAI may have to wipe ChatGPT and start over

https://bgr.com/tech/openai-may-have-to-wipe-chatgpt-and-start-over/

lemire, 9 months ago to random French

China's fertility rate drops to record low 1.09 in 2022- state media

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-fertility-rate-drops-record-low-109-2022-state-media-2023-08-15/

lemire, 9 months ago to random

The Nazis did not apologize. They often moved on to leadership positions.

"New documents reveal just how many officials from the Nazi regime found new jobs in Bonn. A surprising number were chosen for senior government positions."

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/from-dictatorship-to-democracy-the-role-ex-nazis-played-in-early-west-germany-a-810207.html

lemire, 9 months ago to random French

“The damage of COVID lockdowns is only now becoming apparent… The ONS reveals today that the number of people who are economically inactive…has grown by 400,000 to 2.5 million since 2019. More than half—1,350,000—report depression and anxiety.” https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-damage-of-covid-lockdowns-is-only-now-becoming-apparent/

lemire, 10 months ago to random French

"The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education."
Paul Karl Feyerabend

lemire, 10 months ago to random French

There are fewer and fewer of us working relatively speaking. The US labor force increased during the 1980s as women increasingly chose to get jobs. It reached a maximum at the turn of the century and it has been declining ever since in part due to a wave of retirements.

lemire, 1 year ago to random French

Artificial intelligence is being pushed forward by ordinary people according to leaked Google memo: "Many of the new ideas are from ordinary people. The barrier to entry for training and experimentation has dropped from the total output of a major research organization to one person, an evening, and a beefy laptop."

lemire, 1 year ago to random French

The Microsoft ARM Dev kit is slightly larger than two iPhones side by side. It is silent (no fan). It is comparable to an Intel NUC or mac mini.

lemire, 1 year ago to random

AMD appears to do much better at SIMD-based JSON parsing. AMD Zen 4 appears to have competitive AVX-512 support. https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/simdjson

Reminder: I am just an observer and I take no pleasure at one side losing to the other. I don't even own a Zen 4 CPU.