Towards a human-like open-domain chatbot. Meena is the new eliza, and is getting close to human levels of performance.
Author: Gregor J. Rothfuss
Against DPA
Many people are calling for the President to use the Defense Productions Act (DPA) but the reality is that the DPA is neither especially useful nor necessary. The markets are already redirecting resources in a rapid and sophisticated manner.
Borrowing from the Fed
If the Fed wants money to go to businesses quickly, it might have to bypass the banks and just give the businesses money directly.
Noise Phenotype
All marbled crayfish which exist today derive from a single animal. They are all genetically identical. These aquatic clones actually vary quite a bit in their color, size, behavior and longevity. randomness in development may be just as important as genetic and environmental variation.
COVID-19 Testing
Pooling is good:
If we look at this from the view of whole-population biosurveillance after the outbreak period is over and we have a 0.1% base infection rate, pools of 32 samples have an expected number of tests per person at 0.0628 or a 15.9x multiple on throughput/cost reduction.
Not even people dying left and right causes organizations to abandon the rules. Third world processes: Because of privacy concerns, the company’s call center does not leave voice messages. Its operators call back only 2x before moving to the next patient.
There’s also a lot of wishful thinking about serology tests:
There is no “serology test” – there are millions of possible serology tests, which need to be carefully compared and characterized to select ones that do more than just show you if some antibody against the virus is present. Reliable titres are going to be essential in the next phase of understanding this new viral infection – identifying who has protective immunity.
FDA delenda est
An innovative testing program in the Seattle area — promoted by the billionaire Bill Gates and local public health officials as a way of conducting wider surveillance on the invisible spread of the virus — has been ordered by the federal government to stop its work pending additional reviews.
Frequent, fast, and cheap is better than sensitive:
when you compare testing regimes it’s hard to come up with a scenario in which infrequent, slow, and expensive but very sensitive is better than frequent, fast, and cheap but less sensitive
Bill Gates is not impressed:
The majority of all US tests are completely garbage, wasted. If you don’t care how late the date is and you reimburse at the same level, of course they’re going to take every customer. Because they are making ridiculous money, and it’s mostly rich people that are getting access to that. You have to have the reimbursement system pay a little bit extra for 24 hours, pay the normal fee for 48 hours, and pay nothing And they will fix it overnight.
Prince of Persia history
Prince of Persia used xor to have enough memory for an opponent.
Economy freezer
Denmark is putting the economy into the freezer for 3 months. the government is paying companies for employees who are going home and not working. These workers are being paid a wage to do nothing. The government is saying: Lots of people are suddenly in danger of being fired. But if we have firing rounds, it will be very difficult to adapt later.
Titrating Quarantine
Last week I predicted that this might look like titrating quarantine levels – locking everything down, then trying to unlock it just enough to use available medical capacity, then locking things down more again if it looked like the number of cases was starting to get out of hand. This would eventually develop herd immunity without overwhelming the medical system. A paper argued for alternating periods of higher and lower quarantine levels based on how the medical system was doing:
A seesaw pattern of quarantine might work
Chloroquine
This is not a benign compound; it should only be taken when you have a solid expectation of benefit, and (saying it again), we don’t yet have that. Better trials are cranking up right now: please, wait for those.
Biggest explosion
you could fit 15 Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster’s hot gas