I am trying to work out which is more dull, the world bore draw due to super computer championship of Chess or the Beatles documentary.
Dunno. Does the Beatles documentary consist of exactly the same piece of footage repeated fourteen times?
Does the incomplete chorus of the same song being tootled on a guitar inbetween Paul McCartney ordering this lunch count?
Depends on what else (if anything) happens and how often this is repeated. One would need to see the Beatles documentary to offer a truly informed opinion. And no, I'm not volunteering.
NB Chess championship game three ends in a draw. I'm shocked.
I don't see the point of human chess championships now we know that computers can play the game better, more elegantly, more cleverly and creatively
It's a bit like favouring the Paralympics over the Olympics
Computers also can, or shortly will be able to, knap flint or, random example, write novels better than us too. The human element may at least add some drama.
I am totally unaware of the history of this period. The only Labour split I was aware of was the SDP one.
Ydoethur will know far more than I, but suffice to say that the first Labour PM in history ending up expelled from Labour is pretty amusing. Ex-Leaders seem to reputationally struggle, apart from Attlee maybe?.
Apparently 1931 was the last GE not held on a thursday, and since the Tories got 470 seats perhaps they should have let the 2019 GE take place on a different day as the opposition attempt to do (for reasons I really cannot recall).
If the Cons got 84pc of the vote (?!?) then why didn't they just form a government?
I am trying to work out which is more dull, the world bore draw due to super computer championship of Chess or the Beatles documentary.
Dunno. Does the Beatles documentary consist of exactly the same piece of footage repeated fourteen times?
Does the incomplete chorus of the same song being tootled on a guitar inbetween Paul McCartney ordering this lunch count?
Depends on what else (if anything) happens and how often this is repeated. One would need to see the Beatles documentary to offer a truly informed opinion. And no, I'm not volunteering.
NB Chess championship game three ends in a draw. I'm shocked.
I don't see the point of human chess championships now we know that computers can play the game better, more elegantly, more cleverly and creatively
It's a bit like favouring the Paralympics over the Olympics
I am not Chess expert, but it appears now to be a battle of trying to construct approaches that your opponent won't have studied with the computer.
Speaking to Sky News, Labour's shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy said it was "unconscionable" that France and the UK government were "engaging in a blame game while children drown off our coastline".
She said her party would work with international partners to "open up safe and legal routes" for refugees in order "to pull the rug out from under the business model that these smugglers currently rely on".
My biggest worry over Labour was them opening up the flood gates on immigration and now they confirm they're doing it. And if this is just the stuff they are saying out loud, imagine what else they will do in office. I really wanted to vote against Boris in the next election, but not at the cost of bad immigration decisions that will last decades.
That's a weird interpretation of Nandy's sensible comments. There's nothing in what she says that suggests any 'floodgate' opening. She's merely pointing out the truth: the Channel crossings are mainly a consequence of an absence of legal routes for genuine asylum seekers.
And that she's correct to point out - however, how much has she said about how robust Labour intends to be about sifting the refugees from the economic migrants? And, very importantly, has any indication been given that Labour would put a cap on the numbers of refugees and asylum seekers accepted each year?
The world is replete with failed states, totalitarian states and simply illiberal states from which hundreds of millions of people could make a plausible case for asylum. And that's before we get to the tremendous question of how many people will end up attempting to flee havoc induced by climate change. We can't take in limitless numbers, and the electorate doesn't want limitless numbers.
If Labour can't provide plausible reassurance that it isn't in favour of letting in every single hard luck case then voters will draw the obvious conclusion: namely, that if it thinks, looks and acts like an open borders party, it is one.
I'm pretty confident that Starmer et al will make absolutely sure that Labour doesn't think, look or act like an open borders party at the next GE. There's a huge gap, though, between being a party that has a humane asylum policy and an open borders policy.
Labour didn't act like an open borders party in 1997 either but they very quickly put in place policies to transform our demographics just a year later. This Labour Party is already signifying to their base they will do things to expand immigration: more refugees, no income minimum for arranged marriages etc. I don't trust them any more. If they put in place the equivalent to Gordon Brown's match Tory spending levels on immigration I will vote for them. If not, I will be reluctantly crossing the Tory box on my election paper.
Quite, the idea Starmer will make sure Labout doesn't think, look or act like an open borders party is laughable. The absolute best he can do is make them look like an open borders party trying to soft peddle that fact. Even post Corbyn the activist base wouldn't take any less and senior figures are not going to want to say anything to upset them in advance of a post election leadership contest.
Speaking to Sky News, Labour's shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy said it was "unconscionable" that France and the UK government were "engaging in a blame game while children drown off our coastline".
She said her party would work with international partners to "open up safe and legal routes" for refugees in order "to pull the rug out from under the business model that these smugglers currently rely on".
My biggest worry over Labour was them opening up the flood gates on immigration and now they confirm they're doing it. And if this is just the stuff they are saying out loud, imagine what else they will do in office. I really wanted to vote against Boris in the next election, but not at the cost of bad immigration decisions that will last decades.
That's a weird interpretation of Nandy's sensible comments. There's nothing in what she says that suggests any 'floodgate' opening. She's merely pointing out the truth: the Channel crossings are mainly a consequence of an absence of legal routes for genuine asylum seekers.
And that she's correct to point out - however, how much has she said about how robust Labour intends to be about sifting the refugees from the economic migrants? And, very importantly, has any indication been given that Labour would put a cap on the numbers of refugees and asylum seekers accepted each year?
The world is replete with failed states, totalitarian states and simply illiberal states from which hundreds of millions of people could make a plausible case for asylum. And that's before we get to the tremendous question of how many people will end up attempting to flee havoc induced by climate change. We can't take in limitless numbers, and the electorate doesn't want limitless numbers.
If Labour can't provide plausible reassurance that it isn't in favour of letting in every single hard luck case then voters will draw the obvious conclusion: namely, that if it thinks, looks and acts like an open borders party, it is one.
I'm pretty confident that Starmer et al will make absolutely sure that Labour doesn't think, look or act like an open borders party at the next GE. There's a huge gap, though, between being a party that has a humane asylum policy and an open borders policy.
I'm pleased with the tone of Nandy's comments. Ok, we don't want to get ourselves painted as 'come one come all' namby pambys, but we also don't want to be trying to outflank the Cons on the lurid 'strong borders' rhetoric. Lose our soul that way - and imo lose more votes than we gain.
I am trying to work out which is more dull, the world bore draw due to super computer championship of Chess or the Beatles documentary.
Dunno. Does the Beatles documentary consist of exactly the same piece of footage repeated fourteen times?
Does the incomplete chorus of the same song being tootled on a guitar inbetween Paul McCartney ordering this lunch count?
Depends on what else (if anything) happens and how often this is repeated. One would need to see the Beatles documentary to offer a truly informed opinion. And no, I'm not volunteering.
NB Chess championship game three ends in a draw. I'm shocked.
I don't see the point of human chess championships now we know that computers can play the game better, more elegantly, more cleverly and creatively
It's a bit like favouring the Paralympics over the Olympics
Computers also can, or shortly will be able to, knap flint or, random example, write novels better than us too. The human element may at least add some drama.
I have recently purchased some fantastic 1/1 art that was generated after I told an AI what sort of picture I wanted.
I was so impressed, I actually bought the ability to work with the AI on a monthly basis to create more.
Morocco is also suspending maritime passenger transport with France
"Le Maroc a décidé de suspendre le transport maritime de passagers avec la France à partir de dimanche soir, en raison de la recrudescence de l'épidémie de Covid-19, a indiqué un responsable au ministère du Transport #AFP"
The doors are being shut across the world, we may not see them reopened in our lifetime
Calm down. This is just Morocco pretending it was them that dumped their ex partner. Once no one will accept flights from you the jig is up.
I saw something with Laurence Fox in it for the first time the other day - He was playing Lord Palmerston in Victoria. I can see why people dislike him, thoroughly cocksure and smarmy
I went through a period of trying to feel sorry for Lozza as there is something pitiful about him, but back to thinking he deserves all the pelters he gets.
I'd not seen Richard Tice before that video from Bexley - have the far right found a post-Farage leader who is actually coherent and sane? (Though the obsession with boilers was a bit worrying.)
Tice is CEO of an asset management group worth £500 million. He is a successful businessman, not just a Far Right ranter whatever else you may think of him and he does not need the money from being an MP if he was elected therefore.
He has also shifted RefUK to be a largely libertarian, anti lockdown, low tax, small government party rather than just a vehicle against immigration post Brexit, making it more respectable for mainstream right voters to consider if they think Boris is too statist and authoritarian
Strange how there's a big overlap between anti-lockdown and anti-migrant sentiment but there does seem to be.
I think it’s simply tribal. I am increasingly anti-lockdown now we are all vaccinated and also a socially liberal pro migration remainer, but that feels an uncomfortable place to be when my fellow travellers on Twitter seem to have discovered a taste for public health authoritarianism.
In other countries it’s sometimes the right, sometimes the left or centre, who are the lockdown sceptics. I think it all depends on political context.
I yearn for the glory days of the 80s and 90s when the puritans and authoritarians were right wing and the lefties were more hedonistic.
I know what you mean. Back then we had a great time but got hammered in elections. Now we're still getting hammered in elections but ...
I am trying to work out which is more dull, the world bore draw due to super computer championship of Chess or the Beatles documentary.
Dunno. Does the Beatles documentary consist of exactly the same piece of footage repeated fourteen times?
Does the incomplete chorus of the same song being tootled on a guitar inbetween Paul McCartney ordering this lunch count?
Depends on what else (if anything) happens and how often this is repeated. One would need to see the Beatles documentary to offer a truly informed opinion. And no, I'm not volunteering.
NB Chess championship game three ends in a draw. I'm shocked.
I don't see the point of human chess championships now we know that computers can play the game better, more elegantly, more cleverly and creatively
It's a bit like favouring the Paralympics over the Olympics
Or bothering with the 100m when we have sports cars, or the high jump when we have aeroplanes, or darts when we have Kalashnikovs, or .......
No, chess is different. It is pure maths. And the beauty of it is in the elegance and brilliance of the maths, and computers are just way better at this, more elegant and brilliant
The equivalent is preferring to watch a man with his arms out running around pretending to be a plane while screaming wheeeeeeeee! as against watching Concorde in flight
I am trying to work out which is more dull, the world bore draw due to super computer championship of Chess or the Beatles documentary.
Dunno. Does the Beatles documentary consist of exactly the same piece of footage repeated fourteen times?
Does the incomplete chorus of the same song being tootled on a guitar inbetween Paul McCartney ordering this lunch count?
Depends on what else (if anything) happens and how often this is repeated. One would need to see the Beatles documentary to offer a truly informed opinion. And no, I'm not volunteering.
NB Chess championship game three ends in a draw. I'm shocked.
I don't see the point of human chess championships now we know that computers can play the game better, more elegantly, more cleverly and creatively
It's a bit like favouring the Paralympics over the Olympics
On that basis do you think the 100M sprint is not worth it anymore because motor cars can do it in 1 second?
Chess is really beautiful as it shows what the human mind can think at elite levels -
I am totally unaware of the history of this period. The only Labour split I was aware of was the SDP one.
Ydoethur will know far more than I, but suffice to say that the first Labour PM in history ending up expelled from Labour is pretty amusing. Ex-Leaders seem to reputationally struggle, apart from Attlee maybe?.
Apparently 1931 was the last GE not held on a thursday, and since the Tories got 470 seats perhaps they should have let the 2019 GE take place on a different day as the opposition attempt to do (for reasons I really cannot recall).
If the Cons got 84pc of the vote (?!?) then why didn't they just form a government?
No idea. Not the first time in the early century they had the numbers for government but let someone else be the leader.
Stanley Baldwin would be much higher up the list of PMs by tenure if the period of his dominance were counted.
I am trying to work out which is more dull, the world bore draw due to super computer championship of Chess or the Beatles documentary.
Dunno. Does the Beatles documentary consist of exactly the same piece of footage repeated fourteen times?
Does the incomplete chorus of the same song being tootled on a guitar inbetween Paul McCartney ordering this lunch count?
Depends on what else (if anything) happens and how often this is repeated. One would need to see the Beatles documentary to offer a truly informed opinion. And no, I'm not volunteering.
NB Chess championship game three ends in a draw. I'm shocked.
I don't see the point of human chess championships now we know that computers can play the game better, more elegantly, more cleverly and creatively
It's a bit like favouring the Paralympics over the Olympics
Computers also can, or shortly will be able to, knap flint or, random example, write novels better than us too. The human element may at least add some drama.
I have recently purchased some fantastic 1/1 art that was generated after I told an AI what sort of picture I wanted.
I was so impressed, I actually bought the ability to work with the AI on a monthly basis to create more.
Morocco is also suspending maritime passenger transport with France
"Le Maroc a décidé de suspendre le transport maritime de passagers avec la France à partir de dimanche soir, en raison de la recrudescence de l'épidémie de Covid-19, a indiqué un responsable au ministère du Transport #AFP"
The doors are being shut across the world, we may not see them reopened in our lifetime
That's disappointing. I was expecting to live beyond the first half of 2022.
Not with OMICRON, THE KING OF VIRUSES, FOR IT IS HE
The way Morocco is reacting (et al), I reckon they will tell is in about a week that OMICRON THE KING OF ETC ETC has a CFR of 80-90%, and a R number of 329, meaning everyone in the world will be dead or on a ventilator by Boxing Day
Enjoy that turkey
Nice example of keeping calm and carrying on here.
Morocco is also suspending maritime passenger transport with France
"Le Maroc a décidé de suspendre le transport maritime de passagers avec la France à partir de dimanche soir, en raison de la recrudescence de l'épidémie de Covid-19, a indiqué un responsable au ministère du Transport #AFP"
The doors are being shut across the world, we may not see them reopened in our lifetime
Calm down. This is just Morocco pretending it was them that dumped their ex partner. Once no one will accept flights from you the jig is up.
I'm extremely calm. Sipping tea and looking at a frigid blue Regent's Park sky, streaked with delicate, attenuated, pale mauve clouds. Quite impressionist
I am also intrigued how far this frontier-closing will go
I am trying to work out which is more dull, the world bore draw due to super computer championship of Chess or the Beatles documentary.
Dunno. Does the Beatles documentary consist of exactly the same piece of footage repeated fourteen times?
Does the incomplete chorus of the same song being tootled on a guitar inbetween Paul McCartney ordering this lunch count?
Depends on what else (if anything) happens and how often this is repeated. One would need to see the Beatles documentary to offer a truly informed opinion. And no, I'm not volunteering.
NB Chess championship game three ends in a draw. I'm shocked.
I don't see the point of human chess championships now we know that computers can play the game better, more elegantly, more cleverly and creatively
It's a bit like favouring the Paralympics over the Olympics
Computers also can, or shortly will be able to, knap flint or, random example, write novels better than us too. The human element may at least add some drama.
I have recently purchased some fantastic 1/1 art that was generated after I told an AI what sort of picture I wanted.
I was so impressed, I actually bought the ability to work with the AI on a monthly basis to create more.
They have now pivoted to crypto / NFT space, where you can basically purchase a token to interface with their AI machine to generate your own. It is a fantastic, if expensive, experience, where you can type in a phrase and some modifiers about roughly describing what you want, and it pumps out some fantastic stuff.
I am totally unaware of the history of this period. The only Labour split I was aware of was the SDP one.
Ydoethur will know far more than I, but suffice to say that the first Labour PM in history ending up expelled from Labour is pretty amusing. Ex-Leaders seem to reputationally struggle, apart from Attlee maybe?.
Apparently 1931 was the last GE not held on a thursday, and since the Tories got 470 seats perhaps they should have let the 2019 GE take place on a different day as the opposition attempt to do (for reasons I really cannot recall).
IIRC, the 1931 election had five distinct brands of Labour standing, four of them winning seats.
I'd also argue the New Party as a Labour offshoot, but they got utterly routed in 1931.
Chess ain't a patch on Go for complexity or beauty. Took significantly longer to beat humans too. Still hasn't "solved" the game either. Too many variables and potential moves especially in the opening.
I am trying to work out which is more dull, the world bore draw due to super computer championship of Chess or the Beatles documentary.
Dunno. Does the Beatles documentary consist of exactly the same piece of footage repeated fourteen times?
Does the incomplete chorus of the same song being tootled on a guitar inbetween Paul McCartney ordering this lunch count?
Depends on what else (if anything) happens and how often this is repeated. One would need to see the Beatles documentary to offer a truly informed opinion. And no, I'm not volunteering.
NB Chess championship game three ends in a draw. I'm shocked.
I don't see the point of human chess championships now we know that computers can play the game better, more elegantly, more cleverly and creatively
It's a bit like favouring the Paralympics over the Olympics
Computers also can, or shortly will be able to, knap flint or, random example, write novels better than us too. The human element may at least add some drama.
I have recently purchased some fantastic 1/1 art that was generated after I told an AI what sort of picture I wanted.
I was so impressed, I actually bought the ability to work with the AI on a monthly basis to create more.
They have now pivoted to crypto / NFT space, where you can basically purchase a token to interface with their AI machine to generate your own. It is a fantastic, if expensive, experience, where you can type in a phrase and some modifiers about roughly describing what you want, and it pumps out some fantastic stuff.
Some of that is crap, some is kitsch, some is compelling and some is properly beautiful - and drawn by a computer?
It is also quite scary. And jolly interesting. Ta
GPT4 or 5 will give such a good impression of real general AL we will, for all intents and purposes, consider them conscious and intelligent, while not quite knowing whether they actually are, or not
I am trying to work out which is more dull, the world bore draw due to super computer championship of Chess or the Beatles documentary.
Dunno. Does the Beatles documentary consist of exactly the same piece of footage repeated fourteen times?
Does the incomplete chorus of the same song being tootled on a guitar inbetween Paul McCartney ordering this lunch count?
Depends on what else (if anything) happens and how often this is repeated. One would need to see the Beatles documentary to offer a truly informed opinion. And no, I'm not volunteering.
NB Chess championship game three ends in a draw. I'm shocked.
I don't see the point of human chess championships now we know that computers can play the game better, more elegantly, more cleverly and creatively
It's a bit like favouring the Paralympics over the Olympics
Computers also can, or shortly will be able to, knap flint or, random example, write novels better than us too. The human element may at least add some drama.
I have recently purchased some fantastic 1/1 art that was generated after I told an AI what sort of picture I wanted.
I was so impressed, I actually bought the ability to work with the AI on a monthly basis to create more.
"For those of you just coming aboard, Carlsen, 30, has been at No 1 in the Fide rankings for 10 straight years and was considered the world’s best player even before he dethroned Viswanathan Anand for the title in 2013. Nepomniachtchi, 31, is ranked No 5, having earned his place at the table by winning the eight-man candidates tournament in April with a round to spare"
So they're both real people - not sure what angle the AI debate is coming from
Breaking: The Dutch #RIVM has confirmed 13 #Omicron cases out of the 61 positives. #coronavirus #Corona
That’s 13 cases of OMICRON THE MIGHTY on just one flight to Europe. How many flights have come from Southern Africa to Europe, N America, Asia, in the last week or so? There must be a few thousand cases seeded worldwide
It depends how it impacts vaccinated populations. Does it put significantly more people in hospitals and morgues? If it doesn't, it's a blip not a gamechanger.
Yes, the evidence so far is that Omicron is only bad news for the non double vaccinated in terms of potential hospitalisation and death, certainly that is true for the young.
Even the older double vaccinated should be protected from it according to most scientists estimations once they have had their boosters which most over 70s now have had
What it certainly does mean is that we need to get on with double vaxxing our younger people as a matter of urgency. Action this day as Boris's hero used to say.
To come back to an earlier point I made - at what stage will the government consider compulsory vaccinations ? Can't be far off if this is as bad as some fear.
They won't do it unless they're absolutely desperate. Can you imagine how much screaming there will be if they go down the route of punitive fines as in Austria, and it takes about five minutes for somebody to crunch the numbers and work out that they're being disproportionately inflicted upon black people with low incomes?
Yes.
But - how many of those vote Tory?
Given a choice between kicking a lot of Labour voters and having his own voters suffer due to pressure on the NHS and restrictions on the wider population, given his extremely factional, even transactional approach I wouldn't go bail for Johnson holding out.
The answer has always been no vaccination then no hospital treatment.
Nope. That is callous and sets a horrific precedent for other life choices. The answer (if there has to be one) is to dis/incentivise through the tax system.
Its callous to delay the non-covid medical treatment of others because hospitals are wasting their resources on anti-vaxxers.
But I'd be quite happy to financially dis-incentivise anti-vaxxers firstly through their tax codes and secondly through charging them for any medical treatment they receive.
To save an unvaccinated person from a horrible death by Covid is not a waste of NHS resources.
And if two other people die because NHS resources are being used on anti-vaxxers ?
Either the NHS is using resources on anti-vaxxers instead of on other patients or its continual whine about being 'overrun with anti-vaxxers' is a lie to shift blame from its own failings.
It is using scarce resource on treating Covid patients - many of whom aren't vaccinated - and this is a big part of why the system is stressed. But this isn't to say resource is being wasted. How is saving the life of an unvaccinated young Covid sufferer a waste of effort? Their life isn't worth saving because they've fallen prey to antivaxx crap, have an irrational needle phobia, are thick and lazy, or whatever? That's a rather crass sentiment imo.
I think of it more as the ease at which they could've prevented their predicament.
Yes this opens the door to criticising those who's lifestyles increase their risk of needing hospital treatment. But I plead extraordinary circumstances and during a pandemic this should be the case.
There are a limited number of beds which the anti-vax are occupying when they should not be. To triage against them may be distasteful but is it unethical? We would certainly be rationing care if the health service was to collapse. And for those with less urgent conditions it effectively has.
I would propose a deadline that beyond which those who through choice have not been vaccinated should receive care after others within the system. Cos if we don't isn't the treatment backlog just going to increase?
Interesting that out of 61 positive patients off that plane only 13 had Omicron. It suggests Delta still has some mojo.
Bear in mind SA had extremely low case numbers until a few weeks ago which would be good news for a new variant trying to make a name for itself. So if they are now rising rapidly, and a large proportion are Delta, then maybe the growth advantage Omicron has isn’t so big after all.
As far as I can see there’s not much point panicking until we see vaccine efficacy stats against severe illness. If those hold up, then I think it’s as you were. If not then we need to get those repurposed jabs fast tracked.
But Omicron is already 80% of new cases in SA in surveyed region.....it took delta months to reach that versus Kent variant in any sample.
Doesn’t chime with anything like the 500% advantage being touted by some.
That plus founder effects in a low prevalence population, and the fact it’s almost certainly been around for longer than a few weeks, and I’m not buying (yet) this idea it’s got some kind of superhuman power.
R0 of endemic COVs is apparently around 7. Immune evasion seems like the most likely reason for outperformance, but so far that’s in a quite unusual population with low vax take up, partial immunity from natural infection, high HIV levels, and history of a previous epidemic of a variant (Beta) that never really took hold elsewhere.
Beta didn't take hold because delta out competed it....but all the experiments showed.current vavccines are poor against beta and reinfect is high. Even if Omicron is only a bit more infectious than Delta, so that it can outcompete, reinfection and vaccine escape are potential massive problems. Then if it is measles infectious plus all the other elements, that is why the world governments are shitting themselves, in a way they didn't over Beta or the similar Brazilian variant that had equivalent Beta mutations.
They did shit themselves over Beta and Brazil. Only a few months ago our geographer general Raab was putting France on the amber list because of Beta infections in “the French region of La Reunion”.
No evidence this variant is more infectious in a naive population, but plenty to suggest it has immune evasion properties. That puts it in a similar category to Beta. Maybe best we keep encouraging Delta to spread and outcompete it.
No...what our stupid government do with the silly travel list, where they put countries on and off it every other week, isn't the same as the basically every western government all acting within a day of one another. We haven't had that sort of reaction, even at the start or over Delta, certainly not over Beta or the Brazilian variant most similar to Beta.
Clearly all their scientific advisors are extremely worried. Now they might all be wrong, but we haven't seen this sort of reaction during the whole pandemic, where every major government acts in a very similar way basically at the same time.
Yes, it’s not the evidence that is alarming (it’s obscure), it is the reaction of people who see all the evidence unobscured - who are talking to their scientific & ministerial counterparts across the world.
It reminds me of early Wuhan. What got me worried there was not the disease itself but the way the Chinese reacted. Putting 60m people in hard quarantine. Stapling families into apartments. The Chinese had access to the best data and they were crapping themselves
The immediate global spasm over Omicron is eerily similar. Of course it still might be a mad global crapping-of-pants, and hysterical panic. But hmmm
I gotta disagree here. The response globally has been completely token. As the journos said to Boris, if it’s that concerning why aren’t you recommending WFH? “Err well you know there’s two variants. Anyway Saj will be on telly tomorrow, let’s see what he says”.
Why is SA not in lockdown? “We are considering new restrictions”. While bars, schools, restaurants and churches remain packed.
It’s hardly welding 1000 people into a concrete tower while getting the army to build battlefield hospitals in town squares.
I am trying to work out which is more dull, the world bore draw due to super computer championship of Chess or the Beatles documentary.
Dunno. Does the Beatles documentary consist of exactly the same piece of footage repeated fourteen times?
Does the incomplete chorus of the same song being tootled on a guitar inbetween Paul McCartney ordering this lunch count?
Depends on what else (if anything) happens and how often this is repeated. One would need to see the Beatles documentary to offer a truly informed opinion. And no, I'm not volunteering.
NB Chess championship game three ends in a draw. I'm shocked.
I don't see the point of human chess championships now we know that computers can play the game better, more elegantly, more cleverly and creatively
It's a bit like favouring the Paralympics over the Olympics
Computers also can, or shortly will be able to, knap flint or, random example, write novels better than us too. The human element may at least add some drama.
I have recently purchased some fantastic 1/1 art that was generated after I told an AI what sort of picture I wanted.
I was so impressed, I actually bought the ability to work with the AI on a monthly basis to create more.
They have now pivoted to crypto / NFT space, where you can basically purchase a token to interface with their AI machine to generate your own. It is a fantastic, if expensive, experience, where you can type in a phrase and some modifiers about roughly describing what you want, and it pumps out some fantastic stuff.
Some of that is crap, some is kitsch, some is compelling and some is properly beautiful - and drawn by a computer?
It is also quite scary. And jolly interesting. Ta
GPT4 or 5 will give such a good impression of real general AL we will, for all intents and purposes, consider them conscious and intelligent, while not quite knowing whether they actually are, or not
Yes, its not perfect, some of it is rubbish, like GPT-x, you have to select from some rubbish, but it can produce some great stuff. I have had access for about a month and they people behind it have already significantly improved it.
Having spoken to them, basically they said if say all we did was train it for landscape of a certain limited set of styles it would be far better, but we have tried to develop a generalized system that can do all sorts of styles and subjects and all via some word / phrase input.
I should make it clear as well, this isn't my new venture that has kept me offline from PB or anything. I am not here trying to plug my own thing.
I am trying to work out which is more dull, the world bore draw due to super computer championship of Chess or the Beatles documentary.
Dunno. Does the Beatles documentary consist of exactly the same piece of footage repeated fourteen times?
Does the incomplete chorus of the same song being tootled on a guitar inbetween Paul McCartney ordering this lunch count?
Depends on what else (if anything) happens and how often this is repeated. One would need to see the Beatles documentary to offer a truly informed opinion. And no, I'm not volunteering.
NB Chess championship game three ends in a draw. I'm shocked.
I don't see the point of human chess championships now we know that computers can play the game better, more elegantly, more cleverly and creatively
It's a bit like favouring the Paralympics over the Olympics
Or bothering with the 100m when we have sports cars, or the high jump when we have aeroplanes, or darts when we have Kalashnikovs, or .......
No, chess is different. It is pure maths. And the beauty of it is in the elegance and brilliance of the maths, and computers are just way better at this, more elegant and brilliant
The equivalent is preferring to watch a man with his arms out running around pretending to be a plane while screaming wheeeeeeeee! as against watching Concorde in flight
"a man with his arms out running around pretending to be a plane while screaming wheeeeeeeee!"
"Moderna's chief medical officer said he suspects the new omicron variant may elude current vaccines, and if so, a reformulated shot could be available early in the new year"
I am trying to work out which is more dull, the world bore draw due to super computer championship of Chess or the Beatles documentary.
Dunno. Does the Beatles documentary consist of exactly the same piece of footage repeated fourteen times?
Does the incomplete chorus of the same song being tootled on a guitar inbetween Paul McCartney ordering this lunch count?
Depends on what else (if anything) happens and how often this is repeated. One would need to see the Beatles documentary to offer a truly informed opinion. And no, I'm not volunteering.
NB Chess championship game three ends in a draw. I'm shocked.
I don't see the point of human chess championships now we know that computers can play the game better, more elegantly, more cleverly and creatively
It's a bit like favouring the Paralympics over the Olympics
Computers also can, or shortly will be able to, knap flint or, random example, write novels better than us too. The human element may at least add some drama.
I have recently purchased some fantastic 1/1 art that was generated after I told an AI what sort of picture I wanted.
I was so impressed, I actually bought the ability to work with the AI on a monthly basis to create more.
They have now pivoted to crypto / NFT space, where you can basically purchase a token to interface with their AI machine to generate your own. It is a fantastic, if expensive, experience, where you can type in a phrase and some modifiers about roughly describing what you want, and it pumps out some fantastic stuff.
Some of that is crap, some is kitsch, some is compelling and some is properly beautiful - and drawn by a computer?
It is also quite scary. And jolly interesting. Ta
GPT4 or 5 will give such a good impression of real general AL we will, for all intents and purposes, consider them conscious and intelligent, while not quite knowing whether they actually are, or not
Yes, its not perfect, some of it is rubbish, like GPT-x, you have to select from some rubbish, but it can produce some great stuff. I have had access for about a month and they people behind it have already significantly improved it.
Having spoken to them, basically they said if say all we did was train it for landscape of a certain limited set of styles it would be far better, but we have tried to develop a generalized system that can do all sorts of styles and subjects and all via some word / phrase input.
I should make it clear as well, this isn't my new venture that has kept me offline from PB or anything. I am not here trying to plug my own thing.
Breaking: The Dutch #RIVM has confirmed 13 #Omicron cases out of the 61 positives. #coronavirus #Corona
That’s 13 cases of OMICRON THE MIGHTY on just one flight to Europe. How many flights have come from Southern Africa to Europe, N America, Asia, in the last week or so? There must be a few thousand cases seeded worldwide
It depends how it impacts vaccinated populations. Does it put significantly more people in hospitals and morgues? If it doesn't, it's a blip not a gamechanger.
Yes, the evidence so far is that Omicron is only bad news for the non double vaccinated in terms of potential hospitalisation and death, certainly that is true for the young.
Even the older double vaccinated should be protected from it according to most scientists estimations once they have had their boosters which most over 70s now have had
What it certainly does mean is that we need to get on with double vaxxing our younger people as a matter of urgency. Action this day as Boris's hero used to say.
To come back to an earlier point I made - at what stage will the government consider compulsory vaccinations ? Can't be far off if this is as bad as some fear.
They won't do it unless they're absolutely desperate. Can you imagine how much screaming there will be if they go down the route of punitive fines as in Austria, and it takes about five minutes for somebody to crunch the numbers and work out that they're being disproportionately inflicted upon black people with low incomes?
Yes.
But - how many of those vote Tory?
Given a choice between kicking a lot of Labour voters and having his own voters suffer due to pressure on the NHS and restrictions on the wider population, given his extremely factional, even transactional approach I wouldn't go bail for Johnson holding out.
The answer has always been no vaccination then no hospital treatment.
Nope. That is callous and sets a horrific precedent for other life choices. The answer (if there has to be one) is to dis/incentivise through the tax system.
Its callous to delay the non-covid medical treatment of others because hospitals are wasting their resources on anti-vaxxers.
But I'd be quite happy to financially dis-incentivise anti-vaxxers firstly through their tax codes and secondly through charging them for any medical treatment they receive.
To save an unvaccinated person from a horrible death by Covid is not a waste of NHS resources.
And if two other people die because NHS resources are being used on anti-vaxxers ?
Either the NHS is using resources on anti-vaxxers instead of on other patients or its continual whine about being 'overrun with anti-vaxxers' is a lie to shift blame from its own failings.
It is using scarce resource on treating Covid patients - many of whom aren't vaccinated - and this is a big part of why the system is stressed. But this isn't to say resource is being wasted. How is saving the life of an unvaccinated young Covid sufferer a waste of effort? Their life isn't worth saving because they've fallen prey to antivaxx crap, have an irrational needle phobia, are thick and lazy, or whatever? That's a rather crass sentiment imo.
Beacause, in the example give you, two other people die as a result of the resources focused on the antivaxxer
That is grotesquely unfair
Covid is imposing brutally hard choices, this may in the end be one of them. No vax, no treatment
Example:
Some hospitals in the Netherlands have stopped chemotherapy and organ transplants to make way for Covid patients in intensive care.
The Dutch Hospital Association for Critical Care said it had asked the health minister, Hugo de Jonge, to escalate the national Covid response plan so that regular care requiring an overnight stay would be cancelled, reports Reuters.
With the number of coronavirus patients in hospitals surging, experts have warned that hospitals will reach full capacity in just over a week if the virus is not contained. Earlier this week several Covid patients were transferred to hospitals in Germany.
“There are hospitals in several regions scaling back care,” a spokesperson for the hospital association said. “We are talking about care that requires a bed. That means a lot of appointments are being cancelled.”
All over the world, wherever healthcare systems are under stress, people with every condition other than Covid are being abandoned to deteriorate or die in the rush to treat the Covid cases. This was controversial enough when all the Covid patients were ill through no fault of their own. Now that most of the seriously ill cases are effectively self-inflicted, it absolutely stinks.
"For those of you just coming aboard, Carlsen, 30, has been at No 1 in the Fide rankings for 10 straight years and was considered the world’s best player even before he dethroned Viswanathan Anand for the title in 2013. Nepomniachtchi, 31, is ranked No 5, having earned his place at the table by winning the eight-man candidates tournament in April with a round to spare"
So they're both real people - not sure what angle the AI debate is coming from
Interesting that out of 61 positive patients off that plane only 13 had Omicron. It suggests Delta still has some mojo.
Bear in mind SA had extremely low case numbers until a few weeks ago which would be good news for a new variant trying to make a name for itself. So if they are now rising rapidly, and a large proportion are Delta, then maybe the growth advantage Omicron has isn’t so big after all.
As far as I can see there’s not much point panicking until we see vaccine efficacy stats against severe illness. If those hold up, then I think it’s as you were. If not then we need to get those repurposed jabs fast tracked.
But Omicron is already 80% of new cases in SA in surveyed region.....it took delta months to reach that versus Kent variant in any sample.
Doesn’t chime with anything like the 500% advantage being touted by some.
That plus founder effects in a low prevalence population, and the fact it’s almost certainly been around for longer than a few weeks, and I’m not buying (yet) this idea it’s got some kind of superhuman power.
R0 of endemic COVs is apparently around 7. Immune evasion seems like the most likely reason for outperformance, but so far that’s in a quite unusual population with low vax take up, partial immunity from natural infection, high HIV levels, and history of a previous epidemic of a variant (Beta) that never really took hold elsewhere.
Beta didn't take hold because delta out competed it....but all the experiments showed.current vavccines are poor against beta and reinfect is high. Even if Omicron is only a bit more infectious than Delta, so that it can outcompete, reinfection and vaccine escape are potential massive problems. Then if it is measles infectious plus all the other elements, that is why the world governments are shitting themselves, in a way they didn't over Beta or the similar Brazilian variant that had equivalent Beta mutations.
They did shit themselves over Beta and Brazil. Only a few months ago our geographer general Raab was putting France on the amber list because of Beta infections in “the French region of La Reunion”.
No evidence this variant is more infectious in a naive population, but plenty to suggest it has immune evasion properties. That puts it in a similar category to Beta. Maybe best we keep encouraging Delta to spread and outcompete it.
No...what our stupid government do with the silly travel list, where they put countries on and off it every other week, isn't the same as the basically every western government all acting within a day of one another. We haven't had that sort of reaction, even at the start or over Delta, certainly not over Beta or the Brazilian variant most similar to Beta.
Clearly all their scientific advisors are extremely worried. Now they might all be wrong, but we haven't seen this sort of reaction during the whole pandemic, where every major government acts in a very similar way basically at the same time.
Yes, it’s not the evidence that is alarming (it’s obscure), it is the reaction of people who see all the evidence unobscured - who are talking to their scientific & ministerial counterparts across the world.
It reminds me of early Wuhan. What got me worried there was not the disease itself but the way the Chinese reacted. Putting 60m people in hard quarantine. Stapling families into apartments. The Chinese had access to the best data and they were crapping themselves
The immediate global spasm over Omicron is eerily similar. Of course it still might be a mad global crapping-of-pants, and hysterical panic. But hmmm
I gotta disagree here. The response globally has been completely token. As the journos said to Boris, if it’s that concerning why aren’t you recommending WFH? “Err well you know there’s two variants. Anyway Saj will be on telly tomorrow, let’s see what he says”.
Why is SA not in lockdown? “We are considering new restrictions”. While bars, schools, restaurants and churches remain packed.
It’s hardly welding 1000 people into a concrete tower while getting the army to build battlefield hospitals in town squares.
I said it *reminds* me, not that it is identical, and this is why I am paying close attention to Omicron
As I remarked, this could still easily be a silly global panic - it also reminds me of the mainland European pant-wetting over Astra Zeneca. Remember how they all over-reacted and basically banned it, before sheepishly changing their minds. This could be that redux, just as it could be properly ominous
In that respect it differs from Wuhan. In Wuhan I was 100% sure this thing was bad, the evidence from China and the Chinese govt was inarguable
I am trying to work out which is more dull, the world bore draw due to super computer championship of Chess or the Beatles documentary.
Dunno. Does the Beatles documentary consist of exactly the same piece of footage repeated fourteen times?
Does the incomplete chorus of the same song being tootled on a guitar inbetween Paul McCartney ordering this lunch count?
Depends on what else (if anything) happens and how often this is repeated. One would need to see the Beatles documentary to offer a truly informed opinion. And no, I'm not volunteering.
NB Chess championship game three ends in a draw. I'm shocked.
I don't see the point of human chess championships now we know that computers can play the game better, more elegantly, more cleverly and creatively
It's a bit like favouring the Paralympics over the Olympics
Computers also can, or shortly will be able to, knap flint or, random example, write novels better than us too. The human element may at least add some drama.
I have recently purchased some fantastic 1/1 art that was generated after I told an AI what sort of picture I wanted.
I was so impressed, I actually bought the ability to work with the AI on a monthly basis to create more.
They have now pivoted to crypto / NFT space, where you can basically purchase a token to interface with their AI machine to generate your own. It is a fantastic, if expensive, experience, where you can type in a phrase and some modifiers about roughly describing what you want, and it pumps out some fantastic stuff.
Some of that is crap, some is kitsch, some is compelling and some is properly beautiful - and drawn by a computer?
It is also quite scary. And jolly interesting. Ta
GPT4 or 5 will give such a good impression of real general AL we will, for all intents and purposes, consider them conscious and intelligent, while not quite knowing whether they actually are, or not
Yes, its not perfect, some of it is rubbish, like GPT-x, you have to select from some rubbish, but it can produce some great stuff. I have had access for about a month and they people behind it have already significantly improved it.
Having spoken to them, basically they said if say all we did was train it for landscape of a certain limited set of styles it would be far better, but we have tried to develop a generalized system that can do all sorts of styles and subjects and all via some word / phrase input.
I should make it clear as well, this isn't my new venture that has kept me offline from PB or anything. I am not here trying to plug my own thing.
Breaking: The Dutch #RIVM has confirmed 13 #Omicron cases out of the 61 positives. #coronavirus #Corona
That’s 13 cases of OMICRON THE MIGHTY on just one flight to Europe. How many flights have come from Southern Africa to Europe, N America, Asia, in the last week or so? There must be a few thousand cases seeded worldwide
It depends how it impacts vaccinated populations. Does it put significantly more people in hospitals and morgues? If it doesn't, it's a blip not a gamechanger.
Yes, the evidence so far is that Omicron is only bad news for the non double vaccinated in terms of potential hospitalisation and death, certainly that is true for the young.
Even the older double vaccinated should be protected from it according to most scientists estimations once they have had their boosters which most over 70s now have had
What it certainly does mean is that we need to get on with double vaxxing our younger people as a matter of urgency. Action this day as Boris's hero used to say.
To come back to an earlier point I made - at what stage will the government consider compulsory vaccinations ? Can't be far off if this is as bad as some fear.
They won't do it unless they're absolutely desperate. Can you imagine how much screaming there will be if they go down the route of punitive fines as in Austria, and it takes about five minutes for somebody to crunch the numbers and work out that they're being disproportionately inflicted upon black people with low incomes?
Yes.
But - how many of those vote Tory?
Given a choice between kicking a lot of Labour voters and having his own voters suffer due to pressure on the NHS and restrictions on the wider population, given his extremely factional, even transactional approach I wouldn't go bail for Johnson holding out.
The answer has always been no vaccination then no hospital treatment.
Nope. That is callous and sets a horrific precedent for other life choices. The answer (if there has to be one) is to dis/incentivise through the tax system.
Its callous to delay the non-covid medical treatment of others because hospitals are wasting their resources on anti-vaxxers.
But I'd be quite happy to financially dis-incentivise anti-vaxxers firstly through their tax codes and secondly through charging them for any medical treatment they receive.
To save an unvaccinated person from a horrible death by Covid is not a waste of NHS resources.
And if two other people die because NHS resources are being used on anti-vaxxers ?
Either the NHS is using resources on anti-vaxxers instead of on other patients or its continual whine about being 'overrun with anti-vaxxers' is a lie to shift blame from its own failings.
It is using scarce resource on treating Covid patients - many of whom aren't vaccinated - and this is a big part of why the system is stressed. But this isn't to say resource is being wasted. How is saving the life of an unvaccinated young Covid sufferer a waste of effort? Their life isn't worth saving because they've fallen prey to antivaxx crap, have an irrational needle phobia, are thick and lazy, or whatever? That's a rather crass sentiment imo.
Beacause, in the example give you, two other people die as a result of the resources focused on the antivaxxer
That is grotesquely unfair
Covid is imposing brutally hard choices, this may in the end be one of them. No vax, no treatment
Example:
Some hospitals in the Netherlands have stopped chemotherapy and organ transplants to make way for Covid patients in intensive care.
The Dutch Hospital Association for Critical Care said it had asked the health minister, Hugo de Jonge, to escalate the national Covid response plan so that regular care requiring an overnight stay would be cancelled, reports Reuters.
With the number of coronavirus patients in hospitals surging, experts have warned that hospitals will reach full capacity in just over a week if the virus is not contained. Earlier this week several Covid patients were transferred to hospitals in Germany.
“There are hospitals in several regions scaling back care,” a spokesperson for the hospital association said. “We are talking about care that requires a bed. That means a lot of appointments are being cancelled.”
All over the world, wherever healthcare systems are under stress, people with every condition other than Covid are being abandoned to deteriorate or die in the rush to treat the Covid cases. This was controversial enough when all the Covid patients were ill through no fault of their own. Now that most of the seriously ill cases are effectively self-inflicted, it absolutely stinks.
Completely agree. Why is an antivaxxer given the chance to live, but the cancer patient left to die?
If you have to make this awful, needless, desperate choice, choose the cancer patient. This would also have the added benefit of pointing the last refuseniks to the jab
"For those of you just coming aboard, Carlsen, 30, has been at No 1 in the Fide rankings for 10 straight years and was considered the world’s best player even before he dethroned Viswanathan Anand for the title in 2013. Nepomniachtchi, 31, is ranked No 5, having earned his place at the table by winning the eight-man candidates tournament in April with a round to spare"
So they're both real people - not sure what angle the AI debate is coming from
Are we absolutely sure Carlsen isn't a robot?
All I know is that from reading a lot of PKD books if he is a robot then he wouldn't himself necessarily know.
Interesting that out of 61 positive patients off that plane only 13 had Omicron. It suggests Delta still has some mojo.
Bear in mind SA had extremely low case numbers until a few weeks ago which would be good news for a new variant trying to make a name for itself. So if they are now rising rapidly, and a large proportion are Delta, then maybe the growth advantage Omicron has isn’t so big after all.
As far as I can see there’s not much point panicking until we see vaccine efficacy stats against severe illness. If those hold up, then I think it’s as you were. If not then we need to get those repurposed jabs fast tracked.
But Omicron is already 80% of new cases in SA in surveyed region.....it took delta months to reach that versus Kent variant in any sample.
Doesn’t chime with anything like the 500% advantage being touted by some.
That plus founder effects in a low prevalence population, and the fact it’s almost certainly been around for longer than a few weeks, and I’m not buying (yet) this idea it’s got some kind of superhuman power.
R0 of endemic COVs is apparently around 7. Immune evasion seems like the most likely reason for outperformance, but so far that’s in a quite unusual population with low vax take up, partial immunity from natural infection, high HIV levels, and history of a previous epidemic of a variant (Beta) that never really took hold elsewhere.
Beta didn't take hold because delta out competed it....but all the experiments showed.current vavccines are poor against beta and reinfect is high. Even if Omicron is only a bit more infectious than Delta, so that it can outcompete, reinfection and vaccine escape are potential massive problems. Then if it is measles infectious plus all the other elements, that is why the world governments are shitting themselves, in a way they didn't over Beta or the similar Brazilian variant that had equivalent Beta mutations.
They did shit themselves over Beta and Brazil. Only a few months ago our geographer general Raab was putting France on the amber list because of Beta infections in “the French region of La Reunion”.
No evidence this variant is more infectious in a naive population, but plenty to suggest it has immune evasion properties. That puts it in a similar category to Beta. Maybe best we keep encouraging Delta to spread and outcompete it.
No...what our stupid government do with the silly travel list, where they put countries on and off it every other week, isn't the same as the basically every western government all acting within a day of one another. We haven't had that sort of reaction, even at the start or over Delta, certainly not over Beta or the Brazilian variant most similar to Beta.
Clearly all their scientific advisors are extremely worried. Now they might all be wrong, but we haven't seen this sort of reaction during the whole pandemic, where every major government acts in a very similar way basically at the same time.
Yes, it’s not the evidence that is alarming (it’s obscure), it is the reaction of people who see all the evidence unobscured - who are talking to their scientific & ministerial counterparts across the world.
It reminds me of early Wuhan. What got me worried there was not the disease itself but the way the Chinese reacted. Putting 60m people in hard quarantine. Stapling families into apartments. The Chinese had access to the best data and they were crapping themselves
The immediate global spasm over Omicron is eerily similar. Of course it still might be a mad global crapping-of-pants, and hysterical panic. But hmmm
I gotta disagree here. The response globally has been completely token. As the journos said to Boris, if it’s that concerning why aren’t you recommending WFH? “Err well you know there’s two variants. Anyway Saj will be on telly tomorrow, let’s see what he says”.
Why is SA not in lockdown? “We are considering new restrictions”. While bars, schools, restaurants and churches remain packed.
It’s hardly welding 1000 people into a concrete tower while getting the army to build battlefield hospitals in town squares.
I said it *reminds* me, not that it is identical, and this is why I am paying close attention to Omicron
As I remarked, this could still easily be a silly global panic - it also reminds me of the mainland European pant-wetting over Astra Zeneca. Remember how they all over-reacted and basically banned it, before sheepishly changing their minds. This could be that redux, just as it could be properly ominous
In that respect it differs from Wuhan. In Wuhan I was 100% sure this thing was bad, the evidence from China and the Chinese govt was inarguable
Yes and on that occasion you were instrumental in allowing me to a) move continents before the panic hit, b) move by pension to cash, c) buy a strip of deep out the money put options on the NYSE. So I owe you a drink.
But perhaps on this occasion it’s the other way around and rather than getting all glum, we should wait a few days more and then start buying March 22 oil futures.
"Moderna's chief medical officer said he suspects the new omicron variant may elude current vaccines, and if so, a reformulated shot could be available early in the new year"
I am trying to work out which is more dull, the world bore draw due to super computer championship of Chess or the Beatles documentary.
Dunno. Does the Beatles documentary consist of exactly the same piece of footage repeated fourteen times?
Does the incomplete chorus of the same song being tootled on a guitar inbetween Paul McCartney ordering this lunch count?
Depends on what else (if anything) happens and how often this is repeated. One would need to see the Beatles documentary to offer a truly informed opinion. And no, I'm not volunteering.
NB Chess championship game three ends in a draw. I'm shocked.
I don't see the point of human chess championships now we know that computers can play the game better, more elegantly, more cleverly and creatively
It's a bit like favouring the Paralympics over the Olympics
Computers also can, or shortly will be able to, knap flint or, random example, write novels better than us too. The human element may at least add some drama.
I have recently purchased some fantastic 1/1 art that was generated after I told an AI what sort of picture I wanted.
I was so impressed, I actually bought the ability to work with the AI on a monthly basis to create more.
They have now pivoted to crypto / NFT space, where you can basically purchase a token to interface with their AI machine to generate your own. It is a fantastic, if expensive, experience, where you can type in a phrase and some modifiers about roughly describing what you want, and it pumps out some fantastic stuff.
Some of that is crap, some is kitsch, some is compelling and some is properly beautiful - and drawn by a computer?
It is also quite scary. And jolly interesting. Ta
GPT4 or 5 will give such a good impression of real general AL we will, for all intents and purposes, consider them conscious and intelligent, while not quite knowing whether they actually are, or not
Yes, its not perfect, some of it is rubbish, like GPT-x, you have to select from some rubbish, but it can produce some great stuff. I have had access for about a month and they people behind it have already significantly improved it.
Having spoken to them, basically they said if say all we did was train it for landscape of a certain limited set of styles it would be far better, but we have tried to develop a generalized system that can do all sorts of styles and subjects and all via some word / phrase input.
I should make it clear as well, this isn't my new venture that has kept me offline from PB or anything. I am not here trying to plug my own thing.
You've got direct access to GPT3? Am Well Jel. I applied months back, have heard nothing
Breaking: The Dutch #RIVM has confirmed 13 #Omicron cases out of the 61 positives. #coronavirus #Corona
That’s 13 cases of OMICRON THE MIGHTY on just one flight to Europe. How many flights have come from Southern Africa to Europe, N America, Asia, in the last week or so? There must be a few thousand cases seeded worldwide
It depends how it impacts vaccinated populations. Does it put significantly more people in hospitals and morgues? If it doesn't, it's a blip not a gamechanger.
Yes, the evidence so far is that Omicron is only bad news for the non double vaccinated in terms of potential hospitalisation and death, certainly that is true for the young.
Even the older double vaccinated should be protected from it according to most scientists estimations once they have had their boosters which most over 70s now have had
What it certainly does mean is that we need to get on with double vaxxing our younger people as a matter of urgency. Action this day as Boris's hero used to say.
To come back to an earlier point I made - at what stage will the government consider compulsory vaccinations ? Can't be far off if this is as bad as some fear.
They won't do it unless they're absolutely desperate. Can you imagine how much screaming there will be if they go down the route of punitive fines as in Austria, and it takes about five minutes for somebody to crunch the numbers and work out that they're being disproportionately inflicted upon black people with low incomes?
Yes.
But - how many of those vote Tory?
Given a choice between kicking a lot of Labour voters and having his own voters suffer due to pressure on the NHS and restrictions on the wider population, given his extremely factional, even transactional approach I wouldn't go bail for Johnson holding out.
The answer has always been no vaccination then no hospital treatment.
Nope. That is callous and sets a horrific precedent for other life choices. The answer (if there has to be one) is to dis/incentivise through the tax system.
Its callous to delay the non-covid medical treatment of others because hospitals are wasting their resources on anti-vaxxers.
But I'd be quite happy to financially dis-incentivise anti-vaxxers firstly through their tax codes and secondly through charging them for any medical treatment they receive.
To save an unvaccinated person from a horrible death by Covid is not a waste of NHS resources.
And if two other people die because NHS resources are being used on anti-vaxxers ?
Either the NHS is using resources on anti-vaxxers instead of on other patients or its continual whine about being 'overrun with anti-vaxxers' is a lie to shift blame from its own failings.
It is using scarce resource on treating Covid patients - many of whom aren't vaccinated - and this is a big part of why the system is stressed. But this isn't to say resource is being wasted. How is saving the life of an unvaccinated young Covid sufferer a waste of effort? Their life isn't worth saving because they've fallen prey to antivaxx crap, have an irrational needle phobia, are thick and lazy, or whatever? That's a rather crass sentiment imo.
Beacause, in the example give you, two other people die as a result of the resources focused on the antivaxxer
That is grotesquely unfair
Covid is imposing brutally hard choices, this may in the end be one of them. No vax, no treatment
Example:
Some hospitals in the Netherlands have stopped chemotherapy and organ transplants to make way for Covid patients in intensive care.
The Dutch Hospital Association for Critical Care said it had asked the health minister, Hugo de Jonge, to escalate the national Covid response plan so that regular care requiring an overnight stay would be cancelled, reports Reuters.
With the number of coronavirus patients in hospitals surging, experts have warned that hospitals will reach full capacity in just over a week if the virus is not contained. Earlier this week several Covid patients were transferred to hospitals in Germany.
“There are hospitals in several regions scaling back care,” a spokesperson for the hospital association said. “We are talking about care that requires a bed. That means a lot of appointments are being cancelled.”
All over the world, wherever healthcare systems are under stress, people with every condition other than Covid are being abandoned to deteriorate or die in the rush to treat the Covid cases. This was controversial enough when all the Covid patients were ill through no fault of their own. Now that most of the seriously ill cases are effectively self-inflicted, it absolutely stinks.
Unacceptable IMO. Cancer patients should not be having their treatment cancelled.
I am trying to work out which is more dull, the world bore draw due to super computer championship of Chess or the Beatles documentary.
Dunno. Does the Beatles documentary consist of exactly the same piece of footage repeated fourteen times?
Does the incomplete chorus of the same song being tootled on a guitar inbetween Paul McCartney ordering this lunch count?
Depends on what else (if anything) happens and how often this is repeated. One would need to see the Beatles documentary to offer a truly informed opinion. And no, I'm not volunteering.
NB Chess championship game three ends in a draw. I'm shocked.
I don't see the point of human chess championships now we know that computers can play the game better, more elegantly, more cleverly and creatively
It's a bit like favouring the Paralympics over the Olympics
Computers also can, or shortly will be able to, knap flint or, random example, write novels better than us too. The human element may at least add some drama.
I have recently purchased some fantastic 1/1 art that was generated after I told an AI what sort of picture I wanted.
I was so impressed, I actually bought the ability to work with the AI on a monthly basis to create more.
They have now pivoted to crypto / NFT space, where you can basically purchase a token to interface with their AI machine to generate your own. It is a fantastic, if expensive, experience, where you can type in a phrase and some modifiers about roughly describing what you want, and it pumps out some fantastic stuff.
Some of that is crap, some is kitsch, some is compelling and some is properly beautiful - and drawn by a computer?
It is also quite scary. And jolly interesting. Ta
GPT4 or 5 will give such a good impression of real general AL we will, for all intents and purposes, consider them conscious and intelligent, while not quite knowing whether they actually are, or not
Yes, its not perfect, some of it is rubbish, like GPT-x, you have to select from some rubbish, but it can produce some great stuff. I have had access for about a month and they people behind it have already significantly improved it.
Having spoken to them, basically they said if say all we did was train it for landscape of a certain limited set of styles it would be far better, but we have tried to develop a generalized system that can do all sorts of styles and subjects and all via some word / phrase input.
I should make it clear as well, this isn't my new venture that has kept me offline from PB or anything. I am not here trying to plug my own thing.
You've got direct access to GPT3? Am Well Jel. I applied months back, have heard nothing
No, this is some specialist AI for art created by these guys out of Cambridge. It will cost you about £5k for access.
"For those of you just coming aboard, Carlsen, 30, has been at No 1 in the Fide rankings for 10 straight years and was considered the world’s best player even before he dethroned Viswanathan Anand for the title in 2013. Nepomniachtchi, 31, is ranked No 5, having earned his place at the table by winning the eight-man candidates tournament in April with a round to spare"
So they're both real people - not sure what angle the AI debate is coming from
Are we absolutely sure Carlsen isn't a robot?
I like the fact he refuses to play against computers.
Interesting that out of 61 positive patients off that plane only 13 had Omicron. It suggests Delta still has some mojo.
Bear in mind SA had extremely low case numbers until a few weeks ago which would be good news for a new variant trying to make a name for itself. So if they are now rising rapidly, and a large proportion are Delta, then maybe the growth advantage Omicron has isn’t so big after all.
As far as I can see there’s not much point panicking until we see vaccine efficacy stats against severe illness. If those hold up, then I think it’s as you were. If not then we need to get those repurposed jabs fast tracked.
But Omicron is already 80% of new cases in SA in surveyed region.....it took delta months to reach that versus Kent variant in any sample.
Doesn’t chime with anything like the 500% advantage being touted by some.
That plus founder effects in a low prevalence population, and the fact it’s almost certainly been around for longer than a few weeks, and I’m not buying (yet) this idea it’s got some kind of superhuman power.
R0 of endemic COVs is apparently around 7. Immune evasion seems like the most likely reason for outperformance, but so far that’s in a quite unusual population with low vax take up, partial immunity from natural infection, high HIV levels, and history of a previous epidemic of a variant (Beta) that never really took hold elsewhere.
Beta didn't take hold because delta out competed it....but all the experiments showed.current vavccines are poor against beta and reinfect is high. Even if Omicron is only a bit more infectious than Delta, so that it can outcompete, reinfection and vaccine escape are potential massive problems. Then if it is measles infectious plus all the other elements, that is why the world governments are shitting themselves, in a way they didn't over Beta or the similar Brazilian variant that had equivalent Beta mutations.
They did shit themselves over Beta and Brazil. Only a few months ago our geographer general Raab was putting France on the amber list because of Beta infections in “the French region of La Reunion”.
No evidence this variant is more infectious in a naive population, but plenty to suggest it has immune evasion properties. That puts it in a similar category to Beta. Maybe best we keep encouraging Delta to spread and outcompete it.
No...what our stupid government do with the silly travel list, where they put countries on and off it every other week, isn't the same as the basically every western government all acting within a day of one another. We haven't had that sort of reaction, even at the start or over Delta, certainly not over Beta or the Brazilian variant most similar to Beta.
Clearly all their scientific advisors are extremely worried. Now they might all be wrong, but we haven't seen this sort of reaction during the whole pandemic, where every major government acts in a very similar way basically at the same time.
Yes, it’s not the evidence that is alarming (it’s obscure), it is the reaction of people who see all the evidence unobscured - who are talking to their scientific & ministerial counterparts across the world.
It reminds me of early Wuhan. What got me worried there was not the disease itself but the way the Chinese reacted. Putting 60m people in hard quarantine. Stapling families into apartments. The Chinese had access to the best data and they were crapping themselves
The immediate global spasm over Omicron is eerily similar. Of course it still might be a mad global crapping-of-pants, and hysterical panic. But hmmm
I gotta disagree here. The response globally has been completely token. As the journos said to Boris, if it’s that concerning why aren’t you recommending WFH? “Err well you know there’s two variants. Anyway Saj will be on telly tomorrow, let’s see what he says”.
Why is SA not in lockdown? “We are considering new restrictions”. While bars, schools, restaurants and churches remain packed.
It’s hardly welding 1000 people into a concrete tower while getting the army to build battlefield hospitals in town squares.
I said it *reminds* me, not that it is identical, and this is why I am paying close attention to Omicron
As I remarked, this could still easily be a silly global panic - it also reminds me of the mainland European pant-wetting over Astra Zeneca. Remember how they all over-reacted and basically banned it, before sheepishly changing their minds. This could be that redux, just as it could be properly ominous
In that respect it differs from Wuhan. In Wuhan I was 100% sure this thing was bad, the evidence from China and the Chinese govt was inarguable
Yes and on that occasion you were instrumental in allowing me to a) move continents before the panic hit, b) move by pension to cash, c) buy a strip of deep out the money put options on the NYSE. So I owe you a drink.
But perhaps on this occasion it’s the other way around and rather than getting all glum, we should wait a few days more and then start buying March 22 oil futures.
FWIW I haven't sold my shares, yet, whereas I did in Feb 2020 - just in time
I will decide this week, I may not sell them at all. It's a tight call
I am trying to work out which is more dull, the world bore draw due to super computer championship of Chess or the Beatles documentary.
Dunno. Does the Beatles documentary consist of exactly the same piece of footage repeated fourteen times?
Does the incomplete chorus of the same song being tootled on a guitar inbetween Paul McCartney ordering this lunch count?
Depends on what else (if anything) happens and how often this is repeated. One would need to see the Beatles documentary to offer a truly informed opinion. And no, I'm not volunteering.
NB Chess championship game three ends in a draw. I'm shocked.
I don't see the point of human chess championships now we know that computers can play the game better, more elegantly, more cleverly and creatively
It's a bit like favouring the Paralympics over the Olympics
Computers also can, or shortly will be able to, knap flint or, random example, write novels better than us too. The human element may at least add some drama.
I have recently purchased some fantastic 1/1 art that was generated after I told an AI what sort of picture I wanted.
I was so impressed, I actually bought the ability to work with the AI on a monthly basis to create more.
They have now pivoted to crypto / NFT space, where you can basically purchase a token to interface with their AI machine to generate your own. It is a fantastic, if expensive, experience, where you can type in a phrase and some modifiers about roughly describing what you want, and it pumps out some fantastic stuff.
Some of that is crap, some is kitsch, some is compelling and some is properly beautiful - and drawn by a computer?
It is also quite scary. And jolly interesting. Ta
GPT4 or 5 will give such a good impression of real general AL we will, for all intents and purposes, consider them conscious and intelligent, while not quite knowing whether they actually are, or not
Yes, its not perfect, some of it is rubbish, like GPT-x, you have to select from some rubbish, but it can produce some great stuff. I have had access for about a month and they people behind it have already significantly improved it.
Having spoken to them, basically they said if say all we did was train it for landscape of a certain limited set of styles it would be far better, but we have tried to develop a generalized system that can do all sorts of styles and subjects and all via some word / phrase input.
I should make it clear as well, this isn't my new venture that has kept me offline from PB or anything. I am not here trying to plug my own thing.
Do they train against human art?
Yes.
Do you know roughly what metrics it uses to build up an image? Does it 'repaint' a photo or is taking the essence of a chunk of works and use that to produce another?
"For those of you just coming aboard, Carlsen, 30, has been at No 1 in the Fide rankings for 10 straight years and was considered the world’s best player even before he dethroned Viswanathan Anand for the title in 2013. Nepomniachtchi, 31, is ranked No 5, having earned his place at the table by winning the eight-man candidates tournament in April with a round to spare"
So they're both real people - not sure what angle the AI debate is coming from
Are we absolutely sure Carlsen isn't a robot?
I like the fact he refuses to play against computers.
Breaking: The Dutch #RIVM has confirmed 13 #Omicron cases out of the 61 positives. #coronavirus #Corona
That’s 13 cases of OMICRON THE MIGHTY on just one flight to Europe. How many flights have come from Southern Africa to Europe, N America, Asia, in the last week or so? There must be a few thousand cases seeded worldwide
It depends how it impacts vaccinated populations. Does it put significantly more people in hospitals and morgues? If it doesn't, it's a blip not a gamechanger.
Yes, the evidence so far is that Omicron is only bad news for the non double vaccinated in terms of potential hospitalisation and death, certainly that is true for the young.
Even the older double vaccinated should be protected from it according to most scientists estimations once they have had their boosters which most over 70s now have had
What it certainly does mean is that we need to get on with double vaxxing our younger people as a matter of urgency. Action this day as Boris's hero used to say.
To come back to an earlier point I made - at what stage will the government consider compulsory vaccinations ? Can't be far off if this is as bad as some fear.
They won't do it unless they're absolutely desperate. Can you imagine how much screaming there will be if they go down the route of punitive fines as in Austria, and it takes about five minutes for somebody to crunch the numbers and work out that they're being disproportionately inflicted upon black people with low incomes?
Yes.
But - how many of those vote Tory?
Given a choice between kicking a lot of Labour voters and having his own voters suffer due to pressure on the NHS and restrictions on the wider population, given his extremely factional, even transactional approach I wouldn't go bail for Johnson holding out.
The answer has always been no vaccination then no hospital treatment.
Nope. That is callous and sets a horrific precedent for other life choices. The answer (if there has to be one) is to dis/incentivise through the tax system.
Its callous to delay the non-covid medical treatment of others because hospitals are wasting their resources on anti-vaxxers.
But I'd be quite happy to financially dis-incentivise anti-vaxxers firstly through their tax codes and secondly through charging them for any medical treatment they receive.
To save an unvaccinated person from a horrible death by Covid is not a waste of NHS resources.
If it costs the life of someone else who doesn't get treated because the hospital is full of unvaxxed covid victims then yes it is a total and utter waste of time
Just not a take I can get behind at all. Brutalist and simplistic. Eg -
25 year old has serious Covid, not vaxed, listened to antivax propaganda and was swayed, bit thick. Has a 75% chance of pulling through if treated, then normal life expectancy.
75 year old, chain smoker, high BP, now has serious Covid despite being vaxed. Has a 25% chance if treated, then a life expectancy of 82.
"For those of you just coming aboard, Carlsen, 30, has been at No 1 in the Fide rankings for 10 straight years and was considered the world’s best player even before he dethroned Viswanathan Anand for the title in 2013. Nepomniachtchi, 31, is ranked No 5, having earned his place at the table by winning the eight-man candidates tournament in April with a round to spare"
So they're both real people - not sure what angle the AI debate is coming from
Are we absolutely sure Carlsen isn't a robot?
I like the fact he refuses to play against computers.
What would be the point? We've known computers can beat human players for a long time now, where's the entertainment or novelty value?
Interesting that out of 61 positive patients off that plane only 13 had Omicron. It suggests Delta still has some mojo.
Bear in mind SA had extremely low case numbers until a few weeks ago which would be good news for a new variant trying to make a name for itself. So if they are now rising rapidly, and a large proportion are Delta, then maybe the growth advantage Omicron has isn’t so big after all.
As far as I can see there’s not much point panicking until we see vaccine efficacy stats against severe illness. If those hold up, then I think it’s as you were. If not then we need to get those repurposed jabs fast tracked.
But Omicron is already 80% of new cases in SA in surveyed region.....it took delta months to reach that versus Kent variant in any sample.
Doesn’t chime with anything like the 500% advantage being touted by some.
That plus founder effects in a low prevalence population, and the fact it’s almost certainly been around for longer than a few weeks, and I’m not buying (yet) this idea it’s got some kind of superhuman power.
R0 of endemic COVs is apparently around 7. Immune evasion seems like the most likely reason for outperformance, but so far that’s in a quite unusual population with low vax take up, partial immunity from natural infection, high HIV levels, and history of a previous epidemic of a variant (Beta) that never really took hold elsewhere.
Beta didn't take hold because delta out competed it....but all the experiments showed.current vavccines are poor against beta and reinfect is high. Even if Omicron is only a bit more infectious than Delta, so that it can outcompete, reinfection and vaccine escape are potential massive problems. Then if it is measles infectious plus all the other elements, that is why the world governments are shitting themselves, in a way they didn't over Beta or the similar Brazilian variant that had equivalent Beta mutations.
They did shit themselves over Beta and Brazil. Only a few months ago our geographer general Raab was putting France on the amber list because of Beta infections in “the French region of La Reunion”.
No evidence this variant is more infectious in a naive population, but plenty to suggest it has immune evasion properties. That puts it in a similar category to Beta. Maybe best we keep encouraging Delta to spread and outcompete it.
No...what our stupid government do with the silly travel list, where they put countries on and off it every other week, isn't the same as the basically every western government all acting within a day of one another. We haven't had that sort of reaction, even at the start or over Delta, certainly not over Beta or the Brazilian variant most similar to Beta.
Clearly all their scientific advisors are extremely worried. Now they might all be wrong, but we haven't seen this sort of reaction during the whole pandemic, where every major government acts in a very similar way basically at the same time.
Yes, it’s not the evidence that is alarming (it’s obscure), it is the reaction of people who see all the evidence unobscured - who are talking to their scientific & ministerial counterparts across the world.
It reminds me of early Wuhan. What got me worried there was not the disease itself but the way the Chinese reacted. Putting 60m people in hard quarantine. Stapling families into apartments. The Chinese had access to the best data and they were crapping themselves
The immediate global spasm over Omicron is eerily similar. Of course it still might be a mad global crapping-of-pants, and hysterical panic. But hmmm
I gotta disagree here. The response globally has been completely token. As the journos said to Boris, if it’s that concerning why aren’t you recommending WFH? “Err well you know there’s two variants. Anyway Saj will be on telly tomorrow, let’s see what he says”.
Why is SA not in lockdown? “We are considering new restrictions”. While bars, schools, restaurants and churches remain packed.
It’s hardly welding 1000 people into a concrete tower while getting the army to build battlefield hospitals in town squares.
I said it *reminds* me, not that it is identical, and this is why I am paying close attention to Omicron
As I remarked, this could still easily be a silly global panic - it also reminds me of the mainland European pant-wetting over Astra Zeneca. Remember how they all over-reacted and basically banned it, before sheepishly changing their minds. This could be that redux, just as it could be properly ominous
In that respect it differs from Wuhan. In Wuhan I was 100% sure this thing was bad, the evidence from China and the Chinese govt was inarguable
Yes and on that occasion you were instrumental in allowing me to a) move continents before the panic hit, b) move by pension to cash, c) buy a strip of deep out the money put options on the NYSE. So I owe you a drink.
But perhaps on this occasion it’s the other way around and rather than getting all glum, we should wait a few days more and then start buying March 22 oil futures.
FWIW I haven't sold my shares, yet, whereas I did in Feb 2020 - just in time
I will decide this week, I may not sell them at all. It's a tight call
In late Feb 2020 there was a once in a lifetime one way bet to be had on the markets. It’s much more complex now, not least because how a covid wobble will impact market expectations of fed tapering. Just HODL and then BTFD.
I am trying to work out which is more dull, the world bore draw due to super computer championship of Chess or the Beatles documentary.
Dunno. Does the Beatles documentary consist of exactly the same piece of footage repeated fourteen times?
Does the incomplete chorus of the same song being tootled on a guitar inbetween Paul McCartney ordering this lunch count?
Depends on what else (if anything) happens and how often this is repeated. One would need to see the Beatles documentary to offer a truly informed opinion. And no, I'm not volunteering.
NB Chess championship game three ends in a draw. I'm shocked.
I don't see the point of human chess championships now we know that computers can play the game better, more elegantly, more cleverly and creatively
It's a bit like favouring the Paralympics over the Olympics
Computers also can, or shortly will be able to, knap flint or, random example, write novels better than us too. The human element may at least add some drama.
I have recently purchased some fantastic 1/1 art that was generated after I told an AI what sort of picture I wanted.
I was so impressed, I actually bought the ability to work with the AI on a monthly basis to create more.
They have now pivoted to crypto / NFT space, where you can basically purchase a token to interface with their AI machine to generate your own. It is a fantastic, if expensive, experience, where you can type in a phrase and some modifiers about roughly describing what you want, and it pumps out some fantastic stuff.
Some of that is crap, some is kitsch, some is compelling and some is properly beautiful - and drawn by a computer?
It is also quite scary. And jolly interesting. Ta
GPT4 or 5 will give such a good impression of real general AL we will, for all intents and purposes, consider them conscious and intelligent, while not quite knowing whether they actually are, or not
Yes, its not perfect, some of it is rubbish, like GPT-x, you have to select from some rubbish, but it can produce some great stuff. I have had access for about a month and they people behind it have already significantly improved it.
Having spoken to them, basically they said if say all we did was train it for landscape of a certain limited set of styles it would be far better, but we have tried to develop a generalized system that can do all sorts of styles and subjects and all via some word / phrase input.
I should make it clear as well, this isn't my new venture that has kept me offline from PB or anything. I am not here trying to plug my own thing.
Do they train against human art?
Yes.
Do you know roughly what metrics it uses to build up an image? Does it 'repaint' a photo or is taking the essence of a chunk of works and use that to produce another?
Although the developers are obviously some what secretive about their exact approach, as their algorithm is not open-source or a copy of anything out there, it is not trying to repaint a photo, no. You can provide any text you like, including foreign languages and things like emoji's and it will produce a 1/1 painting. It is a combination of two learning algorithms, one which has learned to paint from 10,000 of existing art, combined with an AI that has learned the meaning of words / phrases.
You can point it toward wanting basically a new monet style painting, or be more general e.g. luminism but you can also let it choose. And you can control say the season, time of day, what objects, colour, views you want in there etc etc etc.
So it is more than just what they call style transfer i.e. take a photo and make a van gogh version of that.
Interesting that out of 61 positive patients off that plane only 13 had Omicron. It suggests Delta still has some mojo.
Bear in mind SA had extremely low case numbers until a few weeks ago which would be good news for a new variant trying to make a name for itself. So if they are now rising rapidly, and a large proportion are Delta, then maybe the growth advantage Omicron has isn’t so big after all.
As far as I can see there’s not much point panicking until we see vaccine efficacy stats against severe illness. If those hold up, then I think it’s as you were. If not then we need to get those repurposed jabs fast tracked.
But Omicron is already 80% of new cases in SA in surveyed region.....it took delta months to reach that versus Kent variant in any sample.
Doesn’t chime with anything like the 500% advantage being touted by some.
That plus founder effects in a low prevalence population, and the fact it’s almost certainly been around for longer than a few weeks, and I’m not buying (yet) this idea it’s got some kind of superhuman power.
R0 of endemic COVs is apparently around 7. Immune evasion seems like the most likely reason for outperformance, but so far that’s in a quite unusual population with low vax take up, partial immunity from natural infection, high HIV levels, and history of a previous epidemic of a variant (Beta) that never really took hold elsewhere.
Beta didn't take hold because delta out competed it....but all the experiments showed.current vavccines are poor against beta and reinfect is high. Even if Omicron is only a bit more infectious than Delta, so that it can outcompete, reinfection and vaccine escape are potential massive problems. Then if it is measles infectious plus all the other elements, that is why the world governments are shitting themselves, in a way they didn't over Beta or the similar Brazilian variant that had equivalent Beta mutations.
They did shit themselves over Beta and Brazil. Only a few months ago our geographer general Raab was putting France on the amber list because of Beta infections in “the French region of La Reunion”.
No evidence this variant is more infectious in a naive population, but plenty to suggest it has immune evasion properties. That puts it in a similar category to Beta. Maybe best we keep encouraging Delta to spread and outcompete it.
No...what our stupid government do with the silly travel list, where they put countries on and off it every other week, isn't the same as the basically every western government all acting within a day of one another. We haven't had that sort of reaction, even at the start or over Delta, certainly not over Beta or the Brazilian variant most similar to Beta.
Clearly all their scientific advisors are extremely worried. Now they might all be wrong, but we haven't seen this sort of reaction during the whole pandemic, where every major government acts in a very similar way basically at the same time.
Yes, it’s not the evidence that is alarming (it’s obscure), it is the reaction of people who see all the evidence unobscured - who are talking to their scientific & ministerial counterparts across the world.
It reminds me of early Wuhan. What got me worried there was not the disease itself but the way the Chinese reacted. Putting 60m people in hard quarantine. Stapling families into apartments. The Chinese had access to the best data and they were crapping themselves
The immediate global spasm over Omicron is eerily similar. Of course it still might be a mad global crapping-of-pants, and hysterical panic. But hmmm
I gotta disagree here. The response globally has been completely token. As the journos said to Boris, if it’s that concerning why aren’t you recommending WFH? “Err well you know there’s two variants. Anyway Saj will be on telly tomorrow, let’s see what he says”.
Why is SA not in lockdown? “We are considering new restrictions”. While bars, schools, restaurants and churches remain packed.
It’s hardly welding 1000 people into a concrete tower while getting the army to build battlefield hospitals in town squares.
I said it *reminds* me, not that it is identical, and this is why I am paying close attention to Omicron
As I remarked, this could still easily be a silly global panic - it also reminds me of the mainland European pant-wetting over Astra Zeneca. Remember how they all over-reacted and basically banned it, before sheepishly changing their minds. This could be that redux, just as it could be properly ominous
In that respect it differs from Wuhan. In Wuhan I was 100% sure this thing was bad, the evidence from China and the Chinese govt was inarguable
Yes and on that occasion you were instrumental in allowing me to a) move continents before the panic hit, b) move by pension to cash, c) buy a strip of deep out the money put options on the NYSE. So I owe you a drink.
But perhaps on this occasion it’s the other way around and rather than getting all glum, we should wait a few days more and then start buying March 22 oil futures.
FWIW I haven't sold my shares, yet, whereas I did in Feb 2020 - just in time
I will decide this week, I may not sell them at all. It's a tight call
In wave 1 the biggest bounce back for shares came when we had vaccine efficacy numbers, several months before we had manu jabs in arms.
This time round even on a worst case scenario we'll have new working vaccines in 6 months so hard to see what basis there is for a really serious fall, at least on covid alone.
Breaking: The Dutch #RIVM has confirmed 13 #Omicron cases out of the 61 positives. #coronavirus #Corona
That’s 13 cases of OMICRON THE MIGHTY on just one flight to Europe. How many flights have come from Southern Africa to Europe, N America, Asia, in the last week or so? There must be a few thousand cases seeded worldwide
It depends how it impacts vaccinated populations. Does it put significantly more people in hospitals and morgues? If it doesn't, it's a blip not a gamechanger.
Yes, the evidence so far is that Omicron is only bad news for the non double vaccinated in terms of potential hospitalisation and death, certainly that is true for the young.
Even the older double vaccinated should be protected from it according to most scientists estimations once they have had their boosters which most over 70s now have had
What it certainly does mean is that we need to get on with double vaxxing our younger people as a matter of urgency. Action this day as Boris's hero used to say.
To come back to an earlier point I made - at what stage will the government consider compulsory vaccinations ? Can't be far off if this is as bad as some fear.
They won't do it unless they're absolutely desperate. Can you imagine how much screaming there will be if they go down the route of punitive fines as in Austria, and it takes about five minutes for somebody to crunch the numbers and work out that they're being disproportionately inflicted upon black people with low incomes?
Yes.
But - how many of those vote Tory?
Given a choice between kicking a lot of Labour voters and having his own voters suffer due to pressure on the NHS and restrictions on the wider population, given his extremely factional, even transactional approach I wouldn't go bail for Johnson holding out.
The answer has always been no vaccination then no hospital treatment.
Nope. That is callous and sets a horrific precedent for other life choices. The answer (if there has to be one) is to dis/incentivise through the tax system.
Its callous to delay the non-covid medical treatment of others because hospitals are wasting their resources on anti-vaxxers.
But I'd be quite happy to financially dis-incentivise anti-vaxxers firstly through their tax codes and secondly through charging them for any medical treatment they receive.
To save an unvaccinated person from a horrible death by Covid is not a waste of NHS resources.
If it costs the life of someone else who doesn't get treated because the hospital is full of unvaxxed covid victims then yes it is a total and utter waste of time
Just not a take I can get behind at all. Brutalist and simplistic.
Eg:
25 year old has Covid, not vaxed, listened to antivax propaganda and was swayed, bit thick. Has a 75% chance of pulling through if treated, then normal life expectancy.
75 year old, chain smoker, high BP, now has serious Covid despite being vaxed. Has a 25% chance if treated, then a life expectancy of 82.
Who should be treated if only one can be?
Yes, that's a tough decision. Give it to a mega-computer
Some are not so tough
25 year old has Covid, not vaxed, listened to antivax propaganda and was swayed, bit thick. Has a 75% chance of pulling through if treated, then normal life expectancy.
25 year old has cancer, has had the vaccines, has been in chemo for a long time, is a fighter with a long life expectancy if she can have her organ transplant
We had a week in Norway booked just before Christmas due to return on 22nd. With 5 of us going doing PCR tests will cost an extra £300ish. Then we have to hope that the PCR results come back v quickly so we could get things organised for the kids and family on Christmas Day. Looking very tight on timing and we and the other family going are considering calling it all off. This is caused by UK rules and not those in Norway. How many others are in similar positions with pre-Christmas travel?
RSA cases down to 2,858 today from 3200 yesterday. Given how big it had to get in India before Delta spread, and how long that took, not even obvious it'll get everywhere before new jabs are ready to go (for the developed world).
I am trying to work out which is more dull, the world bore draw due to super computer championship of Chess or the Beatles documentary.
Dunno. Does the Beatles documentary consist of exactly the same piece of footage repeated fourteen times?
Does the incomplete chorus of the same song being tootled on a guitar inbetween Paul McCartney ordering this lunch count?
Depends on what else (if anything) happens and how often this is repeated. One would need to see the Beatles documentary to offer a truly informed opinion. And no, I'm not volunteering.
NB Chess championship game three ends in a draw. I'm shocked.
I don't see the point of human chess championships now we know that computers can play the game better, more elegantly, more cleverly and creatively
It's a bit like favouring the Paralympics over the Olympics
Computers also can, or shortly will be able to, knap flint or, random example, write novels better than us too. The human element may at least add some drama.
I have recently purchased some fantastic 1/1 art that was generated after I told an AI what sort of picture I wanted.
I was so impressed, I actually bought the ability to work with the AI on a monthly basis to create more.
They have now pivoted to crypto / NFT space, where you can basically purchase a token to interface with their AI machine to generate your own. It is a fantastic, if expensive, experience, where you can type in a phrase and some modifiers about roughly describing what you want, and it pumps out some fantastic stuff.
Some of that is crap, some is kitsch, some is compelling and some is properly beautiful - and drawn by a computer?
It is also quite scary. And jolly interesting. Ta
GPT4 or 5 will give such a good impression of real general AL we will, for all intents and purposes, consider them conscious and intelligent, while not quite knowing whether they actually are, or not
Yes, its not perfect, some of it is rubbish, like GPT-x, you have to select from some rubbish, but it can produce some great stuff. I have had access for about a month and they people behind it have already significantly improved it.
Having spoken to them, basically they said if say all we did was train it for landscape of a certain limited set of styles it would be far better, but we have tried to develop a generalized system that can do all sorts of styles and subjects and all via some word / phrase input.
I should make it clear as well, this isn't my new venture that has kept me offline from PB or anything. I am not here trying to plug my own thing.
Do they train against human art?
Yes.
Do you know roughly what metrics it uses to build up an image? Does it 'repaint' a photo or is taking the essence of a chunk of works and use that to produce another?
Although the developers are obviously some what secretive about their exact approach, as their algorithm is not open-source or a copy of anything out there, it is not trying to repaint a photo, no. You can provide any text you like, including foreign languages and things like emoji's and it will produce a 1/1 painting. It is a combination of two learning algorithms, one which has learned to paint from 10,000 of existing art, combined with an AI that has learned the meaning of words / phrases.
You can point it toward wanting basically a new monet style painting, or be more general e.g. luminism but you can also let it choose.
Cheers!
If I was an artist I would be feeling a little aggrieved that some micro-aspect of my works was being used from their database. Maybe royalties are due to the long suffering creatives?
We have relatives from the USA arriving on 23rd December. What are they supposed to do? It will be just as tricky for them returning on 28th as the US requires a negative test 48 hours beforehand.
I am trying to work out which is more dull, the world bore draw due to super computer championship of Chess or the Beatles documentary.
Dunno. Does the Beatles documentary consist of exactly the same piece of footage repeated fourteen times?
Does the incomplete chorus of the same song being tootled on a guitar inbetween Paul McCartney ordering this lunch count?
Depends on what else (if anything) happens and how often this is repeated. One would need to see the Beatles documentary to offer a truly informed opinion. And no, I'm not volunteering.
NB Chess championship game three ends in a draw. I'm shocked.
I don't see the point of human chess championships now we know that computers can play the game better, more elegantly, more cleverly and creatively
It's a bit like favouring the Paralympics over the Olympics
Computers also can, or shortly will be able to, knap flint or, random example, write novels better than us too. The human element may at least add some drama.
I have recently purchased some fantastic 1/1 art that was generated after I told an AI what sort of picture I wanted.
I was so impressed, I actually bought the ability to work with the AI on a monthly basis to create more.
They have now pivoted to crypto / NFT space, where you can basically purchase a token to interface with their AI machine to generate your own. It is a fantastic, if expensive, experience, where you can type in a phrase and some modifiers about roughly describing what you want, and it pumps out some fantastic stuff.
Some of that is crap, some is kitsch, some is compelling and some is properly beautiful - and drawn by a computer?
It is also quite scary. And jolly interesting. Ta
GPT4 or 5 will give such a good impression of real general AL we will, for all intents and purposes, consider them conscious and intelligent, while not quite knowing whether they actually are, or not
Yes, its not perfect, some of it is rubbish, like GPT-x, you have to select from some rubbish, but it can produce some great stuff. I have had access for about a month and they people behind it have already significantly improved it.
Having spoken to them, basically they said if say all we did was train it for landscape of a certain limited set of styles it would be far better, but we have tried to develop a generalized system that can do all sorts of styles and subjects and all via some word / phrase input.
I should make it clear as well, this isn't my new venture that has kept me offline from PB or anything. I am not here trying to plug my own thing.
Do they train against human art?
Yes.
Do you know roughly what metrics it uses to build up an image? Does it 'repaint' a photo or is taking the essence of a chunk of works and use that to produce another?
Although the developers are obviously some what secretive about their exact approach, as their algorithm is not open-source or a copy of anything out there, it is not trying to repaint a photo, no. You can provide any text you like, including foreign languages and things like emoji's and it will produce a 1/1 painting. It is a combination of two learning algorithms, one which has learned to paint from 10,000 of existing art, combined with an AI that has learned the meaning of words / phrases.
GPT3 can, infamously, draw surreal but accurate images - never drawn before - simply from hearing a verbal description
We had a week in Norway booked just before Christmas due to return on 22nd. With 5 of us going doing PCR tests will cost an extra £300ish. Then we have to hope that the PCR results come back v quickly so we could get things organised for the kids and family on Christmas Day. Looking very tight on timing and we and the other family going are considering calling it all off. This is caused by UK rules and not those in Norway. How many others are in similar positions with pre-Christmas travel?
RSA cases down to 2,858 today from 3200 yesterday. Given how big it had to get in India before Delta spread, and how long that took, not even obvious it'll get everywhere before new jabs are ready to go (for the developed world).
I am trying to work out which is more dull, the world bore draw due to super computer championship of Chess or the Beatles documentary.
Dunno. Does the Beatles documentary consist of exactly the same piece of footage repeated fourteen times?
Does the incomplete chorus of the same song being tootled on a guitar inbetween Paul McCartney ordering this lunch count?
Depends on what else (if anything) happens and how often this is repeated. One would need to see the Beatles documentary to offer a truly informed opinion. And no, I'm not volunteering.
NB Chess championship game three ends in a draw. I'm shocked.
I don't see the point of human chess championships now we know that computers can play the game better, more elegantly, more cleverly and creatively
It's a bit like favouring the Paralympics over the Olympics
Computers also can, or shortly will be able to, knap flint or, random example, write novels better than us too. The human element may at least add some drama.
I have recently purchased some fantastic 1/1 art that was generated after I told an AI what sort of picture I wanted.
I was so impressed, I actually bought the ability to work with the AI on a monthly basis to create more.
They have now pivoted to crypto / NFT space, where you can basically purchase a token to interface with their AI machine to generate your own. It is a fantastic, if expensive, experience, where you can type in a phrase and some modifiers about roughly describing what you want, and it pumps out some fantastic stuff.
Some of that is crap, some is kitsch, some is compelling and some is properly beautiful - and drawn by a computer?
It is also quite scary. And jolly interesting. Ta
GPT4 or 5 will give such a good impression of real general AL we will, for all intents and purposes, consider them conscious and intelligent, while not quite knowing whether they actually are, or not
Yes, its not perfect, some of it is rubbish, like GPT-x, you have to select from some rubbish, but it can produce some great stuff. I have had access for about a month and they people behind it have already significantly improved it.
Having spoken to them, basically they said if say all we did was train it for landscape of a certain limited set of styles it would be far better, but we have tried to develop a generalized system that can do all sorts of styles and subjects and all via some word / phrase input.
I should make it clear as well, this isn't my new venture that has kept me offline from PB or anything. I am not here trying to plug my own thing.
Do they train against human art?
Yes.
Do you know roughly what metrics it uses to build up an image? Does it 'repaint' a photo or is taking the essence of a chunk of works and use that to produce another?
Although the developers are obviously some what secretive about their exact approach, as their algorithm is not open-source or a copy of anything out there, it is not trying to repaint a photo, no. You can provide any text you like, including foreign languages and things like emoji's and it will produce a 1/1 painting. It is a combination of two learning algorithms, one which has learned to paint from 10,000 of existing art, combined with an AI that has learned the meaning of words / phrases.
You can point it toward wanting basically a new monet style painting, or be more general e.g. luminism but you can also let it choose.
Cheers!
If I was an artist I would be feeling a little aggrieved that some micro-aspect of my works was being used from their database. Maybe royalties are due to the long suffering creatives?
There are millions of images of art that are royalty free to use and they aren't trying to sell those images, so I image any issues of royalties are null and void.
Breaking: The Dutch #RIVM has confirmed 13 #Omicron cases out of the 61 positives. #coronavirus #Corona
That’s 13 cases of OMICRON THE MIGHTY on just one flight to Europe. How many flights have come from Southern Africa to Europe, N America, Asia, in the last week or so? There must be a few thousand cases seeded worldwide
It depends how it impacts vaccinated populations. Does it put significantly more people in hospitals and morgues? If it doesn't, it's a blip not a gamechanger.
Yes, the evidence so far is that Omicron is only bad news for the non double vaccinated in terms of potential hospitalisation and death, certainly that is true for the young.
Even the older double vaccinated should be protected from it according to most scientists estimations once they have had their boosters which most over 70s now have had
What it certainly does mean is that we need to get on with double vaxxing our younger people as a matter of urgency. Action this day as Boris's hero used to say.
To come back to an earlier point I made - at what stage will the government consider compulsory vaccinations ? Can't be far off if this is as bad as some fear.
They won't do it unless they're absolutely desperate. Can you imagine how much screaming there will be if they go down the route of punitive fines as in Austria, and it takes about five minutes for somebody to crunch the numbers and work out that they're being disproportionately inflicted upon black people with low incomes?
Yes.
But - how many of those vote Tory?
Given a choice between kicking a lot of Labour voters and having his own voters suffer due to pressure on the NHS and restrictions on the wider population, given his extremely factional, even transactional approach I wouldn't go bail for Johnson holding out.
The answer has always been no vaccination then no hospital treatment.
Nope. That is callous and sets a horrific precedent for other life choices. The answer (if there has to be one) is to dis/incentivise through the tax system.
Its callous to delay the non-covid medical treatment of others because hospitals are wasting their resources on anti-vaxxers.
But I'd be quite happy to financially dis-incentivise anti-vaxxers firstly through their tax codes and secondly through charging them for any medical treatment they receive.
To save an unvaccinated person from a horrible death by Covid is not a waste of NHS resources.
If it costs the life of someone else who doesn't get treated because the hospital is full of unvaxxed covid victims then yes it is a total and utter waste of time
Just not a take I can get behind at all. Brutalist and simplistic.
Eg:
25 year old has Covid, not vaxed, listened to antivax propaganda and was swayed, bit thick. Has a 75% chance of pulling through if treated, then normal life expectancy.
75 year old, chain smoker, high BP, now has serious Covid despite being vaxed. Has a 25% chance if treated, then a life expectancy of 82.
Who should be treated if only one can be?
Yes, that's a tough decision. Give it to a mega-computer
Some are not so tough
25 year old has Covid, not vaxed, listened to antivax propaganda and was swayed, bit thick. Has a 75% chance of pulling through if treated, then normal life expectancy.
25 year old has cancer, has had the vaccines, has been in chemo for a long time, is a fighter with a long life expectancy if she can have her organ transplant
Who gets the hospital bed?
No brainer
Actually, what lies at the core of the objections to present policy is that nobody appears to be attempting to make any judgments like this at all. The presumption is automatically in favour of freeing capacity for Covid patients. It really doesn't matter if the person waiting for a liver transplant is an otherwise viable 12-year-old with their entire life still ahead of them, whereas the Covid patient is a 90-year-old anti-vaxxer who's deemed to have just enough fight left in their knackered old body to have some chance of survival. The 90-year-old gets put on a ventilator; if a suitable donor becomes available for the 12-year-old then the donor organs end up at the crematorium and the child keeps waiting.
We have healthcare rationing and Covid patients, unless deemed completely beyond saving, are always at the front of the queue. It's as simple as that.
I am trying to work out which is more dull, the world bore draw due to super computer championship of Chess or the Beatles documentary.
Dunno. Does the Beatles documentary consist of exactly the same piece of footage repeated fourteen times?
Does the incomplete chorus of the same song being tootled on a guitar inbetween Paul McCartney ordering this lunch count?
Depends on what else (if anything) happens and how often this is repeated. One would need to see the Beatles documentary to offer a truly informed opinion. And no, I'm not volunteering.
NB Chess championship game three ends in a draw. I'm shocked.
I don't see the point of human chess championships now we know that computers can play the game better, more elegantly, more cleverly and creatively
It's a bit like favouring the Paralympics over the Olympics
Computers also can, or shortly will be able to, knap flint or, random example, write novels better than us too. The human element may at least add some drama.
I have recently purchased some fantastic 1/1 art that was generated after I told an AI what sort of picture I wanted.
I was so impressed, I actually bought the ability to work with the AI on a monthly basis to create more.
They have now pivoted to crypto / NFT space, where you can basically purchase a token to interface with their AI machine to generate your own. It is a fantastic, if expensive, experience, where you can type in a phrase and some modifiers about roughly describing what you want, and it pumps out some fantastic stuff.
Some of that is crap, some is kitsch, some is compelling and some is properly beautiful - and drawn by a computer?
It is also quite scary. And jolly interesting. Ta
GPT4 or 5 will give such a good impression of real general AL we will, for all intents and purposes, consider them conscious and intelligent, while not quite knowing whether they actually are, or not
Yes, its not perfect, some of it is rubbish, like GPT-x, you have to select from some rubbish, but it can produce some great stuff. I have had access for about a month and they people behind it have already significantly improved it.
Having spoken to them, basically they said if say all we did was train it for landscape of a certain limited set of styles it would be far better, but we have tried to develop a generalized system that can do all sorts of styles and subjects and all via some word / phrase input.
I should make it clear as well, this isn't my new venture that has kept me offline from PB or anything. I am not here trying to plug my own thing.
Do they train against human art?
Yes.
Do you know roughly what metrics it uses to build up an image? Does it 'repaint' a photo or is taking the essence of a chunk of works and use that to produce another?
Although the developers are obviously some what secretive about their exact approach, as their algorithm is not open-source or a copy of anything out there, it is not trying to repaint a photo, no. You can provide any text you like, including foreign languages and things like emoji's and it will produce a 1/1 painting. It is a combination of two learning algorithms, one which has learned to paint from 10,000 of existing art, combined with an AI that has learned the meaning of words / phrases.
GPT3 can, infamously, draw surreal but accurate images - never drawn before - simply from hearing a verbal description
What is so striking here is that the developers of GPT3 never expected it to have this facility. It just emerged
This is basically the same as this AI I have access to, but you get the subtly of art e.g. things like the brush strokes. Also, I have full ownership of the IP of any art I generate. If I wanted I could start selling a load of prints / posters etc, because I actually got it because I was interested in the project and in the market for some unique art, as I move into a new house early next year and office based now.
RSA cases down to 2,858 today from 3200 yesterday. Given how big it had to get in India before Delta spread, and how long that took, not even obvious it'll get everywhere before new jabs are ready to go (for the developed world).
Breaking: The Dutch #RIVM has confirmed 13 #Omicron cases out of the 61 positives. #coronavirus #Corona
That’s 13 cases of OMICRON THE MIGHTY on just one flight to Europe. How many flights have come from Southern Africa to Europe, N America, Asia, in the last week or so? There must be a few thousand cases seeded worldwide
It depends how it impacts vaccinated populations. Does it put significantly more people in hospitals and morgues? If it doesn't, it's a blip not a gamechanger.
Yes, the evidence so far is that Omicron is only bad news for the non double vaccinated in terms of potential hospitalisation and death, certainly that is true for the young.
Even the older double vaccinated should be protected from it according to most scientists estimations once they have had their boosters which most over 70s now have had
What it certainly does mean is that we need to get on with double vaxxing our younger people as a matter of urgency. Action this day as Boris's hero used to say.
To come back to an earlier point I made - at what stage will the government consider compulsory vaccinations ? Can't be far off if this is as bad as some fear.
They won't do it unless they're absolutely desperate. Can you imagine how much screaming there will be if they go down the route of punitive fines as in Austria, and it takes about five minutes for somebody to crunch the numbers and work out that they're being disproportionately inflicted upon black people with low incomes?
Yes.
But - how many of those vote Tory?
Given a choice between kicking a lot of Labour voters and having his own voters suffer due to pressure on the NHS and restrictions on the wider population, given his extremely factional, even transactional approach I wouldn't go bail for Johnson holding out.
The answer has always been no vaccination then no hospital treatment.
Nope. That is callous and sets a horrific precedent for other life choices. The answer (if there has to be one) is to dis/incentivise through the tax system.
Its callous to delay the non-covid medical treatment of others because hospitals are wasting their resources on anti-vaxxers.
But I'd be quite happy to financially dis-incentivise anti-vaxxers firstly through their tax codes and secondly through charging them for any medical treatment they receive.
To save an unvaccinated person from a horrible death by Covid is not a waste of NHS resources.
If it costs the life of someone else who doesn't get treated because the hospital is full of unvaxxed covid victims then yes it is a total and utter waste of time
Just not a take I can get behind at all. Brutalist and simplistic.
Eg:
25 year old has Covid, not vaxed, listened to antivax propaganda and was swayed, bit thick. Has a 75% chance of pulling through if treated, then normal life expectancy.
75 year old, chain smoker, high BP, now has serious Covid despite being vaxed. Has a 25% chance if treated, then a life expectancy of 82.
Who should be treated if only one can be?
Yes, that's a tough decision. Give it to a mega-computer
Some are not so tough
25 year old has Covid, not vaxed, listened to antivax propaganda and was swayed, bit thick. Has a 75% chance of pulling through if treated, then normal life expectancy.
25 year old has cancer, has had the vaccines, has been in chemo for a long time, is a fighter with a long life expectancy if she can have her organ transplant
Who gets the hospital bed?
No brainer
Actually, what lies at the core of the objections to present policy is that nobody appears to be attempting to make any judgments like this at all. The presumption is automatically in favour of freeing capacity for Covid patients. It really doesn't matter if the person waiting for a liver transplant is an otherwise viable 12-year-old with their entire life still ahead of them, whereas the Covid patient is a 90-year-old anti-vaxxer who's deemed to have just enough fight left in their knackered old body to have some chance of survival. The 90-year-old gets put on a ventilator; if a suitable donor becomes available for the 12-year-old then the donor organs end up at the crematorium and the child keeps waiting.
We have healthcare rationing and Covid patients, unless deemed completely beyond saving, are always at the front of the queue. It's as simple as that.
I agree, it's bizarre how an assumption seems to be being made that Covid patients should always get priority over everyone else.
We have relatives from the USA arriving on 23rd December. What are they supposed to do? It will be just as tricky for them returning on 28th as the US requires a negative test 48 hours beforehand.
I really really hope I am wrong, but my honest guess is that they won't be coming. In about 3 weeks no one will be going anywhere.
Maybe prepare yourself for that possibility, practically and emotionally, and if I am wrong (yay!!) then feel free to come on here and mock me, mercilessly. I won't mind because I will be knee deep in champagne, celebrating the fact that Omicron was a needless mass panic
We had a week in Norway booked just before Christmas due to return on 22nd. With 5 of us going doing PCR tests will cost an extra £300ish. Then we have to hope that the PCR results come back v quickly so we could get things organised for the kids and family on Christmas Day. Looking very tight on timing and we and the other family going are considering calling it all off. This is caused by UK rules and not those in Norway. How many others are in similar positions with pre-Christmas travel?
You don't know what the rules are going to be in the UK or in Norway in three days' time, never mind three weeks' - and if any changes mean you have to take a test whilst you're over there and it comes back positive then you're absolutely sunk. If I were you and were worried about all of this buggering up the kids' Christmas then I'd be cancelling pronto, but that's your call of course.
We had a week in Norway booked just before Christmas due to return on 22nd. With 5 of us going doing PCR tests will cost an extra £300ish. Then we have to hope that the PCR results come back v quickly so we could get things organised for the kids and family on Christmas Day. Looking very tight on timing and we and the other family going are considering calling it all off. This is caused by UK rules and not those in Norway. How many others are in similar positions with pre-Christmas travel?
This is one of the reasons many of us gave up on the idea of foreign travel this year.
That’s such shitty journalism. Consider when the match was, and then consider the range of dates plotted on the chart. Unless a mutation includes time travel, I think we can rule it out.
Breaking: The Dutch #RIVM has confirmed 13 #Omicron cases out of the 61 positives. #coronavirus #Corona
That’s 13 cases of OMICRON THE MIGHTY on just one flight to Europe. How many flights have come from Southern Africa to Europe, N America, Asia, in the last week or so? There must be a few thousand cases seeded worldwide
It depends how it impacts vaccinated populations. Does it put significantly more people in hospitals and morgues? If it doesn't, it's a blip not a gamechanger.
Yes, the evidence so far is that Omicron is only bad news for the non double vaccinated in terms of potential hospitalisation and death, certainly that is true for the young.
Even the older double vaccinated should be protected from it according to most scientists estimations once they have had their boosters which most over 70s now have had
What it certainly does mean is that we need to get on with double vaxxing our younger people as a matter of urgency. Action this day as Boris's hero used to say.
To come back to an earlier point I made - at what stage will the government consider compulsory vaccinations ? Can't be far off if this is as bad as some fear.
They won't do it unless they're absolutely desperate. Can you imagine how much screaming there will be if they go down the route of punitive fines as in Austria, and it takes about five minutes for somebody to crunch the numbers and work out that they're being disproportionately inflicted upon black people with low incomes?
Yes.
But - how many of those vote Tory?
Given a choice between kicking a lot of Labour voters and having his own voters suffer due to pressure on the NHS and restrictions on the wider population, given his extremely factional, even transactional approach I wouldn't go bail for Johnson holding out.
The answer has always been no vaccination then no hospital treatment.
Nope. That is callous and sets a horrific precedent for other life choices. The answer (if there has to be one) is to dis/incentivise through the tax system.
Its callous to delay the non-covid medical treatment of others because hospitals are wasting their resources on anti-vaxxers.
But I'd be quite happy to financially dis-incentivise anti-vaxxers firstly through their tax codes and secondly through charging them for any medical treatment they receive.
To save an unvaccinated person from a horrible death by Covid is not a waste of NHS resources.
If it costs the life of someone else who doesn't get treated because the hospital is full of unvaxxed covid victims then yes it is a total and utter waste of time
Just not a take I can get behind at all. Brutalist and simplistic.
Eg:
25 year old has Covid, not vaxed, listened to antivax propaganda and was swayed, bit thick. Has a 75% chance of pulling through if treated, then normal life expectancy.
75 year old, chain smoker, high BP, now has serious Covid despite being vaxed. Has a 25% chance if treated, then a life expectancy of 82.
Who should be treated if only one can be?
Yes, that's a tough decision. Give it to a mega-computer
Some are not so tough
25 year old has Covid, not vaxed, listened to antivax propaganda and was swayed, bit thick. Has a 75% chance of pulling through if treated, then normal life expectancy.
25 year old has cancer, has had the vaccines, has been in chemo for a long time, is a fighter with a long life expectancy if she can have her organ transplant
Who gets the hospital bed?
No brainer
Mine is not tough at all. You treat the otherwise healthy 25 year old. Yours is the toughie. It's absolutely not a no-brainer. Treating those in need based on the medical criteria of urgency and risk and benefit, and keeping judgments as to their worthiness as human beings out of it, is a core principle of our public healthcare system. We won't be - and shouldn't be - tossing it over because of Covid.
I am trying to work out which is more dull, the world bore draw due to super computer championship of Chess or the Beatles documentary.
Dunno. Does the Beatles documentary consist of exactly the same piece of footage repeated fourteen times?
Does the incomplete chorus of the same song being tootled on a guitar inbetween Paul McCartney ordering this lunch count?
Depends on what else (if anything) happens and how often this is repeated. One would need to see the Beatles documentary to offer a truly informed opinion. And no, I'm not volunteering.
NB Chess championship game three ends in a draw. I'm shocked.
I don't see the point of human chess championships now we know that computers can play the game better, more elegantly, more cleverly and creatively
It's a bit like favouring the Paralympics over the Olympics
Computers also can, or shortly will be able to, knap flint or, random example, write novels better than us too. The human element may at least add some drama.
I have recently purchased some fantastic 1/1 art that was generated after I told an AI what sort of picture I wanted.
I was so impressed, I actually bought the ability to work with the AI on a monthly basis to create more.
They have now pivoted to crypto / NFT space, where you can basically purchase a token to interface with their AI machine to generate your own. It is a fantastic, if expensive, experience, where you can type in a phrase and some modifiers about roughly describing what you want, and it pumps out some fantastic stuff.
Some of that is crap, some is kitsch, some is compelling and some is properly beautiful - and drawn by a computer?
It is also quite scary. And jolly interesting. Ta
GPT4 or 5 will give such a good impression of real general AL we will, for all intents and purposes, consider them conscious and intelligent, while not quite knowing whether they actually are, or not
Yes, its not perfect, some of it is rubbish, like GPT-x, you have to select from some rubbish, but it can produce some great stuff. I have had access for about a month and they people behind it have already significantly improved it.
Having spoken to them, basically they said if say all we did was train it for landscape of a certain limited set of styles it would be far better, but we have tried to develop a generalized system that can do all sorts of styles and subjects and all via some word / phrase input.
I should make it clear as well, this isn't my new venture that has kept me offline from PB or anything. I am not here trying to plug my own thing.
Do they train against human art?
Yes.
Do you know roughly what metrics it uses to build up an image? Does it 'repaint' a photo or is taking the essence of a chunk of works and use that to produce another?
Although the developers are obviously some what secretive about their exact approach, as their algorithm is not open-source or a copy of anything out there, it is not trying to repaint a photo, no. You can provide any text you like, including foreign languages and things like emoji's and it will produce a 1/1 painting. It is a combination of two learning algorithms, one which has learned to paint from 10,000 of existing art, combined with an AI that has learned the meaning of words / phrases.
You can point it toward wanting basically a new monet style painting, or be more general e.g. luminism but you can also let it choose.
Cheers!
If I was an artist I would be feeling a little aggrieved that some micro-aspect of my works was being used from their database. Maybe royalties are due to the long suffering creatives?
There are millions of images of art that are royalty free to use and they aren't trying to sell those images, so I image any issues of royalties are null and void.
Yes, for sure. What interests me in painting is you can almost see some reflection of the artists brain in their work. Their thought patterns and styles. When I paint I see similar patterns appearing and further reinforcing themselves. But also new ones being developed when I have to think about about a new idea.
I'm, sure the AI does simillar things. Yet, it has been designed to do so. Say a bridge appears in its work that looks similar to a bridge on one of the database paintings is it copying? Does it amalgamate all the pictures of bridges it sees and produce some average?
Breaking: The Dutch #RIVM has confirmed 13 #Omicron cases out of the 61 positives. #coronavirus #Corona
That’s 13 cases of OMICRON THE MIGHTY on just one flight to Europe. How many flights have come from Southern Africa to Europe, N America, Asia, in the last week or so? There must be a few thousand cases seeded worldwide
It depends how it impacts vaccinated populations. Does it put significantly more people in hospitals and morgues? If it doesn't, it's a blip not a gamechanger.
Yes, the evidence so far is that Omicron is only bad news for the non double vaccinated in terms of potential hospitalisation and death, certainly that is true for the young.
Even the older double vaccinated should be protected from it according to most scientists estimations once they have had their boosters which most over 70s now have had
What it certainly does mean is that we need to get on with double vaxxing our younger people as a matter of urgency. Action this day as Boris's hero used to say.
To come back to an earlier point I made - at what stage will the government consider compulsory vaccinations ? Can't be far off if this is as bad as some fear.
They won't do it unless they're absolutely desperate. Can you imagine how much screaming there will be if they go down the route of punitive fines as in Austria, and it takes about five minutes for somebody to crunch the numbers and work out that they're being disproportionately inflicted upon black people with low incomes?
Yes.
But - how many of those vote Tory?
Given a choice between kicking a lot of Labour voters and having his own voters suffer due to pressure on the NHS and restrictions on the wider population, given his extremely factional, even transactional approach I wouldn't go bail for Johnson holding out.
The answer has always been no vaccination then no hospital treatment.
Nope. That is callous and sets a horrific precedent for other life choices. The answer (if there has to be one) is to dis/incentivise through the tax system.
Its callous to delay the non-covid medical treatment of others because hospitals are wasting their resources on anti-vaxxers.
But I'd be quite happy to financially dis-incentivise anti-vaxxers firstly through their tax codes and secondly through charging them for any medical treatment they receive.
To save an unvaccinated person from a horrible death by Covid is not a waste of NHS resources.
If it costs the life of someone else who doesn't get treated because the hospital is full of unvaxxed covid victims then yes it is a total and utter waste of time
Just not a take I can get behind at all. Brutalist and simplistic.
Eg:
25 year old has Covid, not vaxed, listened to antivax propaganda and was swayed, bit thick. Has a 75% chance of pulling through if treated, then normal life expectancy.
75 year old, chain smoker, high BP, now has serious Covid despite being vaxed. Has a 25% chance if treated, then a life expectancy of 82.
Who should be treated if only one can be?
Yes, that's a tough decision. Give it to a mega-computer
Some are not so tough
25 year old has Covid, not vaxed, listened to antivax propaganda and was swayed, bit thick. Has a 75% chance of pulling through if treated, then normal life expectancy.
25 year old has cancer, has had the vaccines, has been in chemo for a long time, is a fighter with a long life expectancy if she can have her organ transplant
Who gets the hospital bed?
No brainer
Actually, what lies at the core of the objections to present policy is that nobody appears to be attempting to make any judgments like this at all. The presumption is automatically in favour of freeing capacity for Covid patients. It really doesn't matter if the person waiting for a liver transplant is an otherwise viable 12-year-old with their entire life still ahead of them, whereas the Covid patient is a 90-year-old anti-vaxxer who's deemed to have just enough fight left in their knackered old body to have some chance of survival. The 90-year-old gets put on a ventilator; if a suitable donor becomes available for the 12-year-old then the donor organs end up at the crematorium and the child keeps waiting.
We have healthcare rationing and Covid patients, unless deemed completely beyond saving, are always at the front of the queue. It's as simple as that.
It's not true.
Hardly any covid patients over 65 get ventilated at all, and only under 45s get ECMO, due to the very poor prognosis.
Admitting a cancer patient for organ transplant (an unusual scenario) would put them at high risk of hospital acquired covid, with a poor prognosis.
ICU ward liaison teams make these decisions every day as to who is most likely to benefit from treatment. The numbers admitted depend more on staffing than machines or space, and ICU nurses have had dreadful attrition over the last 18 months and are in short supply.
Breaking: The Dutch #RIVM has confirmed 13 #Omicron cases out of the 61 positives. #coronavirus #Corona
That’s 13 cases of OMICRON THE MIGHTY on just one flight to Europe. How many flights have come from Southern Africa to Europe, N America, Asia, in the last week or so? There must be a few thousand cases seeded worldwide
It depends how it impacts vaccinated populations. Does it put significantly more people in hospitals and morgues? If it doesn't, it's a blip not a gamechanger.
Yes, the evidence so far is that Omicron is only bad news for the non double vaccinated in terms of potential hospitalisation and death, certainly that is true for the young.
Even the older double vaccinated should be protected from it according to most scientists estimations once they have had their boosters which most over 70s now have had
What it certainly does mean is that we need to get on with double vaxxing our younger people as a matter of urgency. Action this day as Boris's hero used to say.
To come back to an earlier point I made - at what stage will the government consider compulsory vaccinations ? Can't be far off if this is as bad as some fear.
They won't do it unless they're absolutely desperate. Can you imagine how much screaming there will be if they go down the route of punitive fines as in Austria, and it takes about five minutes for somebody to crunch the numbers and work out that they're being disproportionately inflicted upon black people with low incomes?
Yes.
But - how many of those vote Tory?
Given a choice between kicking a lot of Labour voters and having his own voters suffer due to pressure on the NHS and restrictions on the wider population, given his extremely factional, even transactional approach I wouldn't go bail for Johnson holding out.
The answer has always been no vaccination then no hospital treatment.
Nope. That is callous and sets a horrific precedent for other life choices. The answer (if there has to be one) is to dis/incentivise through the tax system.
Its callous to delay the non-covid medical treatment of others because hospitals are wasting their resources on anti-vaxxers.
But I'd be quite happy to financially dis-incentivise anti-vaxxers firstly through their tax codes and secondly through charging them for any medical treatment they receive.
To save an unvaccinated person from a horrible death by Covid is not a waste of NHS resources.
And if two other people die because NHS resources are being used on anti-vaxxers ?
Either the NHS is using resources on anti-vaxxers instead of on other patients or its continual whine about being 'overrun with anti-vaxxers' is a lie to shift blame from its own failings.
It is using scarce resource on treating Covid patients - many of whom aren't vaccinated - and this is a big part of why the system is stressed. But this isn't to say resource is being wasted. How is saving the life of an unvaccinated young Covid sufferer a waste of effort? Their life isn't worth saving because they've fallen prey to antivaxx crap, have an irrational needle phobia, are thick and lazy, or whatever? That's a rather crass sentiment imo.
I think of it more as the ease at which they could've prevented their predicament.
Yes this opens the door to criticising those who's lifestyles increase their risk of needing hospital treatment. But I plead extraordinary circumstances and during a pandemic this should be the case.
There are a limited number of beds which the anti-vax are occupying when they should not be. To triage against them may be distasteful but is it unethical? We would certainly be rationing care if the health service was to collapse. And for those with less urgent conditions it effectively has.
I would propose a deadline that beyond which those who through choice have not been vaccinated should receive care after others within the system. Cos if we don't isn't the treatment backlog just going to increase?
Try and picture it though. If you can't picture it, it's a sign it's not a serious option. A young person in acute distress with Covid requires hospital treatment without which they will die. Their partner calls an ambulance.
"Did she get the vaccine?" "No." "Ah. Terribly sorry then but no dice."
Speaking to Sky News, Labour's shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy said it was "unconscionable" that France and the UK government were "engaging in a blame game while children drown off our coastline".
She said her party would work with international partners to "open up safe and legal routes" for refugees in order "to pull the rug out from under the business model that these smugglers currently rely on".
My biggest worry over Labour was them opening up the flood gates on immigration and now they confirm they're doing it. And if this is just the stuff they are saying out loud, imagine what else they will do in office. I really wanted to vote against Boris in the next election, but not at the cost of bad immigration decisions that will last decades.
That's a weird interpretation of Nandy's sensible comments. There's nothing in what she says that suggests any 'floodgate' opening. She's merely pointing out the truth: the Channel crossings are mainly a consequence of an absence of legal routes for genuine asylum seekers.
It’s a convenient interpretation. Asylum claims are down significantly over the last few years.
Funnily enough they tend to go up and down with levels of conflict and repression abroad. Plenty of that about as always, but less than at the height of the Arab Spring, Syrian conflict or ISIS surge.
Asylum claims to UK reach highest level in nearly 20 years
Breaking: The Dutch #RIVM has confirmed 13 #Omicron cases out of the 61 positives. #coronavirus #Corona
That’s 13 cases of OMICRON THE MIGHTY on just one flight to Europe. How many flights have come from Southern Africa to Europe, N America, Asia, in the last week or so? There must be a few thousand cases seeded worldwide
It depends how it impacts vaccinated populations. Does it put significantly more people in hospitals and morgues? If it doesn't, it's a blip not a gamechanger.
Yes, the evidence so far is that Omicron is only bad news for the non double vaccinated in terms of potential hospitalisation and death, certainly that is true for the young.
Even the older double vaccinated should be protected from it according to most scientists estimations once they have had their boosters which most over 70s now have had
What it certainly does mean is that we need to get on with double vaxxing our younger people as a matter of urgency. Action this day as Boris's hero used to say.
To come back to an earlier point I made - at what stage will the government consider compulsory vaccinations ? Can't be far off if this is as bad as some fear.
They won't do it unless they're absolutely desperate. Can you imagine how much screaming there will be if they go down the route of punitive fines as in Austria, and it takes about five minutes for somebody to crunch the numbers and work out that they're being disproportionately inflicted upon black people with low incomes?
Yes.
But - how many of those vote Tory?
Given a choice between kicking a lot of Labour voters and having his own voters suffer due to pressure on the NHS and restrictions on the wider population, given his extremely factional, even transactional approach I wouldn't go bail for Johnson holding out.
The answer has always been no vaccination then no hospital treatment.
Nope. That is callous and sets a horrific precedent for other life choices. The answer (if there has to be one) is to dis/incentivise through the tax system.
Its callous to delay the non-covid medical treatment of others because hospitals are wasting their resources on anti-vaxxers.
But I'd be quite happy to financially dis-incentivise anti-vaxxers firstly through their tax codes and secondly through charging them for any medical treatment they receive.
To save an unvaccinated person from a horrible death by Covid is not a waste of NHS resources.
If it costs the life of someone else who doesn't get treated because the hospital is full of unvaxxed covid victims then yes it is a total and utter waste of time
Just not a take I can get behind at all. Brutalist and simplistic. Eg -
25 year old has serious Covid, not vaxed, listened to antivax propaganda and was swayed, bit thick. Has a 75% chance of pulling through if treated, then normal life expectancy.
75 year old, chain smoker, high BP, now has serious Covid despite being vaxed. Has a 25% chance if treated, then a life expectancy of 82.
Who should be treated if only one can be?
Total bollocks from you as usual as you pit two unequal examples....why not 25 year old anti vaxxer with 75% to live if treated vs 25 year old with something not his fault and with 75% chance to live if treated.....this situation fuck the anti vaxxer letting him die just improves the gene pool. He is a darwin award winner grats him....
Comments
I was so impressed, I actually bought the ability to work with the AI on a monthly basis to create more.
The equivalent is preferring to watch a man with his arms out running around pretending to be a plane while screaming wheeeeeeeee! as against watching Concorde in flight
Chess is really beautiful as it shows what the human mind can think at elite levels -
Stanley Baldwin would be much higher up the list of PMs by tenure if the period of his dominance were counted.
Magnus Carlsen and Ian Nepomniachtchi both AIs or something?
I am also intrigued how far this frontier-closing will go
https://www.artaigallery.com/collections/all-items/nature
It is particularly good at landscape.
They have now pivoted to crypto / NFT space, where you can basically purchase a token to interface with their AI machine to generate your own. It is a fantastic, if expensive, experience, where you can type in a phrase and some modifiers about roughly describing what you want, and it pumps out some fantastic stuff.
I'd also argue the New Party as a Labour offshoot, but they got utterly routed in 1931.
Took significantly longer to beat humans too.
Still hasn't "solved" the game either. Too many variables and potential moves especially in the opening.
It is also quite scary. And jolly interesting. Ta
GPT4 or 5 will give such a good impression of real general AL we will, for all intents and purposes, consider them conscious and intelligent, while not quite knowing whether they actually are, or not
I guess we first need a definition of art.
"For those of you just coming aboard, Carlsen, 30, has been at No 1 in the Fide rankings for 10 straight years and was considered the world’s best player even before he dethroned Viswanathan Anand for the title in 2013. Nepomniachtchi, 31, is ranked No 5, having earned his place at the table by winning the eight-man candidates tournament in April with a round to spare"
So they're both real people - not sure what angle the AI debate is coming from
Yes this opens the door to criticising those who's lifestyles increase their risk of needing hospital treatment. But I plead extraordinary circumstances and during a pandemic this should be the case.
There are a limited number of beds which the anti-vax are occupying when they should not be. To triage against them may be distasteful but is it unethical? We would certainly be rationing care if the health service was to collapse. And for those with less urgent conditions it effectively has.
I would propose a deadline that beyond which those who through choice have not been vaccinated should receive care after others within the system. Cos if we don't isn't the treatment backlog just going to increase?
Why is SA not in lockdown? “We are considering new restrictions”. While bars, schools, restaurants and churches remain packed.
It’s hardly welding 1000 people into a concrete tower while getting the army to build battlefield hospitals in town squares.
Having spoken to them, basically they said if say all we did was train it for landscape of a certain limited set of styles it would be far better, but we have tried to develop a generalized system that can do all sorts of styles and subjects and all via some word / phrase input.
I should make it clear as well, this isn't my new venture that has kept me offline from PB or anything. I am not here trying to plug my own thing.
You've seen a leaked copy of Bozo's next speech?
"Moderna's chief medical officer said he suspects the new omicron variant may elude current vaccines, and if so, a reformulated shot could be available early in the new year"
https://twitter.com/business/status/1464932874034061312?s=20
Some hospitals in the Netherlands have stopped chemotherapy and organ transplants to make way for Covid patients in intensive care.
The Dutch Hospital Association for Critical Care said it had asked the health minister, Hugo de Jonge, to escalate the national Covid response plan so that regular care requiring an overnight stay would be cancelled, reports Reuters.
With the number of coronavirus patients in hospitals surging, experts have warned that hospitals will reach full capacity in just over a week if the virus is not contained. Earlier this week several Covid patients were transferred to hospitals in Germany.
“There are hospitals in several regions scaling back care,” a spokesperson for the hospital association said. “We are talking about care that requires a bed. That means a lot of appointments are being cancelled.”
All over the world, wherever healthcare systems are under stress, people with every condition other than Covid are being abandoned to deteriorate or die in the rush to treat the Covid cases. This was controversial enough when all the Covid patients were ill through no fault of their own. Now that most of the seriously ill cases are effectively self-inflicted, it absolutely stinks.
As I remarked, this could still easily be a silly global panic - it also reminds me of the mainland European pant-wetting over Astra Zeneca. Remember how they all over-reacted and basically banned it, before sheepishly changing their minds. This could be that redux, just as it could be properly ominous
In that respect it differs from Wuhan. In Wuhan I was 100% sure this thing was bad, the evidence from China and the Chinese govt was inarguable
https://www.twitch.tv/levitovchess
If you have to make this awful, needless, desperate choice, choose the cancer patient. This would also have the added benefit of pointing the last refuseniks to the jab
But perhaps on this occasion it’s the other way around and rather than getting all glum, we should wait a few days more and then start buying March 22 oil futures.
I will decide this week, I may not sell them at all. It's a tight call
25 year old has serious Covid, not vaxed, listened to antivax propaganda and was swayed, bit thick. Has a 75% chance of pulling through if treated, then normal life expectancy.
75 year old, chain smoker, high BP, now has serious Covid despite being vaxed. Has a 25% chance if treated, then a life expectancy of 82.
Who should be treated if only one can be?
My humans are not good.
You can point it toward wanting basically a new monet style painting, or be more general e.g. luminism but you can also let it choose. And you can control say the season, time of day, what objects, colour, views you want in there etc etc etc.
So it is more than just what they call style transfer i.e. take a photo and make a van gogh version of that.
This time round even on a worst case scenario we'll have new working vaccines in 6 months so hard to see what basis there is for a really serious fall, at least on covid alone.
Some are not so tough
25 year old has Covid, not vaxed, listened to antivax propaganda and was swayed, bit thick. Has a 75% chance of pulling through if treated, then normal life expectancy.
25 year old has cancer, has had the vaccines, has been in chemo for a long time, is a fighter with a long life expectancy if she can have her organ transplant
Who gets the hospital bed?
No brainer
NEW: UK reports 3rd confirmed case of new coronavirus variant, along with "dozens" of suspected cases - FT
If I was an artist I would be feeling a little aggrieved that some micro-aspect of my works was being used from their database. Maybe royalties are due to the long suffering creatives?
https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1346554999241809920?s=20
What is so striking here is that the developers of GPT3 never expected it to have this facility. It just emerged
Covid cases in south-west London have risen sharply and concerns are growing over passengers from Gauteng who left airport without testing"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/fears-twickenham-rugby-match-may-have-omicron-superspreader/
We have healthcare rationing and Covid patients, unless deemed completely beyond saving, are always at the front of the queue. It's as simple as that.
Maybe prepare yourself for that possibility, practically and emotionally, and if I am wrong (yay!!) then feel free to come on here and mock me, mercilessly. I won't mind because I will be knee deep in champagne, celebrating the fact that Omicron was a needless mass panic
I'm, sure the AI does simillar things. Yet, it has been designed to do so. Say a bridge appears in its work that looks similar to a bridge on one of the database paintings is it copying? Does it amalgamate all the pictures of bridges it sees and produce some average?
Hardly any covid patients over 65 get ventilated at all, and only under 45s get ECMO, due to the very poor prognosis.
Admitting a cancer patient for organ transplant (an unusual scenario) would put them at high risk of hospital acquired covid, with a poor prognosis.
ICU ward liaison teams make these decisions every day as to who is most likely to benefit from treatment. The numbers admitted depend more on staffing than machines or space, and ICU nurses have had dreadful attrition over the last 18 months and are in short supply.
What did Orwell say about the East Stand at Twickenham?
"Did she get the vaccine?"
"No."
"Ah. Terribly sorry then but no dice."
Is Emma Raducanu about to do a Tyson Fury?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-10251699/Emma-Raducanu-wants-role-model-Lewis-Hamilton-win-Sports-Personality-Year-her.html