No - spritestacking is not as effective for the most of things but there is something playful about it - it changes the way you think about what you draw which imposes an unique style on your creations.
This is great news! I'll definitely be in line to get it whenever my turn comes.
A thing that keeps worrying me is the amount of people I've seen/chatted with (empirical evidence) that don't trust these vaccines. The most common comments they make are: "I don't want to be guinea pig", "How do I know the government won't control me", and more conspiracy theories. All of these fears seem to come from misinformation on the internet, friends and family get a ton of memes/fake news through WhatsApp highlighting the unproven negative effects of the vaccine.
Is there any effective way to control the propagation of misinformation on these platforms?
How would one even get started to tackle that problem?
No problem. All that's needed to get people wanting it is to tell them they can't have it. Just announce that it will be distributed last to places that don't require masks, and watch the screams.
Some people think emotionally, not logically. Figuring that out took me way longer in life than it should have.
Logical thinkers will be able to do the risk/benefit analysis with “good enough” fidelity so long as data is available, so you don’t really have to worry about convincing them.
For the emotional thinkers, whom I am assuming have a large intersection with the people that believe misinformation (that assumption may need to be checked, but I ... just don’t have that data), perhaps we would have had better luck by pushing a message like “we are all soldiers in a war now, and soldiers take risks to protect each other.” Complete with an advertising campaign featuring a frontline combat veteran recounting how she walked out under enemy fire to rescue her comrades, and subtly or not-so-subtly shaming people who are unwilling to take tiny risks to protect their fellow soldier-citizens.
It isn't entirely the typical anti-vax nonsense or outlandish conspiracy theories, though. mRNA vaccines are entirely new and I don't believe we've had even traditional vaccines start getting used outside of trials so quickly before. This is new ground, and not without its own potential risks.
It's important to understand that antivaxxers are wrong not because they make a risk analysis of vaccines, but because they make that analysis based on flawed data. They severely undervalue the risks of the various diseases, and severely overvalue the risks of the vaccines, and land in the wrong conclusion that every single vaccine therefore is bad for you.
But they're not wrong in making that risk analysis in the first place.
I do not belong to a risk group for covid-19. I don't live with anyone in a risk group, I don't hang out with people in a risk group or even meet with them. So I don't mind being at the back of the line for this vaccine, the risk of the disease is negligible to me, while the risk of the vaccine is unknown. I don't mind waiting and seeing what happens after millions of people have gotten the vaccine before I get it myself. That minimizes the risk to me.
But my dad belongs to a risk group, so for him the same risk analysis gets a different result, because his risk of dying is a hundred times greater than my risk of dying. So he will try to get vaccinated as soon as he can, as he should.
> They severely undervalue the risks of the various diseases, and severely overvalue the risks of the vaccines, and land in the wrong conclusion that every single vaccine therefore is bad for you.
What's the data look like for long-term effects of an mRNA vaccine?
What are the long-term effects of vaccines everyone is talking about? This is not a loaded question, I'm asking in good faith.
And I ask because even the rarest documented effects occur within 3-4 months of administration, which is hardly long-term.
There may be a case for a specific Lyme disease vaccine, but thanks to the anti-vaxxers, the whole thing was withdrawn (against FDA recommendation) before the actual reason could be found.
I think the bigger concern in this case is that we don't know. And the overwhelmingly strong historical case for vaccines that exist doesn't really apply that well here since it's a pretty new approach of essentially doing gene therapy to get your own body to produce the protein that triggers the immune response. And as far as I know (and admittedly, my slightly more-than-average time spent researching this still rounds down to nothing) that technique has only been used in humans on a fairly rare disease so far. I'm definitely optimistic from the data so far. I'm more likely to get it since I know I'm done having children anyway. If I was high risk I would probably get it. But I'm not high risk. I'm also optimistic I could survive a COVID-19 infection. I'm not rushing out the door to get my hands on either to be honest.
Exactly. This is a new type of vaccine that was rushed through testing being deployed widely for a disease that kills less than 1% of people who get it.
I think the best we can do is lead by example in the short term, and in the long term investigate the failure of education systems that bring this about
This is what I think too. I try to do my best to talk to these people and alleviate their fears. But as well, I predict that as their family and friends and millions of people in general in front of them receive the vaccine, and end up fine, that it will change their mind. The vaccine will go from being spooky to no big deal.
Disinformation and the rise of computer generated audio, video, and images is going to make this problem even more challenging. I think we may need to come up with ways to sign audio, video, and images that guarantee that the media is captured naturally (or that the media hasn't been tampered with since it was spread by a certain entity).
I also think we need to build back the public's trust in institutions. Once they deserve that trust. When anyone with any motive can spread content online that reaches thousands or millions without much of an editorial process, well... it's proven to be disrupting.
These are very challenging problems.. I'm counting on Tristan Harris to bring us something.
> A thing that keeps worrying me is the amount of people I've seen/chatted with (empirical evidence) that don't trust these vaccines. The most common comments they make are: "I don't want to be guinea pig", "How do I know the government won't control me", and more conspiracy theories. All of these fears seem to come from misinformation on the internet, friends and family get a ton of memes/fake news through WhatsApp highlighting the unproven negative effects of the vaccine. Is there any effective way to control the propagation of misinformation on these platforms? How would one even get started to tackle that problem?
Whether or not you agree with their opinions or the sources they derived them from, what you're advocating is dangerous. Who should have that authority to determine what is and is not misinformation?
Well it sure doesn't help people gain trust in the institution when the large cooperations like Facebook Google and Twitter censor wrong speak with the blessing of many political leaders. eg. YouTube will censor videos about election fraud (in the 2020 presidential election not the 2018 Georgia senator election) or anything against the WHO (even though they corrected themselves a few times).
Misinformation? This is literally a very untested vaccine. There are literally no longitudinal studies. You should be weary of this vaccine. I am not an unintelligent person. I have a bachelors and masters and I am very weary of something that has been spread through its trials this quickly.
The people who you hear say "I don't want to be guinea pig" ... they're not wrong. This vaccine could be perfectly safe .. or we could see a lot of edge cases when you start injection a million people at a time with it. On top of all of that, you can be sure hospital will be sure to force front line workers to take it first.
Please, let's be honest about this. Why are we suddenly trusting drug companies after disasters like viox. I'm not against vaccines in general. I've had all my MMRs, took my Typhoid, Meningitis, Hep B for certain overseas trips. But those took time to go through trials and were vetted for safety in a way this simply hasn't had the time to.
People are going to be weary and that's not wrong. That's not "anti-science." This is legitimately going to be an experiment which, if they get wrong, can potentially harm a lot of people. You only need to look back to the 70s and the Swine Flu vaccine disaster.
There's some value to their fear. I share some of it too.
These are some of the fastest-to-market vaccines ever produced. Some were also developed with technology never used before at this scale.
There's some nuance to the fear though - for example, once frontline, health workers and people like Dr Fauci are vaccinated, and it becomes clear that these are at least as safe as flu vaccines, I'll also likely take one, if only for the sole reason that I sorely miss travel.
It's won't though, not for at least 1~5 years. All the long term studies are being skipped. So long as this vaccine is a choice, I'm okay with it. But if it becomes required for certain jobs, or to be able to enter a store or venue ... I dunno. The speed that this has been rushed through just does not feel right.
I would rather wait 5 years. I prefer that risk for myself over the risk of a rushed to market vaccine. The trouble is, everyone will yell that you not getting the shot can hurt everyone else.
This gets into the dangerous game of personal agency, liberty and autonomy vs what the State is telling you is mandatory for the safety of all. There won't be enough doses for this to matter for a while, but when it does, we'll see some big ethical concerns and court cases.
There are no long term studies. The reason vaccines take so much in "regular" circumstances are:
- Actually finding money to run the trials
- Run Phase 1, 2, 3 trials one after another
- (longest) Waiting for the events (infections) to accrue: if it's not in a pandemic, and with relatively low incidence, this takes years to happen
- Regulatory approval (if not in emergency, that's two years)
- Production scale-up (at least one year)
The fact that vaccines takes years to develop for safety is a myth. It is mostly a matter of time, and the fact that we were used to them taking years. Let's not forget smallpox and rabies vaccinations took far less to be invented, and people devising them didn't even know what viruses were. And also because most of the easy targets are now done. What's left are the harder ones (HIV). SARS-CoV-2 might have been hard, or one of the easy pickings. Luckily, it fell into the "easy" camp.
In this specific case, production was started during the trials, events, due to the fact that the virus is spreading like wildfire in the USA, took a matter of weeks to accrue (from 35 in October to 94 two weeks later, according to the Pfizer data), and the fact that an obscene amount of money was spent meant that most trials were started as soon as possible.
But, even looking at the protocols, you might notice that it ticks all the good boxes for proper clinical research.
I got excited when I saw the title, then checked the URL and it is a software simulation / game of building a computer. I'm not denying this can be interesting, but I've been thinking for a while to get my hands dirty with hardware as a side project. (I'm a software eng by profession). I haven't really done a lot of research on this yet, but does anyone have any recommended guides/books/tutorials on how to get started designing and building my own computer? (extra points it it's a mobile/embedded computer)
Super educational, but if you want to get into more embedded hardware hacking, I would say that building a homemade computer like he does is probably not a super exciting place to start. I'd recommend picking up some Teensy 4.0 microcontrollers and build some small hardware projects with the microcontroller before diving into lower-level circuitry.
Check out Ben Eater on YT. He has a series where he builds an 8 bit CPU from components. And another where he builds a 6502 based computer from scratch. He sells kits to follow along, and explains everything along the way
I would recommended just using the Nand2Tetris book Elements of Computing Systems and implement the computer on an FPGA. I went through the course using the original project’s simulation tools, and I am now circling back and implementing the Hack CPU on a Xilinx FPGA using VHDL.
It has a USB host port for a keyboard and VGA out for the display. The jury is still out as to whether I can build the entire CPU using nand gates, including the ROM and RAM memory. Doing so will use a lot of the FPGA's resources from calculations I've seen. If that's not possible for the memory, then I plan on using the block RAM that's included on the Xilinx board, but for everything else I plan on following the book's design as close as possible. So far, I am in chapters 1-3 simply porting my solutions in the course's HDL to VHDL, which is relatively straightforward so far. I'm taking my time to make sure I'm doing things "professionally", as I'd like to learn the Xilinx toolchain in my professional work at some point. My experience with FPGAs has been implementing them with LabVIEW, which actually makes learning VHDL somewhat mechanical although a bit frustrating. (If I had an FPGA big enough that's targetable via LabVIEW, I could probably build and test the computer in a day or two aside from the VGA and keyboard.) The combinatorial gates are done now, and I've implemented a DFF and am building things from there. So now I'm learning about clocking and such with VHDL. The most troublesome part I anticipate is what to do about the ROM and RAM memory and the display and keyboard. I'd also like to update the CPU where I can interactively download new code to the CPU from a PC using the assembler and software stack I'm building, which is in F#.
I have several books I am using as reference:
- VHDL By Example by Blaine C. Readler (great first intro to VHDL)
- Digital Design Using Digilent FPGA Boards: VHDL/Vivado Edition by Haskell and Hanna
- Effective Coding with VHDL: Principles and Best Practices by Ricardo Jasinski (I'm using this to sort through the various ways to do things in VHDL and have best practices in my code.)
- VHDL for Logic Synthesis by Andrew Rushton
- FPGA Prototyping by VHDL Examples: Xilinx MicroBlaze MCS SoC by Pong Chu
Also James Sharman's channel[1]. He has built an 8-bit, pipelined, computer from scratch. He works at the level of TTL chips. Sharman is good at explaining what he's doing, but does not go down to the very detailed level of bit-by-bit explanation of Ben Eater.
The first question you'll need to answer is if you want to build a computer from discrete gates, or if you'd rather glue large existing IP blocks together.
In the former approach, you won't get anything in a mobile form factor, as your computer would simply be too big. But you might learn more than in the latter approach.
I'm sure this is happening in about 3-5 years from now, but not in your smart phone, but in an augmented reality glasses-like device (we can probably already build demos for this on NReal or Hololens). The HUD is going to be embedded in the real world. People will be able to control what information they show in their profile. I've seen some VR social apps already doing a very basic version of this, albeit in a 100% simulated environment.
This is amazing!
Can't believe Sega had a VR Headset in 1993 and for only $200, it's a bit sad they couldn't get it out there.
I believe VR is coming very close to going main stream, probably in less than 5 years from now. Oculus Quest 2 is IMO by far the best overall VR device ever, and things will only improve from here. That's why I've recently made a career change to work full time on VR application development, I truly think this is the next big computing platform.
My favorite code editor by far is Vim. But I've tried newer ones over the years: Sublime, Atom, VSCode, etc. None of them seem to stick with me and I always go back to Vim. I think I've developed some sort of dependency to Vim shortcuts and on every new code editor I try I immediately install a Vim shortcuts plugin to make it feel more familiar. I still find the editors mentioned above to lack the "ease" of customization you can have with VIM. I put ease in quotes because learning vimscript is not simple, I highly recommend taking a look at https://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com/ to learn how to do it. Thanks to that guide I was able to write my first simple plugin https://github.com/ElHacker/vim-gitstatus
I'm working on building VR applications with Unity and C#. For that task I have to say that VSCode works pretty well, it has a ton of really nice features I regularly use: like debugging unity code, autocomplete/snippets from the unity API, and my favorite Zen Mode. My biggest complain with VSCode is how slow it runs sometimes, I can type faster than VSCode refreshes which adds noise to my flow, note that I don't consider myself to be a fast typist. If they would only fix that I would be very happy with it.
I've recently started using VS Code and my favorite feature by far is Zen Mode. It allows me to focus a lot more, takes away a lot of the distractions I get from my million open browser tabs and other apps trying to get my attention.
I'm currently going through with my first startup, I'm a technical founder and this post definitely helps me to try to invest more of my time learning how to do sales. Thanks for sharing.
Glad it helped. If you have a co-founder whom you trust can do sales for the company you need not worry about it. Nevertheless, a bit of soft skill can go a long way.
I've never edited voxel models with the spritestacking 2D technique, I'll give it a try. Is it more efficient than placing voxels in a 3D viewport?
On a side note I've been building my own very simple voxel editor in VR you can take a look at it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiaGvePo6jo