Schmidhuber has written about recursive self-improvement since his diploma thesis in the 80s: "Evolutionary principles in self-referential learning, or on learning how to learn: The meta-meta-... hook".
Your quote sounds like it could just as well have been from that thesis.
Indeed, in the local news I could hear the Polish gov is preparing hotels and other accommodation places for people who will flee away from the conflict. I don't know the details but watch out, because there might many hotel owners, whose will want more money than they would usually take for a stay.
Edit: If they would decide leaving their country my very early tip is to download Google Translate with the all locales they know + country where they are. While you can find many people who speak Ukrainian/Russian in central EU countries, it is a priceless help for any foreigner. I had occasion to be a participant of a talk between people, who were writing the phrases on the screen to communicate. Since that moment, I have downloaded Ukrainian locale pack for offline use in Google Translate.
I wish that people who say things like "learn to live with it" actually meant it. We do indeed need to learn from the past two years, and that will result in something quite different from pretending that we're still in 2019.
One lesson learnt is, shutting down the borders does not help. It can at most delay the inevitable by a few weeks. If you don't have a vaccine ready to be administered to all your population in 3-4 weeks, shutting down the borders is pointless.
Another one, politicians need to stop using science for propaganda. The mistrust in scientists has cost us dearly.
Shutting down borders works if and only if you're successfully implementing an elimination strategy. In North America and Europe it was pretty pointless, but it was absolutely useful in New Zealand, Australia, China and Hong Kong.
I'm quite sure it will be much more like 2019 than you think. People will learn to live with the deaths if it continues as it was in 2020/21. Prolong the lock downs more and most of the population will go crazy.
I'd argue a lot of people have already gone crazy and will do anything to avoid going back to normal and letting people live their lives. The obsession with the need for a "new normal" amongst some is really terrifying. There needs to be some targeted campaign to "deprogram" the people that have become obsessed with covid and make them move on. I'm serious about this, if we just pretend it will get better on it's own, there will continue to be these lingering theatrics - I don't want to see the world end up like air travel did.
No improvements to ventilation standards? No changes to work culture that encourages "working through it" instead of briefly isolating?
Like we have massive infrastructure in place to prevent diseases like cholera from being a problem. We should do more to mitigate airborne transmission.
Most of the hospitals near me are near capacity for ICU beds due to people refusing a free vaccination.
If I have a heart attack or car accident tomorrow, I’m at serious risk of not getting a bed and treatment.
If the anti-vac morons weren’t taking up so much space at the hospitals, I’d agree. But with numbers the way they are, “return to normal” is a pipe dream.
People have different situations. I'm severely immunocomprimised - while I get and understand that the world can't remain locked down indefinitely for a small segment of the population, I'm absolutely going to advocate for my own survival, and that doesn't make me "crazy" or that I need "deprogramming". It's not irrational to not want widespread transmission of a virus that has a 20% CFR for people like me.
It's unfortunate for you, I understand. But where do we draw the line? I'm severely allergic to birch tree pollen, should I start advocating to burn down all the birch trees in the world?
It always bothered me growing up, the lack of elbow-operable doorknobs and other measures for what would seem to be basic hygiene in public spaces. Cities are disease kettles, it never was appropriate to design them with the same low hygiene standards as our homes.
Zeynep has been wrong so many times during the pandemic that it hurts. She will not admit to it, though. She claimed that the Delta variant would end the pandemic, in the same way it is claimed for Omicron now. She's very naive about how the immune system works.
Her writing is generally more propaganda than science.
> She claimed that the Delta variant would end the pandemic
No she didn't - the article you're referring to is below, and what she said was more nuanced. It's also a reasonable analysis from the perspective of the time it was written (May 2021):
Citation? The best I could find with a quick Google was her NYT opinion piece [1], which pretty clearly couched her statements about Delta possibly being the last surge in hospitalisations and deaths in the US as a potential scenario and not a certainty.
Whilst I agree that she (and most other science reporters!) use simplistic models for immune system responses (possibly more for her readers), I’m yet to come across anything she’s written that has been very clearly wrong or she hasn’t later corrected/clarified.
Besides, I wish that causality had been mentioned more than once in passing. Due to the existence of the ladder of causality, many important queries cannot be answered by mere observation, or even by intervention; such queries require counterfactual reasoning, and structural causal models generalize because they describe something that is very invariant in the world.
They're processed foods, but not ultra-processed. Generally that means advanced factory processes and chemicals that are only used in industrial settings. Factory made bread is likely to be ultra-processed, however.
Can you provide an example of a factory process that is only performed in a factory (and not in the kitchen + grocery store, e.g. flour is preprocessed wheat)? bonus points if this process applies to bread making.
If I'm reading this right, literally the only difference between this process and the one used in a home kitchen is "intense mechanical working by high-speed mixers, not feasible in a small-scale kitchen".
Otherwise the raw materials are the same:
> Flour, water, yeast, salt, fat, and, where used, minor ingredients common to many bread-making techniques such as Vitamin C, emulsifiers and enzymes are mechanically mixed for about three minutes.
In what way does this represent "processed" food in any material sense?
If anything, this sounds like a perfect example of the kind of fear mongering associated with the "processed food" label...
> one uses dissolved co2 and low protein wheat and the other high protein wheat. One also goes through a fermentation process while the other does not. Salt content also varies
You've misread the Wikipedia page.
What you're describing is Dauglish's process that preceded CBP. Here's the key bit from the introduction:
> In 1862 a radically new and much cheaper industrial-scale process was developed by John Dauglish, using water with dissolved carbon dioxide instead of yeast, with no need for an eight-hour fermentation. Dauglish's method, used by the Aerated Bread Company that he set up, dominated commercial bread baking for a century until the Chorleywood process was developed.
Notice that last part of the sentence.
CBP, as described in the Wikipedia article, "is achieved through the addition of Vitamin C, fat, yeast, and intense mechanical working by high-speed mixers".
In particular, no CO2 is used with CBP. Bread is proofed by "[placing the dough] in a baking tin and [moving it] to the humidity- and temperature-controlled proofing chamber, where it sits for about 45–50 minutes", with the process aided through the use of dough conditioners like ascorbic acid.
Instant coffee is simply coffee that is freeze-dried. That is the only step added above and beyond normal coffee-brewing. It is likely one of the least processed foods one can buy.
Sounds like a case of Goodhart's law,
"Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."
