beerpls (u/beerpls) - Readit News

beerpls commented on Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists natesilver.net/p/journali... · Posted by u/h2odragon

Zetice · 3 years ago

It isn't clear to me that there are meaningful outward pressures on these folks to lie or misrepresent what they're able to credibly support.

And even if there were, it does nothing for the argument that it was a lab leak. You can imply and infer all day, but "surely there'd be proof if only people would be free to speak" isn't actually an argument in favor of an idea, just a plausible explanation for a lack of that argument.

beerpls · 3 years ago

Lol all of y’all are interpreting my comments in terrible faith but because you support the narrative it’ll be accepted.

Never mind friends. I just wanted to make people think a little, but that’s always a mistake here.

For the record: I’m quite skeptical that the lab leak theory is true.

beerpls commented on Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists natesilver.net/p/journali... · Posted by u/h2odragon

Zetice · 3 years ago

Just to be clear, I'm not commenting on if the lab leak theory is plausible or not, I'm commenting on how none of these folks were willing to go "on the record" about it in a way that would have to stand up to the level of scrutiny they know would come.

beerpls · 3 years ago

“ Now realize that publicly stating your lab had a protocol failure of this magnitude and you face career death, the possible eradication of your lab and it’s connections, etc.”

From my previous comment.

It wouldn’t be the least bit surprising that these researchers wouldn’t say it happened even if they had strong evidence it did.

The downsides are obviously not good for them nor their careers in any way. God forbid they themselves could be found connected to the responsibility and would inevitably become a scapegoat.

And if they did come out and nothing happened to them - what positives would occur? “Reforming safety protocols”? All that would do is create more red tape in the future and inhibit research even more.

I think you should better evaluate the context of what a scientist in that position would face and think. You really quickly see there’s a lot of grey area, and we can’t think very highly of our typical standards of proof.

Of course, i’m not saying “absolutely it was a leak”. Simply that you’re holding the theory to such high standards of proof as to be, imho, unreasonable.

beerpls commented on Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists natesilver.net/p/journali... · Posted by u/h2odragon

Zetice · 3 years ago

Ugh. Nate, why?

Nate (and you, dear reader) should know better than this. What a person is willing to say under oath (or in a peer reviewed paper) is what they're able to defend. What they say in slack chats or emails is completely different, and not in any way beholden to anything approaching the same level of rigor.

It should matter, a lot, that even a group of scientists who believed a lab leak idea was plausible couldn't muster up an argument that would hold up under peer review. If these folks couldn't do it, maybe there's a reason; it's simply not supported by observations/facts.

beerpls · 3 years ago

“scientists who believed a lab leak idea was plausible couldn't muster up an argument that would hold up under peer review”

Scientists work with covid viruses, scientists accidentally contract virus when one of a thousand technical protocols accidentally slipped, scientists unknowingly spread virus.

I worked in a clean lab for years with, presumably, much lower tolerances than you would want at a lab studying deadly viruses. We had leaks all the time even with protocols in place. Scientists are smart, they aren’t perfect and make mistakes.

Now realize that publicly stating your lab had a protocol failure of this magnitude and you face career death, the possible eradication of your lab and it’s connections, etc.

You’re saying no lab leak claims “held up under peer review” and it’s “not supported by facts”. I’m not sure if you get this, but if this did leak from a lab then there would probably be zero way to trace that without speculation. You’re not going to go find a covid virus with a time stamp and location of where it came from or where it moved. How on Earth would one ever prove this?

I have a feeling that your terms of proof a priori make it impossible to ever conclude a lab leak was the cause…

beerpls commented on The Code Review Pyramid (2022) morling.dev/blog/the-code... · Posted by u/rainhacker

andelink · 3 years ago

Couldn’t agree more. I am lucky to have worked with two individuals early in my career who would take the time to really help develop team members by way of thoughtful, detailed PR comments. I attribute much of my own growth due to this, and as such I always try to do the same for others. I care deeply about it and consider it to be one of the most important parts of the job. It saddens me that most people (IME) don’t feel the same.

beerpls · 3 years ago

On the other side of the spectrum - code reviews have never, not even one single time, given me any real opportunity to learn something of value. They have only ever been someone else shoving their preferences onto my coding style (for better or worse)

I was shocked at my first job to realize the code reviewer didn’t even read my code, merely glanced over and demanded style changes (which were not consistent from review to review in the slightest)

It really felt more like how you hand your advisor your thesis with obvious easy to fix errors so he doesn’t compulsively decide “well something must need improvement” and make you fix something difficult

beerpls commented on The Code Review Pyramid (2022) morling.dev/blog/the-code... · Posted by u/rainhacker

gilbetron · 3 years ago

After 30+ years, I kind of reverse the pyramid, honestly. I look for readable, maintainable code, and try to make sure the writer is doing appropriate testing. But whether or not it works and is correct, that's not my job, that's the developer's job. I know developers that will spend days on a code review, which is a horrible waste of time. CI/CD and your deployment followup structure (canaries, monitors, gates, etc) should be catching any significant issues the vast majority of the time, and if it isn't, you need to spend time there.

My main concern as a reviewer is to make sure future people can understand the code when the inevitable modification comes along.

Things are different if the writer and reviewer are in a mentorship relationship, but even still, if you are only engaging with the code as a mentor when the PR hits, you're messing up the mentorship!

beerpls · 3 years ago

“ I look for readable, maintainable code, and try to make sure the writer is doing appropriate testing. But whether or not it works and is correct, that's not my job, that's the developer's job.”

And I personally refuse to work with this style of workflow anymore

Does the code do what it needs? That’s objective and it either does or doesn’t. I can manage that kind of review.

Does the code look pretty enough? This is subjective and guarantees i’ll waste hours of my life every month bc someone else felt anxious/neurotic/masochistic and wanted to dump a chore on me.

No thanks, if you have style guidelines i’ll follow them. I’m not your whipping boy that will ask how high when you say jump.

beerpls commented on Predicting hit songs with 97% accuracy frontiersin.org/articles/... · Posted by u/geox

CrazyStat · 3 years ago

I'm a statistician, not a machine learning person, but

>Small data sets are not appropriate for machine learning as they lead to high bias in their results (Vabalas et al., 2019). To address this, we created a synthetic set data with 10,000 observations using the synthpop package in R (Nowok et al., 2016). This standard automated procedure creates observations by repeatedly randomly sampling the joint distribution of the data. This technique is used when obtaining large datasets is infeasible, including analyses of computer vision (Mayer et al., 2018), sensitive information like hospital records (Tucker et al., 2020), and with unbalanced data (He et al., 2008; Luo et al., 2018).

Isn't this just making up data? How is the analysis of the synthetic 10,000 observations (based on observations from 33 real people) at all meaningful?

beerpls · 3 years ago

Yeah, this is an issue with way more science than anyone (esp scientists) is comfortable acknowledging

In grad school I encountered experiment after experiment, paper after paper where the authors went around emphasizing the parts which were statistically “sexy” while ignoring glaring issues like this

It’s almost like the methodology for creating science is more rigorous than the science itself

Sometimes the sample is too small. Sometimes they assume a correlation that doesn’t exist. It’s troubling and was a large part of why I left academia

beerpls commented on Dead Electric Car Batteries Find a Second Life Powering Cities nextcity.org/urbanist-new... · Posted by u/chaisquared

beerpls · 3 years ago

“Powering cities”

Hyperbole isn’t good

beerpls commented on How the DEA scrubbed Thomas jefferson's poppy garden from public memory alternet.org/2010/03/how_... · Posted by u/pera

zanethomas · 3 years ago

strange that a constitutional amendment was required to ban alcohol, but none was required for other drugs

beerpls · 3 years ago

Alcohol was used by more people. The governmental play that had to be carried out to make the people tolerate the tyranny was minimal.

Remember it’s not about what a piece of paper says the rules are - it’s what you can get away with in power.

beerpls commented on Royal Navy says quantum navigation test a success thequantuminsider.com/202... · Posted by u/ninacomputer

beerpls · 3 years ago

Um how do you figure?

Gravity cares about distance and mass, and as large parts of the planet move their density distribution shifts affecting both of those factors

beerpls · 3 years ago

Lol this point is true but it’s downvoted.

I love how the IQ of this place keeps spiraling downward.