For posters who do time restricted eating, how do you deal with the panicked/dizzy feeling you often get when not eating for long periods. Does that eventually go away with IF, or do you just get used to it?
That's from low blood pressure and/or electrolyte imbalance. So drink more fluid supplemented with electrolytes. You can also take a spoonful of a pure fat like coconut oil or ghee in the morning or in between a meal to help with any hunger pain.
You don't faint from low blood sugar, you faint from low blood pressure. If you were losing consciousness from low blood sugar you're gong to start convulsing and having seizures, afaik.
In normal homeostasis, insulin lowers blood sugar as needed and glucagon raises it. There is always a balance being made between the two I believe.
This one hits me hard, I'm in a very similar situation right now. After finally overcoming social anxiety to the point I could get out I was starting to finally build some connections, but now it pretty much seems hopeless.
By the time this is all over and society resumes I will be pretty far past the cutoff point for fixing my social life and still managing to be relatively "normal"
> I will be pretty far past the cutoff point for fixing my social life and still managing to be relatively "normal"
There's no cutoff for this, and don't let anyone else decide what's "normal" for you. Or barring that, don't let other people's perceptions of normal prevent you from doing what you need to in order to be happy.
People you want to form relationships with are going to have expectations of your experience, skill, and maturity levels that increase with age. You’re going to find fewer people willing to tolerate your adolescence at 45 than you will at 25. Beating yourself up over “normal” isn’t helpful, but this is a real problem.
I'm not discounting the challenges, just the idea of some arbitrary "cutoff" where relationships (romantic or otherwise) are no longer possible. Certain things might become harder as you get older, but there's never a cutoff (and some things might actually become easier).
(I originally responded with a different message that I deleted, since it looks like you edited your message in such a way that my original reply wasn't super applicable anymore.)
>By the time this is all over and society resumes I will be pretty far past the cutoff point for fixing my social life and still managing to be relatively "normal"
It's like anything else you want. Put the work in; enjoy the process; and don't get frustrated when progress isn't linear. The more you get in your head, the harder the work will seem, the less you'll enjoy it, and the further what you want will seem.
This is utterly terrifying, I barely go out but to know someone following all the precautions could still get it freaks me out so much. Every allergy attack I've gotten throughout the summer has plunged me into fear I've got it, or every slight cough.
Honestly I was starting to think the dread of the virus was worse than the virus itself, but the more articles like this I see the more I realize it isn't.
Has anyone here had it? Especially as a younger person I read the advice saying things like "the risk is low" but I'm terrified of having to face this.
I work for a large metro fire department/EMS. We have had lots (<30) of people under 50 get it. Nobody has been hospitalized and most report that it was a sucky flu. We had a retiree who was overweight, with diabetes get it at the ER where he worked as a Paramedic... he had a significantly different experience being placed on a vent and coding several times. He is still kicking however!
Long and short; You can only control what you can control... which is to say not much. Take precaution, but fear is occupying space in your mind rent free. I don't know about you, but I charge for space there.
My roommates (likely) had it while I quarantined for a few months in a different location early on in this pandemic.
Their experience was extreme fatigue (totally exhausted going up two flights of stairs), moderate cough, and a very high fever they’re both healthy early-30s.
Everything I have read seems to indicate the severity is heavily tied to your viral load. If you get a lot of the virus your body has to fight harder than a small amount. This is part if the reason masks and avoiding indoor spaces seems to help.
Edit: They both recovered but one roommate says it took about eight weeks to feel “normal” again. No apparent long term damage, but we shall see.
I'm at the tail end of it now. Or at least I hope I am.
It started about three weeks (wait, is it four?) ago with a high fever, migraine, back aches, and fatigue. Then a few days later I started getting a bit of a soar throat, and a few days after that I lost my sense of smell and taste in about a day -- and that's when I knew. A few days later I took a test which four days later came back positive.
My wife and daughter were both sick as well. My wife's symptoms mimicking mine, but offset by two days. My daughter, well... kids are invincible, also being 3 she lacks the vocabulary to communicate much more than this and that hurts. She had a fever and a head ache for a few days.
The fever, migraine and bed rest lasted about a week and a half.
They were both given the all clear last week, while I got put on antibiotics and an inhaler because I was displaying some indications that it was migrating to my lunges. I seem to be in the clear now.
I'm 38 and a C level exec at a startup in a critical phase, and I am afraid to say that I've been defunct since this thing started. The fatigue has been crushing. But it seems to be mental fatigue and not a physical one (well, after the first week at least). I've been doing gardening and started a gazebo construction project while this was going on (being idle makes me go a bit nuts), sweating like a manic under the sub-tropical sun, but I've hit brick walls as soon as I've tried to focus on anything more complex than "man beat tree, tree fall down".
I can't focus on anything complex for more than a little while. Today I stubbornly started debugging an issue, but after my initial findings, and realizing it was a slightly complex problem, I had to hand it over to a coworker as I was completely wrecked after 10 minutes of focusing -- and this was the most work I've done in weeks.
I see some improvement every day, but it is very frustrating not being able to get any real work done.
It's scares me that it has had this big effect on me even if I had a comparatively mild case. I can't imagine what other people are going through.
> the more articles like this I see the more I realize it isn't.
There's a selection bias at play here though, a first-hand account of someone who suffered horribly is more "interesting" to the general reader (i.e. more people click, publisher make more money on ads).
Articles like this don’t take into account the bigger perspective. They are all very anecdotal. In the same way, I can tell you that I know many people who got it and experienced none of these very unpleasant symptoms.
>This is utterly terrifying, I barely go out but to know someone following all the precautions could still get it freaks me out so much.
In the end, almost everyone is gonna get it anyway for it to stop spreading, precautions or not. Lockdown/masks/etc are more about flattening the curve (spreading the infections) than about people not getting it ever.
And a vaccine could be perpetually "one year in the future" - for many coronaviruses we still don't have one after decades, so all those announcements that we're "18 months from one" are mostly media BS and labs competing for funding.
> And a vaccine could be perpetually "one year in the future" - for many coronaviruses we still don't have one after decades, so all those announcements that we're "18 months from one" are mostly media BS and labs competing for funding.
This is not entirely true. There was no economic incentive for the previous ones but this one is different. We are able to successfully develop vaccines for Coronavirus related diseases in animals. The main problem is upper respiratory tract is a hard area for the immune system to protect.
There’s honestly very little incentive to produce a vaccine for most coronaviruses. The common human ones cause the cold, but there are a bunch of them, and they’re a minority of the viruses that cause the cold. No-one wants a vaccine that reduces their chances of getting the cold by a couple percent, and that’s all a specific vaccine would be for most coronaviruses.
There is an animal coronavirus vaccine that works. Human coronaviruses, until now, either disappeared from the face of the earth (SARS) or are simply not very bad (cold), so there is literally no market for a human coronavirus vaccine, and therefore no reason to make one, until now. It costs at least a billion to make a human coronavirus vaccine, no company can just snap their fingers and spend a billion dollars for no reason. We now have a reason. It is not pollyanna to expect a coronavirus vaccine in the next 6-12 months.
> And a vaccine could be perpetually "one year in the future" - for many coronaviruses we still don't have one after decades, so all those announcements that we're "18 months from one" are mostly media BS and labs competing for funding.
I’d be careful with comparison to other coronaviruses. No one is investing heavily into a vaccine against the common cold. Not many people would get vaccinated - seeing how hard it is to convince people to get a flu shot. There’s much more interest in a COVID-19 vaccine. That doesn’t mean we’ll get one, but drawing the conclusion from “we don’t have one against the common cold, so we won’t get one against COVID-19” is stretching thing.
Here are a couple of links from the CDC. You listen to too much news if you think that young people are at risk. For [0] you should do weekly deaths by age. You'll see that under 25 people are dying at the lowest rate in the past 5 years. For 26-45 you can bet your bottom dollar that the minor bump above is the 40-45 range.
If you get it, regardless of your age, there's a relatively high probability that you will directly and indirectly infect enough people to kill at least one person. I don't want that responsibility on my conscience.
Also, while the data on this for for COVID-19 is obviously limited at this point, the long-term impacts of SARS and MERS on cardiovascular health [0] are concerning. I wouldn't be surprised if getting it knocks a couple years off of life expectancy for a 25 year old.
"As shown, deaths in young people (from babies to college students) are almost non-existent. The first age group to provide a substantial contribution to the death toll is 45-54 years, who contribute nearly 5% of all coronavirus deaths. More than 80% of deaths occur in people aged 65 and over. That increases to over 92% if the 55-64 age group is included."
"The estimated IFR is close to zero for younger adults but rises exponentially with age, reaching about 0.3% for ages 50-59, 1.3% for ages 60-69, 4% for ages 70-79, 10% for ages 80-89."
"Among the 0-4 year, 5-17 year, 18-49 year, 50-64 year, and ≥ 65 year age groups, the highest rate of hospitalization was among adults aged ≥ 65 years, followed by adults aged 50-64 years and adults aged 18-49 years."
"The paper found that the fatality rate gradually increases with age. For example, there were no deaths among children aged nine or younger while it stood at 0.2 percent for people aged between 10 and 39. It increased to 3.6 percent in the 60-69 age bracket before rising to 8 percent among those aged 70 to 79 and 14.8 percent among people in their 80s or older."
I see it differently. Yes, young people are much less likely to have a serious illness from COVID. But, there are still young people who will die from COVID (the death rate is not zero for 0-18yrs old even without preexisting conditions). For those young people, it is death. To say, "you young person, you'll be fine". Is inaccurate. To say, you will most likely be fine. Yeah, sure that's accurate, but some of those people will actually die. Let's not candy coat that. Death is permanent and awful.
"Yes, young people are much less likely to have a serious illness from COVID. But, there are still young people who will die from COVID (the death rate is not zero for 0-18yrs old even without preexisting conditions). For those young people, it is death."
You may believe this to be true, but your sense of risk is ridiculously out of proportion to the actual risk involved. In the US, fewer than 300 people under the age of 25 have died from Covid:
It seems like the much more likely and scary scenario for young people (myself included) is long term health problems that are difficult or impossible to treat and basically destroy your quality of life.
I was curious if you have done any research on that? I keep hoping to find something to put my mind at ease.
When in history have we ever seen a disease where doctors, the public, or the media said "living in fear for your life is a good idea if you contract this disease?"
If someone contracts a dangerous disease aren't we supposed to reassure them that things will be OK? Isn't that part of good medicine? And yet all of society has turned this idea on its head when it comes to coronavirus. One report after another about how horrific it is. Constant anxiety and fear that takes a real toll on people.
Yes it's worse than the flu, if we take the stats in Los Angeles for example about 2.5% of confirmed cases have died. (Based on this it's a fair guess that less than 1% of all cases, including the unreported ones, have died.) Many people like the author have severe symptoms and then recover.
I have to wonder if this aberrant response to coronavirus says more about our times and the media we're subjected to than the virus itself. A 24/7 stream of corona terror is being pushed into our eyeballs. How does that help anyone, especially the people who get sick? Does panic, fear, and a response straight from our lizard brains help us end the pandemic? Who decided that mass terror was the best way to beat it? I didn't sign up for this strategy and I bet you didn't either.
It's a bit misleading to say this "says more about our times and the media we're subjected to than the virus itself", although it is no Ebola for sure. To me, it seems to be somewhere (disturbingly) in the middle -- a low apparent CFR and yet it still seems to cause permanent lung damage a disturbing amount of the time. Perhaps it's too early to tell and we should be cautious and reserve our judgment?
Nevermind "should" -- we should definitely be cautious, observe and reserve our judgment. It's good to be skeptical. But, draw a line at careless speculation.
"yet it still seems to cause permanent lung damage a disturbing amount of the time."
Fact check: there is no evidence of this. Even otherwise reputable sources are trading in anecdotes, and relying heavily on "may" and "could" to spread fear:
1% of 300 million is 3 million, I think that’s the fear on a large scale. So dissemination of information is important, but the 24/7 news cycle not so much. It started its current cadence well before the pandemic, somewhere around mid-2015. I think it’s here to stay. Here at least we have an excuse of keeping people informed for their physical health, even though the amount of new knowledge about the virus itself is vanishingly small.
One thing I've noticed in my more recent job searches before starting my company was that this kind of spam exists at all job search levels.
I'm really getting the feeling that online applications to jobs are rapidly becoming next to useless, it really feels like this market is ripe for disruption, and I've been thinking for a while about how this could be done.
The biggest problem in this space IMO is that there’s so much more money on the recruiting side than the job-seeker side of this exchange, which means that recruiters are ultimately going to play a much bigger role in the product development than the job-seekers.
Job-seekers don’t want to pay to look for work, but recruiters are more than happy to. Until that imbalance is figured out, job posting spam is gonna reign supreme.
Recruiters impacting product development seems so obvious of a link but I've never thought of it that way.
Makes me wonder what effect referral bonuses have on an org. People might be more likely to refer people who are similar to themselves, so you might end up with more of the same. Which could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on who's already in...
Yeah, ultimately the users of your product define how it’s built and what features it needs. And if your goal is to build something profitable, you’re gonna go after users that are willing to pay over those that aren’t.
It’s hard to say what impact referral bonuses have. I know that most of my network does not appreciate being solicited for new opportunities, but I don’t know how often referral bonuses are actually paid out.
The more I learn about the Plague of Justinian the happier I am that our current plague is relatively "mild". I am also amazed how much of an impact these kinds of things can have on the world.
I wonder what the long term fallout of the current situation will be (will there be a large one?). Death tolls are nowhere near past plagues, but the lockdowns have had a large economic impact for some countries. It's an interesting thought experiment, what do people here think?
The US president negotiating the terms of Germany's WW1 surrender/repayments was trying to get a fairer deal, and France's president was negotiating for German punishment. In the days long negotiations, the US president fell ill (possibly with Spanish Flu), and was much weaker/combative when he returned to the negotiating table. Maybe if the flu hadn't hit him, Germany would have gotten a fairer deal and not felt unfairly treated which was a cause of WW2.
Also India's rebellion from the British was during that time, the British suppressing the rebellion's and the added pressures from the flu ravaging their country helped move that process along.
I wonder if the same could be said about the George Floyd protests. Part of it was the timing of everyone being off work/unemployed and having the time to go protest.
That's an interesting story. Another component why the Versailles treaty was so harsh was that Germany had made a similarly harsh treaty with Russia before that, so the western powers gave Germany the same treatment that Germany gave Russia.
Ultimately, the Ottoman empire received probably the most harsh treatment of all, although they were the only country out of the group of Germany, Austria-Hungary and them which managed to reclaim some of the lost territory and keep it up until today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_S%C3%A8vres
I wager that the French were less concerned with whatever happened in Russia, and much more with what happened in France:
>Most of the war's major battles occurred in France and the French countryside was heavily scarred in the fighting. Furthermore, in 1918 during the German retreat, German troops devastated France's most industrialized region in the north-east (Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin). Extensive looting took place as German forces removed whatever material they could use and destroyed the rest. Hundreds of mines were destroyed along with railways, bridges, and entire villages. Prime Minister of France Georges Clemenceau was determined, for these reasons, that any just peace required Germany to pay reparations for the damage it had caused. [0, emphasis mine]
Germany went above and beyond what was necessary for military purposes to cause damages to French industry. It is really not hard to see how "they destroyed our factory, they should pay to rebuild it" would have been a common train of thought.
If say, Japan had occupied part of the continental US in WWII and once it started to retreat its troops, it set California ablaze and reduced it to rubbles --- how many Americans would think "the Japanese should pay for the rebuilding of California" vs "Sure California was set ablaze, but don't you think making them pay back would be a little harsh on them?"? how many Californians?
Although the issue is complex, a very dominant part of the "some reason" was that the German army never really experienced an unequivocal final military defeat (although it was clear to the high command that the war could no longer be won, this was far from obvious to the population) and remained in effective control of Germany, allowing them to consciously disseminate propaganda for their own ends as well as taking full advantage of the ensuing popular unrest after the end of the war.
Well Napoleon had pretty much stomped up and down on the Prussians and Austria during the Wars Of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. I think part of the harshness of the treaty that ended the Franco-Prussian wars was a bit of revenge for the Germans.
That was 1812, though (plus the hundred days). There wasn’t any big German military defeat since the Congress of Vienna system until WWII, a period of over a century.
Imagine the USA’s military ego, but instead of losing Vietnam in the 70s, you stomped France instead. The military arrogance was real.
That’s because there wasn’t a Germany for at least half of that period. And while Germany may not have lost any nearby land wars, their colonial empire was a bit of a joke compared to the other European powers.
To be more specific - at the time the armistice was signed, no Entente soldier had yet a foot on German soil. The front-line was still running through Belgium.
To the average German pundit, it was not at all clear that the war was lost.
Maybe. But at that time, the population of Germany was malnourished and short of food, fuel and other commodities. Civilian death rates began to increase.
So like our plague deniers today, some people probably deluded themselves into believing victory was near. But I’m sure most knew it wasn’t going well.
Given that the press was only allowed to publish positive propaganda about the state of the war effort, all of that could have be explained away as some temporary supply disruption.
Parts of the "complex" is that there was a revolution going on, too. The monarchy was overthrown and the military command happily let the representants of the new democracy take responsibility of the "peace treaty". In the meaning of: "see, this is what democracy gives you. While the army is unbeaten in the field, those traitors give up to the enemy."
And in the Eastern front Germany occupied much territories that while the treaties was being negotiated they were left in control for time being over a large swathe of Russian/Ukrainian/Belorusian territories even though in-effect Germany was the loser of the conflict, is what I remember vaguely from a history I had read.
One interesting thing I picked up from (I believe) the Third Reich Trilogy by Richard Evans was that while the repayments were harsh, enough international loans were made to Germany and unpaid once war broke out that the balance of cash flow was actually in Germany's favor.
Reading that, it really struck me that perhaps we were still internalizing Nazi propaganda. Or at least that we seek simple narratives to explain everything even if they do a fairly poor job of covering the details.
Yup. My understanding was the US was financially supporting Germany so the reparations wouldn’t crush the entire economy.
From what I’ve gathered, Germany’s “we’re not paying any more reparations” was more a political move that got Germans on the side of the govt than anything else.
I'm confused. You have to pay me 100 bucks, but no worries, I'll loan you 80 bucks over 20 years to help your finances.
You'll have to give me 240 bucks.
I'm not that familiar with the details, but it would be more like:
- You owe me $1B in reparations, with $10M payable each year for 100 years
- You can only come up with $8M this year, so I loan you $2M
- You then borrow from someone else to pay me back
Kind of like a rolling credit that is more about cashflow than debt level. Countries like the US were worried that Germany would just run out of cash at some point.
5 billion franks, the equivalent of hundreds of billions in today's currency (the exact amount is difficult to calculate for obvious reasons). It was significant enough to promptly cause an asset bubble in Germany when the French paid it with surprising alacrity, which then contributed to the spectacular crash of 1873 and ushered in an economic depression that lasted two decades (though many other causes contributed to the latter, of course - it was a worldwide crisis).
> 5 billion franks, the equivalent of hundreds of billions in today's currency
Due within 5 years too (france managed to pay it in advance as it included military occupation until the war indemnity was paid), as well as ceding a major industrial region.
Russia ceded an immense chunk of its most prized territorial posessions, leading to 11 countries declaring independence and defaulted on almost all of its international obligations. In fact, the harshness of the terms proposed by the German army was such that the German negotiators were shocked at first. The harshness of the treaty was also explicitly cited by the Allied Powers in response to German complaints about the Treaty of Versailles.
Russia’s situation was equivalent of lighting your house on fire (Ie sending in Lenin) and stripping the furniture before it burned down.
Defeat for Russia was utterly complete. The country was thrown into chaos and the aristocracy crushed and either slaughtered or exiled. Postwar, allied troops sort of intervened, but the result was pretty horrific.
Remember that the years of fighting on the Western Front had been on French (and Belgian) territory, not German. Their economic capacity had been injured and they wanted to be made whole.
The truth is that both sides were left wrecked economically by the war, and therefore both sides felt that they had gotten a raw deal at Versailles. Many inside France believed that Germany had been rewarded for losing the war and France had been punished for winning it.
I remember thinking when coronavirus was a new thing that it was an almost perfect mix of harmless and deadly, harmless enough that most people would carry it asymptomatically, deadly enough that it would reliably kill the vulnerable.
I figured that something like bubonic plague, which is absolutely lethal in comparison, wouldn't get very far against modern surveillance tactics and medical practices.
Since then, my estimations of our ability to deal with pandemics has taken a few hard knocks. It seems to me that even a comparatively nasty disease, with correspondingly obvious symptoms would probably be able to reach pandemic status, just because so many countries are a chaotic mess.
Obviously, even with a South Korea level competent response, I guess it's possible to have a disease that stays asymptomatic but remains contagious, then kills a large number of carriers after some length of time. Doesn't seem likely though - contagion more or less involves some kind of symptom (sneezing, coughing, etc) and it's hard to imagine a body developing a really high viral load or bacterial population without becoming feverish.
> Doesn't seem likely though - contagion more or less involves some kind of symptom (sneezing, coughing, etc) and it's hard to imagine a body developing a really high viral load or bacterial population without becoming feverish.
AFAIU, the profile depends on the class of virus, though obviously not all hosts behave similarly. Evolutionary strategies differ.
> evidence indicates that people who are infected with 2019-nCoV may be at their most contagious in the 48–72 hours before symptoms are noticeable. In addition, it is now estimated that up to 25 percent of infected individuals remain asymptomatic and may unwittingly infect others.
Knowing what we know now about significant aerosol transmission from merely speaking, it should be obvious now that coughing or sneezing isn't a prerequisite for highly contagious respiratory viruses. It should have been obvious before as we already knew that viral host reservoirs often remain asymptomatic. Bats, for example, are common reservoirs for respiratory viruses because a) they roost in dense groups, b) have strong selective pressure for consistently high function (flight is exhausting), and c) they've evolved immune systems that can handle a high viral load (a consequence of (a) and (b)), so don't often exhibit symptoms. I would presume many bird species make good reservoirs for similar reasons, though birds aren't mammals, which might complicate jumping to humans.
IIRC, a friend of mine, who had been researching rhinoviruses for several years at the time, explained to me that the coughing and sneezing fits from some types of cold viruses are caused by viral fragments rather than primary infection, in such cases symptoms peak at the tail-end of infection as fragments build up, and the fits might even be incidental/accidental from an evolutionary perspective. Some human cold viruses are specialized to infect children, who usually exhibit no symptoms or, at worst, a runny nose (again, latter might be incidental). Asymptomatic respiratory infections run rampant among children.
That's pretty scary. An interesting thought experiment: given a disease that was asymptomatic but after some time, deadly, do you think it would be possible to contain given current technology/social situation?
An interesting aside: I just looked it up, and it turns out that quarantine predated the germ theory of disease by many centuries. It's interesting that people can come up with effective strategies for defence against something that they both have no treatment for, and no real understanding of.
something like bubonic plague, which is absolutely lethal in comparison, wouldn't get very far against modern surveillance tactics and medical practices.
This is probably true given the drastic measures used for ebola, MERS outbreaks. If the mortality rate of covid was 50% you wouldn't hear people bitching about masks, hoaxes, fake science, etc.
Your initial estimation was probably right - the press just likes to emphasise the negative. We've already had more deadly and more obvious versions of Covid-19 in the form of SARS and MERS, and for the most part western countries just quietly stopped them using testing and contact tracing without most people even noticing. If Covid-19 was similar, there's every reason to believe that it would've ended the same way since pretty much everywhere put those same measures into place early on. You just didn't hear about it much because early on it wasn't of interest to the press, and later it made for an easier narrative to claim that countries inexplicably did nothing.
1. In-person gathering professions will be severely weakened. We should lose around 1/3 of restaurants, concerts will be gone for 18+ months, musicians and many others will have their livelihoods set-back.
2. Internet will be strengthened, anything remote-friendly will be enhanced relative to the before-times.
3. People will handshake MUCH less, hug much less, and generally be less chummy/close. I don't think we can just abandon 18 months of social distancing, it'll be "baked into" us somehow.
4. Mask wearing will become a regular sight forever...I know if I'm sick in future, I'll probably mask up...I never masked up EVER until March 2020.
5. The USA may come to a reckoning and deal with its healthcare, environmental pollution, chronic health problems...or maybe the US will slowly incrementally change and it still won't ever be enough.
6. Personal vehicles will become King once more...mass transit is going to take a MAJOR hit here.
7. A few hundred small, non-elite universities will die out, many of them can NOT afford to stay open and justify MUCH higher costs for a much lower value of "information into head". The pandemic will have pulled up the wool from our eyes on this issue: most education is overpriced.
8. I and many others will experience a lot of depression/loneliness, though I personally do cope with it better than I used to.
Plenty of Resturarants open in NYC right now. I'd say the outdoor dining has given them a strong presence relative to other things than ever before. Hopefully the outdoor dining becomes permanent.
Knowing shitty US politics, it might, but transit should not take a hit. [1] I hope the bigger wave in Florida than was in New York helps fix the message here---Florida is hardly a capital of public transit!
>Plague of Justinian: the bubonic plague's first-known visit to Europe, in 541 CE. The first wave of plague killed 20 percent of the population of Constantinople. Infection also devastated the trade port of Alexandria. Over the next 160 years, wave after wave of plague may have carried away up to half the population of the Byzantine Empire.
Imagine looking at a crowd and 1/5 to 1/2 of everyone is just gone.
It shrank the empire so much that after the war with Persia, the Levant was heavily depopulated.
...and it was that void that the army of Mohammed filled in the rise of Islam when they conquered the Levant, Egypt, Persia, Messopotamia, and the rest of North Africa in a short period.
The plague and it’s after effects is what basically of what some people call the Dark Ages and is a pretty clear line to demarcate late ancient to the Middle Ages.
What is it about that time period that made the plague so contagious? Lack of antibiotics? Not knowing how it spreads? I would think that it doesn't take a modern scientist to figure out not to let rats into the house, and this was possibly not that hard to achieve even with ancient materials. So what gives?
I think there were a number of factors. Widespread instability led to people clustering in densely packed cities, where you could live behind walls. This was obviously good if you want to avoid being sold into slavery by a roving gang of barbarians, obviously very bad if you want to avoid catching diseases from the ten neighbors you have in your tiny room.
Grain production and shipment was pretty centralized, and as it so happened, the disease turned up first in Alexandria, which was the biggest port of Egypt, which was the bread basket of the empire. So with the grain came the rats, then with the rats, the plague, and since Egypt produced a large portion of the grain eaten in the aforementioned overcrowded cities, y. pestis was delivered directly to all the places where it could do the most damage.
As other commentators have noted, it's really hard to keep rats out of something they want to be in. Even harder if you live in insanely crowded wooden tenement blocks, as most people did at the time. I also don't think it would have been particularly obvious that the plague was coming from the fleas - the buboes turn up on lymph nodes, not on the flea bites.
Worse still, it's also contagious through coughing. So even if they had somehow (and I think it would be impossible) kept the rats out, they would probably still be at risk.
The roman empire at this place was pretty dirty, nobody was bathing, dirt floors were the norm, and honestly, y. pestis is a really nasty disease. If you have it today, you're really likely to die. I don't know if it would have been technically possible to stop it given the technology of the day, even if you had all the requisite knowledge.
Keeping the rats/fleas out would likely be impossible short of literally burning most cities to the ground - and because of the disease essentially being delivered to all the major population centers, by the time anybody was aware, it would probably be too late anyway.
The catch is that treatment must be administered in time. It's a fast-moving disease. Those stats vary a lot depending on how late medical intervention is.
Keeping the fleas out of those places isn't easy either. As far as I know that's the most commonly accepted theory as to where this came from and how it spread.
Germ theory really seems obvious after it was hammered into our collective skulls a thousand times. Yes, it does take a modern person, though not a scientist, to figure out not to let rats into the house.
there is no doubt covid-19 is a mild pandemic compared to spanish flu and certainly plagues like the Justinian plague. Note spanish flu consensus prior to the outbreak of covid19 was 20% mortality. After march 2000, a few thousand edits put it at 2%, which I am more inclined to believe the 20% side of it.
covid19 is somewhere between .5 and 1% (probably). the flu pandemic of 1957 was around .67%. so we literally went through this not long ago, people didnt freak out and destroy their economies for decades like we are trying to do now.
>>The more I learn about the Plague of Justinian the happier I am that our current plague is relatively "mild".
Worst case, AFAIK, is that 2% of the world's population dies with Covid. Say, 5% with no meds and a lot of them are infirm and old people. Hardly crippling, once you realize that it is happening.
>>I am also amazed how much of an impact these kinds of things can have on the world.
I think the fallout in certain religious communities, especially American Protestant Evangelicalism, will be very interesting. Before you dismiss the group as irrelevant to mainstream American life and the current COVID-19 pandemic and the present U.S. political situation, consider that:
- the voter turnout for this group may be proportionately large in the 2020 November election
- components of this group form a large part of U.S. president Trump's most loyal base
- this group is a key contributor to Trump having been elected for his present term
- components have been increasingly anti-science for several decades, prone to believe in conspiracy theories instead
- components of this group are among the least likely to consider seriously the established/being-established scientific causes, countermeasures, treatments, and prevention measures for COVID-19
If I were a sociologist the intersection between this community, COVID-19, and the hopefully-soon-to-end Trump presidency would be my study area for the next 5 or 10 years. I am Evangelical myself (though pro-science, evolution-friendly, I'm not too proud to be a monkey).
American Protestant Evangelicalism is at an interesting crossroads and is deeply divided. Old-style denominations (large formal groupings of individual churches with legal-entity centralized management) are losing ground to "Independent Network Charismatic" (INC) Christianity [1], of which the "New Apostolic Reformation" (NAR) is a big part [2]. The INC and NAR are decentralized and personality-focused, with individual "leaders" promoting their own organizations but aligning themselves with other "leaders" on project-by-project basis. These INC/NAR leaders raise a lot of money, have huge followings extending deep also into a lot of the Pentecostal/Charismatic older denominations, believe God talks directly to them and as a result espouse new "doctrines" and methods to their followers. (Leadership in older denominations on the other hand general rely primarily on the established Bible text as the basis for belief and teaching ... NAR is fast-and-loose with biblical text.)
The NAR also believe it's their mandate to "dominate society", the "seven mountains" or spheres of human activity ... e.g., "government", "business", "science/technology", "entertainment", "family", ... a few others. Traditional Evangelicals have diverse views but most do not believe in Christian domination of society. Many view the NAR folks as heretics and dangerous (as do I).
This is getting long ... but a Trump loss in 2020 November will drive a lot of NAR adherents to believe they're being persecuted at large. They'll feel the U.S. is losing its "special status" as a uniquely "Christian nation". They don't understand how much worse things can be than they presently are, e.g., Plague-of-Justinian-type calamity is outside the realm of their imagination, so loss of this election and some economic setbacks will feel real large to them ... with unknowable reaction.
And yet Christianity is shrinking as education improves. Having been raised in that evangelical cult I hope its end comes sooner than later. It spreads the worst kind of thinking (blind trust in authority) and indoctrinates the young with destructive superstitions (hell, faith healing, etc).
I'm curious, what can I, as a full-stack developer, do to prepare for things like GPT-X eventually making a lot of the work I do obsolete in the next 10-20 years?
Seeing all these demonstrations is starting to make me a little bit nervous and I feel it is time for a long term plan.
The parts of programming that are going to get automated are going to be the parts that require little skill, take a long time, and are boring as hell: writing boilerplate CRUD code, wiring up buttons to actions, etc.
Automating the harder and more interesting parts of programming is many orders of magnitude more difficult. This requires a true understanding of the problem domain and the ability to "think." GPT-3 and similar are just really good prediction engines that can extrapolate based on training data of what's already been done.
The answer therefore is the same as "how do I stay competitive vs. lower skill offshore labor?" You need to level up and become skilled in higher-order thinking and problem solving, not just grinding out glue code and grunt work.
Ruby on Rails scaffolding didn't make backend developers obsolete. I know you said GPT-X, but GPT-3 is at the boundaries of technology. The jump to GPT-4 will either take much longer or be much less impressive than the jump from GPT-2 to GPT-3. I would say that your job is safe from automation from GPT. But the technology that might put you out of job, which I personally think will not be something like a neural network, might be spontaneously discovered in the next 10-20 years just like the spontaneity of smart phones. To answer your question, be a human; be adaptable, be useful.
On the other hand, when it’s good enough to replace us, it’s also good enough to replace basically any job where you transform a written request into some written output, e.g. law, politics, pharmacology, hedge fund management, and writing books.
I have no idea how to prepare, only that I should.
(Edit: what makes us redundant may well not be in the GPT family, but I do expect some form of AGI to be good-enough in 20 years).
There’s a good book called “Rebooting AI” that does some fundamental analysis about current state of deep learning and its applications.
The biggest problem with GPT or any massive neural net is explainability. When it doesn’t do the correct thing, no one quite knows why. GPT makes all sorts of silly mistakes.
The human brain, albeit being a form of a neural net, can do some very deep symbolic reasoning about things. Artificial Neural nets just don’t to that (Yet). We haven’t figured out that not have I seen a system that is close. We haven’t got generic neural nets that can perform arithmetic operations to arbitrary precision. For computers to learn proper language, they have to embed themselves into the world for years like children do and learn the relationship of objects in the world.
So if I were a fake comment house, I’d worry about GPT. Not so much if I were a programmer or a lawyer. We do some very deep symbolic thinking to produce our work. If computers are able to replace us, they can probably replace a large part of humanity. At which point we have way bigger problems to worry about.
Symbolic reasoning is a very hard problem to crack. Something like “how old was Obama’s 2nd child when the US hit 4 digit deaths due to covid-19?”. Answering that question not only requires context like “4 digit” means 1000, it requires a bunch of lookups and ability to break a big problem into smaller problems.
Siri/Ok Google/Alexa/Cortana/GPT3 - all of them fail.
They can’t even answer “Find fast food restaurants around me that aren’t mcdonalds”.
I'm actually looking forward to more code generation tools. Things like wiring up a button aren't stimulating and I wouldn't mind that level of programming becoming automated.
That’s what I loved about Visual Basic. You could just draw your user interface and specify actions and then just fill in the one or two lines of code that need to run when that button is pressed.
I’m surprised React doesn’t have something like that. At least not that I’m aware of. Is there a GUI interface builder for React?
I am as well, especially ever since i saw [1]. It's a small test that someone tried with GPT-3 that translates natural language descriptions and phrases into shell commands.
Some of the examples from the tweets:
> Q: find occurrences of the string "pepsi" in every file in the current directory recursively
> A: grep -r "pepsi"*
> Q: run prettier against every file in this directory recursively, rewriting the files
> A: prettier --write "*.js"
It also seems to work the other way as well. You can set it up to give it a shell command and have it write a plain english description of it.
Granted sometimes the results are wrong, and in a video I saw someone playing with it like 1/10 of the commands were subtly wrong or didn't have enough context to generate what you really meant, but as a starting point it seems like such a powerful tool!
I personally spend a lot of time looking up shell command flags, thinking of ways to combine tools to get the data I want out of a log or something, or running help commands to figure out the kubectl incantation that will just let me force a deployment to redeploy with the latest image.
Imagine having a VS-Code style command palette where I can just type a "plain english" description of what i'm trying to do, and have it generate a command that I can tweak or just run. Turning a 10 minute process of recalling esoteric flags or finding documentation into 10 seconds of typing.
If it's really as good as it seems, imagine being able to type stuff like "setup test scaffolding for the LoginPage component" and having it just generate a "close enough" starting point!
Get good at specifying and documenting product requirements apparently.
Also remember that ultimately even if GPT-X is successful at transforming text into working code, all that's done is essentially define a new programming language. Instead of writing Python, you'll write GPT-X-code at a higher level.
GPT-x will be able to perform most copy-and-paste operations soon enough so that's the kind of jobs that would be made obsolete by it. Low code and point and click jobs are the ones that will follow. At first it will be "aiding" developers by suggesting code, and then GPT's successors will finally deliver the "no code, only a business description promise" that has been hanging on the industry for decades.
Of course GPT-3 is not there but it's only a matter of time: the capabilities are there. You are already thinking in decades which is the right mindset. Fortunately, tech is not something that will be done ever so there will always be opportunities just not in the fields we are looking at this time --digital products like web or mobile apps will be as exciting as a custom invoicing Windows app in a matter of years, but then you have IoT, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, and whatnot. Stay ahead of the ball as an engineer.
Of course you can also move up the food chain and become a manager or technical architect or lead.
Being worried about new potentially disruptive tech is legitimate, it's hard to see our place in an environment we can't predict.
However, particularly as a full stack dev, I think that it will create more opportunities for jobs than concurrence. You mention 10-20 years ahead, if you look that same horizon back in the past it seems (I wasn't working then) that the job also changed significantly, without making devs obsolete.
AGI might happen in our lifetime (I hope so), but I'm dubious that it will happen through a singularity [1]. Therefore, I'm not worried that as tech experts we won't have time to adapt.
It's not clear how much the demos have been gamed for presentation, and it seems more of an opportunity than a threat - it will still need devs to put stuff together, and (assuming it is as impressive as demoed) will take a lot of the donkey work away.
A significant chunk of what devs are paid for is the donkey work. Making every dev significantly more productive increases the supply of dev power relative to the demand, dropping the price.
It may be that deep learning as we know it (TF, PyTorch) is going to be replaced by prompting large models, thus making most applications straightforward for anyone to use.
Your main value add as a developer is understanding the problem domain. Machines won't be able to do this in your, or your children's lifetime, outside some important, but very constrained niches.
I was kind of hoping they would ask it some political questions. One of the very concerning things for me about these kinds of systems is their impact on political discourse, especially online.
If a system can be trained to advocate for a political viewpoint to the level of online debate without human interaction that could cause some interesting effects in online discourse.
It is inevitable that we will soon be able to auto-generate a whole conversation tree between fake participants, each fine-tuned to the desired level of fallacious reasoning in accordance with which position the botmaster wishes to promote.
