It can be both not genetically engineered and a lab leak at the same time.
We study dangerous pathogens in labs all the time. All it takes is a laboratory accident for it to escape containment.
“Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats.”
This is a motte and bailey. The article is about genetic engineering, not accidental leaks, so the specific lab leak theory in this context would be one where not only the virus, but it's subsequent mutations, were engineered and leaked. The probability of it being genetically engineered first for the leak and then for the subsequent mutations is incredibly unlikely and a soft, qualitative model of synonymous mutations is not up to the standard. Especially since the model takes first sequencing as direct evidence for location of origin (it isn't) and it doesn't take into account the mishmash of explosive spread, reinfection, superinfection, and chronic infection that isn't, to my knowledge, present for any other known virus - a strong quantitative model would be necessary at minimum.
Both the CCP and members of the American government that funded risky gain of function research at Wuhan Institute of Virology indirectly through the EcoHealth Alliance have a strong motive to coverup a lab leak as they would be considered culpable in the pandemic.
The wet market theory wouldn't even be seriously considered if it weren't for the messaging by the CCP early on and people being afraid to be labeled "xenophobic" for blaming the pandemic on the irresponsible poor safety practices that were called out in the article I linked to earlier in this thread.
Given all the evidence and ignoring the official narratives of those with something to hide, the likelihood of an accidental lab leak from WIV is overwhelming in comparison to the wet market theory where it just coincidentally appeared out of thin air in the city of Wuhan with no prior animal reservoir ever found.
Pedantically you are correct, but it is and was common to use C++ compilers as a slightly more convenient dialect of C. This gives you the performance and simplicity of the C language with some very nice quality of life improvements.
With few exceptions, C++ can mostly be treated as a superset of C.
What I was trying to say is that if you're comfortable using modern C++ and try to switch back to a C++ compiler from the early 90s you are going to find a lot of the features you regularly use suddenly being absent. With C this is much less of an issue.
IIRC they were also available as “non-standard” feature in compilers at the time before being added to c99 (e.g. I’m pretty sure gcc in the late 90s supported all of these if you didn’t force c89 compatibility).
Snap, my incomprehensible article made you want to program the whole thing? Sorry about that!
As a side note, if you want to go Commander Keen style, you won't have the pleasure to use DOS/4G. CK, alike Wolfenstein 3D, use real mode. Personnaly, I find having to deal with near/far pointers a huge turn off from programming this way.
Hi Fabien thanks a lot for the books and articles! TBF I only understand a small part of them but I find them fascinating.
I'll try out real mode and see what happens. I read about near/far pointers some 30+ years ago in one of my father's programming books so that's the only thing I know about them -- I heard about them :D
I've noticed the exact phenomena you're describing on both here and reddit, where people will gush all over a famous person for their accomplishments until it becomes known that they espouse anything other than woke liberal orthodoxy.
> Binary Qt and GTK apps compiled even 10-15 years ago often still work, and do so on almost any distro.
That hasn’t been my experience at all. Also, the desktop Linux market is minuscule. It is an order of magnitude smaller than the macOS market. There’s a reason commercial software vendors don’t usually bother with it.
It's the unintended consequences of good intentions. The belief is that the criminal justice system has been historically racist against certain minority groups. Once you've been to prison, it becomes dramatically harder to get a job and rent. So by being soft on crime they are righting a "wrong".
Noble intentions but it ultimate creates injustice for victims of the crime. It also promotes petty and organized crime. It also creates a cycle. Soft on crime cause a crime wave caused by social justice DAs. Voters get pissed and then only vote for Tough on Crime candidates. Tough on Crime candidates crack down on crime creating a sense of injustice. The sense of injustice pisses off Voters and they vote for Social Justice candidates who are soft on crime and the cycle repeats.
It sounds like that could be Someone Else's Problem from the perspective of a District Attorney. It plausibly looks good to somebody that the DA is minimizing prison costs regardless of second-order effects of policies which minimize prison costs.
DA has a bully pulpit they could use to petition for building more jail space, but no direct control of that. Also it takes years to build more jail space. Prisons/jails are incredibly expensive to build and operate.
My point is that the vaccines abilities were oversold and underwhelmed people with their efficacy. This and several other policy missteps have severely undermined people’s trust regarding public health institutions.
Probably true, though most things in life are oversold. Including how well a past infection will help you out. :D
I don't want to demand that we listen to experts, but I do regret people seem to have expected experts to never be wrong. And the current culture has gotten to where admitting a mistake is literally the worst thing you can do for a political stance. :(
I'm vaguely curious on which ones you mean. Especially with regards to the vaccines, the data is pretty overwhelming that they were a net good. The charts that were showing hospitalization/deaths of vaccinated versus not were fairly conclusive. Did they live up to some of the initial hype about them? I don't actually know. The pipe dream that many were saying of a sterilizing vaccine were always a distant hope.
I’m mostly talking about the partial lockdowns where only specific categories of businesses or employees were considered essential. Many of these designations were arbitrary at best and politically motivated at worst.
Please cite your sources here. Lockdowns were effective.
1) Lacking a nationalized infrastructure to deliver food, utilities, and healthcare, some businesses are clearly essential
2) It is impossible to have unanimous consensus on what "essential" means
3) In some areas, businesses are not tightly scoped - the primary source of food for a neighborhood may also sell non-food items.
4) Even the definition of "essential" cannot be tightly defined - are manufacturers of spare infrastructure components essential? What about their suppliers? What about the contractor who refills their coffee machine?
Decisions had to be made, and administrators largely made the best decisions with the information available to them.
Programmer logic leads some to the libertarian path. Not everything is a zero sum game. Life is messy and it’s not always governments fault. Getting it right more than wrong saved countless lives. You can’t quantify the amount of lives saved.
> White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci that the chances of scientists creating a highly effective vaccine — one that provides 98% or more guaranteed protection — for the virus are slim.
> Scientists are hoping for a coronavirus vaccine that is at least 75% effective, but 50% or 60% effective would be acceptable, too, he said.
> The FDA has said it would authorize a coronavirus vaccine so long as it is safe and at least 50% effective.
Not sure why you’re downvoted. It’s not significantly more lethal at this point than seasonal flu. The only difference to the population that I see is that vaccines for COVID have less efficacy than those for influenza.
The big concern with covid is long covid which affects around 5% of people who got covid. Thats what scares me. When I got covid it were only 2-3 bad days and the rest was like a normal flu but I noticed it took me roughly 3 more weeks to feel 100% like I did before, mostly fitness and stamina.
I've never recovered. I permanently lost the ability to taste certain things and can literally get 10 hours of sleep the night before and feel exhausted by noon.
I look forward to people who pretend that it's the same as the flu catching it for themselves so that they can enjoy this "no big deal."
Sorry. I have a brilliant, extremely driven friend who did undergrad at an ivy. After getting covid, She had to drop out of her grad school program and her new life is a shell compared to what it used to be like. 2 years later, and there's a tiny fraction of improvement which she attributes to extreme rest. I forward her literature about emerging LC treatments and mechanisms of which her physicians are laughably ignorant.
Sorry that you're suffering this way. It's infuriating to me that people downplay Covid infections when the risk of suffering from long Covid effects is very real.
> The big concern with covid is long covid which affects around 5% of people who got covid.
Where did you get 5%?
Last I saw you have a 20% chance of long covid, but it seems that was with older variants.
The thing that scares me is:
> up to two years after infection, at an elevated risk for many long COVID-related conditions including diabetes, lung problems, fatigue, blood clots and disorders affecting the gastrointestinal and musculoskeletal systems.
My concern is that there isn't going to be much research on a proper vaccine since the Pharma companies are making money hand over fist on this half-assed one currently available.
It was good when it came out, but based on it's effectiveness, it seems more of a stop-gap than a proper vaccine.
“There were 8996 hospitalizations (538 deaths [5.98%] within 30 days) for COVID-19 and 2403 hospitalizations (76 deaths [3.16%]) for seasonal influenza,”
“Compared with hospitalization for influenza, hospitalization for COVID-19 was associated with a higher risk of death (hazard ratio, 1.61 [95% CI, 1.29-2.02]).”
> The only difference to the population that I see is that vaccines for COVID have less efficacy than those for influenza.
So far COVID vaccines seem to confer protection for longer than flu ones, and the initial protection is generally higher.
Not sure if it's your case, but people often forget that every year there's a new flu shot per hemisphere, and its effectiveness generally hovers at around 40-60%.
The difference is that flu vaccines actually prevent infection in many cases, whereas COVID vaccines do not prevent them, but merely lessen the symptoms and risk of hospitalization.
> The difference is that flu vaccines actually prevent infection in many cases
OK
> whereas COVID vaccines do not prevent them, but merely lessen the symptoms and risk of hospitalization.
Is this something I can read on a peer reviewed study, or is it yet another creative definition of what "infection", "vaccine" or "symptom" really means?
> Irrespective of vaccination and/or prior natural infection, SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infections and reinfections remained highly infectious and were responsible for 80% of transmission observed in the study population, which has high levels of both prior infection and vaccination. This observation underscores that vaccination and prevalent naturally acquired immunity alone will not eliminate risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection, especially in higher-risk settings, such as prisons.
We study dangerous pathogens in labs all the time. All it takes is a laboratory accident for it to escape containment.
“Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...