anonymouz

There is a point in distinguished a formal proof from an intelligible one, notwithstanding the fact that one can, with effort, be extracted from another. That's a key point of the discussion that we mathematicians are having now, and fits into the bigger question as to what it means to gain mathematical understanding. In fact, Tao happens to have some older posts about this himself. The naive formalist reduction that you are making is not really bringing us forward in having a useful reflection about this, as the discussion is already beyond that.

Maybe, but it's not worth discussing the content if you dont comprehend what the authors are actually saying.

I recommend rereading the text.

No, because knowing a proof exists is just a small part of math. It's value is rather limited to actual math, as the article explains quite eloquently and nicely.

You can, mathematicians generally don't. That's what the article is partially about - a purely formal proof doesn't get us much.

The authors discuss the dual roles of proofs, and the new need to differentiate them better, clearly in the article.

Who is "we"?

Aside from the arguments others have already replied to, your numbers are wrong by an order of magnitude. 280K/year comes out to 767/day on average. Yesterday 777 people died of Covid, so, roughly, it seems to be doubling the death rate at the moment (not quite true, since we shouldn't compare to average, and maybe some of these people would have died now anyway, but +100% is a closer estimate than an increase by a single digit percentage). Note that the number of deaths/day are still on an increase, and without lockdown it'd have been expected to increase exponentially for a while longer.

Of course, things get even worse when the disease is left unchecked or hospitals become overwhelmed; some tows in the Bergamo province in Italy reached daily death rates that where 6 times as high as the ones from last year in the same time period.

Edit: The actual numbers for NY show a more than 2x increase so far, see here https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/10/upshot/corona...

But if we had a large number of undetected cases in the past, then we should also have a large number of undetected cases now, contrary to the study. (Unless we already have herd immunity, but there is no data at all suggesting this.)

Well, in principle it does sound like a possibly "vaccine", but without the long-term testing I still don't see how we can be sure we have found this attenuated strain. Personally, I am youngish (30s) and healthy, so I would probably fall into the core group of those that "should" be infected. But given the choice, I don't think I'd do it, because even now, three months after this virus became big, there is still huge uncertainty about its lethality (even among young people), the number of severe cases (possibly causing long-term long tissue), and how this virus behaves in the long-term: how long would immunity even last? [seems unclear now]. There were also reports from China, and now South Korea, about possible reinfections or reactivations. Under these circumstances, I'd rather pass and keep to social distancing/masks etc. until a better solution comes along or the safety of an attenuated strain has actually been proven through a large scale, controlled trial.

I don't see the point of this. Nature has most certainly not established the long-term effects of this virus, seeing as it has only been spreading in humans for a short while.

Skirting the regulations is pointless, because the important thing is the intent of the regulations. If it were just a problem with the regulations, we could also just change the regulations and give the untested vaccine.

Plus, if you want to argue from a pure legal background, this approach would probably still run into trouble, as in most countries it would be highly illegal to infect people on purpose.

It seems the reason the vaccine will take so long (12-18months) to develop is because it needs to be tested for long-term safety which takes a trial with long-term monitoring. As this is essentially a sort of (active) vaccine, how do you propose ensuring it's long-term safety? It seems you'd run into essentially the same problem as with developing the vaccine.

You can't bike across the crosswalk, but you can get off your bike, step onto the sidewalk and walk your bike across the pedestrian crossing.

Is anybody able to find the actual study? The best I could find is the news release from the University of York from May [1].

[1] https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2019/research/an...

I assume you live in the EU (or somewhere else outside the US), where it is the most natural thing to just send money from your account to another one.

This simply isn't a thing in the US, as I discovered when moving to there for a time. They use third-party apps, cheques, and wire transfers (which are expensive and seem to work via ACH, a pull type system). It's simply not possible to go into your ebanking app and transfer money to someone elses account. (With very restrictive exceptions, e.g. same bank, or maybe the bank has integrated a third party service...)

As inconceivable as the American system is in the beginning for somebody coming from the EU, I guess for many people from the US it's similarly non-obvious that a push system can (and does) exist somewhere else.

I like this graph: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48678196 .

Gets the trend across in a very concise and obvious manner.

They'll forever remain on my mind for their rip-off "lifetime hosting". I paid a lot of money for it, and it was supposed to last while the company lasted. But then they were folded into Joyent and the lifetime deals discontinued (with just a little bit limited time hosting offered in compensation).

I have stayed away from them forever since, and warned everybody I could about their terrible business practices.

A typical olympic pool (assumed 50m x 25m x 2m; the depth actually isn't standarized), contains 2500m^3 of water. 1m^3 of water has a mass of 1t (in typical conditions).

So 10^6 tons of water corresponds to 400 olympic swimming pools. That's quite a lot of water (still not much compared to the volume of the oceans, of course).

I don't think it violates the GPL, as the GPL doesn't really care about names. You still have every right to fork git, but have to call it a different name. So if you call your fork "treengler" or whatever, you'd be fine. As far as I can see, you could also still say on your website "Treengler is a fork of Git, that adds/modifies/improves... it in the following way, ...".

To me that seems to be compatible with the text as well as the spirit of the GPL. I think a similar discussion came up in the Debian project with the Firefox trademark at some point. Debian is quite picky about what it means for software to be free, and they seem to be fine with derivatives not being allowed to modify Firefox without changing the name. (At least, I think that was the end status of this discussion.)

From mrmr1993's link:

> The USPTO initially rejected our application as confusingly similar to the existing trademark on GitHub, which was filed in 2008. While one might imagine where the "Git" in GitHub comes from, by the time we applied to the USPTO, both marks had been widely used in parallel for years. So we worked out an agreement with GitHub which basically says "we are mutually OK with the other trademark existing".

> (There was another delay caused by a competing application from a proprietary version control company that wanted to re-brand portions of their system as "GitFocused" (not the real name, but similar in spirit). We argued our right to the name and refused to settle; they eventually withdrew their application).

> So GitHub is essentially outside the scope of the trademark policy, due to the history. We also decided to explicitly grandfather some major projects that were using similar portmanteaus, but which had generally been good citizens of the Git ecosystem (building on Git in a useful way, not breaking compatibility). Those include GitLab, JGit, libgit2, and some others. The reasoning was generally that it would be a big pain for those projects, which have established their own brands, to have to switch names. It's hard to hold them responsible for picking a name that violated a policy that didn't yet exist.

Bitcoin has crazy volatility compared to gold and even USD. Sure, you can use it for speculation, but no one in their right mind uses Bitcoin as a store of value.

People just hope that someone else will use it as a sure if value, so that the price rises and they get rich off it. Ie, speculation.

The thing is, TCP/IP is necessary to deliver the website. From a user's point of view, a huge majority of the websites have no reason to set a cookie. Anything where I don't login, just read some news, read some blog entries, inform myself about some products, or similar doesn't actually need cookies.

It's just that in recent years the operators of the website have decided they'd like to track and/or analyze their users (best case), or even send that data of to some 3rd party ad network. So I appreciate the heads-up. (Not that it matters, I delete the cookies anyway when I leave the site.)

Care to tell us which one it is?

Are there no laws in the US?

Tough luck.

There is no fundamental right allowing tracking or advertising.

There is a fundamental right to privacy.

Did you delete all EU users' data?

I don't understand why you are getting downvoted, because this is indeed what Tether claims. From their homepage

"100% Backed

Every tether is always backed 1-to-1, by traditional currency held in our reserves. So 1 USD₮ is always equivalent to 1 USD."

Whether Tether's claim is actually true is at best unclear, of course.

Even worse, they tried to get an audit, but it ended up with them and their auditor ending the process without producing an audit. Apparently they weren't too happy the auditor wanted to actually take a close look:

“We confirm that the relationship with Friedman is dissolved. Given the excruciatingly detailed procedures Friedman was undertaking for the relatively simple balance sheet of Tether, it became clear that an audit would be unattainable in a reasonable time frame. As Tether is the first company in the space to undergo this process and pursue this level of transparency, there is no precedent set to guide the process nor any benchmark against which to measure its success.” - Tether spokesperson

See https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/bitfinex-and-tether-is-unaudi...

The problem isn't the warnings. The problem is that every damn website where you read a single article thinks it's somehow ok to set a cookie (and track you).