FTA: A chat bot can handle expected, middle-of-the-road queries (as in, for a bank, “what’s my balance” and so on) – but customers can get those answers already from the app or website.
This is where the author misses the point. Chat bots will be te main interface in the future. Especially for these mundane middle of the road queries. Integrated into voice controlled ai buddies.
The author is spot on for the more complicated requests. Even though these will be triaged by a the ai buddy.
I just read this January 2023 article by a person with last name Fauci that claims coronaviruses have never been controlled by vaccines. More communication problems or admission of mistakes?
Rethinking next-generation vaccines for coronaviruses, influenzaviruses, and other respiratory viruses
David M. Morens, Jeffery K. Taubenberger, and Anthony S. Fauci
'Because these viruses generally do not elicit complete and durable protective immunity by themselves, they have not to date been effectively controlled by licensed or experimental vaccines. In this review, we examine challenges that have impeded development of effective mucosal respiratory vaccines ...'
> with last name Fauci that claims coronaviruses have never been controlled by vaccines
Actually, the full text is:
"Viruses that replicate in the human respiratory mucosa without infecting systemically, including influenza A, SARS-CoV-2, endemic coronaviruses, RSV, and many other “common cold” viruses, cause significant mortality and morbidity and are important public health concerns. Because these viruses generally do not elicit complete and durable protective immunity by themselves, they have not to date been effectively controlled by licensed or experimental vaccines."
The authors of the paper (not just Fauci) named off a group of different viruses, not just a single one. Taken in the stated context, it should make a lot more sense to anyone who reads this stuff.
Countless studies have shown that SARS-CoV2 can infect systemically and not just the lungs. The SARS-CoV2 virus has been found in virtually every organ and the first autopsy studies in 2020 demonstrated this.
It is horrifying that the person who has lead the response to this virus for the US is a coauthor of this factually incorrect statement 3 years into the pandemic.
Humoral vaccines do provide some limited protection when it comes to transmission. Nothing like a mucosal vaccine would. But an additional line of protection for the susceptible we may come in contact with.
For full disclosure I don't vaccinate anymore (waiting until the mucosal vaccines are available). But I understand those who do, especially if they are around other people when maskless more than I am.
I was under the impression that there is no data showing that the covid mrna vaccines reduce transmission. If you are aware of a source that says otherwise I would love to check it out.
> The ARs among household contacts of index patients who had received a COVID-19 booster dose, of fully vaccinated index patients who completed their COVID-19 primary series within the previous 5 months, and of unvaccinated index patients were 42.7% (47 of 110), 43.6% (17 of 39), and 63.9% (69 of 108), respectively.
I appreciate the response. Hard to draw many conclusions from that study for a number of reasons, but perhaps the greatest in my mind is highlighted near the end: "TCOVID-19 prevention measures (vaccination, isolation, and mask use) are likely highly correlated within households, and the identified risk factors might not be independent predictors of transmission".
Basically this article doesn't show that vaccines prevent transmission. It doesn't show they don't either, although that there wasn't a more dramatic effect is a negative finding in my opinion. I wish the authors had analyzes the AR in vaccinated vs unvaccinated household contacts.
Firstly, not all spans are interesting. When 99.99% of your traffic is just going to serve up an HTTP 200 within your acceptable latency threshold, you don't need every one of those. You probably do want to keep 100% of error spans, or those where the root has a duration beyond a configured threshold. There's tools to be able to sample that way.
Secondly, there's ways to also attach your effective sample rate as metadata to spans, and if there's a backend that supports re-weighting counts based on that, you can still get accurate all-up counts of overall traffic.
Admittedly, OTel and many other backends don't have the best story for this yet. But it's getting better.
While I would like to ingest every one, cost is a factor.
Even if we were self-hosting, there's a cost to ingesting and storing every single span.
And even if we are able to pay for ingesting 100%, not everything is practical to be ingested 100%. Our most common request type (heartbeat) generate a span payload size that is a multiple of the original request. We're using Elixir in production, and those can absorb a tremendous amount of traffic, saturating the entire CPU capacity of the hardware if we let it. The agents are not capable of keeping up.
In my career I got quite some technical certifications. Any cert shows you are taking your job seriously and you are willing to learn.
The following three certs helped to show I know my field really well and these separated me from others that just say they know it. Cisco CCNA/CCNP, Linux institute LPI and Agile Alliance certified Scrum master.
Later on I used certifications to quickly pivot into a niche, sometimes when already practicing the role. Architecture (togaf) and product management.
Many moons ago I created all graphs in the LPIC2 exam prep book [1] using graphviz. The book is open sourced now, and all dot files are preserved in the accompanying repo [2].
One thing I learned creating these graphs was that with some tinkering you have quite a lot of control on how the result will look, without littering the semantic in the source file with a lot of markup.
I choose graphviz because the dot notation can easily be checked into source control. It is also easy to create reproducible results using a makefile.
