It was spotted by someone claiming statistical irregularities in the movement of vote tallies between rounds and demanding an investigation, which this time, they got.
Last year there were also lots of claims of statistical irregularities in the movement of vote tallies, and demands for investigations, which they mostly didn't get. Or in which they got a fake investigation at least - I remember seeing one video someone had secretly filmed inside a counting centre where some volunteers doing a recount were trying to report that a large run of ballots had identical signatures, and the overseer was telling them to ignore it, that it wasn't their job to report fraudulent ballots!
You're also making the rather generous assumption that this was an actual error. As other commenters observe, "test ballots" for which you need >100k of them, which contain real candidates names and which are posted to the production database do not sound like any defensible testing strategy. If it's genuine incompetence it's of the form that in the civil engineering world would send people to prison.
It sort of does. The new app in your case would be signed by a different key and so wouldn't have access to the existing app's data. It would boil down to a phishing attack - the new app would have to impersonate the UI of the old one and get users to log in again.
Hence my concern with this part of the article:
"While it’s unlikely Google would ever do so, it is possible that it could sign apps on behalf of a developer"
Actually given the trend the company has been on over the past 6 years I'd say it's very likely Google would do this ...
I've not used Copilot but I've experimented with two other AI driven autocompletion engines in Java and Kotlin. In both cases I uninstalled the plugins due to a combination of two problems:
1. The AI suggestions were often less helpful than the type driven IDE autocompletions (using IntelliJ).
2. The AI plugins were very aggressive in pushing their completions to the top of the suggestions list, even when they were strictly less helpful than the defaults.
The result was it actually slowed me down.
Looking at the marketing materials for these services, they're often focused on dynamic languages like Python or JavaScript where there's far less information available for the IDE to help you with. If you've picked your language partly due to the excellent IDE support, it's probably harder for the AI to compete with hand-written logic and type system information.
I'd recommend TabNine, it is extremely helpful. I tried Kite once, and it is WAY overrated. So slow that by the time it provided me suggestions I was only a few characters away from finishing. Tabnine has saved me hours.
Yes, but you were doing that in response to news articles citing academics who - we now know - were assuming COVID was 10x deadlier than it actually was (reported IFRs fell from 1%-2% to 0.1%-0.2% in most places). Which is what the article is about: how did that happen and why did the media and research institutions do such a bad job?
BTW the post you're replying to is factually correct. As a government the EU does not innovative in the sense normally understood by the word, e.g. it does not introduce surprising new products, or (directly) create new technologies. It does however regulate.
Well yes, but FreeSpeech's comment was grey and flagged when I saw it, even though it's indeed kind of so obvious it's pointless. And it had a reply disagreeing, so it needed to be spelled out.
Whilst this may well be true, the very same problem affects COVID death numbers: a death is reported as a COVID death if it occurs within about a month of a positive test result, regardless of whether symptoms are displayed at all or whether the person is already dying of something else. Thus using the same standard to classify vaccine-correlated deaths ensures at least that the numbers are comparable in this regard. You can see where this affects their results where they calculate a CFR using the globally reported death rates.
If they had used some other way to define a vaccine-related death, it would make the vaccines look artificially good, because you'd be comparing it against something made to look more deadly than it really is.
There is an additional problem with your counter-argument: it is anticipated and is discussed in the paper, which appears to counter it:
"One might argue that it is always difficult to ascertain causality in such reports. This is certainly true; however, the Dutch data, especially the fatal cases, were certified by medical specialists"
They also discuss your second point:
"In the Israeli field study, the observation period was six weeks, and in the U.S. regulatory studies between four to six weeks, a period commonly assumed to be sufficient to see a clinical effect of a vaccine, because it would also be the time frame within which someone who was infected initially would fall ill and perhaps die. Had the observation period been longer, the clinical effect size might have increased, i.e., the NNTV could have become lower and, consequently, the ratio of benefit to harm could have increased in favor of the vaccines. However, as noted above, there is also the possibility of side effects developing with some delay and influencing the risk–benefit ratio in the opposite direction"
Some of the counter-arguments on Twitter seem to criticize the paper for being bad and then make other dubious arguments of their own (it's frustrating, nearly all COVID research is like this). For example "Health Nerd" states:
"10/n If you assume that everyone who stays alive will get infected without a vaccine eventually - which is a fact"
That is not in any way a "fact". That is a model assumption based on epidemiological theory that has not yet yielded any usefully accurate predictions. The theory is so weak you could have made exactly the same arguments on exactly the same grounds for SARS-1 or MERS-CoV or really any infectious disease at all, yet the world is full of infectious diseases and people who have never caught them. Additionally it ignores the way viruses seem to become less dangerous over time as they evolve to optimize for propagation rather than killing their host, meaning even the very nature of what people eventually may get infected with can be very different. This is already visible with the discussion of how the delta variant has milder symptoms than the original.
That's not the right way to increase people's confidence in vaccines. It's not normal for journal board members to resign in protest at a paper even if they believe it has methodological errors, and their argument in this case is especially weak, consisting as it does of:
1. Only virologists and "vaccinologists" may express opinions on the safety of vaccines. This is argument by authority and especially bad given the obvious conflicts of interest both groups have, along with the fact that many virologists were just exposed as engaging in a massive conspiracy and coverup re: lab leaks.
2. A complaint that classifying a post vaccine death as a vaccine-caused death is not OK. Where were these people when COVID deaths were defined as any death at all within 28 days of a positive test, regardless of comorbidities or age? Are they resigning in protest at that? No? If not, why not? Isn't this massive hypocrisy? And wouldn't they be concerned at the risk of inconsistent classification by doctors given the extreme emotions attached to the topic, as evidenced by their own response?
Real scientists would respond to a paper they thought was wrong with another paper explaining why it's wrong. These "scientists" are refusing to do so and demanding retraction on the basis that the paper is being referenced by "anti-vaxxers". In other words, the conclusion itself is considered sufficient grounds for retraction.
How can anyone believe the scientific world is on top of the vaccine safety topic when clearly un-scientific behavior like this is occurring?
The lab leak people did have evidence: the fact that the virus emerged right next to a lab doing experiments on coronaviruses. The people claiming it couldn't have escaped from the lab were the ones without any evidence. Their claims were basically "it wasn't from the lab trust us we're scientists".
The "anti China posturing" you say existed could also be described in other ways but if someone believes China allowed a deadly virus to escape from a lab and then covered it up, it's hard for that position to not be anti China in some way.
As for "a strong undercurrent of undermining scientists", as you admit, it turned out later that they had been dishonest so the people trying to undermine them were in fact doing the right thing.
It feels like you're trying to retroactively justify a dismissal of these claims by arguing that because their conclusions didn't fit with your notion of what good people think you were right to dismiss it. But that's not how argumentation is meant to work.
> The lab leak people did have evidence: the fact that the virus emerged right next to a lab doing experiments on coronaviruses. The people claiming it couldn't have escaped from the lab were the ones without any evidence. Their claims were basically "it wasn't from the lab trust us we're scientists".
You are way way underselling it. There's a ton of stuff we knew a year ago that were called conspiracy theories until a month or so ago, until suddenly the media is pretending they're both credible and were only just discovered.
thu2111 says "Who is saying they want to kill half the population?!"
He's speaking of mostly apparent desire, not what people have explicitly said (although it is sometimes explicitly said, too). On the surface it would seem to be political suicide to say one wanted, for example,
- all Trump supporters, or
- all woke activists, or
- all conspiracy theorists, or
- all Democrats, or
- all Republicans, or
- all blacks or all whites or all LGBTQ+ etc.
(pick a group)
to be dead. But there is plenty of such talk going around and it is not always cancelled or censored by FAANG and it is sometimes even encouraged. I believe that the OP's observation is correct about a significant part of the population.
Political affiliation and religious affiliation are both beliefs. Wars have been/are being fought over beliefs. There are plenty of quotes by various parties suggesting what should be done with unbelievers at all times through history.
At bottom, isn't everything we know really belief?
Last year there were also lots of claims of statistical irregularities in the movement of vote tallies, and demands for investigations, which they mostly didn't get. Or in which they got a fake investigation at least - I remember seeing one video someone had secretly filmed inside a counting centre where some volunteers doing a recount were trying to report that a large run of ballots had identical signatures, and the overseer was telling them to ignore it, that it wasn't their job to report fraudulent ballots!
You're also making the rather generous assumption that this was an actual error. As other commenters observe, "test ballots" for which you need >100k of them, which contain real candidates names and which are posted to the production database do not sound like any defensible testing strategy. If it's genuine incompetence it's of the form that in the civil engineering world would send people to prison.