tghw

When I was in grad school, I was working on general game playing AI. Unfortunately, I was in a "pure logic" research group, founded on the old-school AI principles that believed AI could be derived from deterministic logic.

Of course, this limited the games that we could simulate to purely deterministic games (checkers, chess, go, etc.). Any games that included an aspect of chance required a hack like a "dice player" or a "deck player" that would add the random aspects of the game. Of course, this led to other problems, since the engines would try to calculate the current state of the game based on the "optimal" play of the random player.

This is a much more interesting approach, and I imagine will prove to be far more useful.

That's an extraordinary claim. You need extraordinary evidence to back it up. So far, we haven't seen anything to suggest that evidence exists.

A WSGI middleware would not be able to catch exceptions in production mode, as the generic 500 error page would already be completed by that point.

Many of the comments here seem to be missing the point. It is an object moving into the path of the car, and if the safety systems work as advertised, it should avoid that object. Whether it's a person, shopping cart, bike, go kart, etc. doesn't matter.

Barring concrete evidence that is the case, it's a very dangerous assertion to make. It would also mean that the transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 is much higher than we originally thought, amongst those without "natural immunity".

Even if it were the case that half the population was naturally immune, we would want to understand why. The leading explanation at the moment is T-cells and previous exposure to other coronaviruses. Problem is, there's a good chance that previous exposures would be less likely in certain populations, like children, which could be especially problematic as we're debating sending kids back to school.

At the very least, we need more data on T-cell prevalence/reactance to SARS-CoV-2 before we can jump to the conclusion that people are already immune.

But right now, it's far more likely that we've seen drops because of the drastic measures that have been taken and the changes in daily behavior across the population.

The distinction comes down to factors that change (behaviors, mandates, regulations, etc.) and those that don't (age, gender, etc.).

Saying we've reached herd immunity given behavioral changes is largely meaningless, as most people do not want to continue these behavioral changes indefinitely. One of the biggest changes that you failed to acknowledge is that people are not in contact with nearly as many people in their day to day life as they were before. Working from home, kids not in school, limited social interactions, etc.

It's not herd immunity if a return to previous behaviors negates the immunity.

68% tested positive at a clinic in one neighborhood. Getting tested, without proper controls, is highly subject to self-selection bias. People were sick, couldn't get a test at the time, want to know if it was COVID, go in for an antibody test later. The people who were healthy, unless selected for a prevalence study, would much less likely to be tested in the first place.

Even in your first link, the highest percent positive is the Bronx reporting 33%. Not sure where you're getting 51% from, but it very much seems like you're trying to cherry pick data to support your argument.

Just because you and your friends weren't tested, doesn't mean the statistics are invalid. The link above was from random antibody testing and has a high confidence interval.

I've been sick twice during this time. Thought it had to be COVID, but two PCR tests and an antibody test all came back negative. Maybe the tests are flawed, sure, but it's far more likely I just had something else.

I find it hard to believe, with the R0 numbers we were seeing initially, that 40% had a significant level of immunity. If the numbers were that high, then R0 among those without memory T-cell immunity would have been significantly higher, which suggests that the level of exposure/immunity necessary for herd immunity to set in would be significantly higher as well.

While true, that map and a photo of an outdoor space with people in it are poor pieces of data to hinge your entire argument on.

You completely failed to take into account people working from home, schools delaying opening and not having been in session since March or April, and all of the other measures that have been put in place to decrease transmission (masks, barriers, decreased social interactions, restaurant closings, other indoor spaces being closed, etc, etc, etc).

Your conclusion is flawed because you left all of these factors out of your analysis.