gwillen

• gwillen 29 Mar 2020 21:18 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: gwillen's comment on: [Up­date: New URL] To­day’s On­line Meetup: We’re Us­ing Mozilla Hubs

  I tried tak­ing a video to demon­strate the is­sues, but I seem to have hung the head­set. I think the Quest prob­a­bly just can’t do Mozilla Hubs with ad­e­quate perfor­mance.

  It has no trou­ble at all with similar en­vi­ron­ments in na­tive apps, so again I won­der if We­bVR is to blame.

  EDIT: Hon­estly I wish I could get a video of the truly comedic amount of prob­lems this has caused the head­set. First I got a di­a­log that “Ocu­lus Sys­tem” had stopped re­spond­ing, then the di­a­log sep­a­rated into two pieces at a jaunty an­gle to each other and the dis­play froze. Then I tapped the power but­ton, and got a di­a­log ask­ing if I wanted to power off the head­set, but I was un­able to click any but­tons. One of the con­trol­lers seemed to be track­ing in­verted from re­al­ity some­how (pointed along the op­po­site vec­tor in VR from how the real con­trol­ler was pointed.) The other one was sort of gen­tly or­bit­ing.

  Hon­estly, I have found VR to be a pretty buggy ex­pe­rience over­all, but this is definitely the worst be­hav­ior I have ever seen from this plat­form. It’s pretty funny.

• gwillen 29 Mar 2020 21:15 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: gwillen's comment on: [Up­date: New URL] To­day’s On­line Meetup: We’re Us­ing Mozilla Hubs

  I fi­nally made it into one of the rooms. I sus­pect I’m hav­ing perfor­mance is­sues? The tu­to­rial room had 4 avatars and very few ob­jects, and loaded fairly promptly. The other en­vi­ron­ments are more com­plex with more peo­ple in them. I’ve fi­nally got­ten into one of them, but it’s … bad. Au­dio is al­most un­us­able. A lot of ob­jects are failing to ren­der. Track­ing is hope­less. Move­ment is im­pos­si­ble.

  I sup­pose I could try re­boot­ing the head­set and see if any­thing im­proves.

• gwillen 29 Mar 2020 21:12 UTC

  3 points

  on: [Up­date: New URL] To­day’s On­line Meetup: We’re Us­ing Mozilla Hubs

  I am try­ing to use Hubs through Ocu­lus Quest. So far I am ex­tremely unim­pressed. If I man­age to en­ter one of the non-tu­to­rial rooms with­out a hang, I might get slightly more im­pressed, but the au­dio is also pretty crap for me. Lots of weird static and glitch­i­ness. Some­times when I turn my head I lose track­ing and the world jit­ters. I think We­bVR is not a good sub­sti­tute for na­tive VR apps.

  EDIT: Ok, I re­booted the head­set (and switched from the Mozilla browser, “Fire­fox Real­ity”, to the na­tive browser), and it seems to be work­ing smoothly now. Not sure what the cause was of the is­sues be­fore.

• gwillen 29 Mar 2020 8:41 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: romeostevensit's comment on: Will gro­cery stores thwart so­cial dis­tanc­ing, and when should I eat my food stock­pile?

  Most or all the 24-hour gro­cery stores here (bay area) have con­verted to hav­ing clos­ing hours, as far as I know, to help them deal with the lo­gis­ti­cal prob­lems caused by over­whelming de­mand. You might ex­pect this to hap­pen in your area too, at some point.

• gwillen 29 Mar 2020 8:03 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: regnarg's comment on: Coron­avirus Jus­tified Prac­ti­cal Ad­vice Summary

  Be­ware, some of the very thin bare-look­ing cop­per wire you will find is “mag­net wire”, which is ac­tu­ally coated in a thin layer of clear in­su­la­tion.

• gwillen 28 Mar 2020 21:11 UTC

  12 points

  on: What should we do once in­fected with COVID-19?

  List­ing /​ sum­ma­riz­ing some things I’ve seen el­se­where:

  This gen­eral sum­mary post by Sarah Con­stantin: https://​​sr­con­stantin.github.io/​​2020/​​03/​​27/​​home-care-mild-COVID19.html

  A post by SC speci­fi­cally on “non-in­va­sive ven­tila­tion”, mean­ing CPAP and BiPAP ma­chines (which some peo­ple may already have at home), with pos­i­tive con­clu­sions: https://​​sr­con­stantin.github.io/​​2020/​​03/​​20/​​non-in­va­sive-ven­tila­tion.html

  A doc­u­ment by Matt Bell with in­for­ma­tion about chloro­quine phos­phate /​ hy­drox­y­chloro­quine: https://​​docs.google.com/​​doc­u­ment/​​d/​​160RKDODAa-MTORfAqbuc25V8WDkLjqj4itMDyzBTpcc/​​

  ---

  One of the most in­trigu­ing things I saw was about “pron­ing”: https://​​em­crit.org/​​pulm­crit/​​pron­ing-non­in­tu­bated/​​

  The au­thor of that post is Josh Farkas, a pul­mo­nolo­gist (i.e. lung spe­cial­ist) and as­sis­tant pro­fes­sor of crit­i­cal care and pul­monary dis­ease (i.e. lung dis­ease.)

  “Prone” here means a face-down ly­ing po­si­tion, the op­po­site of “supine” which means face-up. The au­thor says “Typ­i­cally we prone in­tu­bated pa­tients.” From con­text, I am read­ing “we” to mean his hos­pi­tal /​ de­part­ment, and “prone” to mean “ro­tate into the prone po­si­tion for 6-18 hours per day.” The com­mon­al­ity of this prac­tice seems to vary among hos­pi­tals.

  The post, how­ever, is a dis­cus­sion of pron­ing for awake, non-in­tu­bated pa­tients, and con­cludes that it ap­pears safe and effec­tive. There is a lot of un­cer­tainty around how effec­tive it is, but it looks to me like, if you have pneu­mo­nia and hos­pi­tal treat­ment is not available to you, there is some ev­i­dence that—per­haps coun­ter­in­tu­itively—you will breathe bet­ter ly­ing on your belly, vs. on your back.

  (The main coun­ter­point I have seen to this is that fre­quently mov­ing around and chang­ing po­si­tions is best. I can’t tell whether the post is largely about pa­tients who are too out-of-it to do that. I have seen it sug­gested that, if you’re able, sit­ting up is bet­ter than ly­ing down (I have no cite handy for this.) There seems to be over­all agree­ment, at least, on this one point: ly­ing sta­tion­ary on your back for long pe­ri­ods of time is NOT good when you have lung prob­lems.)

• gwillen 28 Mar 2020 20:39 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: Elizabeth's comment on: What should we do once in­fected with COVID-19?

  I was un­der the im­pres­sion that loss of sense of smell was pri­mar­ily hap­pen­ing to peo­ple who take zinc in­tranasally. (I don’t have num­bers handy.)

  My im­pres­sion was that the effect of the zinc was sup­posed to be on the virus (or the virus’s in­ter­ac­tion with your cells), not on the body. Which (if true) would seem to im­ply that pro­phy­lac­tic use shouldn’t cause adap­ta­tion.

  This pa­per ap­pears to be a dis­cus­sion of a Cochrane re­view from 2011, and sup­ports pro­phy­lac­tic use (and also gen­er­ally sup­ports use, and pro­vides more info):

  https://​​www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/​​pmc/​​ar­ti­cles/​​PMC3273967/​​

  The 2011 ver­sion of the Cochrane re­view in ques­tion: https://​​www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/​​pubmed/​​21328251 /​​ http://​​sci-hub.tw/​​10.1002/​​14651858.CD001364.pub3

  (Ir­ri­tat­ingly, there have been a num­ber of sub­se­quent ver­sions of the Cochrane re­view, but sev­eral of them have been with­drawn, for rea­sons that are hard for me to in­ter­pret, al­though one at least in­volved an ac­cu­sa­tion of pla­gia­rism from an­other meta-re­view on the same topic. It feels to me like there may be some kind of poli­ti­cal fight over own­er­ship of this Cochrane re­view.)

  ALSO, while look­ing through Cochrane re­views, I found this one in fa­vor of Vi­tamin C for the com­mon cold: https://​​www.cochranelibrary.com/​​cdsr/​​doi/​​10.1002/​​14651858.CD000980.pub4/​​full

• gwillen 25 Mar 2020 0:36 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: steve2152's comment on: Coron­avirus Open Thread

  Thanks, I be­lieve that ar­ti­cle is great ad­vice and I fully en­dorse it—I saw it a few days ago but never came back here and up­dated my com­ment.

• gwillen 18 Mar 2020 18:14 UTC

  4 points

  on: LessWrong Coron­avirus Agenda

  Please ap­ply the Coron­avirus tag to this post.

• gwillen 17 Mar 2020 22:45 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: streawkceur's comment on: Coron­avirus Open Thread

  Yeah, I think some­thing at the gov­ern­ment (or google/​face­book) level would be a lot more effec­tive. (Of course, peo­ple might have some qualms. China already did it, of course, and it’s manda­tory—but that’s China.)

• gwillen 17 Mar 2020 4:01 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Vaniver's comment on: Coron­avirus Jus­tified Prac­ti­cal Ad­vice Summary

  Yeah, agreed over­all. I would not want to dis­cour­age liter­ally our only source of di­rect data on this from do­ing it again. But ugh, why can’t ev­ery­one in the en­tire world please be like, sig­nifi­cantly more care­ful about ev­ery­thing, all the time? (Pre­ced­ing sen­tence is rhetor­i­cal and is me mak­ing fun of my­self for mak­ing un­rea­son­able de­mands.)

• gwillen 17 Mar 2020 1:04 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Spiracular's comment on: Cred­i­bil­ity of the CDC on SARS-CoV-2

  Note that “sur­vived as an [ar­tifi­cially-gen­er­ated] aerosol” does not mean that aerosols are gen­er­ated in sub­stan­tial num­bers in re­al­is­tic sce­nar­ios, nor does it say any­thing about how in­fec­tious the aerosol route is. (Also note that the “3 hour” figure in the preprint’s origi­nal ab­stract was grossly mis­lead­ing; the preprint has been up­dated to re­move it. The real figure im­plied by their data is longer.)

  What links here?

  • Spiracular's comment on Why isn’t in­creas­ing ven­tila­tion of pub­lic spaces part of the best prac­tice re­sponse to the Coronovirus? by ChristianKl (16 Mar 2020 22:05 UTC; 3 points)

• gwillen 16 Mar 2020 23:47 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Bucky's comment on: Coron­avirus Jus­tified Prac­ti­cal Ad­vice Summary

  Thanks, I am not best pleased about rely­ing on data from a pa­per that turns out to have been so sloppy. (I guess a rush was un­der­stand­able un­der the cir­cum­stances, but I think check­ing all the calcu­la­tions twice was also ar­guably im­per­a­tive un­der the cir­cum­stances! And the mis­lead­ing ab­stract was just dumb.)

• gwillen 16 Mar 2020 23:45 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Vaniver's comment on: Coron­avirus: Jus­tified Prac­ti­cal Ad­vice Thread

  See here: https://​​www.less­wrong.com/​​posts/​​B9qzPZDcPwnX6uEpe/​​coro­n­avirus-jus­tified-prac­ti­cal-ad­vice-sum­mary?com­men­tId=LuJRfhrNhu4aBanQn

• gwillen 16 Mar 2020 22:31 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: streawkceur's comment on: Coron­avirus Open Thread

  There are at least two at­tempts I’m aware of to do al­most ex­actly this, surely more that I’m not aware of, plus some at­tempts to do other mod­el­ing (like, us­ing peo­ple’s tracks from fit­ness apps, so they don’t have to in­stall a new app.)

  I think it’s go­ing to be re­ally un­likely to get enough peo­ple to use some­thing like this to be use­ful, but I’d love to be wrong. If you want to help I’m happy to di­rect you to them.

• gwillen 16 Mar 2020 3:00 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Ruby's comment on: Coron­avirus Jus­tified Prac­ti­cal Ad­vice Summary

  Every­thing I’ve seen so far seems to sug­gest that cop­per ox­ide is still anti-micro­bial, but I haven’t re­ally at­tempted to re­search this, so take that for what it’s worth (which is lit­tle.) (I’ve ac­tu­ally be­come cu­ri­ous whether hav­ing it on my hands—which are visi­bly turn­ing a bit blue-green where they rub against the cop­per—might have fur­ther an­timicro­bial benefits. But this is idle spec­u­la­tion I do not in­tend to do any­thing with.)

• gwillen 16 Mar 2020 2:59 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Evan Huus's comment on: Coron­avirus Jus­tified Prac­ti­cal Ad­vice Summary

  FWIW, I started tak­ing Vi­tamin D with­out mea­sur­ing my blood lev­els af­ter read­ing https://​​www.gw­ern.net/​​Longevity#vi­tamin-d . I take 2000 IU/​​day; the NIH site says the “tol­er­able up­per in­take level” is 4,000 IU, so I think I have pretty good mar­gins. https://​​ods.od.nih.gov/​​fact­sheets/​​Vi­tam­inD-HealthProfessional

• gwillen 16 Mar 2020 1:17 UTC

  18 points

  on: Coron­avirus Jus­tified Prac­ti­cal Ad­vice Summary

  Some notes /​ pro­posed ad­di­tions or clar­ifi­ca­tions:

  • The #1 haz­ard noted about cop­per tape turned out to be cut­ting your­self on the edge of the tape while ap­ply­ing it (4 in­de­pen­dent re­ports I’m aware of, in­clud­ing my­self.) Maybe worth men­tion­ing.

  • The 24-hour figure from the ab­stract of the pa­per about virus sur­vival is mis­lead­ing (all those num­bers re­flected the time of the last dat­a­point they saw virus in, notwith­stand­ing the time of the first virus-free dat­a­point.) Those num­bers (and the whole ab­stract) were all re­moved in v2 of the pa­per (https://​​www.medrxiv.org/​​con­tent/​​10.1101/​​2020.03.09.20033217v2.full.pdf—you may want to up­date the link in the post.) So “vi­able virus could be de­tected up to 24 hours on card­board” ac­tu­ally means that it dropped be­low de­tectabil­ity some­where in the 24-48h win­dow. The half-life es­ti­ma­tion graphs were also made much larger and eas­ier to read in v2; eye­bal­ling the graph, the card­board num­ber looks to have a me­dian of around 24h, but a dis­tri­bu­tion that ex­tends out­ward closer to 36h or 48h. (Although, as you say, this is de­pend­ing on the con­cen­tra­tions they were us­ing; the half-life, which I be­lieve was re­ported cor­rectly, is the more im­por­tant figure.)

  • On vi­tamin-D, if you haven’t seen this, some­one found a meta-anal­y­sis that sort of sug­gests a benefit even for peo­ple with ad­e­quate blood lev­els, if you squint a lit­tle bit. (I be­lieve it was a sub­group anal­y­sis that showed this, with the sub­group be­ing “tak­ing it daily/​weekly, rather than as a bo­lus”. Which does seem to match how any­body self-sup­ple­ment­ing would take it.) https://​​www.bmj.com/​​con­tent/​​356/​​bmj.i6583

• gwillen 16 Mar 2020 0:44 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Chris S's comment on: Coron­avirus Open Thread

  I think this doesn’t quite change ev­ery­thing, for the fol­low­ing rea­sons:

  • Even if long-term im­mu­nity is un­likely, short-term im­mu­nity will push this back to­wards the flu cat­e­gory, where most peo­ple are not get­ting it acutely at the same time. This will sig­nifi­cantly im­prove the health­care situ­a­tion vs what we’re see­ing in the pan­demic phase.

  • Diseases evolve to­wards in­creased spread, which usu­ally in­volves evolv­ing to­wards re­duced lethal­ity /​ sever­ity. If this be­comes en­demic it’s likely to do the same.

  • If it turns out that this does be­come a se­vere en­demic dis­ease, there will be a lot of pres­sure on the de­vel­op­ment of a vac­cine, much more so than has been true for hu­man coro­n­aviruses in the past (when they were much closer to be­ing mostly a nui­sance, and in­cluded in the gen­eral “com­mon cold” cat­e­gory.) Even if long-term im­mu­nity is un­likely, we can still im­prove the situ­a­tion like we cur­rently do with in­fluenza, giv­ing peo­ple pe­ri­odic boost­ers based on the cur­rent cir­cu­lat­ing strains.

• gwillen 16 Mar 2020 0:40 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: jimrandomh's comment on: Coron­avirus Open Thread

  This is a fairly late up­date, but clos­ing the loop on this: I be­lieve the 3-10% num­ber ended up be­ing the sec­ondary at­tack rate among house­holds where the in­fected per­son was iso­lated af­ter di­ag­no­sis. So that’s an es­ti­mate of the rate of trans­mis­sion dur­ing ex­tended close con­tact be­fore symp­toms/​di­ag­no­sis, not af­ter, which makes more sense. I as­sume that ex­tended close con­tact with a symp­tomatic in­fected per­son will re­sult in very likely trans­mis­sion.