I find it too easy for people not on the front line to criticise those who are.
1. Chloroquine has been used since 1949 for treating a range of diseases including malaria, and is therefore a well known drug which causes complication only in rare cases because its side effects and use are well known, it's even given in prevention to healthy people travelling in certain parts of the world
2. Pr Raoult has demonstrated 13 years ago its effectiveness against coronaviruses
3. The current CV19 pandemic is killing people at an alarming rate
4. In Europe hospitals are stretched beyond capacity meaning more are dying for lack of space/equipment/attention/treatment, and not because of CV19 itself
5. As a world renown specialist Pr Raoult has been in contact with doctors in China who were the first to use it to treat CV19 and observe its effectiveness in greatly reducing the viral load
6. As director of a research hospital Pr Raoul is on the front line for handling CV19 patients and is responsible for making life and death decisions not just for his own life but for all patients arriving in mass to his door
7. There is no other alternative treatment to date for CV19, some other drugs are promising but are either much newer and less known, or heavier on side effects and cost
Now take into account the above facts, imagine yourself in Pr Raoult shoes, and realise that withholding the use of chloroquine in such dire situation, where the luxury of a full study cannot be afforded and the drug is very well known, can be considered not only immoral but also criminal. In other words when the choice is either to let people die with a "wait and see" attitude, or to save lives by significantly reducing the viral load and infection with a well known drug, the choice is clear. Another way to view the situation: you are a policeman stopping an ambulance not respecting the driving code and driving too fast, and then learn there is a dying patient in the back, what do you do?
Also Pr Raoult does not claim he has done a full study. Those that get finicky and still want to have a full study before allowing its use are irresponsible people who have no idea of what's it's like on the ground. Those that criticise him as a lone advocate are really out of touch with reality: he is definitely not alone, he's got 200 staff under his responsibility, 80 of which are researchers, he has been on the forefront of his field worldwide (see his wikipedia page), knows very well how to perform perfect academic studies, and is and has been constantly talking with specialists and doctors around the world since the earliest time of the pandemic.
Chloroquine has side effects and the drug might not work. It'd make the front blinds a hell of a lot worse if we start giving people whatever without any scientific basis just because one charismatic scientist has been pushing for it. Ignoring the science is what got us here. Staying blind to science to pursue false hope isn't going to get us out of here. Remember how during Ebola we were all convinced that drug by Gilead was going to work since it seemed to have an impact on the mechanism of action etc etc? Remember how it failed after rigorous studies? Imagine if we'd just decided it worked without testing it on preliminary data and given it to people on the front lines to protect themselves.
These regulations are written in blood. Dengue vaccines are another example. Ignoring science got us here. Ignoring science again will keep us here.
Today France authorized the use of hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of covid-19 - based on this study. So the study has had impact on policy already.
see point #2, plus all the hindsight of using this drug since 1949
> during Ebola we were all convinced that drug by Gilead was going to work
You mean Remdesivir, a drug which is barely 5 years old in the clinical world? For that one yes, precautionary principle should have a much higher precedence over the urgency, but for a well known drug like chloroquine which is normally available OTC, sorry saving lives comes first.
I take it you are not on the front line and have no immediate responsibility of the life and death of those infected.
On Android the first thing you notice when you install a firewall such as NetGuard is the amount of applications that try to access facebook servers. It's mind boggling, probably 50% are doing so. And I'm not even on facebook at all.
And it was sad to see in facebook offline activity how much data was linked to me, from apps which have the sdk. And you don't even need to log in via facebook or like/share. The sdk being present and working is enough.
Netguard proved to me that, despite never having a FB account, I surely had dozens upon dozens of shadow accounts. Pretty much any new hardware that had vanilla Play Store apps were ratting me out the entire time.
I was going to say Apple must have became aware of such flaw a year ago (iOS 12.2). However checking back on the article I see it is from 2013! So for all this time nothing has been done, Apple reacted last year, and Google has done nothing.
Worrying.
Honestly it just seems mostly coincidental to me. Reddit has downtimes every other day or every few days, and twitter only slightly less. The only unique downtime here is github, and even then it has been a bit since their last down time.
The new Spotify blog only states that "the Wrapped Campaign data pipeline had one of the largest Dataflow jobs to ever run on GCP," without claiming that it was the largest ever. I didn't see any additional evidence in the TechCrunch article to support this being the largest either.
Not sure if a better title is warranted ("How Spotify ran its massive Google Dataflow job for Wrapped 2019", "How Spotify ran one of the largest Google Dataflow jobs ever for Wrapped 2019"?).
Totally agree, this is a problem I also see plaguing our industry, and solving it is indeed a priority. We developers or engineers like wasting our time in abstractions, i.e. virtual worlds of isolated castles and babel towers of different languages and expertise. In such virtual worlds we can create and fantasize on all the abstractions we want, be the expert, play god, decide on which constraints matter, and build a world based on that. Such is the power of the non material software world indeed. Who does not want to be god? To caricature I'd say a significant part of the IT industry is about writing virtual entertainment: video games to be sold to the wider public, and toys developers and engineers can play with: languages, IDEs, ecosystems, frameworks, etc.
Earlier in this thread I wrote about data being the top priority [1], the raw material, that we rarely give data the primary focus it deserves and instead focus too much on the processing side. More concretely: dashboards showing instrumented processing clusters give a biased view that does not focus on what matters at the end of the day. What we also need are dashboards showing data flowing between sinks and sources, data quantity, data quality, etc. Sure resource utilization and efficiency matters, but only after we can validate we still have the right output, and that input is of proper quality. If output contains garbage, is it bad processing or is it garbage from the input? And if something is wrong with processing, do we know the impact downstream? In other words instrumentation should include data sensors, not just processing sensors: data counters, validation points, invariants, etc. Because at the end of the day, when the power goes off, do you know what's left to recover? Do you prefer your customers telling you about an unfulfilled order or do you rather want it to be detected earlier? If you get audited for GDPR, do you have a map of your sensitive data? In terms of security, is it about protecting clusters and containers, or is it about protecting the data? Once you get the data side right many things become simpler, but if you get it wrong, as we often do, we create a world of problems. Giving data its proper place in our engineering practices will certainly change our industry for the better and bring it closer to "reality" with less danger of veering into the virtual for the sake of it.
In a world where software is increasingly involved in human activities this would have a great impact. However I don't think we should stop there, as I believe this is part of a larger trend I'm concerned about: the idea that, not just in software development but in most human endeavors, we're increasingly favoring spending time in virtual/man-made spaces and activities, at the expense of the real world, the place and time we're at, nature and the environment. As if we want to escape the physical conditions we're in: whether it's our body, our environment, society, the work we do, etc. When one can't see a way to influence the real world a tendency would be to start operating in a virtual one where we get the illusion to have an effect, make some money, be an expert, etc. Oh and let's not forget this desire to put as much tech between us and the real world, as if we don't want to experience it directly, it's too icky, and instead need devices to offer an indirect perception: wearable tech, navigation by GPS, remote controlling tractors in vast industrialized agricultural fields, etc.
A friend working in a supermarket chain told me this story: he often advised a younger manager to consider better maintenance procedures of their A/C system, but to no effect. Now that my friend is retiring soon this younger manager is proposing to make an excel chart to track energy consumption in order to optimize setpoints, and asks my friend for his approval. Really? Approve perception to be limited to an excel chart? Isn't that the same as leaving the windows open and wanting to change the setpoint?
What matters most is what you want to still be there when the power goes off: data.
No amount of processing power matters if you don't have the data.
Everyone in the industry focuses too much on the processing side: objects, functions, containers, VMs, k8s, etc. but nobody really gives proper attention to data, its provenance, where it stays and where it goes, etc. I'm not saying engineers don't think about these things, they obviously have to think about it at some point. It's just that data is always accessory to the story.
It's like processing is the cool kid and data is the stinky one nobody wants to approach unless you have to.
Look at the 12 factor principles for example, where is data in there? How easy is it to take data from one place/cloud/database to another?
Data is the raw material, it needs to be the primary concern in programming languages and architectures, not objects or functions, containers or whatever, those come after, not first.
SQL and its continued success is a testament to how valuable this approach can be. Could be something here though, as I have found maintaining databases and datasets in a sane way to be difficult, even today.
The problems around data are in general harder to address than the processing part. Most people dabbling in software engineering don't have the skills or attention span to work on those, and most of the issues are already solved by extremely complicated systems (e.g. DBs, Apache projects, ...).
As for 12 factor principles, it was first touted by a PaaS provider. The whole idea is that they take care of the nitty gritty, while you can focus on the exciting (and technically easier) parts of software systems.
I'd be tempted to say something similar: data is harder because it sticks, in the sense that it ties us back to the physical world because it's always tied to a place somewhere, it has to be moved, copied, synchronised, etc.
However when I look at the accidental complexity we have created on the processing side, I wonder if it does not surpass the essential complexity of dealing with data.
In other words: maybe we have yet to create the proper concepts and tools to deal with data, all this time the industry created a tower of babel (and of overspent $$$) with our languages, frameworks, containers, etc.
As someone in the hardware world where CPUs and fancy accelerators are all the rage, it's the same story when it comes to thinking about non-volatile memory (AKA NAND, Optane, PMem, etc.)
I would add the problem of long term archiving - both as the physical medium and file formats into this. Will my jpgs be accessible 50 years dpwn the line? If yes, who will remember and have the equipment to read 100gb blu-ray mdisc?
1. Chloroquine has been used since 1949 for treating a range of diseases including malaria, and is therefore a well known drug which causes complication only in rare cases because its side effects and use are well known, it's even given in prevention to healthy people travelling in certain parts of the world
2. Pr Raoult has demonstrated 13 years ago its effectiveness against coronaviruses
3. The current CV19 pandemic is killing people at an alarming rate
4. In Europe hospitals are stretched beyond capacity meaning more are dying for lack of space/equipment/attention/treatment, and not because of CV19 itself
5. As a world renown specialist Pr Raoult has been in contact with doctors in China who were the first to use it to treat CV19 and observe its effectiveness in greatly reducing the viral load
6. As director of a research hospital Pr Raoul is on the front line for handling CV19 patients and is responsible for making life and death decisions not just for his own life but for all patients arriving in mass to his door
7. There is no other alternative treatment to date for CV19, some other drugs are promising but are either much newer and less known, or heavier on side effects and cost
Now take into account the above facts, imagine yourself in Pr Raoult shoes, and realise that withholding the use of chloroquine in such dire situation, where the luxury of a full study cannot be afforded and the drug is very well known, can be considered not only immoral but also criminal. In other words when the choice is either to let people die with a "wait and see" attitude, or to save lives by significantly reducing the viral load and infection with a well known drug, the choice is clear. Another way to view the situation: you are a policeman stopping an ambulance not respecting the driving code and driving too fast, and then learn there is a dying patient in the back, what do you do?
Also Pr Raoult does not claim he has done a full study. Those that get finicky and still want to have a full study before allowing its use are irresponsible people who have no idea of what's it's like on the ground. Those that criticise him as a lone advocate are really out of touch with reality: he is definitely not alone, he's got 200 staff under his responsibility, 80 of which are researchers, he has been on the forefront of his field worldwide (see his wikipedia page), knows very well how to perform perfect academic studies, and is and has been constantly talking with specialists and doctors around the world since the earliest time of the pandemic.