ccc @ccc@qoto.org

I've always appreciated a good story; something that makes me think. As a result, I really do enjoy quality #literature; Pratchett and Asimov are great examples, but I could probably name a dozen more as well.

I make my daily bread #writing #software (and those who think that there's no artistry in software have clearly never come across the right bit of code).

I also find a lot of enjoyment in #mathematics, and there are plenty of interesting fields of #science...

Happy new year, everyone. And may this year be better for you than last year was!

> I do agree people might get so paranoid they may avoid going to the doctor all together. But I'd argue that is likely to be a small minority of the population.

Before talking with you, I would have simply assumed that every doctor who *could* get the vaccine *would* get the vaccine, as quickly as possible, as a simple matter of course and good sense. Now? Now I'm a lot less certain of that.

It's a common failing among people of every stripe to make one simple assumption: that deep down, most people are *just like me*. This is closely related to the idea that if Person X is in any way different from me, then Person X must surely be a minority of the population...

I was implicitly assuming that most doctors would get the vaccine immediately. You are assuming that most people would be fine with going to a doctor who had not been COVID-vaccinated. Each of us thinks that the other is probably wrong in these stances. I'm pretty sure that in taking said stances, at least one of us (and possibly both) are falling foul of the above-mentioned "just like me" fallacy at some point.

Which doesn't mean you're wrong. It just means that unless you have evidence, you should be assigning a very low confidence interval.

> Moreover because, as I stated, doctors are able to successfully see and treat immunicompromized patients in clean rooms.

Yes... that requires that the doctor be very careful and keep concentrating on the matter at hand. (And also have a freshly sterilised full-body cloth suit). This is a level of care above and beyond the care a doctor will give to a routine consultation.

> As a side note remember being vaccinated doesnt prevent you from transmitting the disease, it only prevents you from getting sick. So any reasonable person would be focused on the doctors safety precautions and not their vaccination status anyway.

Noted. Preventing you from getting sick does prevent you from generating vast new supplies of the virus, though... so it does *reduce* the odds of passing it on rather significantly. (I know I'd still be happier if the doctor was wearing a mask, vaccinated or not).

Merry Christmas, all!

In short; 20 is of form 3k+2. The set of numbers given (all of form 3k except one which is of form 3k+1) can only add up to numbers of form 3k or 3k+1; they cannot add up to numbers of form 3k+2 (like 20).

The value 30340 is a value of the form 3k+1, so I can't rule that one out. I can rule out 30341, which is of form 3k+2.

Also, it doesn't matter how many calculations I do to find the answer - what matters is how the number of calculations *scales* with an increasing number of elements in the set. If I find a way to solve the set sum problem with ten billion calculations for a set of _any_ size, then that would prove P=NP (since the number of calculations would then be independent of N, therefore polynomial in N)

So, first off, I'm not in the U.S. - this is very much an outsider's perspective on the current mess.

But I've been taking a look at the federated feed on here, and one thing seems clear - someone is controlling the discourse here.

There are any number of posts suggesting - or outright claiming - that fake democratic ballots will be shipped in in order to force a democratic victory. At first, I thought that these were merely bitter Trump supporters... but then there was a series of posts claiming that a number of _republican_ ballots had been found somewhere, where (apparently) someone had put them and the forgotten about them. And every one of the toots I saw on _that_ story were phrasing it as how "those evil democrats were trying to hide real republican votes".

That wasn't the last of it, but just thinking about the way those two sides were presented - both stories about ballots that were put aside and recovered from opposite sides, both framed in such a way as to suggest the same side was evil, both repeated dozens of times and I never once saw any one making the opposite claim - that tells me that someone is _pushing an agenda_.

Whoever it is, they're trying to make it _seem_ as if it's a grassroots movement, people complaining because they feel strongly about something.

This feels (to me) as if it's a Bell-Pottinger-type social media campaign; where they have a bunch of people write suitably grassrootish tweets and toots, and some software platform that just spams these messages _everywhere_; probably using a couple of hundred fake accounts.

I've always appreciated a good story; something that makes me think. As a result, I really do enjoy quality #literature; Pratchett and Asimov are great examples, but I could probably name a dozen more as well.

I make my daily bread #writing #software (and those who think that there's no artistry in software have clearly never come across the right bit of code).

I also find a lot of enjoyment in #mathematics, and there are plenty of interesting fields of #science...

#introductions

Let's see... apparently, putting in a bunch of tags of things that interest me is going to make it easier for other people who share those interests to run across me.

Alright, then. Let's see...

#literature
#pratchett
#boardgames
#programming
#ai
#sciencefiction
#science
#machinelearning
#fantasy
#mathematics

...that should be enough for the moment, I guess.

Now let's see what else is around here.

So. This will be my first mastodon post.

Whatever else I do, this will always be at the top of my timeline. However things change.

I should probably make it somehow interesting, or timelessly relevant.

But there is such a thing as overthinking things. A poor first post is very ignorable, and I don't want analysis paralysis to prevent me from ever posting anything at all.

So... overthought first post done, I guess.