[TUHS] The Unix shell: a 50-year view

[Henry Bent]

I'm going to come right out ahead of any path to the contrary and say that
I'm in favor of the lockdowns that were enacted in the US.  I very plainly
do not trust the population here to make reasonable decisions, even in the
face of clearly presented evidence to the contrary.  Furthermore, I have
not seen any evidence that US lawmakers acted according to any model
whatsoever.

The evidence being what it is, I applaud UK lawmakers for acting as they
did, and our hindsight evidence can only support increased funding for
statistical modeling.  It wasn't a widely regarded field before this and I
can only hope that its support improves after this.

-Henry

On Sat, 10 Jul 2021 at 08:02, Ralph Corderoy <ralph at inputplus.co.uk> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Jon Steinhart wrote:
> > In lectures these days, I'm asking the question "We haven't managed to
> > off more than a thousand or so people at a time with a software bug
> > yet so what's going to be software's Union Carbide Bhopal moment?"
>
> If buggy code rather than a single bug counts then the software model
> written over fifteen years by Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, London,
> which has been instrumental in poor UK Government policy decisions on
> COVID-19 has easily topped more than a thousand deaths in the net tally.
>
> It was a single 15,000-line file of C, written by a non-programmer.
> Eventually, ic.ac.uk released a C++ version which had been worked on by
> Microsoft and other volunteers for a month so it could face the public.
>
>    ‘For me the code is not a mess, but it’s all in my head, completely
>     undocumented.  Nobody would be able to use it... and I don’t have
>     the bandwidth to support individual users.’ ― Neil Ferguson.
>
> Politician Steve Baker MP, a former senior programmer, has been critical
> of the public version and commissioned a review by Mike Hearn.  A path
> to Hearn's paper starts at
> https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1323897771510943745.html
>
> And another coder critique is at
> https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/
>
> The numbers from Ferguson's original pre-release C program were
> presented by him to Number 10 and were instrumental in setting the UK on
> the path of lockdowns.  ‘...lockdowns are the single worst public health
> mistake in the last 100 years’ ― Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine
> at Stanford University.
>
> --
> Cheers, Ralph.
>
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