On the other end of the spectrum, what doesn’t make sense is testing a random person off the street for Ebola. The prevalence approaches zero and symptoms are fairly noticeable, so any positive test is definitely wrong.

Most diseases are in between and have to be evaluated case by case, not buckshot.

You may be particularly interested to hear that there’s little evidence to support regular checkups in most adults beyond blood pressure testing and cervical cytology.

> Given the lack of favorable evidence and the potential adverse effect, primary care providers should consider the fact that general health checks, beyond the screening interventions shown to have benefit, likely have little or no effect on important health outcomes. Some of the interventions with demonstrated benefit have sufficiently large effects that a uniform application is warranted (blood pressure measurement and cervical cytology screening). In others, the trade‑off between benefits and harms is so close that patients should be involved in fully shared decision making regarding their participation (breast and colon cancer screening).

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31642821/

I suspect your doctor would agree with me. See if they’ll test you for Ebola, for instance. Not because you have symptoms but just cuz.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31642821/

And blood pressure is especially pernicious, basically every doctors office measures it wrong so the results aren’t particularly useful. Many use the wrong size cuff for example, or don’t give people time to relax before a reading. A ton of people have white coat hypertension, high BP only because they’re in a doctors office.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1120072/

I saw a paper that showed only 36% of cardiologists did it right.

The chance a positive is real is so low you may as well just point to a body part and get it biopsied.

A positive from this kind of test is statistically meaningless.

Bayes Theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes'_theorem

There’s a very good reason we don’t test asymptomatic people in low incidence populations. Basically all positives are false positives when you do that, no matter how accurate the test is.

When you’re testing healthy randos for everything the odds of a positive being false have so many 9s it would make an SRE weep.

Unless this is accurate to a degree previously unheard of in medical science it’s a boondoggle, and I can’t help but notice there’s no mention of accuracy.

Unfortunately that’s just basic statistics.

Biopsies are expensive, waste time, hospital resources and carry risks of infection and scarring that do not net out positively for people who aren’t in your risk group.

Getting a totally random positive doesn’t put you into a higher incidence category so whatever follow up test you take will be just as inaccurate as the first one.

The reason to avoid them is the tests would be a waste of time, statistically, and expose you to a bad risk-reward profile.

If you knew apriori 99% of the positive tests are false positive why are you taking the test?

It’s literally just math. Sometimes the right thing for you on average is to do nothing, which feels bad, but it’s still the right thing to do.

If it has a 1% false positive rate but the incidence is 1%, the vast majority of the positives are false. Then you have to deal with the consequences, including invasive procedures for further diagnosis.

If you’re searching for tens or hundreds of low incidence conditions in the general population at a time it’s absolutely worthless because basically every positive is a false positive. At that point save the scan fee, spin a wheel of body parts and go get a biopsy of that.

This is why doctors are confused why companies are offering periodic full body scans in normal people. They only test people who are high risk or symptomatic to confirm a suspected diagnosis. That extra signal is what makes the test useful.

Go down to the medical diagnosis section for a worked example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes'_theorem

Regarding cancers every human has all sorts of weird lumps that are generally meaningless.

In order for this to not be a boondoggle it would have to be spectacularly accurate to a degree previously unheard of. Just from a statistics perspective.

For static or thread storage, in C11 and later, ={0} will guarantee padding is zeroed. For automatic storage, per C11 6.7.9, only subobjects are required to be zeroed. Padding is not. [1]

In C23 initializing with ={} will give you zeroed padding, initializing with ={0} will not.

[1] https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1548.pdf

  struct S {
      char c;
      int i;
  };

  struct S a = {0};
  struct S b = {0};

  memcmp(&a, &b, sizeof(a)) == ...

This is why the compiler is angry at the post writer, and why the reinterpret_cast is needed. Ideally if they wanted to do something with the data, they'd unbox the structure.

That's why it's not a good idea to use void* to pass arbitrary data interchangeable with bytes. It's a location, it makes no representation as to what's there and how to interact with it. Let alone who owns it.

std::span solves two problems here. One is the ownership problem. The other is that span is a T[]. void* is god only knows.

The post asserts:

> The code is very clear and straightforward: you pass a pointer to the custom data structure, and its size in bytes. That’s it. Simple and clear.

This is unfortunately entirely false in C thanks to the aforementioned alignment/padding UB (and of course inner pointers). This is addressed with std::span. You'd still have to reinterpret_cast your structure to get the UB.

> Why should people complexify and uglify their C++ code with the uint8_t pointer (or std::byte), when void* works just fine??

tl;dr: because it doesn't. It just kinda looks like it does if you squint, and it's going to lead to the gnarliest bugs in the world.

This is such a weird religion.

Their TTM revenue is down 66% from what it was in 2012.

In nominal dollars. In real dollars it's down 75%.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GME/gamestop/reven...

America has several sets of eminent domain laws depending on the jurisdiction. The most coercive is federal eminent domain law specifically as it relates to building infrastructure like railways and highways.

It's set up so that you can take the land first and eventually go back around and decide on what the right price should have been.

Not only does it superscede state and local law, federal infrastructure projects are also not bound by state laws like CEQA.

You can even apply federal eminent domain law by e.g. transferring a state-level project to the Army Corps of Engineers.

What America is lacking in these projects is will, not means. The federal government could take your house and run a train through it by the end of the week if they wanted, doesn't matter where you live.

[edit] In fact some states even ceded their eminent domain rights to private railways.

https://ij.org/press-release/appeals-court-sides-with-railro...

Once you show PMF though the balance changes to long-term sustainability and maintainability.

What's going to be interesting is getting to a place where it generates better code than we would from specs. You can get better and better generated code by filling in the context the model infers. Do that long enough, and well, a perfect spec is just code.

We do live in interesting times.