I'm trying to wrap my head around coming to this bizarre conclusion from these two news items that are 40 years apart. It is incredibly difficult to come to anywhere close to similar conclusion when considering it with any seriousness.

Ok, so I'm squinting my eyes and trying to imagine...Ok, so I'm an American in the 1940s just reading a news article about the discovery of extermination camps in Germany by allied forces. They just discovered these camps and they don't know yet quite how many people were killed. WW2 has just ended, information is just coming out, slowly. Incidentally I also subscribed to a magazine that prints daily news from 28-30 years ago and I coincidentally also just read, in a news items from 1915-1917, that some group of people calling themselves Zionists, whatever that means, killed a Swedish anthropologist in Palestine who was living with a Arab tribe that was being harrased by the group when attempting to intercede on the tribe's behalf.

And I'm supposed to think what exactly from these two tidbits of information? That Jews seem to have been on this violent chosen people gambit for a quite a long time and that the Nazis had a point?

Or maybe instead of answering that you can just ask the one in three Jews in New York who voted a pro-palestinian mayor into office why they didn't know any better. New York, incidentally a city that supposedly only rivals Tel Aviv in the number of Jewish residents residing in it.

Your comment above was sufficient, nothing here added additional meaningful information, it's not worth your time or the parent's to go down this road. It wasn't believed to be a flu in the beginning and I think the excess death stats bear that out. Once the people tracking it think it's equivalent to the flu, rigid policy makes less sense.

I wish people would just accept that public policy need not align with what's right for them personally based own their health own situation. I can simultaneously understand why a public policy of lockdowns on Day 1 makes sense, while at the same time fight for exceptions to the rules due to my personal situation. Everyone I think is aware that the future is personalised medicine, that we're at the very beginning of that awareness, and that the current state of the art in medicine is very crude from that perspective.

Hell, if we had infinite money we should have just sent anyone 60 plus or in ill health to Florida, Texas, SoCal and Mexico for a 6-months/year vacation and mandated that they try to spend most of their time outdoors.

To be fair to the parent, despite what they think about the lockdown decision now, it says nothing about whether or not they thought it made any sense then.

It's perferctly possible to believe that the lockdown was a reasonable decision with what was known then, and still believe that the lockdown is to blame for certain unavoidable consequences down the line. Again, the parent might not believe this as well but their point can be taken separately fron your complaint.

Since several generations of Americans are not familiar with a drawn out sustained attack on acceptable cost-of-living parameters, the observation that "people are more awful" should be familiar to many people who lived and endured in places that have had decades-long deteriorating econonmies. If the economy or subjective economic perception had not tanked post-lockdown, the awfulness of people would be much less pronounced I believe.

I'm curious when we started conflating transcription and summarization when discussing this LLM mess, or maybe I'm confused about the output simonw is quoting as "the transcript" which starts off not with the actual transcript but with a Meeting Outline and Summarization sections?

LLM summarization is utterly useless when you want 100% accuracy on the final binding decisions on things like council meeting decisions. My experience has been that LLMs cannot be trusted to follow convulted discussions, including revisting earlier agenda items later in the meeting etc.

With transcriptions, the catastrophic risk is far less since I'm doing the summarizing from a transcript myself. But in that case, for an auto-generated transcript, I'll take correct timestamps with gibberish sounding sentences over incorrect timestamps with "convincing" sounding but halluncinated sentences any day.

Any LLM summarization of a sufficiently important meeting requires second-by-second human verification of the audio recording. I have yet to see this convincingly refuted (ie, an LLM model that maintains 100% accuracy on summarizing meeting decisions consistently).

Due to longterm conditioning from reading tech article headlines and discussions, my brain now autocompletes the word "cargo" to "cargo cult" every time it sees it in a tech context.

So I read "Largest cargo cult sailboat completes first Atlantic crossing" and was immediately intrigued...