"Coronavirus" is the category, dangit. (COVID-19 thread)

[Friday]

"It's not like it used to be when you could have an opinion, talk about it and then sit down and have a beer together and talk about football."

man why do these motherfuckers all read out of the same playbook it's insane

"what do you mean you're upset all i was talking about was killing hundreds of thousands of people whats the big deal lets grab a beer and watch FOOTBALL because this is the GOOD OLD DAYS when MEN WERE MEN and HOMELESS PEOPLE SHOULD DIE"

[Brantly B.]

Aren't people who opine about the good old days on the list of people who need to be culled?

[Yoji]

Like, what did he even expect? For everyone else to agree with a closet Nazi and chant LET THEM EAT DEATH?

For all the bellyaching about the First Amendment, they always seem to forget it cuts both ways.

[Mongrel]

I mean, that's without even getting into the whole fact that Covid is attacking some healthy young(er) folks and giving them life-altering injuries.

[Mongrel]

Meanwhile, across the pond the British death toll is creeping close to 30,000.

[Mongrel]

On the cheerier side there's an old lady in New York who has now survived both Covid-19 and the Spanish Flu (and miscarriages, internal bleeding, sepsis, and cancer).

I'm not sure the vampires are necessarily correct about it being the blood of the young you ought to be drinking...

[mharr]

Maybe they're worried about blood like hers having the Weatherwax effect?

[Mongrel]

Another strange Covid mystery

It is a mystery that has left doctors questioning the basic tenets of biology: Covid-19 patients who are talking and apparently not in distress, but who have oxygen levels low enough to typically cause unconsciousness or even death.

The phenomenon, known by some as “happy hypoxia” (some prefer the term “silent”) is raising questions about exactly how the virus attacks the lungs and whether there could be more effective ways of treating such patients.

A healthy person would be expected to have an oxygen saturation of at least 95%. But doctors are reporting patients attending A&E with oxygen percentage levels in the 80s or 70s, with some drastic cases below 50%.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... es-doctors

[Mongrel]

[Yoji]

Can you really say your team is shutting down when it didn't really do anything in the first place?

[Büge]

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

[Brantly B.]

Trust me, there's definitely a two-word phrase on the mind of every American old enough to remember 2003 when they see Jared Kushner taking a victory lap early with a death toll already three times the stated goal.

[Mongrel]

A previous generation would refer to that as "Peace With Honour". Somehow, IT KEEPS HAPPENING.

(Also you can tell we're obviously more advanced because we managed to raise our word efficiency by a full 50%)

[Mongrel]

thread

A wild and wooly day with one of thousands of intermediaries and subcontractors bidding up the price of masks.

You know it's gonna be good when one of the first lines is:



It's great how the guy who gets a call from a journalist saying "hey this looks fishy as, what's up" decides to immediately and gratuitously incriminate himself. Hilariously, he still manages to come off as the least scummy of all the scummy people featured in the story, in that at least he comes off like he really thinks he's trying help (hint: buddy, you're not).

[Yoji]

I hate this timeline so much. I need to fucking shake someone.

[Brantly B.]

So my first attempt at running Folding@Home (with focus on simulating COVID-19 proteins, natch) didn't go so well because the damned app is a greedy little fuck and will eat any CPU/GPU resources it can without regard to heat, fan speed, or overall system lifespan, even if you explicitly tell it not to do that. I'm still not sure but I think running it overnight wore out and unbalanced one of my GPU fans.

Constraining it to a single CPU core kiiinda helped but not quite. However, constraining all your resources at the OS level seems to work great! And only somewhat turns your system into a laptop from the late aughts.

I've currently got my Maximum Processor State setting at a cool 50%, and that's enough under my current fan ramp to be as silent as this box ever gets (read: not particularly). That setting is: Control Panel > Power Options > Change plan settings > Change advanced power settings > Processor power management > Maximum processor state > Setting, under Windows. For my CPU. I have no idea how universal this feature is. For obvious reasons, if you're interested in doing this, I'd suggest doing it under a separate power plan than your usual one*. Under GNU I'm sure there's some similar arcane utility for this that will blow up three random machines on your network if you type something in wrong so uh, let me know how it goes with that, Thad.

On the flipside it turns out that Folding@Home doesn't really work with ARM-based SoCs, like, at all, so no throwing spare fanless Raspberry Pi resources at that particular project. Bummer. I have managed to roll some working configurations for Rosetta@Home (think like the margarine to Folding's butter) on my Raspberry Pi4 and Jetson Nano, but those solutions involve either A) actually owning a Raspberry Pi4 and not caring very much if it becomes nonfunctional for anything besides Rosetta@Home/other BOINC applications or B) knowing what the fuck a Jetson Nano is and caring enough to actually own one. I don't think anybody here is in either of those categories so I won't blather on about it here, but if you're interested, drop me a PM.

Note: I consider this a coronavirus post, but if a mod wants to move it into one of the OH MY GOD TOO MANY COMPUTER WORDS quarantines we have then go right ahead.


* P.S.: If you're actually doing this, I also suggest keeping the "only [process] when idle" option on for Folding, since other GPU-intensive applications (read: games) honor the processor cap in theory but tend to be a bit stupid and assume that they're the only things running. Accidentally starting one of these on top of Folding can put your (read: my) CPU/GPU temperatures at "could actually melt" temperatures pretty fast.

[atog]

I have a chorus of dying system fans, at any given time I can hear up to a barbershop quartet led by my GPU and possibly also my CPU fan. The case fan right next to my HD may also be singing its swan song. Idk. I've dusted and swapped fans around and tried to balance the load but some are molded or soldered onto their cards and/or behind a heavy and delicate heatsink.

Running folding might take my 10-year-old system out back and put a slug in it.

[Mongrel]

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/09/health/f ... index.html

Just how many receptors does this virus touch?! Autoimmune responses, cardiac responses, inflammatory responses, this is one hell of a virus.

[Mongrel]

[Mongrel]

Latest news is that places trying to reopen outside the US are nearly universally seeing a spike in cases. China got a bunch along the Russian border, Seoul shut down bars and clubs again, lots of stuff.

And then there's this: