Musings on the Human Condition

The COVID experiment has shown not only that corrupt, selfish societies fare worse, but also that a multi-tier healthcare system is a symptom of such a decaying society and results in higher deaths per capita. Elites like Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan get hospital care for "minor symptoms" while those who actually need hospital care are left to die. Non-egalitarian societies do worse in countless ways. Here's a link on death rates per capita by country (look at the second tab on the graphics). Leaders include some obvious culprits: Russia, US, Brazil, India. All nations with "cult of personality" leaders. The list of countries by wealth inequality has the same leaders.

I recently watched an interview with Python creator Guido van Rossum where he describes feeling the need for Python while working with the great Andrew Tanenbaum on a project called Amoeba.  He clearly states that he intended Python as a language/tool that could fill the gap between scripting and enterprise workhorses like C and Java.  He said scripting was good for up to 50 lines of code, after which scripting became unwieldy. And he designed Python as a language suitable for 100 to 1000 lines of code.  So, he clearly wasn’t intending Python to be used for industrial strength ML programs. It’s a bit scary to think that a lot of the ML libraries written in Python might not be as bulletproof as they ought to be.