Wrote my first programs for this too, at 7. Copied from the manual with no understanding but eventually writing my own. The only coder in the house! Didn't write anything decent until the C64 when I made a few small games.
Sadly I'm in the same boat, for years now. Fatigue is such an inadequate term. Can't even sit up for long without getting exhausted. Still trying treatments but to no avail so far. The impact of Long Covid seems to be drawing a lot of eyeballs to this though so I'm hopeful something will be found.
It's taught me patience and empathy. I used to teach others how to program and when people couldn't get something I presumed they weren't trying hard enough. I get it now. Now I read the requirements or exercise or puzzle or whatever and there's just nothing where once there was a bubbling and filtering of ideas or whatever we call thinking.
A lesson learned from hard experience and unfortunately too late: get your own illness benefit insurance. If you have it through your employer you can't sue the insurance company since you're not a party to the contract. They don't even need to talk to you, only your employer.
The book is well worth a read too. There are some great bits with John Von Neumann.
On a similar note, Adventures of a Physicist by Luis Alvarez is also a great read. Among many other things, he and his son proposed the theory that the dinosaurs' extinction was caused by a meteor.
I'm interested in your opinion of the citations too. They purport to show persistence beyond standard treatment in mice, dogs, macaques and humans, the latter via xenodiagnosis and PCR. PCR is pretty direct.
I got one shipped to Ireland and it arrived in one beautiful piece. Cliff also sent on a email documenting the process and I replied with an unboxing photo. It was worth ordering just for the lovely interaction.
30000 Lyme cases a year are reported by health services to the CDC so eventually some celebs are going to catch it, and since they make good news you'll hear about it.
On "chronic Lyme", it's been rebranded as post treatment Lyme disorder (PTLDS), it's acknowledged by the CDC [0] and they also acknowledge that some experts hypothesize it may be the result of persistent infection, others an autoimmune disorder. One John Hopkins study [1] found the typical symptoms of PTLDS do persist for some after treatment for Lyme and another[2] found a set of symptoms allowing them to reliabily identify PTLDS.
Any disease that lasts a long time and doesn't have a set treatment is going to attract quackery and plenty people will fall for it, but that doesn't mean there's no disorder there. The fact the symptoms can come and go makes it that much easier to associate their most recent treatment with a cure.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/postlds/index.html
[1] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/...
[2] Mentioned here https://www.hopkinslyme.org/lyme-disease/treatment-and-progn...
> But the concept of a "chronic" bacterial lyme infection has little to no medical bearing.
From your first link:
"In 2017, scientists at the Tulane National Primate Research Centers, funded in part by an NIH research resources grant, reported evidence of persistent and metabolically active B. burgdorferi after antibiotic treatment in rhesus macaques"
From your second link, to the CDC:
"Other experts hypothesize that PTLDS results from a persistent but difficult to detect infection".
I found it well worth reading, and found his writing about thinking to be so clear that I felt like I could almost understood thought, for a while.
You might like the abridged version, "Psychology: The Briefer Course" [1] to get a taste. This shorter is referred to as 'Jimmy' where the full version is 'James'!
Normal DB indexes are designed to be general-purpose so that they give predictable performance no matter the data you insert.
The paper basically describes a more efficient way to look up data by using an index that's tailored to the specific dataset it's built over. It's expected that you'd be able to get a performance increase by doing this.
In more detail, they use neural nets to learn an approximation of the distribution of the data and use that to look up the rough position of each key faster than usual. They still use traditional structures for the "last-mile" which is not so easily learned.
You could accomplish the same thing without NNs by using anything that can approximate the distribution of the data. E.g. a histogram would work for some cases, and you could do some PCA and normalization first to deal with more cases. NNs have the advantage that they can learn more complex distributions.
It's worthwhile to remember that Athenian democracy was direct and not representative like nowadays. Individuals voted on bills rather than electing officials to vote in their place. Plato claimed this form of government led to bills passed by popularity contest and tyranny of the majority which sounds pretty modern to me.
Still, I'd prefer democracy with all its problems to the Republic he proposed.
Great memories of Parsec too.