a_shovel

A lot of these books are reference titles that are outdated to the point of uselessness and/or weren't that great/interesting when they were new. Not many people have interest in or use for textbooks from the 50s.

This is what hype looks like. Managers were convinced they had secured a source of magic fairy dust that immediately finishes any job it lands on and has no downsides, and they saw their employees weren't using it for reasons they couldn't understand, and so they went about solving the problem in a way that would make sense for someone with that worldview.

I don't usually pick up on whether an article is written/edited by an LLM, but I suspect this one is because it has the exact cadence of those X posts about how AI is going to take all our jobs by Friday.

I hope it's accurate, because it's interesting. On-demand manufacturing lets you beat economies of scale. I have some beloved print-on-demand comics on my shelf that would never be considered for traditional publication.

Puberty blockers for transgender and potentially transgender teens aren't meant to be taken all the way through to adulthood, if that's what you mean by "otherwise stopped growing." Ideally they're taken just long enough for them to get counseling and come to a decision, a couple years at max.

Apart from that, "different use case, different intended goal" is cause for what I'd call "ordinary levels of scientific uncertainty." A 13-year-old just starting puberty is not so different from an 8-year-old just starting puberty to justify denying a medication to one by law while still prescribing it to the other without concern.

The "desistance" measured in that study is between going to the clinic as a child (before any treatment would be offered) and the time they would go to receive medical treatment from the clinic. Most sources I've seen suggest that change in gender identity is more common in younger children and drops off around the time puberty would start, which is the earliest that medical treatments are offered. The meaning of "desistance" being discussed here is regret after receiving medical treatment - basicly, the Type I error (false positive) rate of the treatment decision. These aren't really comparable.

Puberty blockers are not meant to be prescribed from onset of puberty to adulthood. (I don't think anyone wants to be just starting puberty at 18.) They're meant to buy time for the patient to make a decision and get counseling if they need it if they're not sure they want a natal puberty or HRT at the onset of puberty. They will have to decide as a minor.

The pattern I've observed repeated around issues of transgender health care is "ordinary levels of scientific uncertainty used to argue for the most extreme possible restrictions." Puberty blockers have long been used to treat precocious puberty, the main problems of which are social difficulty from going through puberty earlier than one's peers and a shorter adult height.

The opponents of transgender healthcare have used the minor uncertainty of prescribing this medication to a group a few years older to argue not for tighter safeguards, but for a legal ban on prescribing it for that purpose. Not letting doctors evaluate the potential risks and benefits for their patients is one thing, but not even wanting a medical trial to begin to gather more data is outrageous. There is absolutely no concern from these same groups about any risk of the medication to cisgender children, which casts doubt that the concerns are raised in good faith.

This is what finally made the idea behind Watt's condenser click for me.

the sun seeker wrap is a cool retro look. can anybody place what it's based on / inspired by?

The museum has not, in fact, made any indication that it would wish to cancel (to decide not to conduct or perform) its Charles Dickens exhibition. The sense of 'cancel' being used here is the dumb one.

Skeptics said SpaceX would fail, but it succeeded. Therefore, skepticism in general is wrong and SpaceX will have an annual revenue of $11 quadrillion by 2030.

I don't think the demand for second homes worth over $5 million is a major driver of construction of new units in NYC.

I keep javascript on because i want websites to not be broken by default. but if they insist, i can add their domain to my ublock filter

There's a political backlash against vaccines because of mandates too, and I think we shouldn't listen to them either.

The next administration needs to mandate the big American auto companies produce more EVs in more models in order to save them from the irrelevance they seemingly desire and arguably deserve.

They think their dog food tastes great now, not because they improved it any, but because they've forgotten the taste of human food. Karmically hilarious.

An interesting article. I wonder if there's a valid point in here buried somewhere underneath the endless obnoxious comparisons of his opponents to cultists.

I was hoping this would have some application for human solving. I gave up on Semantle because I couldn't figure out any sort of strategy.

The paragraph about the stove making dozens of breakfasts as the house collapses at the climax of the story is what always stuck with me most. It would take a better writer than me to say why it works so well, I just know it does.

Bayer dithering in particular is part of the signature look of Flipnote Studio animations, which you may recognize from animators like kekeflipnote (e.g. https://youtu.be/Ut-fJCc0zS4)

Steam doesn't need to lock down the Steam Machine to subsidize it with store purchases. The casual user could theoretically install another OS, but that doesn't matter because they won't (because they're casual users), and the dedicated user buys most of their games on Steam anyways because it's the dominant distribution platform.

I started dieting recently and I've come to understand the people who say that American portions are huge. An automat lets you sample a bunch of different stuff instead of the typical fast-food format of a main, french fries, and a drink each in a too-large portion. I'd like something like that.

I can't help but notice similarities with certain conservative attacks on puberty blockers and hormone therapy for trans people.

> A general subjective notion that the evidence "isn't good enough" with no reference to the level of evidence that is typically used to approve other treatments with similar risks and benefits

> The focus on randomized controlled trials as the only acceptable form of evidence, despite (or because of) their expense and length

> Common and easy-to-collect indirect markers of effectiveness (presence of antibodies, lower reported suicidality) are against them, so they insist on using only rare, hard-to-collect direct markers (prevented illnesses, reduction in completed suicide attempts) despite lacking any reason to believe the results will be different

> The insistence on unnecessary, lengthy trials or tests for treatments that are time-sensitive, to the point of overrunning the time when they ought to be administered (RCTs for flu vaccines that would delay them past flu season, vs insisting on a large and arbitrary minimum number of assessments before allowing puberty blockers such that puberty starts before the patient is approved). For the anti-treatment side in both cases, a long enough delay is effectively a victory that doesn't require them to prove any of their points.

So, what can we draw from these tactics? They want to make their opponents waste time and resources on long, difficult trials (the longer the better,) because every day it goes on is a day that treatment is delayed or a "temporary restriction" can continue. Plus, if they need more time, they can always push the arbitrary standard of evidence they demand arbitrarily higher. They can always demand more trials, or more specific and difficult-to-collect data.

But on some level, they know they can't say "THIS is the study that will prove vaccines/HRT are unsafe" because they understand that the results will probably not go in their favor (or, that they'd get caught if they faked it).

It seems like they understand that the evidence is against them, but that stalemate is in their favor.

Proposing a CLI command as a candidate for "simplest UI ever" is a great gag.

that's less than i was expecting. i was looking for a ps2 around then and i'd definitely have paid $150 plus shipping for all of that.

> Unfortunately, nobody wanted to buy these even for a cost that would cover all the expenses spent on this project.

Makes me wonder how expensive these were to make.

I can imagine it. If I were the kind of person whose needs and desires could all be satisfied by mass-produced products sold by the top 5 or so largest retail corporations, and who did things like fill out consumer surveys for a chance to win gift cards, and who enabled all tracking in every app everywhere for convenience's sake, and who didn't care much about privacy because I had nothing to hide, I imagine that ad targeting might become effective enough that I would regularly encounter ads for products that looked interesting and which I might want to buy.

You'll need to explain this a little bit more, because the TC article seems to indicate the issue is that he is accused of targeted harassment. I doubt you could design a poll to make people vote 85% in favor of targeted harassment.

All social media moderation is "banning people for saying stuff people don't like". Most people don't like e.g. spam, or death threats, or racism, so social media offer communication platforms where those kinds of speech are restricted, with varying degrees of effort and success. The goal of banning Vance would be to have a social media site that moderates against the kinds of things Vance says.

> Note that David never actually addresses the “far right” label on its merits — he just pivots to calling it overused, trying to direct your attention elsewhere like a magician distracting the audience as he performs a trick.

I'm not sure he's bringing it up for that reason. He thinks the label is losing its power because it really is losing power over him, because he's becoming more comfortable with it and beginning to accept it. Keep an eye out for if he starts to call himself a fascist "ironically".