coffeecat

This topic is one of my biggest pet peeves. The hypothesis that sub-clinical lead exposure _causes_ IQ loss is, in my opinion, much weaker than most people realize. Observational studies (which are more or less all we have) tell us that Pb exposure correlates negatively with IQ, and that the correlation is moderated by a multitude of variables that are subtle and difficult to model. These studies do not tell us in which direction the arrow of causality points - they merely tell us that not all causative pathways are accounted for by the study's model. The idea that causation points from lead to IQ loss has some issues - e.g., that developmentally delayed two-year-olds ingest more dust/dirt, which increases their lead exposure.

I think the impact of AI will be too pervasive and complex to be understood in terms of a simple winners/losers dichotomy. My prediction is this:

Software developers and lawyers will probably have significantly lower incomes, and so to some extent, we'll lose status relative to everyone else. But software and legal work will become cheap as hell. This ought to reduce prices generally on just about everything. Even housing prices should go down, as the median worker will be making less money. Governments will probably try to counteract the ensuing deflation with massive stimulus programs. Optimistically, this could culminate in new UBI programs. A happy outcome is not by any means guaranteed, but seems likely in the long term.

Therein lies the problem. Most people are apathetic and incompetent. Winning rat race points requires some amount of competence and "oomph", so rat race points will always correlate positively with applicant quality. Most rat-race-losers, unfortunately, aren't Socrates.

It sucks that leaded aviation fuel has persisted so long, but the resulting Pb exposure is insignificant relative to what people were exposed to from leaded gasoline in cars back in the day. Mean BLLs in the mid-70s were ~15 mcg/dL; nowadays mean BLLs are significantly below 1 mcg/dL, and ~1 mcg/dL is 95th percentile.

There are better causes to donate to, in my opinion. Pb is nasty stuff, but the purported risks have been inflated beyond what's actually grounded in solid evidence.

The term "Pb poisoning" has two different meanings: traditionally it's referred to blood lead levels above about 50 mcg/dL, at which demonstrable symptoms occur (slowed reaction times, etc). But in recent decades, it's also used to describe much lower levels (>15 mcg/dL, >10 mcg/dL, or even >5 mcg/dL), for which the only evidence of harm comes from observational studies.

Observational studies establish correlation, not causation, and there are good reasons to doubt that the observed correlations are due to Pb neurotoxicity. The relationship between Pb exposure and cognitive/behavioral outcomes is intractably complicated, because for most children Pb exposure is primarily from dirt/dust ingestion, which in turn correlates with a child's developmental status, household cleanliness, and subtle aspects of parenting behaviors (in addition of course to more widely appreciated factors like age/condition of the home). Poor nutrition also causes higher BLLs.

It's been demonstrated that publication bias in the Pb literature has steadily risen over time, as reported effect sizes have increased. Several studies have found Pb correlations which resemble a U curve, where children with the highest blood lead levels have better cognitive/behavioral outcomes than those with intermediate BLLs (because outside the range of BLLs which are primarily driven by dirt/dust ingestion, "something else is going on", which doesn't correlate as well with cognitive/behavioral outcomes).

Dirt/dust ingestion (and therefore, BLLs) drop precipitously around age 2, because this is around the time when children outgrow mouthing behavior - some children a bit earlier, some children a bit later. BLL measurements at this age therefore a metric of developmental status. Or alternatively, this is the age at which "lead causes the most harm".

My argument is of course not that you should go paint your child's nursery with chrome yellow. Ingesting paint chips can be enough to put a child into the "actual lead poisoning" BLL range (drinking water from lead pipes generally cannot). But excluding exposure from leaded gasoline (which was formerly the dominant source of exposure, but which has fortunately been banned almost everywhere) and people living near smelting facilities, it's probably not the scary ubiquitous IQ-point larcenist that it's made out to be.

> The PinePhone Pro is another smartphone designed for Linux, that's an upgrade from the original PinePhone. It has a faster processor, more memory, and improved storage. The display is larger and has Gorilla Glass 4 for scratch resistance. The cameras have been upgraded, and the device will be available for pre-order soon.

The PPP's been out for like two years now. This article is dated today... but I suppose that would have been correct around the time of ChatGPT's training data cutoff.

This article makes the mistake of conflating open source and free software. Open source software may be distributed under licenses that prohibit use by orgs/industries that the developer finds unsavory. But the resulting software is proprietary - not FOSS.

> The same thing has happened to Linux which was ok as long as it was chasing commercial Unix, spawning POSIX even; but look what happened with systemd, wayland, snaps/flatpacks, Docker, k8s, and all the other erratic developments - all the while not a single end-user app was created in the last decade.

Strongly disagree. Desktop Linux is better than it's ever been before, and not at all comparable to the degenerate hellhole that is the modern web.

systemd isn't perfect, but I think it's an improvement from traditional init. If you prefer the simplicity of traditional init systems, then you're free to use a non-systemd distro. Wayland is a much-needed modernization and simplification of the graphics stack, and again, nobody's forcing you to use it - X11 won't disappear any time soon. Snap, Flatpak, Docker, etc aren't exactly my cup of tea either, but again, nobody's forcing us to use them. Debian, Arch, etc are chugging along just fine. Meanwhile, PipeWire is a significant improvement compared to bare ALSA or Pulse+Jack, and iwd is a significant improvement compared to wpa_supplicant+NetworkManager.

As for new end-user applications, how about Sway?

I think this is the correct answer. Guns enable these incidents, but they're of course not the root cause. Bullying is a common motivation, but I don't think it's exactly the root cause either. It can be seen as a mental health issue, but I don't think that's the most instructive analytical lens.

The problem is our lack of social fabric. Kids don't have enough friends. They spend too much time looking at screens, and they can't imagine positive futures that they'd like to live out. They don't have enough guidance from parents and other adults to put them on a more positive path.

The free market should be thought of as an optimization algorithm. Ideally, the government's role should be to set up a constrained optimization problem, which attempts to align profitability with human well-being (e.g., "provide people with whatever material comforts they want to pay for, under the constraint of not poisoning them and not polluting the environment"). The market's role is to solve the constrained optimization problem, and if the incentives set up by the government are good, the optimal point of profitability should reasonably approximate an optimal point of human well-being.

The error of so-called free market proponents, is that they want the government to set up an unconstrained optimization problem. The market will find some kind of optimum, but without intelligently designed constraints (i.e., regulations), there's no guarantee that optimal profitability should correspond to optimal human well-being.

> God help us if "rejects inappropriate word recommendations" is being added to people's ad profiles.

I tried to reproduce the "landlord" warning in Google docs, and I was unable to. So perhaps Google already makes personalized predictions regarding whether or not users want such suggestions.

Please define "extremely rare". They're found in many products including dental floss, clothing, furniture, carpets, pizza boxes, fishing line, and only-God-knows-what-else.

It's certainly small as a mass fraction of household waste, let's say 0.01%. According to the article, European waste-to-energy plants burn 96 million tons of trash annually. So that's 9600 tons annually of fluorocarbon pollution, which will build up cumulatively in the environment because it effectively never breaks down.

Where do all the nasty fluorocarbons end up? As far as I can tell, the answer is that they're simply emitted out the smokestack and into the environment.

I'm sure that applies in some cases, but it doesn't seem universally true. Personally, I hate exercising but I do it because the epidemiologists say I should. And I love drinking, but I don't because the epidemiologists say I shouldn't. Smoking has declined pretty significantly over the past several decades, no?

The followers of QAnon presumably don't see any major contradictions between its claims and their {experience, assumptions about how the world works}. If they did, then they wouldn't be followers.

What's unsettling about QAnon is: substantial numbers of otherwise sane, high-functioning followers, probably a bit less intelligent on average than you or me, but not that much less intelligent, find it to be a compelling theory. And that's a rather pessimistic data point that we should bear in mind when calibrating our own degrees of epistemic certainty.

> Right but if the premise is a critique of traditional media not doing a good enough job by, say, focusing on made up narratives or 'both sides-ing' an actual position vs a caricature position, how is this addressed by basically amplifying bullshit further?

All narratives are made-up narratives. The problem is, your bullshit/not-bullshit dichotomy doesn't necessarily line up with someone else's. Your idea of bullshit versus not-bullshit has your own priorities/associations/assumptions baked into it. A steel-manned version of the opposing argument probably isn't going to line up with the average statement of the argument as you're likely to find it in the wild. You can just ignore shit-posts that you consider bullshit, or you can try to understand the priorities/associations/assumptions that lead people to make those shit-posts.

Kudos to the OP for doing this. Providing people with sympathetic representations of what they consider bullshit isn't going to win you any popularity contests though, except among people who already like sympathetic representations of what they consider bullshit, which isn't exactly the audience who needs this.

There's already been a pretty significant correction this year. Short of an escalation of the war or an unexpectedly aggressive interest rate hike, I find it hard to imagine that stocks might hit a lower low this year than the botttom we saw a week or two ago.

> I feel like the stock market has stopped reacting to real world fundamentals in any sense and just seems to continue its upwards march forever.

It'll continue its upward march until the factors causing the upward march change. What else are people going to do with their wealth? As long as the stock market remains one of the best places for investors to put their wealth, they'll keep buying equities and the prices will keep going up. Perhaps we'll see some stagnation or decline as the baby boomers retire and begin liquidating their retirement accounts.

> The window of what is considered beyond the pale has grown quite a big larger than it was in the past.

I'd say it's worse than that. Our information diets are so heterogeneous, that with respect to certain topics, it's plausible that two people might have non-overlapping windows of what they consider reasonable/plausible, and of what they consider totally bat-shit insane. e.g., your uncle's views on climate change fall into your bat-shit insane window, and your views on climate change fall into your uncle's bat-shit insane window.

What are some examples of jokes/bullying that you've encountered?

Scott Alexander pointed out on his old blog that compared to other recent Republican candidates (Romney and McCain), Trump performed about the same among white voters and over-performed among non-white voters. The notion of Trump as the "white man's candidate" is mostly BS.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-w...

This seems about right. For most endeavors nowadays - music, art, science, technology, business - the process of reviewing what's already out there is just overwhelming. Then you actually review the existing stuff, and find that five other people have already pursued your great new idea. Over time, this cycle tends to erode your enthusiasm for pursuing new ideas.

PinePhone + mainline Linux. Obtaining freedom isn't easy - it requires hard work and sacrifice - but it's absolutely possible.

Librewolf applies a few very small patches to the Firefox codebase (to remove Mozilla's VPN promotion, etc), but I don't think they have the resources to maintain dropped features, or any other significant deviations from the official codebase. I view it as a custom Firefox build rather than a fork.

I think this is a fundamental flaw in the platform. Shared context is the key to having productive conversations, and twitter is a massive decontextualization machine.

Traditional forums allow messages to be disseminated widely to readers who potentially have no out-of-band context. But they have enough in-band context to enable productive conversations: (1) there's a thread title and an original post which everyone generally reads, (2) all messages in a thread are visible to everyone, and (3) longer messages are supported.

Short messages of a sentence or two are insufficient to convey much information without context, but can be very useful with context: "Sure, 6 sounds good". SMS and messaging apps work fine because messages are displayed in the context of a conversation, and dissemination is limited to known recipients who generally have some out-of-band context.

But twitter provides little or no in-band context, messages are too short to stand on their own without context, and messages are disseminated to a global user base which has no out-of-band context. You'd expect that to be a recipe for a dumpster fire.

So if Windows/MacOS/Jack all lack support for buffer rewinding without noticeable latency, does that imply that Pulse encourages the use of abnormally large buffers compared to what all other audio systems use?

> A truck will cost you what, US$ 50k?

I paid $600 for my first truck back in high school, drove it for a couple years, and received something in the ballpark of $100 from the scrapyard I sold it to in the end. In the current market where I live, ~$3k can get you a truck with no mechanical deficiencies and a few years of life remaining. Financially, I wouldn't advise anyone to shell out $50k for a new F-250, but some people enjoy saving money and others enjoy shiny new vehicles.

There's nothing wrong with buying $3k worth of VYM instead, and using the dividends to subsidize your rental truck costs. It's probably the better decision if you move things only 1-5 times per year, no maintenance obligations, and more free space in your driveway. If you move things more frequently than that, you enjoy the buying process, and you dislike the complexity of renting, then the calculus reverses.

When you make the purchase, you're exchanging $x for resalable equipment that's presumably worth $x. Your bank account balance goes down quite a lot, but the only decrease to your net worth is from the taxes and title transfer fees. Your net worth goes down as the vehicle depreciates. Even if you drive it to the very end of its operable life, you'll still get a bit of money from the junkyard you sell the vehicle's corpse to.

This does ignore the time that needs to be spent buying the vehicle, transferring the title, obtaining insurance, etc, which is significant. But procuring a rental truck is also time-consuming; on a typical Spring/Summer/Fall weekend where I live, you're lucky if you're able to get one at all. The local hardware stores are first-come/first-served, and can't guarantee over the phone that they'll have a rental truck available by the time you arrive.

I recently worked out the cost of owning a truck (including insurance, maintenance, and expected depreciation, but excluding the cost of the truck itself) versus renting from U-haul/Penske. I found that for more than 4-6 trips per year, owning is probably more economical. And that's assuming the truck is sitting in the driveway unused for the rest of the year; if your family also requires a secondary passenger vehicle, then owning a sedan and a truck almost certainly makes more sense than owning two sedans and occasionally renting a truck.

This is a difficult topic for me to articulate, so the below explanation is merely my best effort to express the experience in words.

The perception of my own heartbeat is something that I've always been squeamish about, but for most of my life it was never a problem. It made me a bit uncomfortable during high intensity exercise, but it was easy enough to just ignore.

During meditation, I began to perceive my heartbeat more intensely than ever before, and it became a "center of gravity" that my attention would often "fall into". My attention would gravitate toward intense perception of my heartbeat not only while meditating, but also at other times (while trying to fall asleep, while trying to focus on work, while driving), and paired with my pre-existing squeamishness, this became very uncomfortable. I might go through most of my day normally, but as soon as my mind becomes idle for a bit, or if something triggers me to start thinking about my heart, my mind will uncontrollably gravitate toward perceiving my heartbeat, and I'll struggle to ignore my heartbeat and to focus on other things.

My strategy at the time was to attempt to become more comfortable with my heartbeat through continued meditation. I thought that by deliberately focusing on my heart during meditation rather than trying to ignore it, I could "fight the monster face-to-face", kill off the squeamish feeling, and learn to perceive my heartbeat as a benign sensation.

Unfortunately, I developed a delusion that I might gain the ability to consciously control my heartbeat (analogously to how we can consciously control our breathing when we think about it), and that I'd injure or kill myself because I'm not at all qualified to exercise that kind of control. I convinced myself that this is impossible because the heart uses its own pacemaker, unlike the lungs which are controlled by the nervous system. But this didn't kill the delusion - it just transformed it into a more vague anxiety, centered around the notion that I might be inadvertently abusing whatever regulatory connections exist between my heart and my brain. I think this delusion is really just a transformation of the visceral squeamishness that I originally felt when I began perceiving my heartbeat, into a more cerebral form of "squeamishness". I made the decision to stop meditating a couple years ago, but the delusion still lurks in my subconscious and comes back from time to time.

So to summarize, when it first began, the uncontrollable heartbeat perception paired with the squeamishness/delusion caused a lot of agony for about two weeks. I've gotten significantly better at ignoring my heartbeat and not being so troubled by it, but it's a problem that I haven't been able to completely get over.

Strongly disagree. There's more to meditation than just sitting quietly. I'd say it's more analogous to breaking out of a sandboxed VM and gaining read/write access to the underlying OS and kernel.

My personal anecdote - I developed a difficult-to-control, anxiety-inducing thought* while dabbling in meditation a couple of years ago. I experienced a week or two worth of extreme anxiety, and had a panic attack. To this day, the obsessive thought is still with me and causes occasional distress. I can't say with certainty that the meditation practice was the cause, but the timing coincides, and I've never experienced anything like this prior to the meditation practice.

* not exactly a thought, but I'm not quite sure what to call it. It's more of an involuntary, difficult-to-control channeling of my focus/perception toward sensations which I perceive as uncomfortable and disturbing.