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cykros

428 karma · joined May 19, 2022

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cykros··on Should DayQuil Be Legal?
Fentanyl isn't all that unsafe, aside from the habituation potential.

When your measurement is "that looks about right" when purity is entirely unknown, not much really is all that safe.

cykros··on Should DayQuil Be Legal?
Everyone's ability to metabolize drugs being different has a lot to do with why the labels end up advising less than is effective for many people. Dextromethorphan surely is NOT ineffective, but at 2 tsp, yea, it aint gonna do much of anything (unless you're CYP2D6 deficient -- then, it may still do a LOT depending on how deficient).
cykros··on Should DayQuil Be Legal?
"Most studies have found that dextromethorphan performs the same as a placebo and some suggested it was worse than honey."

Something tells me this is because they're using it at the dosages listed.

Because let me tell you, it certainly does NOT do nothing if you take more...

Part of the issue though is that 1 in 10 people have a CYP2D6 enzyme deficiency and if you take the tablespoon or so that would be more effective (that a pharmacist I used to work with advocated for) you REALLY shouldn't be driving (or going to work for that matter).

Phenylephrine of course is absolute garbage -- they just felt like they had to leave people a placebo for when they took away pseudoephedrine from the shelves to stop people making meth out of it.

Beyond that, I do sort of agree that putting all of these actives into a single product entirely prevents you from working the doses for what actually is effective. If you have a product full of acetaminophen you CAN'T then just take more of it to get the effective dose of dextromethorphan (and I'm not even sure there IS an effective dose of phenylephrine, but if there is it's definitely higher than what's on the label).

Not gonna say "there should be a law!" because I don't think anyone needs men with guns coming for them over this, but I do wonder why anyone buys this crap when the individual active ingredients can all be purchased and used in appropriate amounts.

But I guess most people just take what the label tells them to...

cykros··on The best thing that's ever happened for multiplayer games?
The best thing that happened for multiplayer games is that kids came along that agreed that they didn't need developers to actually create games when all they really wanted was graphics and physics so they could be responsible both for buying the game and creating all of the "content" in it by interacting with each other.
cykros··on Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't
Switzerland is the only first world country.
cykros··on Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide
More like Debian (and derivatives) on older hardware.

No thanks.

Slackware's running just fine on this system I've got with 15 year old DDR3 RAM without needing an article about it. It's not always thrilled with the fact that I made my urxvt's transparent, but I'm still rocking 20 open tabs on a regular basis without more than a little extra fan noise from time to time. It'd probably help if I replaced the fan(s) that died completely...

cykros··on Why I email complete strangers
If I haven't chatted with a CEO or other builder in a week I've probably not spent a ton of time online.

Obviously different people have different time and attention; they don't all get back to you.

But it really doesn't take very long to just throw together a note sharing your thoughts or questions for them you may have. They may not answer. But they might.

If it does fail though, I've also been finding that asking an LLM what so and so would say to whatever I have to share can sometimes be insightful and based on their public comments. Though obviously, probably best not to hold what an LLM said against the person the LLM said might say it...

cykros··on Show HN: Verso – A $14.99 Mac word processor with no subscription
So it's like OpenOffice or LibreOffice or Abiword but it costs money?
cykros··on No Babies? Blame Capitalism
The amount of people who can't see the difference between a monetary system captured by central planners who stand in the way of the free market at every turn and who, in their continuous debasement, perpetuate a K-shaped economy, and capitalism, is quite alarming.

But I suppose that we can't expect much when they've been educated by government employees.

cykros··on Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years
I'm not sure I really consider SQL a programming language though. Certainly doesn't seem fair to compare it to anything turing complete (at least, unless you're going to lump in extensions such as PL/SQL or T-SQL.

Doesn't detract from the advice to learn it though. Picking up books on Perl and C as a teenager always left me feeling like I was missing something key that'd make programming more accessible, and I learned FAR later that what that was was an appreciation for making better use of structured data. In lieu of either larger data structures or microcontrollers, everything I looked at felt like a much more complicated and slightly more capable calculator; the access to large relational data models is really where the super powers of turing complete languages clicked.

cykros··on A 10 year old Xeon is all you need
Does this mean my 15 year old Phenom is too old? But it has 16 gb of DDR3 RAM!

Admittedly web browsers and it don't get along that well. Literally the only thing that drags though on my Slackware 15 system, and even then usually only when it gets to around 15 or so open tabs.

cykros··on A Gentle Introduction to Lattice-Based Cryptography [pdf]
Good stuff to know, just in case the life extension tech explodes and we're all alive by the time cryptographically relevant quantum computers actually hit the scene.
cykros··on RISC-V Router
I doubt this from Start9, but it does usually at least mean that figuring out how to do so manually means not just reading docs for the upstream packages, but also figuring out what changes they made to smooth over it all.

This has always been my reason to avoid StartOS for running a Bitcoin node. When you're dealing with contentious forks (like we are right now) it's helpful to be able to get as low level as you want without realizing that things have all been hidden from you.

That said it depends on exactly what you're doing. Their server having a jitsi server that just works is nothing to shake a stick at. Nor is Start Tunnel making the server accessible over the Internet without any port forwarding required to the casual user.

I'm just not certain I'm their target userbase.

cykros··on Pope Leo called his bank's customer service line. They hung up on him
Netanyahu is a figurehead for many too. Though if I found out my bank DIDN'T hang up on him I'd be looking for another bank.

As far as Popes go, Leo's probably upset more catholics than any in recent history. Which is saying something, given that the guy before the last one was a literal Nazi.

cykros··on Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as difficulty drops
The larger it is, the less likely your mining set up is actually all that solid.

The best miners are doing so with near free electricity, either with things like subsidized solar, or energy acquired from things like nat gas that'd otherwise get flared, or hydroelectric power that exists too far from civilization to have a demand otherwise.

If your miner is plugged into the grid, you're probably doing it wrong.

cykros··on Usenet Archives
https://eternal-september.org/ last I checked there was still some activity on comp.misc after Slashdot pissed everyone off with their Beta a decade or so ago (same time Soylent News spun off as well). Definitely a few others with a handful of posters.

But yes, it's definitely small islands in a sea of spam or just dead groups.

cykros··on Usenet Archives
https://eternal-september.org/

Not the one you were replying to, but this is free for anyone for text based Usenet (no binaries).

cykros··on An NSFW filter for Marginalia search
I think sentient autonomous cybernetic organisms. Still haven't encountered any yet.
cykros··on How Does Offline Bitcoin Signing Work Step by Step
Idk what's worse, how basic this is, or how many hardware signers think they do it better with a usb cable (or dear god -- without a screen).

Coldcard, Passport, DIY, or GTFO.

cykros··on Blocking Internet Archive Won't Stop AI, but Will Erase Web's Historical Record
That sounds bleak, unless they also bring back Tradewars and LORD.
cykros··on Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?
Last I checked it was still quite alive with quite a few BBS systems, though admittedly that was a few years ago.

Looks like you can still hook up to it using a Synchronet BBS anyway using the steps available here: https://wiki.synchro.net/howto:fidonet

The homepage for FIDONet itself is here: https://www.fidonet.org/

And the Zone 1 Hub, Dark Realms (a Renegade BBS since 1994) is here: https://www.darkrealms.ca/ It has node lists available if you're looking for systems to connect from.

cykros··on Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse
If you got to choose your own censorship it'd be nice. As it stands, other instances can decide to defederate with what you're on. Sometimes, even knocking off servers you had connectivity with that were indirect.

The Fediverse is to Nostr what the legacy telephone system was to the Internet.

cykros··on Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse
"Market demand."

If I've got a profile on let's say, mastodon.social, and I have a following, and people I follow across other servers, and then mastodon.social decides that due to a few people over on outrageousposts.social, I can no longer access their content, nor they mine, I am left with exactly two choices: write that portion of my network off as a complete loss, or create a completely new profile on a new instance, and build up a new network from scratch.

That anyone puts up with this state of affairs suggests to me that people just don't know Nostr solved this problem 3 years ago.

I get that compared to Facebook, Twitter, etc, Mastodon does seem like an improvement even with this state of affairs -- after all, you at least CAN just create a new profile rather than getting booted off of the network entirely. It was handy for a few years. But a better alternative has been created, and I for one won't be looking back.

cykros··on Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse
Everyone else, as long as they don't defederate your server as petty tyrants.

Which has always been the drawback of the Fediverse.

Nostr has delivered what I had hoped to get from the Fediverse: actually decentralized, censorship proof social media (and then some), wherein you actually maintain full ownership of your own identity (as it's a keypair, not an account). Where if you get banned from one relay or other, you just move to a new one, and everything comes with you. Where if nobody wants to platform you, you can literally run your own relay on your PHONE and stay connected to the network.

And yea, there is at least one bridge between Nostr and Mastodon (Mostr), so you don't even have to give up on talking to your Mastodon buddies.

That it also does so much more than social media is icing on the cake. Really leverages its existence as a protocol rather than a platform to use the Internet as it was always meant to be.

cykros··on U.S. Troops Were Told Iran War Is for "Armageddon,"
Medicare for all doesn't seem to be a winning strategy, judging by the way it gets turned into euthanasia for all by our neighbors to the north.

Lowering the cost of necessary education is important, though in many cases the methods attempted just serve to make matters worse (much like how corporate average fleet economy regulations, in attempting to improve fuel efficiency, just made vehicles bigger). The structure of college itself (and schooling up until that point) is something I think we could stand to seriously reconsider, given how much of it really formed amid the industrial revolution and was modeled off of the ubiquitous factory models. I don't have some ready made model to address this, but do think there's room for an open conversation.

I don't care THAT much about abortion so much as the system that incentivizes it -- that is, the one that makes it particularly unaffordable to have children, and drives debaucherous, nihilistic behavior. In other words, the monetary system. Fix that, and see if a lot of this other stuff even needs to be fixed or resolves on its own.

Background checks, not licensing, I don't see a strong reason to oppose. I don't have a strong reason to back it, but not a total non-starter.

America first doesn't just mean cutting Israel's influence -- more importantly, it means cutting the influence of international bankers who bought our nation out from under us by printing OUR currency through the Eurodollar system. We've started to address this by leaving LIBOR for SOFR, but it's not a done deal, and there are decades of damage to undo.

Strong on crime needs to come with it sanity of enforcement. Another area I suspect fixing money can help, because I'm not convinced there isn't a fair bit of funded agitation to disrupt the social fabric that has law enforcement at its wit's end. That said, police killing people in the street is not a good look.

As for DEI, no argument.

cykros··on U.S. Troops Were Told Iran War Is for "Armageddon,"
Yea...forgive me for doubting that Genocide Joe's MK-Ultra'd lieutenant would not have us similarly murderous.
cykros··on U.S. Troops Were Told Iran War Is for "Armageddon,"
Armageddon is the old name for what is now called Megiddo. It's a Kibbutz in northern Israel.

But hey, if the goal is to bring war to the doorstep of the occupiers,there are probably worse goals to have.

cykros··on How to talk to anyone and why you should
I've talked to random people.

Most of them are unbearably boring, and they need to resort to alcohol and professional sports just to have anything to talk about in the first place.

Bring up ECDSA and suddenly you may as well have just beamed down from a spaceship.

cykros··on If AI makes human labor obsolete, who decides who gets to eat?
What a hyperbolic nonsensical title from a bastion of Keynesian slop.
cykros··on Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026
Sounds like most packages in the Debian ecosystem in my experience.

Just do yourself a favor and run Slackware.

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