grumpy-de-sre

Low cost ground based drones / robotic weapons platforms.

I beg to disagree, 10kW at ~140khz is actually relatively straight forward with modern semiconductors and LiPo's. Eg. the inverters in a Tesla Plaid can do up-to 750kW, so I think two orders of magnitude more power is theoretically possible.

And then they left out that at such long wavelengths there are some unconventional antenna topologies available. Some of which are a lot more feasible than anything that was discussed in the talk.

The dismissal is quite concerning IMO.

Yeh Japan surprised me in that trust survey, perhaps the question didn't translate well. On a general basis they seem to trust each other even less than most western nations.

Very hard thing to measure.

Admittedly Anglo culture took a lot of influence from the scandinavians (due to Viking conquest etc). I think some of the cultural tenants we are talking about probably did come originally from Scandinavia.

Just have a look at https://ourworldindata.org/trust. The Anglo countries are all well above the global average (but admittedly East Asia and the Scandinavians have us beat). I'm super impressed by how high trust China is tbh. Apparently, since the recent increase in surveillance (and ability to police petty crime), a lot of folks don't even bother locking up bikes etc.

FWIW the only Anglo country left in the EU is Ireland.

I think in any low trust environment where social mobility outside the group is poor, sticking together based on blood lines probably was the default for sure.

However I think there's plenty of evidence that migration and intermingling between tribes occurred frequently. If only as social practices to prevent inbreeding. Probably a bunch of bride kidnapping sadly but also young males leaving to seek opportunity isn't an exclusively modern phenomenon.

From the perspective of my original comment, more than anything church is just a formalized social occasion. Repeated social contact, and proximity seems to be critical to friendship formation.

Wasn't commenting on family formation etc.

It's easy to blame the decline of organized religion, but it curiously coincides with the same time-frame in which the car was invented and modern suburbia sprung up. Having to move to allow for a family is definitely a new and worrying phenomenon.

My gut feel is that having to maintain close family ties and living with parents until adulthood are an adaption to poverty, poor social mobility, and low trust society. People will rationalize it but given opportunity they'll act in the exact same way as the rest of us (just look at urbanization in China).

Thanks for the article, wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if the loneliness epidemic is a statistical artifact of bad data.

In Anglo cultures kids aren't usually moving away from home until they are at least ~18 years old. This is not a factor in teenagers feeling isolated. Suburbia and the decline of third places probably play a far greater role in this demographic.

It's a common trope on here to lament on how the Anglo cultures don't value family ties strongly enough. I'd argue not overly valuing family ties has been a big competitive advantage of the Anglo cultures for centuries, eg. moving for opportunity (improved social mobility), ability to connect with outsiders, couple pairing across cultural/geographical boundaries, prerequisite to a high trust society, etc.

What really needs to happen is we need to figure out ways of facilitating friend formation/maintenance in this brave new world of the internet and atheism. We are going to need some new social technologies to really combat this.

One interesting recent social technology out of china https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/china-personalities...

Dr. Blakelys lab has produced knock-in mice with the rare SERT variants described, and they have exhibited the behavioral and biochemical markers of ASD. It's actually a very remarkable finding. They also saw a reduction in ASD symptoms by pharmaceutically blocking the offending inflammatory pathways.

So I think at-least for the tiny fraction of ASD patients with these rare SERT variants there's actually a chance that they are a major driver of the disorder. Regardless it provides a tantalizing look at some of the upstream pathways that could be involved more generally.

I think we're going to find the disorder is very heterogenous and there will be many different subtypes and pathways involved.

You can also add agriculture to that list, apparently we should give up the wins of the green revolution and go back to living in this idealized world of Permaculture food forests and tree houses (George Monbiot has some great takes on these ideas).

I really wonder why HN goes off the rails when these topics come up. Is it just a weak science education, combined with the relative accessibility (and acceptability) of health/fitness/exercise self experimentation? Though I also see gut microbiome discussions being shoehorned to any discussion in this space aswell.

I guess I just don't get it, probably the 'tism.

On the topic of metabolic disturbances in Autism, huge fan of the work Dr. Randy Blakely is doing on the links between Serotonin metabolism and Autism. One of the most surprising, and strongest (25-30% of patients), biomarkers for Autism is actually Platelet Hyperserotonemia (high levels of bound Serotonin in the blood).

For decades it's been without explanation but recently Dr Blakely has described a bunch of cases where it was narrowed down to SERT transporter polymorphisms and inflammation.

Worth a watch for those interested in the weeds of this stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpDtuKV5CJs

I've got a pet hypothesis that differences in Serotonin metabolism (and receptor hypersensitivity) might play a role in why SSRIs aren't generally considered a first line treatment for ASD symptoms, https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1112345109

OCD is extremely difficult to talk openly about, even in this TikTok era, society just isn't ready yet.

So by and far it's diagnosis is actually made very late, but I guess over time it'll become trendy aswell.

And to top it off, the same pressure to be perfect can also exacerbate underlying risk factors, and cause a legitimate increase in illness.

Agreed, plus the controversial take, some young adults seem to take an odd pride in strongly identifying with their diagnoses, an in-group effect if you will.

Either way back to the original article, talk is cheap, action is harder. If we want to actually improve mental health we're going to talk less and do more, eg. reducing the pressure on young people (housing/education reform anyone?).

Ah but that OCD study suggests the opposite of OCD overdiagnosis.

People who actually have OCD are being misdiagnosed with other more specific disorders due to a poor understanding of the heterogeneity of the condition.

Yeh I kinda threw that out there and wasn't the clearest but yes I'm 100% in agreement that everyone is somewhere on the spectrum and I guess we need to reach a place as a society where everyone is okay with that and that there are thresholds where intervention and disorder verbiage makes sense and thresholds where perhaps a conservative approach is sufficient (and these can change over an individuals life).

Totally true that the DSM uses concrete cutoff values in an attempt to limit subjectivity, given that, what do you think is driving "overdiagnosis"? Eg. given we have guidelines in place?

> I think it's unhelpful if folks who (for example) like their TV to be set to an even number talk about 'their OCD'.

I guess we can agree that a tiktok mental health awareness is a poor substitute for a proper education (broad, balanced, evidence based etc). The sad thing is tiktok awareness is popular because people just aren't getting good information elsewhere.

At the same time I don't think gatekeeping is particularly good, the folks who struggle the most are often the quietest.

Like everything in the health world it's a spectrum isn't it. Where you draw the cutoff for something being a disorder and needing intervention is super subjective. Probably something where too much talk doesn't necessarily help, as it seems to dilute that threshold over time.

I guess that's just it, it's a spectrum and even "normal" people can be somewhere on it. And decisions about diagnosis or labeling etc should be taken based on degree of impairment to functioning.

Saying that, we really do want to make kids aware of mental health issues (the same as health in general). I really could have benefited from an education about OCD, as it took me more than ten years to understand why I struggled so much.

Thank you for saying that, it's a bitter pill for a lot of people to swallow. I suspect most folks who struggle with squaring the facts just haven't spent much time around livestock.

Oh the popular WGS services are a borderline scam. I fell for their BS unfortunately so are out a few hundred euros. I don't expect to see results for 12 months or more (if ever).

In the end I found a local company that does WGS sequencing and they are a lot more reasonable to deal with, maybe 1.5-2x the price. So perhaps look for smaller providers, they are all just reselling time on the same Illumina machines.

In your case, just confirming, your blood pressure is otherwise normal and you experienced an episode of severe hypertension after starting Sertraline (zoloft)? No other contraindicated medications? No indications of a bipolar/mania or something of that nature? I've talked to maybe 3x other people now who've had similar experiences (after scouring the internet), and the only commonality I've found is ASD.

This is a bit of a pet project of mine, so if you want to chat about ASD shenanigans, please reach out to: asd.shenanigans@mailbox.org

Now that's some serendipitous reading.

I've been on the hunt for possible mechanisms (for further study) as to why last year after trying an SSRI (escitalopram), to treat an anxiety disorder co-morbid to my ASD, that I ended up in the hospital in a hypertensive crisis. Was an all around terrible experience and I hope one day I can figure out WTF happened to me.

Interestingly the BP rise seemed to be mostly diastolic driven and I had crazy excessive urination which made me think about ADH/aldosterone/etc. Seeing ADH is potentially linked to ASD definitely catches my attention! Some of the alternative theories are, I am a MAO-A knockout (unlikely because of lack of intellectual disability), or possess a hyperfunctional SERT (also linked to ASD).

Really excited for the results of the whole genome sequencing I ordered to arrive.

I've seen some behavior on German job sites that blows my mind as an Australian (and from this discussion it's pretty clear Aussie tradies aren't saints).

Zero compliance with hard hats, straddling a 4th story window without fall protection, incredibly sketchy scaffolding, dust everywhere etc. I was half expecting a worker fatality at some point.

Though I'm not sure I'd blame the Germans (other than for very lax oversight) it was an entirely Eastern European work crew. Which seems to be the case for many job sites around here. Bunch of young folks hustling for money to take home with zero regard for health and safety.

There's an interesting cultural element to this, and I think Brother being a Japanese company is not a coincidence. I see the same mindset applied widely here in the German Mittelstand.

The American growth at all costs mindset (particularly quarterly) is excellent during the technology exploration phase. It spurs radical innovation, but as a technology matures it becomes impossible to meet growth expectations. In response to this the spiral of Enshittification kicks off and eventually the company and it's products fade into irrelevance. Stability in such an environment is impossible (the gain knob is cranked to the max).

The German Mittelstand are different, typically they are much slower to innovate during the technology exploration phase (I think mostly due to the German economy not really rewarding early stage innovation). However as a technology matures the Mittelstand's strength in stable, gradual evolution and refinement really shines. They focus on being the best in their niche and grow by expanding to new markets, opening adjacent product lines etc. Enshittification is the last thing on their minds (the system is critically/over damped).

Thanks so much for sharing your experience.

Do you have any further information / links / legal references regarding the IP transfer grace period? As ideally this is what I'd like to do with my current ideas.

Basically work on a bunch of opensource components that would complement a commercial product that I offer / develop under a future GmbH (which I spin up basically as soon as I have an interested party in the hypothetical product).

Trying to reduce the amount of legal and finanzamt shenanigans where possible.

For an interesting evidence point in this direction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbLFYeU3Mw0

Or a more Australian example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qwj8UKaEoeY

Also look at how much of the salary increases get sucked up by the real estate sector (another high "growth" sector in Australia).

I think in general the costs of low productivity sectors tend to outpace the average which kind of negates additional spending (we see that already, educational spending has grown a lot over the years).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

I always wonder what the breakdown of these administrative costs look like. Is it personnel, is it suppliers fleecing school districts, or is it as simple as everything having got more expensive (eg. building maintenance, janitors, transport etc).

Low productivity growth. The productivity of the education sector has been unable to keep up with other competing industries in their communities. Unfortunately we see a similar phenomenon for other labor intensive industries (nursing, public transport, etc).

Australia's revenge for all the invasive species.