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nelox

892 karma · joined December 3, 2019

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nelox··on We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports
This sounds like a real cross-cultural mismatch, but it’s doing too much work with nationality alone. In a lot of Indian (and broader South Asian) work contexts, questioning instructions can be read as challenging authority or admitting incompetence, so people default to executing without asking. That’s often reinforced by education systems and contractor dynamics where producing something quickly feels safer than pausing to clarify.

Add in time zones, language friction, and fear of losing work, and "just run with it" becomes a rational strategy. Meanwhile, many Western workplaces treat clarification and check-ins as professionalism, so the behavior reads as strange or careless.

The key point is that this usually isn’t lack of curiosity or reflection, but risk management under different norms. The pattern often disappears once expectations are explicit: ask questions, check back, iteration is expected.

nelox··on The Brazen Illegality of Trump's Venezuela Operation
Yes, this is apparently the moment international law finally collapsed. After decades of regime change, covert action, targeted killings, proxy wars, and executive unilateralism carried out by every administration of both parties. What makes this case uniquely intolerable is not the conduct itself, but the failure to dress it up in the usual layers of euphemism and multilateral paperwork. The real violation, it seems, is skipping the rituals.
nelox··on Microsoft Office renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app”
No, I’m not German. But danke for the approval, I’ll take it anyway.
nelox··on AI and the Human Condition
Right, because this time humans will heroically reject cheaper, faster, better substitutes out of pure reverence for "the human condition." Any day now. We’ve famously done that with factory goods, photography, recorded music, CGI, calculators, spellcheck, and literally every other technology that "could never replace" human craft.

The claim boils down to: AI won’t replace humans because humans like feeling special. A rigorous argument. History definitely supports the idea that sentiment reliably beats convenience, especially once the imitation is indistinguishable and half the price. But yes, this disruption will surely pause out of respect.

nelox··on Microsoft Office renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app”
1975: Traf-O-Data renamed Microsoft. Traffic counting ditched. Visionary.

1985: MS-DOS released. Users typed everything. Peak convenience.

1995: Windows 95 launched. Clippy forced assistance. Users thrilled.

2012: Metro interface rolled out. Tiles everywhere. Intuitive design.

2014: Windows Azure renamed Microsoft Azure. “Windows” dropped. Bold move.

2020: Office 365 renamed Microsoft 365. Bing renamed Microsoft Bing. Defender renamed Microsoft Defender. Branding masterstroke.

2022: Office brand killed after 32 years. Portal substituted. Heartwarming farewell.

2023: Bing Chat renamed Copilot. Azure AD renamed Entra ID. Creativity unleashed.

2024: Groove Music renamed endlessly. Finally axed. Customer loyalty rewarded.

2025: Microsoft 365 renamed Microsoft 365 Copilot app. Price hiked. Bargain.

2026: Copilot slapped on everything. Rebranding triumphs. Bugs eternal. Pure genius.

nelox··on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
How? Try this:

https://www.state.gov/nicolas-maduro-moros/

[edit] Maduro remained under US federal indictment on narco‑terrorism and related cocaine trafficking conspiracy charges throughout the Biden administration.

nelox··on Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings
Christopher Nolan and Paul Thomas Anderson made a similar appeal a few years ago. The soap opera effect is my pet bugbear and is the first to go.

https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/christopher-nolan...

nelox··on Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri
Reuters calling the switch a "font" change instead of a typeface change is troubling, though consistent with a society that now casually refers to all pasta as "spaghetti". A typeface is the design; a font is its specific instance. This is basic knowledge, taught to children, houseplants, and most domesticated goats.

A simple correction would stop this spiral, but Reuters appears committed to forging a bold new era in which terminology is chosen at random, like drawing Scrabble tiles from a bag and declaring them journalism.

nelox··on Big Tech are the new Soviets
Yanis, wasn’t an aristocrat. However, these were all from upper-class or elite backgrounds too: Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Josip Broz Tito.
nelox··on Why does New Zealand take such a long summer holiday break?
Because Australia is a big place ;)
nelox··on Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
How we would design a rigorous study that measures total cost of ownership when teams integrate AI assistance, including later maintenance and defect rates, rather than just initial output speed?
nelox··on Coffee linked to slower biological ageing among those with severe mental illness
It is a critique, not a summary. If you think it stops being one, point out where.

I don’t take articles at face value, especially when it comes to science reporting. Journalists often overstate or oversimplify studies, so I read the actual paper. I highlighted what it really says, what it doesn’t say, and what the article adds that isn’t in the study at all.

If an article misrepresents a paper’s core ideas, why shouldn’t that be called out? Misreporting confuses readers and undermines the authors’ work by failing to represent it accurately.

nelox··on NVIDIA frenemy relation with OpenAI and Oracle
If only they were
nelox··on NVIDIA frenemy relation with OpenAI and Oracle
Do I need to explain the meaning of not?
nelox··on NVIDIA frenemy relation with OpenAI and Oracle
Thank you
nelox··on NVIDIA frenemy relation with OpenAI and Oracle
The problem isn’t theorising itself, investing is full of it. The issue is when speculation is presented with the tone and certainty of established fact. The article doesn’t merely offer possibilities in light of missing data; it states mechanisms and outcomes as though the evidence for them is already in hand. So the objection isn’t to building a model, but to blurring the line between assumption and demonstration, and to glossing over the range of alternative explanations that the same incomplete information could support.
nelox··on NVIDIA frenemy relation with OpenAI and Oracle
not an attempt to pass off anything as my own
nelox··on NVIDIA frenemy relation with OpenAI and Oracle
The point was simply to analyse the argument on its merits
nelox··on NVIDIA frenemy relation with OpenAI and Oracle
It was a straightforward critique of the article’s claims
nelox··on Autism's confusing cousins
Your experience illustrates something that often gets lost in the autism-vs-not-autism debate: many people don’t fall into clean diagnostic categories. You’re describing a profile that mixes autism traits, trauma adaptations, ADHD features, and developmental history, and instead of neatly labeling you, the system failed you outright with a bipolar misdiagnosis. That alone shows how fragile clinical certainty really is.

I think the most important part of what you wrote is that you changed over time. Whether that improvement came from meditation, therapy, maturity, trauma processing, or simply growing into yourself, it challenges the idea that autism is a static essence. Development, coping skills, neurology, and environment interact in ways the current diagnostic boundaries don’t fully capture.

Where I push back slightly is on the conclusion that self-diagnosis can automatically fill the gaps. For some people it’s deeply accurate and validating, for others it may explain one part of their experience but obscure another. As you said, many people carry a “grab-bag” of traits, and a single label can illuminate or compress that complexity depending on how it’s used.

You’re right that the field has a painful history and uneven present. Misdiagnosis is real. Forced treatment is real. Diagnostic tools are blunt instruments for a very diverse human reality. Supporting research while staying critical of the system makes sense, not because autism isn’t real, but because the categories we have are still evolving. Your story is a perfect example of why humility in diagnosis matters, whether it’s done by a psychiatrist or by oneself.

Edit:typo

nelox··on Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros
More choice for users of Netflix
nelox··on Tailscale Coordination server performance issues
“A fix for the issue has been deployed, and our team is currently monitoring. Wed, 3 Dec 2025 at 11:02 UTC (24 minutes ago)”
nelox··on Music eases surgery and speeds recovery, study finds
The core issue is that the BBC report inflates what the study actually shows. The paper is a small, single-centre RCT of one specific surgery (laparoscopic cholecystectomy). Its primary outcome is a modest reduction in propofol and fentanyl dose under a very specific anaesthetic protocol. It does not demonstrate broadly faster recovery or an across-the-board clinical benefit. The authors themselves are cautious and explicitly list limitations.

The article strips out that narrow context and generalises. Phrases like “music eases surgery and speeds recovery” and “strongest evidence yet” extrapolate from a sample of 56 people undergoing one procedure to “surgery” in general. The paper doesn’t measure global recovery outcomes, discharge times, or longer-term effects. Satisfaction and pain scores are even reported as comparable between groups (P=0.361 and P=0.07).

There’s also mechanistic speculation in the article (implicit memory, psychological responses, “humanising the operating room”) that isn’t in the study’s data. The paper reports dose differences and perioperative physiological measures—not neuropsychological mechanisms.

nelox··on What is a manifold?
A $1,500 trip to the mechanic
nelox··on OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly
What tests? The term “therapist” is not protected in most jurisdictions. No regulation required. Almost anyone can call themselves a therapist.
nelox··on Claude for Excel
Indeed. Take the New Zealand Department of Health as an example; it managed its entire NZD$28 billion budget (USD$16B) in a single Excel spreadsheet.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/10/nz_health_excel_sprea...

[edit: Added link]

nelox··on US Government Uptime Monitor
Indeed. In Australia, a government was once dismissed after failing to pass supply bills in the Senate (Supply bills allocate money to the government). The Governor-General resolved the deadlock by dissolving Parliament and calling an election. The event is known as “The Dismissal”. It remains one of the key examples of the Governor-General’s reserve powers in action.
nelox··on Inflammation now predicts heart disease more strongly than cholesterol
Could it be either of these studies?

“Dietary Intervention to Reverse Carotid Atherosclerosis” (Circulation, 2010) — participants were randomized to low-fat, Mediterranean, or low-carbohydrate diets; carotid arteries were imaged with 3-D ultrasound cross-sections at baseline and follow-up. After 2 years there was a ~5% regression in carotid vessel-wall volume, with similar regression across all diets (i.e., including the low-carb arm). [1]

Volek et al., 2009 (Metabolism) — 12-week very-low-carb vs low-fat trial; ultrasound of the brachial artery showed improved post-prandial flow-mediated dilation (a marker of endothelial function/inflammation) in the low-carb group. Not carotid 3-D slices, but still vascular imaging with before/after comparisons. [2]

[1] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.1...

[2] https://lowcarbaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Volek-e...

nelox··on America's top companies keep talking about AI – but can't explain the upsides
Well, I use an iPhone and “ is default on my keyboard.

Tell me, why should I not use a hyphen for hyphenated words?

I was schooled is British English where the spaced endash - is preferred.

Shall I go on?

nelox··on That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
The World Trade Center is/was closer to UNHQ ;)

Edit:ascii emoji fail

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