paimapi

this was the first web search result for brain wave pseudoscience:

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/brain-wave-pseudoscience/

I got my current job (which I love and am being paid incredibly well for) by cold-firing a DM to someone at the company who I thought would be responsive who then put me down as a referral.

It's a whole song-and-dance, absolutely. The 'game' is to post enough (once/twice a week) with genuine, non-AI generated content to get your co-workers liking your posts and engaging. General, pro-social musings about layoffs, coworkers, job prospects, etc.

Recruiters started hitting me up fairly quickly after I started doing this even with my paltry engagement numbers (5k~ views per post) - half a dozen DMs a week for pretty decent roles in my city while I kept it up (and still a handful now after I stopped posting). And it also made my profile relatively 'attractive' for hiring managers, too, which is to say I didn't seem like a total sociopath with anger problems.

It helps that code-switching is pretty easy for me given my personal history so it doesn't feel like I'm somehow fundamentally betraying who I am by posting fluffy things on one social media platform. I imagine if you're more sensitive about your identity or how you engage socially, it can be very difficult to put any effort into your LI profile. If you've never had to put on a mask to fit in then the first wear can be very uncomfortable.

I think skepticism is healthy for the vast majority of sensationalized titles especially those coming from corporate entities. You'll very often find me in those OAI/Anthrop threads being very critical of their claims.

I like applying that same rigor to articles like this one. This is not a revolutionary discovery, it is a possible, un-replicated new avenue that could become revolutionary with enough of an evidence base. But there are many dozens of these same kinds of discoveries published all the time often leading to dead-ends (which is actually great since that's another rabbit hole you no longer have to chase - here's to null findings!)

In the same way you shouldn't accept PR regurgitated by so-called 'independent' journals when they come from corporate and government institutions, the same rigor should be applied to PR from universities seeking grants

Bit of a sensationalist title - EEG/iEEG measurements have led to worthwhile clinical outcomes but also are an avenue for bunk pseudosccience so it pays to be careful whenever you see the words 'brain waves' paired with some large claim.

More accurate, much less sexy title: Intracranial Recordings Uncover Spiral and Concentric Brain Waves During Memory Tasks" (study completed only on small cohorts of epilepsy patients performing constrained memory tasks).

No inner workings revealed or laid bare, just another piece of evidence contributing to a small part of the debate in cortical electrophysiological studies on whether or not some data measures can be discarded as the downstream, messy noise of the neurons firing or actual, high-fidelity signals of activity

you weren't around back in the days that it was just a Ron Paul fanboy forum and a lot of r/atheism echo chambers (I say this as an atheist who got keenly annoyed by the amount of self-fellating going on there) - this was pre-sub-reddits, when kn0thing was still active on the site and a force for some pro-social moderation, and Digg was still their biggest competitor (until it was flooded with the HD-DVD key leak and a lot of people left it out of annoyance)

ah yes, adding a futures market to a sector heavily invested in AI certainly won't lead to catastrophic over-speculation that will collapse the industry entire

they're quite literally trying to create a techno-priest class who are the only ones with access to the hidden knowledge of salvation (ie generation)

similar to priest classes, they warn of impending, world-consuming doom, talk up how they are uniquely positioned to interpret the sacred text (ie create models), while casting aspersions on heretics who offer a similar mode of salvation but whom they describe as being morally and ethically bankrupt (ie GLM lacks safeguards!)

all this in spite of, well, lots of evidence that they themselves have repeatedly done the very same immoral and unethical acts (the many times Anthropic employees have had incompetent sandboxing/configs and too-broad prompts that led to actual intrusion attempts)

they even have the irregular obsession with sex covered (at least it's sex-positive?). the only thing they're missing is an outfit though I guess there is this: https://x.com/Aella_Girl/status/2063798788310118655

that's totally fair and I'm really sorry to hear that. wraparound services provided in-full is necessary and often a skipped thing that municipalities ignore and foist on ill-equipped and often-problematic religious institutions and things like AA (which is effectively also a Christian/deist indoctrination program)

I'd love to live in a utopia where our money doesn't go to murdering hundreds of children in an elementary school in another country and instead provides fully funded and socialized longterm treatment programs for people who need it, with strict regulatory and auditing guidelines to prevent abuse and non-evidence-based practices

it's a fucking shame how far we are from that ever becoming reality

I love that you just Googled sources and didn't even read them

your first source says verbatim: "One of the main causes of homelessness is the lack of affordable housing". it also doesn't link addiction or mental illness as a cause - it describes that the rates are higher in unhoused populations

a brief thought experiment: if you were unhoused, living on the streets, barely enough money for food and water, your body exposed to the weather, knowing that society looks down on you at worst or ignores you at best, how would your mental health fare?

well, according to your second source:

> It can be more challenging for people who are homeless to stop using substances, because they may not have easy access to treatment, often have smaller social support networks, may have decreased motivation to quit drugs or alcohol, and may have other, higher priorities, such as finding housing or food

it's almost like being unhoused itself causes cycles of addiction because at least the drugs take the pain away for a short stint?

your third source similarly contradicts your initial claim:

>For years, ending chronic homelessness was thought to be a multi-step process, with individuals receiving treatment for addictions and illnesses, perhaps while living in transitional or temporary housing, before being found capable of living on their own. However, the strategy for ending homelessness has changed, largely due to research pioneered by housing providers. Instead of requiring chronically homeless individuals to be "housing ready" by first addressing issues thought to underlie homelessness, the new strategy allows chronically homeless individuals to move into permanent supportive housing without preconditions.

either find better sources or actually read the research you're citing, learn from them, and stop making unfounded and ludicrous claims you can't even back up

there's some omissions in this analysis:

one, delivering intermittent renewable energy requires storage and transmission. and that leads to inefficiencies and loss so there's actually way more upstream generation capacity than end-use meters show

two, air-source heat pumps perform extremely poorly during extreme temperatures (which is pretty much a guarantee at this point) which drives peak load during critical moments. which means you need to build more massive firm generation reserves (not the most carbon neutral process)

three, energy demand is not fixed and never has been. expanding electricity to billions experiencing global energy poverty combined with the rebound consumption in the Global North (in the same way that adding one more lane to a highway just leads to more drivers) means we'll need much more generation, magnitudes more. it works for this all-things-equal thought experiment but that's not the reality we're living in, unfortunately

electrification is great and necessary but it's not a magic bullet that solves our problems whatsoever. I know the technocrats want you to believe there's a way to innovate and disrupt climate change but this certainly (nor any of the slew of current technocratic pipe dreams) are getting us there

not for COVID afaik but it seems like the mechanism is similar - systemic shocks to the body of some sort by viral loads leading to future pathologies

you can pretty much run frontier-level models locally now with GLM 5.3 Flash and Qwen 3.8 Flash Next so this pricing feels very geared towards squeezing people who are still dependent on cloud subscription models only and don't know how to divert grunt work to cheaper models automatically with the 'smarter' frontier models acting as orchestrators and refinement

https://this.os.isfine.org/blog/posts/chinese-flash-models-a...

this is great! my city's independent press corp (that's always in need of some fiduciary support) has a similar tracker for this: https://atlpresscollective.com/city-of-atlanta-settlements/

makes me wonder how hard it would be to set up a national database that scrapes the APIs of various municipal boards and councils for resolutions that approve settlements like these, filtered by type

depends on the infection. COVID, for eg, is well-studied as something that chronically weakens the immune system and may cause autoimmune disorders

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7744845/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12185401/

so it's not surprising that infections can lead to downstream, systemic problems in the human body which then allows for things like cancer to arise (especially given that we just lived through a once-in-a-century pandemic that is still ongoing)

one thing to note is that the solar industry has receded quite a bit in the last two years in China due to overproduction (or, as the Chinese state likes to call it, 'involution' or 'too much competition'). solar is cheap now because 1) Chinese subsidies are reduced, shrinking their installation market and 2) overproduction leading to essentially fire sales. once production stabilizes against the market, costs will go back up. it's really never been a better time to buy panels than now

https://dialogue.earth/en/energy/behind-the-layoffs-in-china...

>Some observers estimate 20-30% capacity reductions are required, but demand shrinkage could increase that figure. “I’m particularly worried about the downstream side,” says Reis. “Even as prices collapsed, demand remained robust for three years, but power market reforms are now upending the entire renewables market.”

combine this with the global backing-off of the Paris Agreement (and subsequent subsidy defunding) and power utilities in the US abandoning clean energy goals in order to immediately increase output for proposed hyperscale facilities and you've got something of an enduring demand shortage

that said, there is a lot of automation happening in that industry right now (which is likely going to cause a small recession in China due to half a million to a million workers being out of a job, depending on how much the parts manufacturers also automate) so it's possible production with continue improving as more R&D is dedicated there. only time will tell!

depends on how you use it? I do a lot of scripting with it that makes my life a lot easier. paired with a good set of skills and some greppable context docs, the job gets done fairly easily and well. most of the misses are just oversights and overly-complicated solutions and there's plugins like superpowers and ponytail that help mitigate it somewhat

plus, it might just be me and my love of RPGs, strategy roguelikes, and 4X games but figuring out meta-process improvements for bespoke plugins and tooling feels very rewarding. being able to consistently have agents, for example, update a changelog in a straightforward and concise way whenever they're done with a slice of work without having to micro-manage it feels great and then allows you to iterate and improve on the outputs as you continue using it. it's something like a gamified loop, almost but the end result is you're better and faster at your job

there's always some organizational, systematized intent in the creation of incompetence. all organizations should be accountable for it's workers and their adherence to policy - it's why safety regulations and training exist, after all

if you have an individual who has been sexually harassing others regularly the problem exists both with the individual and with there not being clear reporting standards, remediation processes, and person-by-person training opportunities (or only offering lackluster, barely enforced versions of the training)

organizations, especially ones as large and well-funded as LLM model providers that can hire whole fleets of trainers, ethics watchdogs, etc, that then produce large-scale, systematic incompetence are and should be the primary culprit and the one targeted by accountability processes

outside of someone just straight up embezzling funds or grossly misusing their power, organizations should also bear the brunt of the culpability especially when it relates to harms to the public good, especially if those harms benefit the organizations directly. and even in those cases the question becomes why weren't there accountability practices? checks on power? etc

yep! most of the older hacktivist types who had initially set it up are keenly aware that it's not just Flock doing surveillance. I think it's the newer anti-Flock folks from groups like 50501 that are maybe a bit too obsessed and don't see it as an extension of state hegemony. that said, Flocks expansion and growth is multiple times that of Axon/Motorola in this space -they really opened the can of worms that's standalone, non-grid-powered CCTV and now all the companies are pursuing the tech

EFF's Atlas of Surveillance also does a really great job keeping track of contracts with these companies: https://www.atlasofsurveillance.org/

if you feel up for it, filing some ORRs according to your local statute for these contracts and sending them to the EFF is a great way of getting involved on a small scale. MuckRock has an entire tool for it that someone on HN pointed me to a few days ago (https://www.muckrock.com/foi/create/) and I'm going to spend an evening or so sending out some requests :)

> Mozilla has been distracted by a million shiny things around them

also this - like Brave being inundated with crypto shit and now AI shit isn't them hopping on every last fad as fast as possible?

it's also wild to me how many people default to citing FireFox when there are open-source, privacy-focused forks like LibreWolf, Tor Browser, and Mullvad Browser out there, all of which blow Brave out of the water for privacy by their own admission on that privacytests.org site (that one of their staff engs owns)

for what it's worth, the DeFlock maps also include Axon/Motorola cams. they pick up my city's custom implementation too so the anti-surveillance movement is really benefiting from this Flock-focused hate

right, the solution here is not a hyper-capitalist race-to-the-bottom-of-devaluing-labor. it's recognizing discretion and diligence are things still required for work to be of a certain quality

buddy will be so surprised to learn how many people on social programs like that hold down a job and are some of the nicest, sweetest people in the world who just got screwed over by circumstances

in the same way people are delusional in thinking they're just temporarily embarrassed billionaires, they also don't realize how precarious their own financial positions are, and how they'll definitely want a safety net that helps them to survive if it happened to them

I mean, I think the problem isn't that the LLM doesn't know how to code, it's that companies are expecting 3-5x velocity with the bottleneck of code review and testing becoming much more severe than before

if you're an MBA-brained exec who doesn't actively use LLMs to code and you just believe whatever slop it outputs at first without checking it, you're not going to realize how recklessly it can be used, how you need to be critical and skeptical of its outputs, that you need to explore it's reasoning and logic (which is still really easy compared to understanding legacy code and barely takes any time!)

say you also believe all this marketing hype about 'how dangerous (ie capable) AI agents are.' LLMs can do anything you think so you just say 'ship it' without building out the tooling and capabilities to enable faster code review and better tests. and to keep the shareholders happy, you start cutting jobs that you can't directly connect to a KPI (ie the platform/SRE team who would be the ones who can trial, onboard, and maintain those capabilities for your teams)

and from this, suddenly a lot of debit card stops working and the only one getting the blame are individual SWEs trying to hit their sprint velocity. the fact that you fucked up the whole SDLC real bad with your incompetence gets you a golden parachute and you job hop to a better paycheck. rinse and repeat

or it could be that the pan-spermia theory bears out and we are downstream products of ejected extremophiles that survived a space trip through the relatively short solar system

there's far too much unknown about the origins of life to say we even have a basic guess as to the probabilities of life

Saturn being basically a giant pollen-dense flower has an allegorical beauty to it

ah yes! I knew I was forgetting something - the NCPS techs we talked to gushed about the AxKid that they had finally gotten imported to the US

I wish the Plus test included detacheable rear-facing seats too. we dropped quite a pretty penny on the Cybex Cloud T because of how well it scored elsewhere

what's Germany's highway speed limit again? and how is their per-capita rate compared to other EU countries with, well, any speed limit at all?

you're also claiming a multiplier for fatality rates for car sizes. and there is a significant difference (https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/global-car-economy) but the fun fact is that all cars around the world are getting much heavier - the US isn't even the leader in terms of how much cars have ballooned, only in that the starting point was higher

but for changes like that, you can control for fatality rates across time, correct? what do those numbers say? have bigger cars led to increased fatality rates? the IIHS has that data. what's that trendline look like? and what about Europe? there's data for that here: https://road-safety.transport.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2022... - page 10 seems to indicate a trend

they already have the backbone for this with Microsoft Clarity: https://clarity.microsoft.com/

I was running a little mitmproxy network test on some baby-tracking apps to see what kind of data got sent back home and man, realizing that everything I was doing on my phone was essentially being recorded and 'anonymized' by whatever definition of MS has for anonymization was really not fun

if you roll a 7 (let's assume a d8) it should be

1) Don't click the link. Just say that the linked thing has already been done. List examples and talk about how the other options are better.

Do not allow the creator to be proud about the fact that they made something, regardless of where they are in their career. Only gatekeep engineering with as much disdain as you can muster.

is this what happens in China's market? because my understanding is that China loves having an array of competitors. their entire strategy is just to 'build the stage' (via infra buildouts, workforce training, etc) for private enterprises to capitalize on which means rich fields for everyone. and the more that compete, the better it is for their economy. it's why there's something like six large smartphone makers all competing with one another (not counting the myriad smaller makers that exist) - how many large smartphone makers exist in the US?