xkcd-sucks

A good place to start is just noticing periodically, "what I'm doing right now, is it really a better use of time / more enjoyable than sitting and doing nothing?".

Sometimes it turns out that video games really aren't fun, thought loops aren't productive, everything sucks and is boring, and the present experience of breathing on and out is really the best show in town

I realize this is somewhat off topic but Massachusetts State Police is notoriously corrupt. Some recent items off the top of my head which have been covered extensively in mainstream media:

  * The overtime scandal; TLDR for years there has been a culture of falsifying overtime often in multiple excess of base salary
  * A recruit was beaten to death in an alleged hazing incident
  * Accepting bribes to pass CDL inspections
  * Drug labs faking results, 21k convictions overturned... years later
  * The Karen Read drama, which is just embarrassing regardless of who's the murderer

It's honestly kind of hard to find refs for some of the specific incidents I'm thinking of, because the search results are masked by other similar incidents! Just for starters,

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/epic-drug-lab-scandal-r...

https://www.wcvb.com/article/recent-massachusetts-state-poli...

https://www.wcvb.com/article/massachusetts-state-police-trai...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_State_Police#Con...

Just for cultural reasons, a roundworm's brain with 302 neurons (each one always in the same place spatially and topologically I might add) is likely better understood. And we don't have a great idea of how it works. But the OpenWorm simulation project seems to have current development https://github.com/orgs/openworm/repositories

It's all good, the fine print establishes the real culprit as "free software from popular code-sharing site GitHub"

The "getting bonked on the head a lot might be killing us" narrative has progressed rapidly in the past 20 years, fwiw, and you'd think we would have noticed it earlier given it is visually evident postmortem and doesn't depend on technology

mammals are x86, birds are ARM

fr Nathaniel Hawthorne is immensely relevant in the present day

I'm taking an introductory economics course right now, and was surprised to find out that even hardcover books are a form of price discrimination: The manufacturing costs aren't significantly higher than paperback, but "enthusiasts" will buy them at inflated prices. I'm starting to think that like 80% of product diversity is really just pricing discrimination in disguise.

Autostereogramming it doesn't help me lol

If it's perfect, the overlapping regions just merge in color, i.e. the cat's paw becomes off-white. If it's not perfect, I still have to attend to which parts are popping in and out. In both cases I still have to compare the merged view to the left and right hand sides.

Although it is very nice for illustrating each eye's contributions to the merged view. Just not an attention-saver.

Consider the liability to which a bad security guard can expose your organization! Not that pay guarantees quality but still

Closer proximity to all the different vibration sensors in the skin helps with sensitivity as the bulk skin mass kind of acts as a low pass filter -- Consider the sensitivity with which you feel a splinter vs the sensitivity of that object on the skin surface.

Also, some people just seem to have a fetish for poking metal bits into themselves.

Maybe it's good for first dates or something, "wanna feel the lumps in my hand" is a bit more intimate than "wanna feel my glove"

You know if you take a metal plate bolted down at it's center, throw some salt on it and bow the edge with a violin bow. It makes stable patterns depending on the frequency of the tone playing

Now take this plate and turn it into a 3d sphere and that's spherical harmonica more or less. Electronsike to form them

An underappreciated feature of nonmonogamy is that it makes ethical conflicts of interest a bit more challenging. This article doesn't discuss that explicitly, but does hint at it in some of the quotes

It's completely rational just inverted -- Our understanding of biology is based on testing hypotheses of how drugs work, mostly. Some of the best practical understanding comes from "phase 4 clinical trials" i.e. those performed informally by the market

Some people don't want to be an interplanetary species at the expense of more urgent priorities; to them it isn't compelling that an ambitious man wants to immortalize himself using concepts from the science fiction of his childhood

> Why not [support bounties for ordinary people to enforce parking?]

Because that kind of thing leads to a lower-trust society, especially when plausibly motivated by personal financial gain

The weapons are orthogonal to the culture; most of the police abuse volume is in beating, arrest and confinement, property destruction and confiscation, etc. The shootings make news, but lots of people don't get shot and still suffer lasting material consequences

making a tea with slightly acidic not-too-hot water helps quite a lot

also chewing fresh ginger or ginger tea

starting on an empty stomach, of course

but surprisingly, sometimes a little bit of miso soup midway can help with the "gastroparesis" type nausea that can emerge late stage

and also a little bit of diphenhydramine if it's still bad (like less than an antihistamine dose)

even if it is all kind of lipstick on a pig :)

Moby Dick, Herman Melville

VALIS, Philip K Dick

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance + also Lila, Robert Pirsig

Naked Lunch, William Burroughs

Immortality, Milan Kundera

Catch-22, Joseph Heller (pair with The Deserters, Charles Glass -- In fact a lot of the stuff in Catch-22 is actually toned down from reality)

Mastering the Core Teachings of Buddha, Daniel Ingram (but ignore 80% of it)

+1 for Valetudo, not only does it work, but it is also maintained and keeps getting better. Moreover old vacuums are still maintained as new ones are added

The key to enjoying it is (1) really caring about eating good food and (2) deeply feeling how absolutely horseshit the cost of good pre-prepared food is. After a while the cooking part just becomes instinct and muscle memory, and repetition/practice is the key to that

    > you get hired to work with mostly irrational actors (sellers and buyers).

AI-scale personalization could help here, assuming macro scale irrationality is mostly rational in consideration of individual values (e.g. character of neighborhood, character of permitting-related town departments, etc)

which could maybe turn out better in the short term as tools for human agents, but still

Really hope there isn't a sloppy geolocation ready to be confused by Lebanon NH

Also, the video game Dead Cells, which might even be the reason the language exists. It is an exquisitely designed and executed game which illustrates the passion of its dev team

> What If Ozempic Is Just a Good Thing?

Then I will gladly suffer FOMO while other people test this hypothesis over the next decade or so

"Hallucinate" is an interesting way to position it: It could just as easily be positioned as "too ignorant to know it's wrong" or "lying maliciously".

Indeed, the subjects on which it "hallucinates" are often mundane topics which in humans we would attribute to ignorance, i.e. code that doesn't work, facts that are wrong, etc. Not like "laser beams from jesus are controlling the president's thoughts" as a very contrived example of something which in humans we'd attribute to hallucination.

idk, I'd rather speculatively invest in "a troubled genius" than "a stupid liar" so there's that

Or even a graduated approval scale with categories of limited liability, etc.: For example, when Vioxx and other cox-2 inhibitors were withdrawn from the market, some employees really stocked up on the reps' samples. And in the present it is said that some vets prefer the off-label-for-humans options per [0]

[0] https://www.merckvetmanual.com/pharmacology/inflammation/non...

Maybe "growth factor" as in "sunlight is a growth factor" is appropriately neutral?

Case in point, melanin synthesis and libido systems are related: There's a drug "bremelanotide" and by now probably some others, injectable melanocortin receptor agonists originally marketed for whole-body skin tanning. But actually it's marketed for libido enhancement and in the process it turned out that most MC receptor subtypes regulate mood/cognition more than skin color

TL;DR, there's evidence to suggest - in humans - that sunlight exposure makes people want to bone. Assuming the sunlight -> MCR activation assumption is true lol

> Webster’s New World College Dictionary, which we use in the newsroom, prefers “gantlet” when describing the act of running between two rows. The dictionary also accepts “gauntlet” in this usage, though the primary definition is a medieval glove worn by knights.

> For consistency, newspapers adopt a style that ensures one, uniform use of certain terms. In the Tribune’s case, we go with Associated Press style, which is to use the term “gantlet.”

> The response shows that the spelling we chose, though correct, was less familiar to readers. The alternative? Bow to common usage by choosing “gauntlet.”

[https://www.chicagotribune.com/2009/10/17/readers-throw-down...]

A couple years ago before the current "AI" hype cycle, someone sent me an IPhone photo of their boston terrier on a black-and-white patterned Ikea rug. Although it was "just an unprocessed photo", the rug pattern had been propagated over the dog's body replacing some of its original markings.