xkcd-sucks

Being able to tune the intensity ratio of the bands, especially with source age, is nice so that everything's in the middle of the sensor's dynamic range ... optical filters can be pretty cheap at scale or as surplus, but, well behaved broadband light sources aren't so easy to find.

> Do you think this is still true?

Personal opinion, when intra org reciprocity is not discussed or measured, quality plummets as a necessary response to stress/burnout feedback loops at every scale.

Coming to terms with this """insight""" etc. was tl;dr life changing and exactly how is still an open question

TL;DR This is what you're looking for https://firekasina.org/

> It would be SO cool if there was a drug that gave me this ability but didn't make me "high" or confused in the way weed or shrooms do.

On one hand, with enough practice and skill in doing drugs the "confusion" and maybe even "high" will go away, and become just more ordinary sensations

On the other hand, the drugs are certainly helpful for developing faith that it is possible to "get there", but they're not so great at "how to get there from here" (unless you're already well practiced at looking). Kind of like sleeping in the taxi to the top of a mountain versus walking up it.

Under the "travel" metaphor, I guess training in doing drugs would be training "how to get back here from there", while training Concentration alone would be training "how to get there from here". The latter is certainly more effort up front. Some people find the former to be more effort later on, unfortunately. The latter is also attractive for other reasons which should be obvious (it's free)

One caveat being, some high quality things really do get drowned out or conceptually polluted by loudly advertised crap. It's a tangly problem that's for sure

> places where you see reverse engineering used, usually to modify existing software.

funnily enough I have a team reverse engineering binary data formats, which is often more easily accomplished by other means + only dropping down to the disassembly/decompilation where absolutely necessary. and which as far as I am aware never involves binary patching

but yeah about the article it seems like if you know this much about assembly / chips etc. to be able to read it, then general problem solving ability should be able to cover most of the article's content

It smells like nail polish remover, well nail polish remover with the acetone subtracted, and it is noticeable well below any toxicity threshold. It's also a characteristic component of some fruit / fermentation aromas

Like, it behooves one to know enough about one's car or house or computer in order to not get scammed/idiot-screwed by mechanics and contractors and tech support

It would be surprising if one's body were different. The general level of faith there seems inconsistent with reality

> It took us so long to get though the jar

> Our first test doses

implying there were more later

I'm genuinely ... horrified, impressed, and much more.

The systemic bug killers are fucking terrifying. They're not approved for human use, so there's some baseline concern. They're neurotoxins which are "specific" to bugs [0], but, all living things are remarkably similar and no drug is 100% specific to its target. Finally, it's formulated to persist in a body for a month, which means it's really hard to flush out an overdose!!!!!!

The product booklet in revolution / frontline rx is actually really comprehensive and worth a read here, it goes in to the pharmacology in detail.

... In spite of all this I still do poison my cat's bugs but try to pad the dosing schedule by a week or 2 each time, it's not like the life cycle of the critical parasites is longer than that.

[0] mostly glutamate gated chloride channel activators, and mammals don't have these receptors. but mammals do have glutamate gated cation channels (AMPAs/NMDAr) and the drugs bind activate them too, just only a little tiny bit... that adds up in an overdose. What you get from excitatory glutamate channel activation is seizures.

Only assuming "Bullshit" to be a though-terminating cliche: It could also be treated as a starting point to understanding how these circumstances came to be, and how to go about effectively untangling them.

perhaps these, and more, are all styles in a normal conversational palette + rigid adherence to one is itself the autistic trait?

I was reminded of this joke:

> A city slicker shoots a duck out in the country. As he's retrieving it, a farmer walks up and stops him, claiming that since the duck is on his farm, it technically belongs to him. After minutes of arguing, the farmer proposes they settle the matter "country style."

> "What's country style?" asks the city boy.

> "Out here in the country," the farmer says: "when two fellers have a dispute, one feller kicks the other one in the balls as hard as he can. Then that feller, why, he kicks the first one as hard as he can. And so forth. Last man standin' wins the dispute."

> Warily the city boy agrees and prepares himself. The farmer hauls off and kicks him in the groin with all his might. The city boy falls to the ground in the most intense pain he's ever felt, crying like a baby and rolling around on the ground. Finally he staggers to his feet and says: "All right, n-now it's–it's m-my turn."

> The farmer grins: "Forget it, you win. Keep the duck."

They probably did think of that, and they did it too: Science as it is practiced in the real world. This sort of stuff is related to our whining about replication crises, careerism, etc.

But it can have its utility too, it's just more "defense from morons" instead "advancing the field". Or more neutrally filling in very predictable gaps in knowledge, like if you got something really unexpected but this stuff is all bog standard unhappy cells

Believe it or not Dead Cells got me personally organized by highlighting the importance of good tool strategies with limited carry slots

In consideration of the placebo effect and sleep architecture, I have started trying to think of deep half-awake time as "stage zero sleep"

Nonono it's the apprenticeship business school model where you work summers to learn the ropes from your uncle who speaks trade Spanish + bankrupts a leaf-node company on every claim and penalty

This kind of consumerist equation: Pay money, physically present to classes and follow explicit instructions, receive grade, [repeat at med school], get high paying job expectation etc. also has the side effect of totally lowering academic standards both as pressure from the top down and friction from the ground up. It's a super depressing realization to hit any passion-oriented graduate student supported on a teaching appointment among other things

I've heard the erection points downwards if you slice the ligament holding it up on the top side that could make it fit down the leg better

omg the name just sounds like "precision scheduled railroading"

Now the popular portrayal of WWII seems kind of idealistic, but there's plenty of historical evidence to suggest many Allied troops really did not want to be there, and the scale of desertion [1] was quite high - In addition to corruption, mismanagement, and racketeering [2].

I only really considered this after encountering "Deserter: The Last Untold Story of the Second World War" by Charles Glass in a used bookstore, which is appropriately referenced etc.

[1] But what is desertion, really? A legal matter the facts of which are decided through process...

[1] like, Catch-22 was actually toned down from reality so to speak, yes it's technically written by a Korean war vet but

I mean lots of the comments in this thread exemplify the need for this book assuming it is well written enough to achieve its purpose [0]

Take for example the dismissal that "waves are just a concept/model/way of describing the universe that is useful and pretty accurate for many purposes".

Yes, this is true, but the wonder is to be found in the universe, not in the model, and the model provides a path to that wonder to be found approaching true understanding. Understanding with one may practically profit, and idk motivational salience to see connections where they are present.

Like, if you stop and think about it, isn't it like totally nuts that light, "heat", "electricity", etc. just smear out into one another at the right frequency, and that you can predict it? That you can ring all the nuclei in a human's body just like ringing a bell, listen to the tone, and turn that into a like a 3d image of tumors and crap? [1] And, this beauty / intricacy / whatever collides into the need to eat and clean up poop and so forth [2] -- And we end up with microwave ovens used thrice daily until broken and trashed, and relegate the concepts themselves into "just"s, because they are ordinary.

And if this sense of holistic appreciation for the universe is more cultivated in more people we'd see more cool stuff or live in a better world or something.

[0] idk, helping the reader develop a sense of ... awe, better intuitive understanding (because people have it no matter how wrong), connection, higher order consequences, all embedded in a practical context or something.

[1] NMR/MRI more or less

[2] which are also emergent consequences of all these heady abstract concepts btw, like what is is that we need to eat, why do we need to eat to begin with, etc.

Even the spooky spy and torture people choose the crappy low bidding implementation partner

It seems hard to disincentivize "data" in the same way it's hard to disincentivize "cocaine", e.g. to most companies "10 kg of cocaine" is a liability but there exist certain companies generally staffed by more unpleasant people who make it their business to treat it as an asset.

Which means going to a different layer / structural solution maybe. How does the value of data go to zero?

Consider that CTE chronic traumatic encephalopathy was discovered only a couple decades ago, despite the fact it could in principle be physically observed with stone age technology [0]. Knowing and caring where to look are important, and its tricky if there's no conceptual framework for it

[0] gently bash someone on the head for decades, cut out their brain, notice it's all shrunken and weird in composition ... maybe in a culture with strong warrior and ritual cannibalism practices

+1 at this time of year it is simply incorrect in my location per my understanding of what a "shadow" is, unless their definition is like complete occlusion in the dead of winter or something

It's surprising that the Watery nature of steam isn't mentioned in the article at all, as it is a terrible material on which to build any reliable consumer technology:

    * Corrosive
    * Heavy
    * Does not lubricate
    * Huge heat capacity, i.e. you get cooked if even a little bit of it gets on you)

About the only advantage it has is being cheap, available, and nontoxic which is cool for factories built on rivers

Is your username the way to ask for beer after-hours in Chinatown?

> Do I understand this? A purely reductionist view of my understanding: this is quantified as "the amount of will to live"? If my understanding is proper, how do you measure this without killing people? I grok that it is an extreme example, I am attempting to glean applicability of such an experiment to humans.

I mean in this is one model and typically a "result" means several models are all consistent with the researcher's mental model of the thing. But yes, the forced swim test is one measure of "will to live" and it's treated as that because of similarities to "that which we call 'depression'" or whatever

It is better than nothing, unless one takes it too seriously.

[0] mice float, they don't drown when they give up, assuming you take them out quickly enough [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4401172/ [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3353513/

> Someone with a better grasp of the scientific method perhaps you can answer this.

As a (recovered, former) neurobio phd it seems the "grasp" is mostly there + the clarity you want just doesn't exist here

I.e., the concept of "depression" is pretty hard to nail down quantitatively in the first place: The best model we've got is a kind of self-contained proven-by-internal-self-consistency thing bootstrapped from questionnaires, which is of course further abstracted away onto those model systems we're allowed to kill: For example, calling "how long do mice swim before giving up if you chuck them into a tank of water" is roughly equated to "amount of depression" (this is oversimplified a bit; you correlate a bunch of those measures etc. but still a lot of very weak signals). Even "relevant quantitative data" like fMRI / ECoG is bootstrapped from questionnaires when it's something undefinable like "depression"

Which isn't the end of the world, everything started out like this, it just sucks when people take these results too seriously or infer too much from them.

And even the human black-box stuff in the DSM manuals admits a lot of different subtypes, lots of different and sometimes opposite symptom clusters, etc. It is entirely possible that mechanistically "depression" is a diverse group of mechanisms all boxed up into the most familiar mainstream concept/word.

Maybe overly cynical but "risks" of "AI" going to Congress seems mostly to be a submarine hype thing