xkcd-sucks

> 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

TL;DR is (1) none of these methods effectively control transmission of AFB, and (2) AFB is taken extremely seriously. Like, where I live there is a state law allowing ag inspectors to burn hives at their discretion overriding any fire codes in effect

The vaccine thing seems to be extremely new and probably isn't validated enough re: transmission

> its capacities are focused on exactly the right place to feel magical.

this focus subverts its intended effect on those of us with hair trigger bullshit-PTSD

Gardening is a link in the chain of land maintenance most places. I.e. where you want plants for erosion control, or blocking an ugly view, or especially fighting other plants away, etc. maybe that's 'landscaping' 'arborculture' etc but by that token so is food gardening 'agriculture'

It's a question of axioms. LLMs are by definition "biased" in their weights; training is biasing. Now the stated goal of biasing these models is towards "truth", but we all know that's really biasing towards "looking like the training set" (tl;dr, no not verbatim). And who's to say the advertising industry-blessed training material is not the highest standard of truth? :)

It's really just a matter of mindset -- Many things go faster if you chuck them into a microwave or a sonicator :) I'm definitely going to try this out with cold brew in a cheapie bath sonicator. The thing here is like a big ass probe sonicator butted up against an espresso portafilter which is probably a bit louder than a loud steamer

Less advanced economies have discovered this pricing innovation, but are generally not able to scale it beyond hostess bar scams and the like :)

I honestly can't tell if this is sarcasm or not... like, fleece melts and natural fibers don't melt

if the writing on the tag, or the "we make it from recycled bottles" marketing material, etc didn't make it clear before that

There was a really good comment from someone here a while ago I failed to favorite that basically resolved "science" into a few separate concepts, like:

    * The ... front line bench top process; messing with the world, observing what happens, iterating based on observation, hypothesis testing, modeling reality and testing the model, etc
    * The *accumulated record of knowledge* related to everything, where faith matters -- Given this record is inherently subjective (if nothing else, re: the current state of knowledge when written!), what of this record of knowledge do you trust, what do you confirm, how deeply etc.
    * something else

So the problem seems to be matchmakers don't scale + don't look techy enough ....... maybe a double ended marketplace for (verified) grannies to curate you some nice verified human matches? upcharge for culturally specific grannies, a committee vs 1, pinning favorite matchmakers etc

> Ask, what if instead of doing [X], [certain characters] put those resources instead into [something else]

In most of these cases the outcome is "it makes a less entertaining story". The Anthropic Principle of Literature, if you will.

Live near Boston, just want to point out they recently discovered a pedophile priest was communicating with his victims using strongly encrypted messaging platforms. I don’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want the police to have another tool to reduce child sexual abuse. etc.

One consideration is maybe stuff that's "hackable", i.e. immediately accessible, can be incrementally and reversibly modified, is more accessible to "play" while stuff that's extremely capable but has a high activation cost (setting up the environment, learning all the stuff to make something basic etc.) is more accessible only to "focused / goal oriented study" and this has all kinds of implications on who does it, who succeeds, under which circumstances etc.

e.g. my friend tells me you can open game.exe in notepad + change this value to walk on lava, then I fiddle with it and tl;dr make a map of my school, then get frustrated with limitations and start learning a game engine with some practical background on what these concepts are etc.

vs. I decide want to make a game because that's cool, I buy a book on game programming, it depends on these libraries, I install them, I install a compiler, the libraries don't work with the compiler/each other, ......... and give up because the grit in my life is reserved for stuff other than video games.

... like really, what is the overlap of people that are really mind blowingly creative as artists, and the people that are super type A driven to go through all this frustration up front? less friction, more better art

"What to say if the moon lander crashes and the astronaut dies", "what to say if Trump starts spouting nonsense about your project faster than you can refute it", etc.

It's basically a really well implemented Newtonian physics based platformer in a deterministic universe on a time loop that resets (22 minutes), so the loop is basically figure out how to get some place and then execute it (i.e. you could decide you want to de-orbit the moon into its planet, practice it, and get it right). Timing also matters as the celestial bodies orbit around and some of them fall apart.

So maybe it's less frustrating if considered like "a Mario level that's supposed to be difficult"

The story is understated, poignant, and one of those "ultimately nothing happened but the real story is what happened along the way". For reasons like this I consider it similar to Disco Elysium, a totally different game on the surface

Just accept it, smile, nod, and deny the existence of the router, lathe, bandsaw, angle grinder with a circular blade on it etc. Chainsaws are probably next up against the wall though since they're pretty well represented in low-effort horror media

There's something heartwarming about this: Just slapping a bunch of panels on any old abandoned structures and calling it a day seems so fundamentally un-Swiss -- It's like they're starting to become human!

(In humor of course -- Switzerland is impressive, I'm fully aware that there's plenty of rural agriculture and other such "suboptimal imperfection" there etc.)

This all seems like a moot point or at least unrelated to "individualism": Prevailing popular wisdom says that East Asian societies are "collectivist" but their prisons are not nicer to be in as a result, and there is still plenty of capital punishment to go around

Pretty common, but small and rarely noticed [0]. Probably lots of construction and geotechnical engineering wouldn't have survived anything significant at least in the Northeast

    [0]  https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?extent=38.03944,-79.33228&extent=45.75219,-63.86353&range=search&showUSFaults=true&baseLayer=terrain&timeZone=utc&search=%7B%22name%22:%22Search%20Results%22,%22params%22:%7B%22starttime%22:%221900-01-01%2000:00:00%22,%22maxlatitude%22:42.816,%22minlatitude%22:41.2,%22maxlongitude%22:-69.593,%22minlongitude%22:-73.592,%22minmagnitude%22:0,%22orderby%22:%22time%22%7D%7D

This inconsistency might have something to do with what the feminists call "consent"

> , I think the best available involves [anything]

Consider how long it took to start suspecting football and other low impact head trauma of causing CTE, and to start believing in CTE at all. Personally, with a phd in neurobiology and no real data besides gut feeling, I would not be comfortable with any system that wasn't thoroughly shown to be mostly harmless over several decades at least

Nevertheless there are a ton of very high quality, and seemingly successful, streamed-prerecorded pirate video sites these past few years, and One might assume their users be more adblocky than google's users.

Oh and also porn sites I guess, and what's the advertising worth there vs on youtube

A two pronged attack: One, adults encourage permissive smartphone use and also become authentically engaged in all the relevant online spaces. Two, adults just stop paying attention to kids at all in real life, no safety, liability, regulation, best practices, bureaucratic systems, nothing, unless informally as an urgent matter of certain loss of life and limb. End result is online stops being the place for kids to a brief respite from overbearing busybodies.

It seems similar to ordinary "best judgement", "careful consideration", "wisdom" etc wrapped up in some externalizing language for the most part. not to trivialize that, it is quite a feat if you can reliably cultivate those qulaities at scale

I've also been suspicious of the long lasting topical antiparasitics for cats - The drugs are targeted to glutamate gated chloride channels which mammals don't have, but, off target binding to excitatory glutamate receptors (AMPA/NMDA) is still possible in theory and likely in practice given the adverse/overdose effect is seizures. I'd like to think seizurey behavior should be obvious, but subacute excitotoxicity is harder to characterize - usually is only mentioned in the context of cognitive damage from chronic subacute seizures.

But on the other hand it's good at keeping the ticks from attaching to my cat so they can all move on to me as I sleep, totally worth it

It's easier and more plausible than a rat poison that doesn't hurt people; harder and less plausible than an antibiotic that doesn't hurt people; ultimately the proof is in the pudding.

Personally I would not try this in a long lasting formulation, only something oral that washes out completely in a few hours, unless it had been on the market for quite a long time

I realize there is confirmation bias here, but ticks always seem to cause pain and inflammation after being attached for a bit

Central MA, also can confirm this is false. Possibly RMSF or something other than Lyme, but you can definitely get sick from non engorged nymphs.