yarou

I found this to be a bit counterintuitive:

"We conclude that in sum, the present study shows that pharmacological modification of complex cognitive performance in a highly demanding task is possible most likely by modifying decision making processes. More reflective decision making may enhance performance when no time limit for the task at hand is present but may have (emphasis mine) disadvantageous effects under time constraints especially in individuals who tend to be rather slow thinkers."

Doesn't that mean stimulants are effectively useless for someone who tends to be a "slow thinker"? I would expect that stimulants would speed up the underlying decision making processes of a slow thinker, especially during times of stress/limited time constraints.

In excessive dosage, sure.

Alcohol will also cause you to make incredibly poor judgements, in excessive amounts. The key is responsible use.

Anecdotally, Modafinil improved the functioning of the right hemisphere of my brain. I noticed this type of enhancement with Phenibut as well, my "emotional intelligence" was increased by one or two orders of magnitude.

On the other hand, Adderall increased my raw intelligence by several orders of magnitude. I strongly believe that amphetamines should be decriminalized and unscheduled, as they are the only class of pharmaceuticals that are proven to increase cognition with a fairly limited side effect profile.

I suspect the anti-science bit has more to do with approving Keystone/DAPL than some hard line policy.

If Balaji Srinivasan is confirmed for the FDA, I'd expect gene therapies and stem cell treatments to become more commonplace. After all, Balaji's first startup dealt with genetic testing.

What is more concerning is that the US might face a brain drain in the coming years, due to the visa ban from so-called "terrorist" states (funny how Saudi Arabia is conspicuously absent from that list...)

It's relatively easy to flood his email. Imagine how much fun an Eastern European kid can have with this. All he needs is a database of cards to cycle through.

You don't see how a supposedly "anti-establishment" candidate who happens to be a billionaire (and is surrounded in his cabinet by other billionaires) doesn't reek of a system of crony capitalism and oligarchy?

If so, I have a few butt coins and a blockchain to sell you.

Not sure why you're being downvoted, it's sort of common knowledge that LinkedIn used really shady dark patterns in order to increase user acquisition.

> But I'd also love for Congress to pass laws outright banning coal use, gasoline cars, and dumping pollutants into waterways.

The Constitution hasn't been respected in decades. There is an entrenched deep state in the US, controlled by powerful corporate and industrial interests that are accountable to no one.

I'm sure someone who's never exercised before could die of cardiac arrest as soon as they step on a treadmill.

I think it's slightly disingenuous to suggest that one should never take risks because there are possible downsides.

Nicotine exists in tomatoes, potatoes, etc. Should I remove these from my diet because they contain nicotine, which might possibly cause a cyst in my retina? Surely, we would both agree that argument is nonsensical.

Nope, you totally missed the pure wisdom in the driver's quote. His point is that academics in ivory towers who make policy decisions are so far removed from his reality, that they are ill-equipped to make appropriate policy decisions on his behalf. He's asking labor advocates to engage with him, rather than hand down a potentially disastrous policy decision.

Government drones could really learn a thing or two from that guy.

I've long suspected that nicotine has a net benefit effect on cognition.

I'm curious to see if there will be a new line of nACHr drugs that can potentially enhance cognition.

The premise of your post implies that Pai and those who subscribe to his policy stances are somehow malicious in nature. But what you're missing is that they could simply be idiots.

Just like someone who believes in fantastical theories, like the Earth is flat. We obviously know the theory he believes in is irrational, but he could very well be a good person. He just happens to be a moron.

Even if they retracted, isn't the damage already done?

The problem with yellow journalism and sensationalism is that purportedly respectable institutions spin narratives that are dangerous.

I'd be curious to see some empirical data on the impact of this story, i.e. how many users switched from WhatsApp to Signal or vanilla SMS.

I'm not gonna lie, I've said some pretty fucked up things on here when I've been inebriated, but the amount of pure malice in your reply even made me look twice.

I'm sure that same winning personality makes you a huge catch.

You'd need a third party that you both trust. If you both don't trust anyone, there are ways around that too...

Well, if you want that expectation of privacy, maybe you shouldn't have become a federal contractor.

> Why do you feel that there's no way to verify closed-source software?

Isn't that the very definition of security through obscurity?

>When US citizens even see Indian names there are less likely to hire (known as name bias).

You're doubly fucked if you have an Indian name and you were born here. White hiring managers automatically assume you're incompetent, and Indian H1B hiring managers are threatened because they fear for their job.

When I was younger, I found it odd that many of family members of mine would Americanize their name. Now, I've experienced the reality of it.

Actually, it's more rational to turn to crime than work a shitty minimum wage job in an economically disadvantaged area. That's why those areas have crime.

The choices are simple.

Work at McDonalds/Walmart

Max weekly earnings: ~$420 assuming CA minimum wage and a 40 hour workweek

Smuggle cocaine from Mexico to USA

85k - 200k per run depending on quantity.

That's really fucked up. It's not impossible to imagine a scenario where the daughter playfully started flirting with the cashier and that ended up fucking his life over.

It ultimately boils down to a cat and mouse game. What you end up with are extremely intrusive anticheat tools that do all sorts of nasty Trojan-like things; for example, injecting DLLs into a player's host machine to determine if they have modified the memory of the game.

The anticheat process itself will hide and run in kernelmode. I don't know about you, but I don't feel terribly comfortable having a closed source binary running in ring0.

Don't forget the massive amounts of money to be made by colluding with the "bad guys". Collect double the amount if you collude for geopolitical purposes.

The entire Silk Road debacle showed that law enforcement itself has become massively corrupt. The long-term effect of the case is further distrust of the government and law enforcement.

Does anyone know if this is another Megaupload situation?

Are there records showing the site operators willfully colluded and incentivized street pimps and sex traffickers? Or is this another "save the children" chilling effect on free speech?

You don't think that a public CEO's incentives should be aligned with their shareholders?

That's the only way you can have real change, instead of the moral hazard situation we have now.

The way I understand it, quantum speedup simply means that the set of candidate solutions for a problem contained in BQP are more accurate over time.

We (as the tech community) have inherited that role. How one defines truth is probably outside of the scope of my reply, so I'll abstain from commenting on it.

However, suffice it to say I would rather have a plurality of viewpoints, where some may be misleading, than a singular viewpoint handed down to me.

I think you're missing the point. A quadtree is a compact way to store a partition of two-dimensional space, much like you'd store a binary heap in an array.

The implementation of a recursive data structure or algorithm can usually take advantage of tail recursion or trampolining. The practical implementation of a theoretical algorithm may look extremely different, much like you wouldn't literally translate abstract pseudocode to the language of your choice.

Thanks for the lucid response. I think the tone of your responses has been way more civil than some of the other comments upthread.

Obviously the pizzagate stuff is stupid and unfounded. It does a great disservice to people that were victims of real sexual abuse.

But can't you see the vast amount of corruption? The DNC rigged the primary for one candidate. We need to hold our political parties accountable for their actions.