Can confirm. If you wish to listen to something while in the train/subway or in some other noisy environments, such as a bus stop right next to a busy road, ANC really helps a lot. Obviously, it’s no replacement for proper hearing protection, but instead of cranking up the volume through the roof, you can listen to things at a very reasonable volume despite the noisy environment.

You know, in some countries boyfriends hold hands in the public.

Sounds like the right kind is microdosing of weed could be used to make the optimal study drug combo.

The idea of modern medicine is to sell chemical compounds that actually have an effect. It’s a philosophical and ethical thing. All products have a unique psychological effect that gets intertwined with their biochemical effect. If you can’t study them individually, it’s impossible to tell if the biochemical effect even exists at all. If your medicine relies heavily, or even entirely, on the psychological side, it’s no different than homeopathy. The idea of modern medicine is to be better than the old stuff that preceded it.

I prefer to think of this as an equation like this: Pm+Bm=Pp+Bp

Pm=psychological effect, medicine

Bm=biochemical effect, medicine

Pp=psychological effect, placebo = surprisingly big

Bp=biochemical effect, placebo = 0

If these sides are equivalent, the medicine is just as effective as placebo. If the medicine side is bigger, you’ll want to know how much of it comes from the P and B terms. In order to figure that out, you would need to know some values. Normally, you can just assume that Pm=Pp, but if you can’t assume that, it you’re left with two unknowns in that equation. In this case, you really can’t assume them to be equal, which means that your data won’t allow you to figure out how much of the total effect comes from psychological and biochemical effects. It could be 50/50, 10/90, who knows. That sort of uncertainty is a serious problem, because of the philosophical and ethical side of developing medicine.

Statistical tests are very picky. They have been designed by mathematicians in a mathematical ideal vacuum void of all reality. The method works in those ideal conditions, but when you take that method and apply it in messy reality where everything is flawed, you may run into some trouble. In simple cases, it’s easy to abide by the assumptions of the statistical test, but as your experiment gets more and more complicated, there are more and more potholes for you to dodge. Best case scenario is, your messy data is just barely clean enough that you can be reasonably sure the statistical test still works well enough and you can sort of trust the result up to a certain point.

However, when you know for a fact that some of the underlying assumptions of the statistical test are clearly being violated, all bets are off. Sure, you get a result, but who in their right mind would ever trust that result?

If the test says that the medicine is works, there’s clearly financial incentive to believe it and start selling those pills. If it says that the medicine is no better than placebo, there’s similar incentive to reject the test result and demand more experiments. Most of that debate goes out the window if you can be reasonably sure that the data is good enough and the result of your statistical test is reliable enough.

What happens if you also take some ADHD medication at the same time? Will your head implode into a black hole or something?

Yeah, that’s the thing with placebo. It’s surprisingly effective, and separating the psychological effect from actual chemistry can be very tricky. If most participants can correctly identify if they’re bing fed the real drug or a placebo, it makes it impossible to figure out how much each effect contributes to the end result. Ideally, you would only use effective medicine that does not need the placebo effect to actually work.

Imagine, if all medicine had lots of placebo effect in them. How would you treat patients who are in a coma or otherwise unconscious?

I’ve seen a bunch of Terminator style movies where an AI slices, dices, scorches and/or nukes humanity to oblivion long before climate change gets us. I have it on good authority that we don’t need worry about the temperature change.

And Siri will immediately call the local exterminator…

Space is mostly empty anyway, so the chances of crashing into anything is pretty low. That’s why space travel is so safe.

Yeah, that’s very much an English thing. Many other languages use reasonably consistent spelling and pronunciation, so memorizing the handful of exceptions isn’t really a problem.

However, with English it’s the other way around. You need to memorize the handful of words that are actually pronounced the way they are written. Everything else is just pure chaos. If you read a word, you can’t pronounce it. If you hear a word, you can’t find it in a dictionary.

Better call my local roach doctor then…

If that gets implemented, it would help AI devs and common people hanging online.

A few years ago, people assumed that these AIs will continue to get better every year. Seems that we are already hitting some limits, and improving the models keeps getting harder and harder. It’s like the linewidth limits we have with CPU design.

“scientist’s calculations reveal that the procurement costs of the source materials and the energy cost of the entire extraction process are 50 times lower than the value of the gold that can be recovered. “

If we assume that “source materials” cover the circuit boards, whey, acids and any other chemicals, then byproduct processing and waste disposal hasn’t been addressed in any way. What’s the processing plant supposed to do anything that isn’t gold, silver or copper?

Anyway, this technique could work in tandem with a normal circuit board leaching plant. If you already have a factory for processing this sort of feed material, you could try to reduce the cost of operating one of the steps by using whey sponge instead.

Those are pretty familiar experiences. Especially the thing about sharing files and having access to specific applications.

A few years ago, I used to travel with my actual laptop (Lenovo Yoga) and it was great in many ways, even though there were drawbacks too. It’s a linux computer, so it runs all the apps I really need and the rest works through a website. The battery life isn’t great, and the computer is big and heavy, but at least it’s an actual computer and it’s able to do all the things I want from a computer. Gnome is nice in many ways, and it’s also pretty cool with a touch screen. Unfortunately, Firefox can’t handle touch screens that well and Gnome Web can’t handle websites that well. That’s why I rarely use that laptop in the tablet mode, so the yoga feature ends up being little more than eye candy.

A few years ago, I tried to use an older iPad, and it worked out surprisingly well while traveling. A few months later I upgraded to another used iPad, but this time it was the pro model and I even got a keyboard for it. Now, this is my first 12” iPad pro, and it really feels a lot like a computer.

Obviously, you can’t do all the real computer stuff with it, but while traveling I rarely need to. Mostly, I’m just browsing Lemmy, watching videos, typing messages, and doing simple calculations on Apple Numbers. Moderately complex calculations still require LibreOffice Calc, because Apple Numbers is pretty feeble.

We should have hired him to make a scifi movie about how humanity fixed the climate change.

LOL, I recall seeing HD sunglasses somewhere roughly 15 years ago. That was the period where everything had to have an HDMI port. I guess someone must have made an HDMI compatible toaster too.

Basic internet etiquette. Never read the article. Disagree with everyone. You are always right. Everyone else is always wrong etc.

Very sneaky! So basically some people have found an exploit in this game. Are the devs going to patch it any time soon? If not, this could become the next meta.