Ask me about:

  • Science (biology, computation, statistics)
  • Gaming (rhythm, rogue-like/lite, other generic 1-player games)
  • Autism & related (I have diagnosis)
  • Bad takes on philosophy
  • Bad takes on US political systems & more US stuff

I’m not knowledgeable about most other things

  • 5 Posts
  • 30 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: September 15th, 2024

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  • I… think this question is a bit more complicated for this community. Following are only my personal opinion

    Prescribed medication? I think so, I’d rather be physically and mentally healthy rather than have the other alternative. And usually medication (even ones with noted negative effects) are meant do do more good than harm so…

    Recreational drugs… the line between this and the above is surprisingly not as clear-cut as it seems. I believe there are active lines of study of using various psychedelic compounds to treat mental disorders or other conditions… Personally I would take medically prescribed psychedelics if I am 1) under medical supervision and 2) based on evidence it would help my mental health (maybe that’s the answer to the question?)

    Hard drugs: I don’t see how they can make anyone a better person, and no








  • Oh my! I didn’t know what to expect, and I have to say… I was quite surprised by some of your answers. Also confirmed to me that I am definitely not normal

    Not many replies that are indicative of Aphantasia so… here goes nothing. I tried really hard at this okay

    spoiler

    I don’t “see” see anything when I close my eyes. I can create a very vague concept of a ball, a table, and… kind of a person in my head, but I don’t actually see the scene, I used to think when people say imagining things they were just making a metaphor. Things get really funk from here… But the overall schema feels more like one of those badly drawn scenes from the hit visual novel Slay the Princess. And yes I imagined it in 2D for some reason

    • Color: the ball doesn’t have a color
    • Gender: it wasn’t even a real person; it seems like a silhouette of the hand and back of a person
    • Looks: As I said, the person isn’t even facing me
    • Size: No idea; in retrospect it’s fairly large compared to the table (diameter probably 1/2-1/3 of table?), but the table is also an abstract concept so…
    • Table: no clue, it is a square table but that’s it. If anything it looks like the things served on Pizza Hut pizzas
    • Well I spoiled the question for myself so… but I didn’t have to choose, heck I couldn’t choose even if I know what the questions are





  • So it was the physics Nobel… I see why the Nature News coverage called it “scooped” by machine learning pioneers

    Since the news tried to be sensational about it… I tried to see what Hinton meant by fearing the consequences. Believe he is genuinely trying to prevent AI development without proper regulations. This is a policy paper he was involved in (https://managing-ai-risks.com/). This one did mention some genuine concerns. Quoting them:

    “AI systems threaten to amplify social injustice, erode social stability, and weaken our shared understanding of reality that is foundational to society. They could also enable large-scale criminal or terrorist activities. Especially in the hands of a few powerful actors, AI could cement or exacerbate global inequities, or facilitate automated warfare, customized mass manipulation, and pervasive surveillance”

    like bruh people already lost jobs because of ChatGPT, which can’t even do math properly on its own…

    Also quite some irony that the preprint has the following quote: “Climate change has taken decades to be acknowledged and confronted; for AI, decades could be too long.”, considering that a serious risk of AI development is climate impacts



    • A privacy-respecting mail service: I use mailbox.org since it follows email standards, but I think many ppl like Proton mail/Tutanota. Recommend because they are privacy-respecting, and self-hosting email is way too difficult
    • More of a yearly subscription per-se, but a personal domain from any domain registrar. Recommend because why not? There are so many cool things one can do with a domain: custom email, your own blog, professional website for job, …
    • A VPS from Linode (or any reliable provider). Recommend because some things are better done on a VPS… and I want a public-facing IP that is not directly from my bedroom
    • I used to have subscriptions to the local arcade. Recommend because I basically get cardio workout on the DDR machine (and it costs less than a gym. And easier to cancel)





  • I have actually never heard anyone say it this way specifically where I grew up… so technically the answer is “no”?

    I tried to dug around and found a Reddit post saying this:

    “The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines the term as “twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week; constantly”. It lists its first reference to 24/7 to be from a 1983 story in the US magazine Sports Illustrated in which Louisiana State University player Jerry Reynolds describes his jump shot in just such a way: 24-7-365.”

    So this might be a fairly new idiom? Which would explain why it’s not really a thing in a lot of cultures… but I assume they have their ways of referring to this.

    number of hours and days are the same

    Ok akktually Japan has a rather interesting 30-hour day thing in the context of businesses… but jokes aside, the 24-hour, 7-day week system is indeed quite universal


  • I realized that I had allergies during the height of the pandemic… so the short answer is it gave me way too much unnecessary stress because I was constantly worried whether I got COVID-19.

    • Depends… I felt most times it was just “did I finally catch covid or is this just allergy?”, there was once or twice when it got really bad though.
    • There was once when I had such a bad allergy that my eyes both flared up and I could barely see… It was bad enough that I reached out to the allergy department of my provider as soon as I was functional & got me into immunotherapy.
    • Not meds, but I did 3+ years of immunotherapy: 1+ year of getting allergen injections every week (thankfully still had a car back then), and then once per month of maintenance after I reached the highest dose. Had to stop because of relocation/insurance nonsense… but I think the treatment worked.
    • No you’re not being a big baby, please take your health seriously and stay safe & healthy.


  • “academic honorable discharge”

    I am aware of this happening in multiple cases involving scientific fraud… no idea how exactly this is being done though.

    But did the low sodium diet itself serve any factor in the violence that occured in this botched study?

    Not sure… but even without dietary interventions, there are a lot of simple explanations to how this could have gone wrong. This was a much larger study than the Camp Calcium series this PI did, a lot of the recruited kids are low income/from problematic households, with very little to no adult oversight, and there were very few activities for entertainment/enrichment… Also the dorm they lived in was technically separated by gender, but let’s just say that it is not difficult to get to the other gender dorm… So yeah.


  • This got me into a way bigger rabbit hole than I remembered… The person is not officially “fired” since you cannot fire a tenured, distinguished professor and a former department head, but I suspect she was persuaded to leave. The incident is quite wild, I was just a random undergrad hired to do lab tests so I only knew some details.

    This is about Dr. Connie Weaver, professor emeritus and former department head at Purdue’s Department of Nutrition Sciences (her ORCiD). She was known for nutrition research where the institution recruits adolescents summer-camp style (similar to a clinical trial), and in 2017 she started to lead a multi-year (lasted one month before it was shut down) study on low-sodium diets in adolescents, Camp DASH. Supposed to be a gold-standard diet study… close to 10 million dollars of NIH money on the line too.

    And then things went off the rail. The operation tried to cut a lot of corners: pretty much all of the employees were undergraduates who couldn’t find other things to do for the summer, training was minimal or nonexistent, and the employees-to-camper ratio was very, very low… oddly similar to the recent MrBeast incident where participation oversight seems to be very bad.

    This then led to sexual harassment, abuse, etc… one poor girl’s nude was shared online, probably more cases of sexual assault, several adolescents got into serious fights with each other, and from what I’ve heard some of the undergrads who were on supervisory roles were also injured. Several lawsuits were filed, the university stepped in and stopped the study (I just remembered them stop scheduling me to work in July and was wondering what went wrong lol), the issue got elevated to the university president, and more lawsuits…

    Obviously tenure means someone should be protected from being terminated at-will like most employment contracts. So the reason I have my suspicion is… Dr. Weaver became a professor emeritus not long after the incident, but is now somehow still publishing work while working from… San Diego State University? Doesn’t seem like someone who retired on their own will to me.

    If you are interested in the full detail… here are some news articles on this incident. Exponent is Purdue’s student-run newspaper


  • Oh boy. I used to live in Houston, TX, a city notorious for being car-dependent…

    I will present three sets of numbers. First is where I first moved to in Houston, in a supposedly highly coveted, super walkable area home to mostly medical students… Second is the place I lived before I moved out (and I used to boast to people how accessible the place was, by US standards). Third is in Chicago, close to city center (“The Loop”).

    And FYI I only lived in places that would be considered to be within the city, so these might be as small as they can get…

    • To the nearest convenience store: 900m | 750m | 170m
    • To the nearest chain supermarket: 700m(used to be 4.2km) | 450m | 220m
    • To the bus stop: 160m(never seen anyone there though) | 350m | 71m
    • To the nearest park: 950m | 1.5km | 1.6km
    • To the nearest big supermarket: 700m(used to be 4.2km) | 450m | 450m
    • To the nearest library: 1.2km | 450m | 1.0km
    • To the nearest train station: 7.0km | 3.8km | 2.5km

    Fun story about the first location! Everything seems so walkable on paper (close to park, close to highway), until you realize that there was no fucking supermarket anywhere within walking distance… H-E-B only opened a store closeby after I moved there. However, even the super-close grocery store is across the highway and I almost never see any sane people walk there so… For parks I am only counting ones that are good enough to be tourist-worthy, otherwise the latter two locations have pretty easy access to lots of green space

    And if you are asking about public transit that are not bus/train: respective distances are 1.4km | 1.0km | 280m. The last number in this series is basically how I chose where to live…