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eluketronic's comments

eluketronic | 1 year ago | on: The quiet rebellion of a little life

I’ve wrestled with this idea since reading My Side of The Mountain when I was quite young. Our society and culture constantly reinforces the perceived need to make enough money to retire one day, assuming that there is a necessary amount of money one needs to continue living and that one should stop working at some point. The fear of exorbitant medical costs in our privatized healthcare system scare me into thinking I need a fortune to feel safe and be able to live a long health life. My rampant consumption and desire to live a “full” life, like those that I see posted on social media, also stoke this financial insecurity mindset—“I must have more so that I can do more so that people will know that I am fulfilled and then I will feel happy and fulfilled.”

eluketronic | 1 year ago | on: Fusion tech finds geothermal energy application

This is pretty interesting but it seems like there’s a massive component of this system that is yet to be proven viable—from the article: “Drilling a hole is challenging enough,” says Tester. “But actually running the reservoir and getting the energy out of the ground safely may be something very, very far off in the future.”

Is there any existing +3km deep geothermal well energy system in use?

eluketronic | 2 years ago | on: Dark UX doesn't work in the long run

In my experience, Dark UX is often a symptom of a myopic, revenue-focused product team. Tricking users with dark UX patterns will almost always have a more profoundly negative effect on the company’s revenue in the long term than whatever the incremental, short term gain may be. I work for a DTC company as a FE engineer and I’m frequently having to try convince product people that implementing & maintaining dark UX patterns erodes our users’ trust in us and puts more of a burden on our customer experience team.

Dissecting the event handling of Feedly’s UI isn’t revealing the crux of the issue here. Engineers (in my experience) want to build things that provide a respectful user experience, things that they themselves would not be frustrated using. I absolutely despise seeing these types of dark patterns in the wild. I would be surprised if an engineer suggested this Feedly feature. But maybe I’m more sensitive to Dark UX than most and as a result have a more aggressive hatred for it in my work ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

eluketronic | 3 years ago | on: NTSB Calls for Alcohol Detection Systems in All New Vehicles

This seems akin to trying to change our nations attitude towards guns and semi automatic weapons instead of improving gun control legislation. According to the 2020 figures in the article > 10,000 people are dying every year from alcohol-related accidents. If there’s something tangible that can be done to reduce that death count, I’m all for it. As wonderful as it would be to reform the national attitude towards alcohol and excessive drinking, the alcohol lobby and our stubbornness as a culture would probably make it very challenging to effect any meaningful change. It’ll be interesting to see how far this gets from a technical standpoint and, if it does actually make it into new vehicles, how many work-arounds people come up with.

eluketronic | 3 years ago | on: Is the psychedelic therapy bubble about to burst?

Psilocybin is still something that can be grown/synthesized outside of a lab. Sure, major pharmaceutical companies could synthesize pure psilocybin and sell that as a new treatment in some kind of ideal form but it seem that from a lot of anecdotes posted here as well as many other stories I’ve heard, “normal”, non-lab-produced psilocybe mushrooms can have a profiundly positive effect. This might be what big pharma is seeing as a potential opportunity loss and therefore funding studies that skew results in a less positive way.
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