fudgefactorfive's comments

I admit, although not medically prescribed or supervised, doing mushrooms has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

Although I still have persistent nightmares it changed my understanding of other people and their perspectives to the point my anxiety in a lot of situations has vanished.

I don't think people should go nuts with them but I do think it's a good idea for some people with anxiety to find a clean pleasant care-free place to try them. Even if it just allows them to spend a few hours immersing themselves in completely different thought patterns and potentially gain something from them.

Next you just need to find a BTC to Bottlecap ATM and you're set!

I've had this discussion with people before, the best answer I've come up with is this:

Nihilism is less the idea that all things are irrelevant or immaterial but rather that there is no universal valuation to things. What we do may not affect a universal scale observer or tautologically "matter" in some sense but there exists some scale or model under which things have some valuation.

The trick then becomes rather than conform to some agreed scale or model of the universe for the moral or value derivative we instead turn to what we have decided is valuable.

If I am cold is irrelevant to the universe, but it is relevant to me, and as such being cold may only last a short time and can be survived but it still matters to me.

Equally there is no universal sense of being moral, there is however my sense of being moral and as such some actions can be good not by being derived from some universal morals but instead by my own definitions. "Being kind to a stranger" is moral to me in line with my definitions, but "not eating fish on Fridays" has no moral definition within my moral declaration so I can eat fish on Fridays without being immoral.

Nihilism isn't an end, it's the start to a personal conversation on values that are specific to you and become meaningful to you by your understanding of their worth. Once you have defined your values independent of some larger prescriptive whole you have a system you actually understand and can defend the merits of, a much stronger core for reasoning about morality and the goodness of your actions.

I'm sorry but the American police and their training to "mag-dump" is something even an uninformed bystander could probably call excessive. A car with no weapons, hence no returning fire and 7 separate officers all but empty their clips until the smoke clears is a quintessential example of the criticisms of American police training.

I spoke recently with a swiss police officer that complained they aren't even allowed to taze someone with a knife explicitly threatening life and instead must attempt to talk them down before even being allowed to put hands on the obvious perpetrator. One is training as an officer of the peace, the other is training for a soldier in a warlords personal hit squad. Even actual American soldiers are court-martialed if they even raise their weapon at an incoming hostile without several verbal warnings going unheeded and even then must fire a warning shot before they can engage.

I remember at 21 getting an email from Paypal that the account I'd used my entire online life was banned because I started it when I was 12. They noticed this after I reached out to support...

Switched email addresses and used that instead. Although I've not used PayPal in a good while because it just randomly rejected transactions for no clear reason.

I think the killer app for FHE is an Ethereum-esque Globally distributed VM (yes eye-roll I hate Crypto/Blockchain nonsense as well). To me that was always the big interesting concept behind Ethereum, running some sort of code with persistent state. Obviously no free lunches so we gotta pay for that somehow to incentivize people to pay for power on computing equipment they aren't personally utilizing. But somehow "crypto" got caught on the literally first example of a distributed systems correctness: debit/credit of synchronized accounts.

I feel FHE combined with slightly cheaper cost might enable things like community run server-less apps that have user state stored and processed by untrusted nodes with persistent state stored and accessible only by the data-owner. E.g. a simple excel-esque web app which only serves the UI while State and calculations are running on this hypothetical system at no cost to the apps creator with me paying only for exclusively my usage. They provide the code but no one but me can extract my data and the results of any computations, and for the privilege I pay the system.

I miss the days of upload and forget software that just relies on client resources and so require little upfront investment from developers, I feel FHE plus distributed computing could enable this.

I am aware "Web3" claims to want this future as a concept but the cost and utter lack of confidentiality (I can observe all data to and from a contract as well as the sender/receivers identity) makes it a super-niche borderline useless VM. For distributed governance sure, it's a public ballot box (the preface to the first distributed systems example, a single account with credits), but for any application/user data absolutely unacceptable.

The vast majority of homeless/unhoused people are completely normal healthy adults that had one bad turn in life and could not get back.

In a 2016 Census, only about 12% of the homeless population aged 15 and up were actually unable to work due to various maladies[0]. According to the same census report a whopping 62% of homeless males were currently employed.

The issue is not to just remember the 3 or 4 homeless people you've seen clearly dazed and likely unable to work, it's the thousands of people living in their car because rent is unaffordable for their income. That's the first point, abundance of housing lowers rents to the point of being affordable to Minimum-Wage workers.

Secondly, one of the first issues homeless shelters noticed is that employers require and address to even apply. So if one of those people living in their cars or under a bridge and still heading to work god forbid loses their job, they literally cannot apply to another one without a fixed address, another way affordable/abundant housing explicitly affects homeless employment.

The 12% that cannot work should probably not be on the street and should be cared for in shelters, but many shelters are filled with people who's employers underpay or pay an unlivable income and so also require shelters. Abundant housing thus allows people in the work-force to not be priced out of a roof, opening up shelters for those that cannot care for themselves.

More housing is a win-win-win. Except maybe it means aunt Karen notices more busses, which she doesn't like the sound of, hence no more developments to appease those with the ability to make their points to local government, at the cost of those that many people even avoid eye contact with.

[0] https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cp5hpi/cp...

Exactly, it's worlds that aren't a sequence of stories but a mesh of relationships that seem much more alive.

I can obviously see how it's much harder to make a narrative state machine than a sequence of events with maybe a few branches, but still it's disappointing when huge budgets are spent on visuals alone with no good reason to examine them deeply.

Cough Cyberpunk 2077 Cough.

Haven't played it, but admittedly I've seen the Hbomberguy video on it and was really interested. Might take another look.

I haven't actually but I've heard great things. I admit the setting isn't one I usually pursue, but I'll get over myself and take a look.

This is famously an issue with Rockstar style missions, they are so adherent to a script that even minor Playstyle variations lead to logical deadlocks. Red Dead 2 had the same issue, players finding paths to the door they know stuff is happening behind only for them to literally not function until an NPC points them out to you.

I want a world where I can figure out what to do next and that still functions, not one where Character X has to tell me to move to the next room for the doors to work as doors.

ECN purely allows the sending CCA to modulate sending rate before packet loss. Buffers filling up does not change, what changes is how early the sender reduces their window sizes and whether packet loss occurs before then.

Urban Dictionary is split on the issue, so either a half-witted claim about globalism enforced homogeneity of thought (read: criticism of neoliberalism) or the tragically stupid alternative "globalist homosexual agenda" (read: being asked not to be *-phobic). Either way not a super constructive point with a hint of dog whistle.

One of the issues is that Mitchell is notoriously litigious and has made a cottage industry of promoting himself as "guy with game world records". He has literally sued people into submission, over this exact claim, which is now forensicly validated. See Karl Jobst for reference.

> living in Europe

> any sign of appeasing would be positive

...yada yada doomed to repeat yada yada...

In the end the only functional parts that worked algorithmicly are exactly those featured in the GlacierMD demo. What trials are running related to this indication, what compounds are being tested for the indication and what other indications are related.

That's the easy part, it's effectively a word association game, TF-IDF did this job admirably, scoring proper nouns by their uniqueness and then associating them with one another and searching for publications with similar words as the requested indication. Effectively a medical word cloud for each indication and compound. Parsing them into symptoms is the first nightmare, the second is numeric values associated with those symptoms and paper results.

There is a very good reason the demo only has one indication and a handful of symptoms, it's being done manually and then at best showing publications related to the words encountered.

It's not a matter of cost, although the author is all but doomed if they want to cover more than a few indications, it's a matter of not forcing publicly funded health publications to use an electronically parseable Format despite the simplicity of them being able to parse their paper by definition.

See the standards XKCD, the issue is getting many different academics and departments to agree on a set of schema to include alongside their publications. PubMed at least tries with their XML dumps but even those are inconsistent at best and non-syntactically interpretable at worst. The Japanese compound tracker is great to learn about a specific compound and their indications but stops there.

I worked for a company that tried to do exactly what this article is proposing, I was responsible for parsing the data from publications into exactly this sort of table.

The primary reason is that it is very hard to come up with a schema that even 5% of papers would adhere to. The vast majority of this knowledge is phrased as natural language.

There are databases that track compounds and the publications related to them, but those papers again are natural language and cannot be readily converted to tabular data. Our first basic approach involved POS tagging and then trying to associate proper nouns with numeric values. Again the issue became how do you interpret a sentence like "may lead to sudden death" as a symptom? Something like "may lead to symptom X in Y% of respondents" is a nightmare to consistently parse without heavy ML running over huge datasets of just text.

In the end we wound up having to shut down concluding that until papers are released with not only arbitrary XML tables/results we were not equipped to handle the task. And even worse, what if our models didn't interpret things correctly and a consumer got {symptom:"sudden death", chance:0%} and insisted on that compound for their indication only to later realize the paper stated "in lab setting 0% of animals didn't experience sudden death after being administered X after diabetes diagnosis". Paying a hundred students to work around the clock couldn't get the volume processed accurately for months, let alone getting a second army of validators to confirm each entry.

What a sad thing for my username to line up with...

Grandma's Wifi up the street -> Public Library Network -> VPN1 -> Tor -> VPN2 /s

At the end of the day, it's a DARPA project originally, I'm sure the US Gov't has been _heavily_ invested in monitoring it for a while. Still I'd argue when doing anything on the web the behemoth that is the US could probably flex some of that spending muscle to levy massive resources.

However FBI tracing bomb-threat is probably still not using NSA-level resources... given the whole not our citizens wink wink thing.