Oligopoly.

DO NOT deny the great ice wall!

Good, we need something to pound those nails.

I’d agree if you weren’t misquoting me and referring to another statement out of context.

Do you have any specific criticism based on both what I actually wrote and actual medical science?

Edit: I expect it’s how I mentioned tricyclics as a first-line treatment. Within anti depressants, SSRIs/SNRIs > tricyclic > MAOI due to side effect profiles, but all will often (but not always) be trialed before moving to benzodiazepine monotherapy or higher dose/frequency adjuvant therapy.

Some studies suggest TCAs are more effective than SSRIs. MAOIs are absolutely more effective than both, but their side effect profiles and restrictions due to dietary/medication interactions can be brutal.

The greatest evidence for this cognitive damage is a self-selected Internet survey: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10309976/

We call that “pretty low quality” data in science and public health. Unsatisfied customers are more likely to write a review. lI’m not saying it’s not possible, but actual data is scant.

You’re also overstating their dangers by providing incomplete, inaccurate information. I worked on a pharma study on long-term benzo usage, so I’m familiar. Needless, inaccurate fear mongering like this is exactly what individuals with anxiety, recalcitrant insomnia, or seizure disorders do NOT need to read when looking into treatment options.

Benzodiazepines are an effective, appropriate treatment for a number of conditions, including treatment-resistant insomnia, anxiety and panic disorders, and epilepsy.

Long-term use is safe if prescribed and used correctly. Taking a low to moderate dose 2-4 days weekly is unlikely to result in tolerance or addiction. Higher-dosage and/or daily treatment is also safe under the care of a knowledgeable physician. Other modalities, such as SSRIs, tricyclics, and MAOIs, are preferable first-line treatments for anxiety and panic disorders, but some individuals have symptoms recalcitrant to treatment and require adjuvant therapy. Benzodiazepines are used as rescue medications by epileptics, and some have such serious symptoms that their use is a major facet of treatment. See Lennox-Gastaut syndrome to get an idea.

Abrupt withdrawal symptoms can be unpleasant but “seizures and loads of horrible symptoms” is more fear mongering. The most common symptoms of “quitting cold turkey” from frequent and long-term usage are minor but unpleasant: agitation, irritability, increased anxiety, increased sweating, etc. Seizures are rare and tend to be in individuals… wait for it… using these medications for acute seizure treatment. These can be easily avoided by tapering down the dosage over time.

I don’t know what your motive here was, but consider the impact before trying to give people a scare.

You are correct. I’m considered a “radical leftist” because I have crazy ideas like “don’t put kids in cages” and “the mentally ill shouldn’t be left to die on the street”.

Clearly polarizing positions that directly contradict the teachings of Jesus.

Biden isn’t even vaguely left leaning. Am I missing the joke?

You’re spot on regarding how AI operates.

AI is stupid story time!

I recently helped a friend with a self-hosted VPN problem. He had been using a free trial of Gemini Pro to try to fix it himself but gave up after THREE HOURS. It never tried to help him diagnose the issue, but instead kept coming up with elaborate fixes with names that suggested they were known issues, like The MTU Traffic Jam, The Packet Collision Quandary, and, my favorite, The Alpine Ridge Controller Trap. Then it would run him through an equally elaborate “fix”. When that didn’t work, it would use the failure conditions to propose a new, very serious sounding pile of bullshit and the process would repeat.

I fixed it in about fifteen minutes, most of that time spent undoing all the unnecessary static routing, port forwarding, and driver rollbacks it had him do. The solution? He had a typo in the port number in his peer config.

I can’t deny that LLMs are full of useful knowledge. I read through its output and all of its suggestions absolutely would have quickly and efficiently fixed their accompanying issue, even the thunderbolt/pcie bridging issue, if the real problem had been any of them. They’re just garbage at applying that information.

I would be shocked if he cared. It’s just not amongst his concerns.

The ads seem to be pretty variable depending on usage so I suspect not everyone is seeing the same thing. I rarely use YouTube in any form. When I do and I’m rawdogging it for whatever reason, it seems like I get a few short ads, like 30s or less. They’re annoying but not awful.

A friend keeps YouTube running constantly on his TV in the background while he works. He gets so many ads and they’re so long! Like several minutes of ads, mostly unskippable, over the course of a 15 minute video. I don’t know how people deal with that shit.

Just to preface, I’m a scientist: micro- and molecular biology. I’m not saying to take what I say as gospel, just giving context that I might know things. Sometimes.

Outbreeding depression has more possible implications than fertility decrease and infant mortality increase, entirely dependent on the heritable traits responsible for the depression effects. While the probability of persistent outbreeding depression seen in subsequent generationa would be lower due to traits subject to higher selective pressure, like increases in early infant mortality, the overall probability of outbreeding depression itself isn’t influenced post facto by its results, just its persistence.

Given we don’t know the original extent of neanderthal/human interbreeding, what we’re seeing now COULD be the “much lower percentage” you mention and still could come from multiple events. In fact, if these crosses resulted in stronger depression effects, I’d argue a greater number of crossings would be one factor behind the persistence of some genes today.

There ya go. It almost has too many squares.

Two ways.

First, sex chromosomes. In mammals, sex is determined by the sex chromosomes - males have XY, females XX. If interbreeding was equal between the sexes of both species, this would be reflected in the frequency of neanderthal genes on each chromosome in the current human population, but it’s more heavily skewed toward the Y chromosome than we’d expect if equal pairing was true. This suggests a higher proportion of successful male neanderthal/female human offspring.

Second, mitochondrial DNA. While genomic DNA in a sexually-reproducing species is a mix between the parents, in most mammals the inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is purely maternal. This is because only the egg’s mitochondria typically survive, though on rare occasion paternal mitochondria are also passed on. There is no known existent neanderthal mtDNA in the human population. This suggests either female neanderthal/male human crosses didn’t happen much and/or didn’t often produce offspring capable of further reproduction.

Of course, there are many other explanations for all of these. These are just amongst the simplest possible options, and in population genetics, it’s not uncommon that the simplest answers are frequently correct.

Keep in mind heterosis isn’t always the result of hybridization and even then the magnitude of isolation doesn’t always positively correlate. Outbreeding depression can also be the result, increasingly so when two groups are more genetically distant or when one group is already subject to heavy inbreeding depression, as the neanderthals were thought to be.

He’ll walk away a billionaire. He gives zero fucks.

Not allowed for the commoners.

I’m allergic to coconut, so I would.

2025: IBM lays off 16-20k tenured employees.
Early 2026: “IBM emerges as a global leader (in asshole-tier cost savings), championing early career development by tripling their number of hired entry-level employees.”

Fuck you, IBM.

Interesting. You’re saying you can tell the difference between 320 kbps and FLAC? How long ago was this?

Anecdotal, but… I’ve been a musician for 36 years and have fantastic hearing not just for my age but for any age. I know, I have to get it quantitatively tested twice a year!

I can’t tell the difference at all between FLAC and 320 kbps from the same source. I can tell a difference between FLAC and 128 kbps, but it’s not huge. It sounds a bit dull, but I have to be looking for the difference and comparing the two. If you just gave me one or the other with no reference, I might suspect the 128 if it was a simple recording of a single instrument or a song I’m intimately familiar with, and even then I wouldn’t be sure of it. It just sometimes “feels” weird.

So I converted over 4 terabytes of my music stash to 320 kbps and cut the total space into less than 2. Feels good.