Ranvier
@Ranvier@sopuli.xyz
- Comment on To put life into perspective 5 weeks ago:
There’s no one that can make the estimate accurately right now. Any calculation like that is going to rest on lots on many wild estimates and unknowns. Happy to look at it if you have a source though.
- Comment on To put life into perspective 5 weeks ago:
We’re working with an n of 1 basically. If you’re talking about the drake equation, many of those terms are wild estimates that we simply don’t know the answer to. In the course of astronomy history when we’ve assume uniqueness about earth or our cosmic situation we’ve generally been wrong. Unfortunately the vast distances between stars make an estimation of life in the universe difficult with current technology.
But there’s septillions of star systems in the galaxy with billions of years for life to happen. Intelligent life has happened at least once because we’re here. It would be utterly shocking if we were the only intelligent life out there.
- Comment on To put life into perspective 5 weeks ago:
That would be very surprising if it were true, considering the incomprehensively vast numbers of stars and planets out there.
- Comment on unsure why we are surprised lol 5 weeks ago:
I’d say more broadly the legal and political system works against any organizations that threaten the status quo, but yes America’s attitudes toward communism have been pretty obvious throughout the twentieth century. I just took issue with the idea that political parties or idealogies are illegal in and of themselves in the US, constitution still manages to protects some things.
- Comment on unsure why we are surprised lol 5 weeks ago:
Someone better tell these people they all could be arrested at any moment!
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_USA
No but seriously it’s an unenforceable junk law that no one has bothered to take the time to repeal that was never even really used in the first place. I mean, the communist party runs candidates for office to this day. Someone finally tried to use it in 1972 to keep a communist candidate off the ballot and a federal district Court promptly ruled it unconstitutional.
- Comment on Apple changes App Store rules to allow retro game emulators globally | TechCrunch 5 weeks ago:
Thanks again EU!
- Comment on Quantum Internet: No One Needs This 1 month ago:
From the applications section of the Wikipedia article on quantum entanglement:
Entanglement has many applications in quantum information theory. With the aid of entanglement, otherwise impossible tasks may be achieved.
Among the best-known applications of entanglement are superdense coding and quantum teleportation.[85]
Most researchers believe that entanglement is necessary to realize quantum computing (although this is disputed by some).[86]
Entanglement is used in some protocols of quantum cryptography,[87][88] but to prove the security of quantum key distribution (QKD) under standard assumptions does not require entanglement.[89] However, the device independent security of QKD is shown exploiting entanglement between the communication partners.[90]
Sci-fi media likes to constantly misconstrue quantum entanglement as allowing for faster than light communication so that they can have faster than light communication in their story. But as far as we know, faster than light communication is impossible.
- Comment on Do straight lines and flat planes exist in nature? 1 month ago:
I’m with you, I was mostly joking. This whole question just hinges on definitions of “straight line” and “flat plane” anyways.
- Comment on Can you un-smart a smart tv? 1 month ago:
They’re not even really available anymore. There’s some but they’re more meant to be directly sold to businesses, and often lack features in addition to costing much more. Easiest thing to do is get a smart TV and just don’t let it connect to the internet.
- Comment on Do straight lines and flat planes exist in nature? 1 month ago:
Unfortunately (fortunately?) the space they’re traveling through is curved. It was a good attempt though neutrinos.
- Comment on The FTC isn’t happy with Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard layoffs 3 months ago:
FTC is doing its job and has been fighting this from the beginning. Need the courts to do their job and side with the FTC.
- Comment on Texas firm allegedly behind fake Biden robocall that told people not to vote 3 months ago:
Don’t worry, they’ve received the most severe of all punishments: a sternly worded letter.
- Comment on Google News is indexing and promoting websites that immediately rip off others with AI clones of their articles. These websites are absolutely littered with Google ads. 3 months ago:
Periodic reminder to please directly subscribe to quality news sources to help fund good journalism. Especially local newspapers which have been really struggling. They are often the only ones holding your local elected officials accountable or reporting on them to any degree.
- Comment on working at a hospital: should I remain in the room watching a patient until he takes a certain medication? 3 months ago:
If a patient doesn’t want to take it, they just say they don’t want to take it, no one is force feeding people or calling security. Patients refuse medication all the time for many different reasons. In this example, the nurse should just document the patient refused and why, notify the doctor what happened, and continue on with their work. Not stand there in an hour long staring contest until the patient takes it.
It’s very important the medical staff know what things you have and haven’t actually taken. If it’s a medication you really need, your doctor will probably come and explain why refusing is a bad idea. If people don’t like the plan, don’t want any treatment, or don’t want to stay in the hospital, they can just walk out and leave. It’s a hospital not a prison. Your doctor may just ask you to sign something just to document they explained to you why leaving is a bad idea.
- Comment on murder 4 months ago:
Poor point of comparison, lol.
snopes.com/…/donald-trump-fifth-avenue-comment/
“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters, OK? It’s like incredible.”
-Donald Trump
- Comment on What is an average person living in the US supposed to do about corporations raising prices? 4 months ago:
You’re not wrong that it’s the profit margin that tells the story, and you can’t tell just from the nominal amount alone.
But average profit margins in the United States have reached a record high percentile not seen since the 1950’s. So it’s not just the dollar amount that’s gone up for corporations, it’s the margin percent that’s gone up too.
- Comment on Are MRNA vaccines any riskier than other vaccines? 4 months ago:
It wasn’t exactly “fast tracked,” a little misleading phrase (not helped by the official name of the operation called “warp speed”) that I think makes people more nervous than they need to me. This kind of implies they didn’t go through the same testing as other vaccines. They have gone through the same stringent criteria as any other vaccine at this point. A lot of what was done to speed things up was the government subsidizing and risk guaranteeing, so multiple steps in vaccine testing and deployment could be done in parellel rather than in series. Normally you wouldn’t be mass producing experimental vaccine doses or medications before you know they work, or else you’ve wasted a ton of money. To speed things up the government basically said they would cover the losses on the vaccines if they ended up being useless. This allowed production of these vaccines to start being distributed as soon as the research was complete. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been churning out millions of doses already with a lot already stockpiled and giving doses of it to icu staff only three days after it got emergency authorization (full formal approval would follow about nine months later).
Honestly people get way more nervous about vaccines than they really need to be. Some of the lowest risk things we use in all of medicine. Though not that they shouldn’t be, since they’re deployed on such a mass scale.
- Comment on The White House is threatening the patents of high-priced drugs developed with taxpayer dollars 5 months ago:
Maybe. Hopefully not. All the more reason to follow every little process for new executive regulations flawlessly when enacting it, like the 6 month comment period. A lot of people are saying just do it immediately. But that’d just be giving the pharma companies and republicans an easy out to strike it down in the courts.
- Comment on The White House is threatening the patents of high-priced drugs developed with taxpayer dollars 5 months ago:
This is specific law Biden is trying to derive the authority from if you’re interested in more:
- Comment on The White House is threatening the patents of high-priced drugs developed with taxpayer dollars 5 months ago:
It’s not toothless. There is an existing law that allows the government to issue their own licenses for drugs still under patent developed using at least some amount of patented money under certain circumstances. It’s pretty broadly worded in the law when this can be done, so previously regulations were made to define the circumstances more precisely. The administration is issuing a new regulation that says one of those circumstances will now include if the drug is high priced limiting its access. Because new regulations issued by the executive branch have a mandatory public comment period after they are proposed its not active quite yet but will be soon (that’s why every headline is using the dumb vague word of threaten). The drug companies are already promising to sue to try and overturn the new regulation. So yeah it’s got teeth.
- Comment on Tesla Whistleblower Says 'Autopilot' System Is Not Safe Enough To Be Used On Public Roads 5 months ago:
I can add more, we don’t only have five senses. Elementary school propoganda that is. Here’s all the ones I can think of while driving.
- Vision
- Hearing
- Tactile feedback from wheel, pedals, you could break this down further into skin tactile pressure receptors, and also receptors of muscle tension, though muscle tension and stretching receptors also involved in number 4
- Proprioception, where your limbs and body are in space
- Rotational acceleration (semi circular canals)
- Linear acceleration (utricle and saccule)
- Smell, okay this might be a stretch but, some engine issues can be smelly
And that doesn’t even consider higher order processing and actual integration of all these things which despite all it’s gains with Ai recently can’t match all the capabilities of the brain to integrate all that information or deal with novel stimuli. Point is Elon, add more sensors to your dang cars so they’re less likely to kill people. And people aren’t even perfect at driving, why would we limit it to only our senses anyways? So dumb
- Comment on YSK that chiropractors are not medical doctors and "Systematic reviews... have found no evidence that chiropractic manipulation is effective" 5 months ago:
www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/…/01.str.32.5.1054
Thank your pointing this out. It’s not just any stroke too, it’s primarily vertebral/basilar artery distribution strokes. Those supply the brain stem which includes such necessary functions as control of breathing and consciousness. You don’t want a stroke anywhere, but particularly not there.
Some chiropractors might swing back that, you’ve only showed correlation not causation. Well, when we have no clear evidence of chiropractic neck manipulation being helpful for anything, and we have a likely very dangerous correlation, the clinical parsimony is just not there. So no one is going to run that study (give a large amount of people neck manipulation, a large amount of people no neck manipulation, and compare rates of stroke that occur afterwards), it would be very unethical, no irb would ever approve that.
- Comment on Dragon Age: Dreadwolf - Official 'Thedas Calls' Teaser Trailer 5 months ago:
This game’s development is going real fast!
…
In comparison to the elder scrolls vi, lol
- Comment on ASD jab: Chinese scientists reach milestone in revolutionary gene therapy for autism 5 months ago:
The headline is so hyperbolic it’s basically a lie. It becomes a little tricky because autism spectrum disorder is kind of a broad category. There are certain diseases that have clear genetic causes, other features to their phenotype besides just autism like features, but may share some aspects of autism spectrum disorder symptoms. So often these get lumped in with autism and patients with those disorders also get a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. For instance people with fragile x syndrome commonly get an autism diagnosis, but there’s many other features to it as well.
This article stub if following a link at the end is referencing a gene called shank3. It’s not involved in most people classified as having autism spectrum disorder. Mutations in shank3 causes a distinct disorder called Phelan-McDermid syndrome that causes severe intellectual disability, dysmorphic features, autism like features, motor issues, and abnormalities across multiple body systems. Shank3 mutations have also been linked with some cases of schizophrenia. A small minority of people with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder have shank3 mutations that may be responsible or pre disposing. So they are testing a gene therapy for shank3 mutations which can have a broad array of phenotypes, many devastating and severe, some phenotypes of which include autism like features. This will not be very applicable to the vast majority of people classified as having an autism spectrum disorder.
- Comment on 'Great' games I didn't play this year due to requirements 5 months ago:
Yeah I wasn’t ready to swap out my whole motherboard and got a 5800x3d. A little on the pricier side still (~$320), but many games really love that extra large cache. Should hopefully keep me going for quite a while before having to upgrade sockets. There’s cheaper options than that that would still be a good upgrade. A couple games recently like baldurs gate 3 have been very cpu intensive.
- Comment on Safe to say peanuts into a US school too? 5 months ago:
/shrug
I think it’s mostly people in the thread are over exaggerating how common it actually is to ban them for a humorous effect. Maybe overly litigious society, schools don’t want to be sued because some dumb bully throws a peanut at a kid who can die from it.
The increasing allergies across the industrialized world is really interesting though, and not a United States specific thing. A lot probably has to do with eradication of parasites. Much of the immune system parts responsible for allergies don’t have any role in response to bacteria or virus, but are intended to fight off parasites. And this is a gross over simplification, but the basics are without any parasites to fight off (since they’ve been eradicated in the industrialized world) it gets dysregulated and starts reacting to benign targets.
- Comment on Safe to say peanuts into a US school too? 5 months ago:
If you’re in Europe, we’ll I’ve got news for you, 2/3rds of European schools have at least one child with an anaphylactic peanut allergy. So peanut allergies are not just from excess freedom it would seem.
- Comment on "I feel like I'm on a hamster wheel" — US cost of living has skyrocketed since 2020 5 months ago:
First of all the comparisons are to 2019, not pre 1983 when those changes are made, so most of this is totally irrelevant to the point I was making. That’s also why all the real wage statistics are anchored to 1982-1984 dollars. Second a forever unchanging fixed basket of goods is not a good way to measure inflation. What people spend their money on changes over time. Cell phones are necessary now, didn’t used to be, shouldn’t they be in the consumer price index? Internet is necessary now, those costs should be in the index. The same things that were necessary in 1975 are not the exact same things people are buying now. Using the exact same basket of goods from 1975 would be ridiculous and not useful. Another frequent criticism is that housing prices aren’t included after 1983. The reasoning being that is an investment, not an expense that you will never get back. However rent is, and the increased housing cost ends up reflected in the rent. So that change doesn’t change the index nearly as much as you might think.
Lots more details here if you’re interested:
nytimes.com/…/inflation-measure-cpi-accuracy.html
Or archived version
All this is to say, I’m highly suspicious of this sudden narrative across the entire media that the economy is in shambles and everyone is struggling, when almost all measures are to the contrary. I’m expecting migrant caravans and all sorts of other sensationalized non stories with only some kernel of truth on the way. And a headline “prices didn’t increase from September to October” gets nowhere near as many clicks as “inflation was 3.2% in October,” even if technically true, taking advantage of misconceptions about what an annualized rate is.
- Comment on Canada says Google will pay $74 million annually to Canadian news industry under new online law 5 months ago:
True, thank you for pointing that out. I still disagree with the idea that you should have to pay to link to another web site. If they’re rehosting content from that website, like an article summary or picture, than absolutely.
- Comment on Canada says Google will pay $74 million annually to Canadian news industry under new online law 5 months ago:
Obligatory fuck Facebook.
But reminder that this law would require sites like Lemmy (or instance owners more specifically), to pay money simply for hosting links to news sites. Terrible law imo.
I think it’s reasonable to require fees for rehosting an article or pictures on your web page, but charging just to have a url link is totally antithetical to the structure of the internet. If anything those links drive traffic to news websites, where they are free to host advertisements or require subscriptions.