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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Consider doing a small test section in one corner before trying anything. Also take a clear photo in full daylight before you start and make comparisons with full daylight pictures later. It is very easy to have the lighting and perspective completely change how something looks, so make the comparison as apples to apples as possible.

    Also, using plain water for a simple rinse can be very effective at removing dirt just by rinsing and repeating, no soap. This is lower risk than many other approaches but requires you fully dry before checking the result. Definitely research other options, but it may be good to try cleaning with plain water.



  • Yep, it started going bad when Google took over it fully and started making changes that didn’t go through to the Chromium browser project. And killing ad blockers. And the telemetry.

    I would recommend trying a few of the Gecko engine based browsers. Zen is pretty cool and has become my desktop default recently but other people prefer different ones. In my opinion if you can’t read the code you can’t know what they are doing, so shouldn’t trust it. Not personally read the code, I mean I principle.




  • I tend towards games that are on the small end, less than 20Gb in general. That covers almost all of my favourites that I have put more than 100 hours into. Some that I have out over 1000 hours into are under 1Gb and are still very intense. That said, if I got a new game which was supposed to look good I would be happy with 70Gb, but more than that feels like lazy studios churning our high res textures to cover up bad design. You can absolutely reuse textures in creative ways to drop the scale of your storage requirements. If you really need massive assets for your top graphics tier then make multiple versions of the assets and allow a smaller install. I don’t need games that are in the Tb range.


  • At the end of the day death is a guarantee. No matter what you do it will eventually end in death. That means that all time time between here and there is not going to change the end point. The worst is already locked in.

    So if the worst outcome is eventually going to happen then you kind of have nothing to lose. You could life the rest of your life afraid of things not working out, afraid to try, afraid to take a risk. You could do that and nobody can stop you.

    The question is, do you want that? Do you want a life that is defined by what opportunities you didn’t take? Defined by what you avoided?

    It seems more likely to be a fun life if you take some healthy risks. Try and meet people. Try to learn new things. Move away from shitty influences. Ditch things that make you unhappy. After all, you literally get one shot at life, you have a finite amount of time left in it, why would you waste it living for people who treat you like shit? Is their opinion of you going to get somehow worse? Could it actually realistically get worse? What impact would that really have?

    I left my family at 17. Homeless, cold, and broke. I’m in my 30s now and don’t regret a thing. I’m married, have a wondrous cat, have a loving partner who actually cares about me and who I love dearly. No amount of approval from my shitty parents would be worth giving that up.

    They already controlled your childhood and made it hell. Don’t give them the rest of your life too.




  • No, but you also don’t need to blame the cholesterol. Cholesterol is a marker we can easily test, so we use that to measure things, but blaming cholesterol is like blaming fire fighters for fires. Cholesterol levels go up when you have damage to your blood vessel walls because LDL covers damage like a scab covers a wound, then once the damage is healed HDL removes the LDL and leaves repaired vessel wall. If you try to lower LDL artificially you can reduce the blood levels and think things are better but really damage is just not being repaired as well as it should be. A better option is to reduce the initial cause of the damage and let the repair process happen more efficiently.

    Don’t smoke, don’t drink as much as possible, avoid huge amounts of sugar, exercise, sleep, and try to reduce stress. And then you can worry about not eating a credit card worth of plastic.


  • So to clarify for those who don’t want to read the article and a few supporting pieces, this is talking about the presence of plastic micro particles in plaques removed from patients.

    Removing the plaque can reduce the risk of stroke so it is done fairly frequently. When they took out the plaque they checked for polyethylene, common plastic for bottles, plastic containers, and similar uses, and for PVC, famous for pipes and incredibly sweaty pants.

    In both cases microplastics were found in the plaque. Both of these plastics have been shown to cause inflammation in other experiments where the plastic is introduced into the body.

    What they seem to be suggesting is that some amount of the inflammation around a plaque could be caused or enhanced by these microplastics.

    This study shows that in some plaques, about half of those examined, these two plastics were present. Previous studies have shown plastics can cause or enhance inflammation.

    This study does not show that plastics are the primary cause of heart disease. It also does not show how much of an impact microplastics have on the formation of plaques, how dangerous they are, or whether they grow.

    Because of the lack of information on how impactful microplastics are and the difficulty of reducing exposure the best evidence currently suggests focussing on removing the big known risks for heart disease. Those are smoking, alcohol, excessive sugar, burned or oxidised fats and oils, and a lack of physical activity. It would be wise to focus on those factors which we know cause heart disease rather than worrying about this small to nonexistent factor.



  • I love the idea of hollow core fibres, basically a long hollow tube with air inside so the laser can be carried through air not glass. It is really cool and a novel approach and we are only seeing the start. What happens if we change the internal gas to something else like argon? Maybe there will be a specific fluid for different laser bands, further reducing transmission loss.

    They also say that the current result of 0.2dB per km of travel is a good starting point, but they think they will likely reach 0.01dB per km with this tech and a little more time. That means a massively increased distance before having to read out the signal with a sensor and then send it again with another laser. That means much less cost and lower latency at the physical level. Very cool, a good number of years before application but good news anyway.


  • Just a quick point, you aren’t starving. Plenty of people are not getting their basic needs met. There are tonnes of people who are unhoused, lots of people, especially kids, experiencing food insecurity, and a huge number of women specifically are living in abusive situations because they do not have the means to live outside those situations. Starving is failing to meet one need, but there are plenty of other needs that lead to death if not met. People die from cold and heat purely because of cost. Those deaths are no less tragic because it was cold rather than a lack of calories.



  • I think I have reasonable grounds to disagree, but I don’t want to cause offense or upset, so to be clear I am not attacking you or your thought process, just the conclusions.

    There has been a long history of these religious approaches to diet influencing scientific research. If we discount all science done by ideologically biased institutions such as those in this study the actual field looks very different. If we further discount known bad methodologies, for example food frequency questionnaires (FFQs) which are shown to be absolutely inaccurate in most cases, then we again find less support for the conclusion that plant based diets are better for humans than meat based diets. In fact, we will find that there are almost no interventional studies of any length that even potentially could tell us that a meat based diet is worse than a plant based diet.

    In most cases the researchers fail the very first step of defining plant based, meat based, high carb, low carb, ketogenic, Mediterranean, and so on. The studies are all way too short, most being done over less than 12 weeks, and very few have any sort of cross over or similar control. Most of the studies are purely observational and have no intervention, so no change can seen as causally linked to an outcome. Most studies are funded in such a way as to bias the outcomes. Most studies are not preregistered. Many suffer from p hacking. Many have no clear outcome measure but instead target a proxy, for example blood cholesterol, but they do not actually look at the true target outcome, heart disease and death.

    The whole field of nutritional science is unfortunately very unreliable at this time due to ideological and financial conflicts of interest. This study is a great example. Given that it is well known that FFQs are unreliable why was this study approved at the outset? Why was a further clarification of the actual diets of participants not taken at some point in the study, even from a subset? Why is this type of study funded, executed, and then passed through peer review? If this arrived on my desk I would not approve it for publication simple for methodological reasons. Why does the journal allow a title which is so provocative and clearly useful for pushing an agenda when their supposed scientific credibility are riding on their reputation as gatekeepers of truth?

    If we had real science I would be keen to see it. This does not meet that level of quality and the continued publication of this type of unfit paper is dragging down the whole scientific endeavour. If we continue to allow people to claim to know what they cannot show we will end up believing anything and making grave mistakes in our choices about how to live.


  • Yeah, so this study basically tells us nothing but can be used for propagandistic purposes. If I were a journal editor I would not publish a study that tells us nothing while being ripe for political and ideological use. It is unethical to act as if this is a purely scientific study when it obviously is not, and the editors of the journal are supposed to be experts in the field, they should be very aware of this issue and be taking appropriate steps.



  • Results

    1. Yes, data was derived from food frequency questionnaires, a known bad method for understanding real consumption.
    2. Definitely not controlling for health focus of participants
    3. Yep, only diagnosed cases were listed, so not checking everyone to see if they had cancer. This leaves room for someone to not have had it checked and it will simply not show up
    4. In this case they made several groups based on how much meat, but the vegetation was all grouped together.

    This was also a religiously motivated study. The cohort was recruited from Seventh Day Adventists and that church has been involved in pushing unscientific propaganda about vegetarianism for decades. The influence goes much further, given that the bulk of the authors work for the Loma Linda University Medical Centre, a Seventh Day Adventist institution.

    This is not a scientific study, this is religious lropaaganda.


  • About to go read the study, but my guesses are;

    1. Probably using a food diary or similar recall based method to figure out food frequency
    2. Likely not controlling for whether people are health focussed or not
    3. The cancer link will be measured by risk of death by cancer, obfuscating whether the individual seeks treatment
    4. The plant heavy nature will be vague, grouping all plants together rather than any specificity, eg sugar beets and kale both count the same

    Back shortly to update.