Newtra

Google also is responsible for the SEO industry. They made ads hugely profitable, then started directing traffic to sites that serve more of their ads, regardless of quality.

Western companies no longer operating in the Russian market, but still producing desirable content. … Western companies have ‘legalized’ piracy in Russia.

100% this.

Media is culture, and IMO people have a right to participate in culture. If it’s excessively difficult or impossible to legitimately access culture, one has the moral right to illegitimately access culture, and share it so others also have access.

It’s inexcusable to refuse to directly sell media. The internet has made it easier than ever to trade access to media for money. Geo-restricted subscription services should be a nice add-on option for power-consumers, not the only way to get access to something.

anthropomorphic behavior

Anyone else morbidly curious about what happens if they don’t fix the bill’s wording and accidentally ban “human-shaped behavior” at school?

The funny thing is that YouTube’s code is already so laggy that we all believed this without a second thought.

The website does a bad job explaining what its current state actually is. Here’s the GitHub repo’s explanation:

Memory Cache is a project that allows you to save a webpage while you’re browsing in Firefox as a PDF, and save it to a synchronized folder that can be used in conjunction with privateGPT to augment a local language model.

So it’s just a way to get data from browser into privateGPT, which is:

PrivateGPT is a production-ready AI project that allows you to ask questions about your documents using the power of Large Language Models (LLMs), even in scenarios without an Internet connection. The project provides an API offering all the primitives required to build private, context-aware AI applications.

So basically something you can ask questions like “how much butter is needed for that recipe I saw last week?” and “what are the big trends across the news sites I’ve looked at recently?”. But eventually it’ll automatically summarize and data mine everything you look at to help you learn/explore.

Neat.

I agree that older commercialized battery types aren’t so interesting, but my point was about all the battery types that haven’t had enough R&D yet to be commercially mass-produced.

Power grids don’t care much about density - they can build batteries where land is cheap, and for fire control they need to artificially space out higher-density batteries anyway. There are heaps of known chemistries that might be cheaper per unit stored (molten salt batteries, flow batteries, and solid state batteries based on cheaper metals), but many only make sense for energy grid applications because they’re too big/heavy for anything portable.

I’m saying it’s nuts that lithium ion is being used for cases where energy density isn’t important. It’s a bit like using bottled water on a farm because you don’t want to pay to get the nearby river water tested. It’s great that sodium ion could bring new economics to grid energy storage, but weird that the only reason it got developed in the first place was for a completely different industry.

This is awesome news. Not because of the car, but because it builds the supply lines for an alternative battery chemistry.

People have been using lithium-ion batteries for home and grid storage, which is nuts if you compare it to other battery types. Lithium is expensive and polluting and only makes sense if you’re limited by weight & space. Cheaper batteries, even if they’re bigger/heavier, will do wonders to the economics of sustainable electricity production.

But the comments below say they’re not able to access the new page, even with the direct URL… It seems certain tiers of customers can’t opt out. Possibly they can’t be included in the first place (e.g. EU users), but it’s a pretty big screw up to hide one’s status on such an important privacy setting.

That’s some awful gaslighting.

I have no idea how these people make it through 8-12 years of college without even getting their understanding of common diseases up to a wikipedia level.

I’ve had psychiatrists push this crap.

One even refused to write me a prescription and insisted I just needed to get outside more after listening to an hour-long recounting of how my ADHD makes self-care difficult to impossible.

I’m glad to hear I’m not missing out on anything. (It’s still not out in Europe.)

Since it’s a natural hormone the body already has ways to get rid of it. It has a half-life of less than an hour. The lethal dose is so high we haven’t been able to intentionally kill animals with it: “Melatonin is not fatal even at a dose of 800 mg/kg in animal studies”.

The big risk of ongoing high doses is becoming so dependent on it that you wake up as soon as it wears off (e.g. after only 4 hours of sleep). At this level you basically can’t sleep without it and have to slowly wean yourself off to get back to normality.

I think the big difference between people benefiting at small doses (~0.3mg) and large doses (2+mg) is that the 0.3mg group use it for sleep quality through the night, whereas the 3+mg people just need the sudden shock to get to sleep in the first place.

The drawback with big doses is that your brain becomes less sensitive so your naturally-produced melatonin might not be enough to keep you asleep for the whole night after the pill wears off. It has a very short half-life in the body (under 1 hour), so there’s no way for a single dose before sleeping to last 8 hours. We naturally produce only 0.06-0.08mg per night, so it’s easy to see how supplementing melatonin could desensitize someone and cause them to wake up after just 4-6 hours of sleep.

I have ADHD and am in the large-dose category and use 2-3mg of melatonin to help me fall asleep. Without it, I can’t sleep reliably because my brain often won’t shut up. Sleep reliably is so much more important to me than sleep quality.

Using it only 5 nights a week, I’m not significantly dependent. I can still sleep without melatonin, just less reliably. I’ve tried 0.3mg, but it felt the same as taking nothing.

For me, 10mg would be excessive and probably harmful in a desensitizing way. The most I’ve taken is 6mg, but it only helped in 2 out of 6 times. The other 4 times my brain just wouldn’t stop. If doubling my usual dose didn’t help, I don’t think doubling it again would be any different.

There are however studies with higher doses, e.g. this one about kids with ADHD that says:

two-third of the patients responded to relatively medium doses (2.5–6 mg/d), whereas doses above 6 mg added further benefit only in a small percentage of children.

so I guess it’s different for everyone.

Yes! Scientific trials have shown that for most people, 0.3mg of melatonin gives better quality of sleep than 3mg.

I’ve seen pills as high as 10mg on the shelf and have to wonder wtf they’re for. If you take too much your body becomes less sensitive to it and you become dependent on supplementation. 10mg is definitely too much.

That was directly in response to:

those are helpful altho the name of the game is also brightness

Every night I lie in bed, lights off, using my phone for about 20 minutes while waiting for the melatonin to kick in and my brain to calm down. In a dark room I have to keep my phone on quite high brightness (about 1/3rd of maximum).

Lamps aren’t an option at that stage as usually my husband is in the room also trying to sleep. I also find that “warm” light still has too much blue

Yes. They’re very effective at making me sleepy, but have 2 big drawbacks: they’re uncomfortable to wear in bed with your head on a pillow, and complete monochromaticity seems to ruin any enjoyment you get from using your phone. If I get bored it’s much harder to get to sleep because my brain starts fixating on stuff and making me anxious. Yay ADHD.

Unfortunately I have to keep my brightness quite high. My eyes can’t focus well in the dark.

I do. I also messed with the iOS accessibility settings to color shift even more. It helps so much.

I even went to monochrome red at one point and it felt like me cellphone was actively putting me too sleep. Unfortunately monochrome also kills a lot of the enjoyment of using a phone. I was getting sleepier, but felt so bored I just wanted to find something too do to fill the dopamine void.

Melatonin

I can’t do sleep hygiene. My cell phone is the first and last thing I see every day. I stare at screens all day for work and for leisure. With moderate melatonin use I can somehow maintain regular and restful sleep.

No side effects if you use it responsibly (e.g. 5 days on, 2 days off, stick with low doses). Very safe. Can improve sleep even if you’re already sleeping well. I don’t know why more people aren’t on it.

Replace mindless entertainment with enriching entertainment. E.g. YouTube video essays, lectures, history podcasts, DuoLingo, Anki, Brilliant, artsy/niche movies/games, etc. Always be learning something, even if you’ll never need it. Try to limit yourself to memorable, unique, or mind-opening content.

It’s no fix, but it trains your brain to be able to wait just a little longer for its dopamine. Also you get to feel like you’re sort-of achieving something, not just losing time every time your impulsive brain takes over.

I’m intermediate level in 3 languages, know a shit ton of science, and have played thousands of unique indie games. Is any of this useful? lol no. But do I feel accomplished and in control of some big parts of my life? Hell yes.