Newtra

Good to see them learning LaTeX young. It’s one of those life skills that no one should need, but everybody does need at some point

I’d say it’s more like they’re failing upwards. It’s certainly good for AMD, but it seems like it happened in spite of their involvement, not because of it:

For reasons unknown to me, AMD decided this year to discontinue funding the effort and not release it as any software product. But the good news was that there was a clause in case of this eventuality: Janik could open-source the work if/when the contract ended.

AMD didn’t want this advertised or released, and even canned this project despite it reaching better performance than the OpenCL alternative. I really don’t get their thought process. It’s surreal. Do they not want to support AI? Do they not like selling GPUs?

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.

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.

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.

In two languages I’m learning, German and Chinese, I’ve found it to suffer from “translationese”. It’s grammatically correct, but the sentence structure and word choice feel like the answer was first written in English then translated.

No single sentence is wrong, but overall it sounds unnatural and has none of the “flavor” of the language. That also makes it bad for learning - it avoids a lot of sentence patterns you’ll see/hear in day to day life.

Thanks! That’s a well-written paper. I don’t know why I keep falling for science journalism’s simplified explanations.

I’ve so-far only skimmed it, but to answer my question they find light dark matter to be the simplest case (I didn’t see a specific range, but they used 250keV as an example), but they also considered a scenario where “dark-zillas” (mass >> 10^10 GeV) are plausible. At least that still narrows the search space a bit 😅

Sadly archive.li seems to be in a broken CAPTCHA loop, so I can’t see the full article. However, I’m struggling to imagine a fundamental universe-spanning interaction that triggers weeks after the big bang, given that the universe has already expanded/cooled enough by 20 minutes to stop fusing nuclei. If there is evidence for a Dark Matter big bang for weeks after the Matter big bang, surely this must have some extreme implications about the possible mass range of DM particles?

One thing nobody seems to be talking about: Just like String Theory, the more new phenomena are needed to make the Dark Matter model work, the further we stray from the edge of Occam’s Razor. While all the research into detecting hypothetical particles has been fun to follow, I can’t help but feel we’re just a few equations away from discovering that the universe is actually pretty MONDane.

Please let it be like Alpha Protocol. That game was amazing (albeit glitchy af), and has too be the closest realtime video game to the tabletop SpyCraft experience.