Oh, that’s really cool. I hope there’s more linkage between the twitter-like and reddit-like islands of the fediverse in the future; I’m somewhat interested in reading the former but it seems to be complicated to actually get federation with it.

Hmm, interesting. Somewhat compelling, but:

• it’s a rather small (n=38) Chinese pilot study
• the effect on the sleep latency is sizable (a latency decrease from 31±14 to 18±12 minutes, effect size of 0.85), but there’s no effect on actual sleep duration.
• the sleep measurements were subjective (sleep diaries, not actigraphy)

I’m also a bit concerned why it’s the only study with this methodology in this later meta-analysis - all of the other “behavioral intervention” studies in it experiment with stuff like “extended time-in-bed”. In other words, there seems to not have been any followup or replication of this study.

It kills parasitic infections caused by worms. Cancer is not a parasitic infection caused by a worm. It’s like asking if a mouse trap can fix climate change. No, because they are in no way related.

That’s not a convincing argument. It suffices to say that ivermectin was considered as a candidate for a cancer drug as early as 2018, with a proposed mechanism of action and everything. It’s not as simple as “cancer is not a parasitic infection”, because pharmacology is never this simple. That paper also mentions positive study results both in vitro and in vivo. There is also a lot of later research (search ivermectin cancer on google scholar), but it’s potentially biased by the horrifying memetic war that happened in America during the covid pandemic.

My conclusion from ten minutes of googling is that quite possibly it’s a real weak anti-cancer drug much like the already-known ones. It’s hard to be sure of those things - we’re in an age where there’s enough research and publication bias and politics that you can’t trust individual studies¹. And you can’t fully trust meta-analyses either, but I can’t even find a meta-analysis of ivermectin as used for cancer, so.

(It’s pretty safe to say that it’s not an amazing cancer drug much better than all existing ones (like some people seem to think) - both on priors, and because if that was the case it’d be extremely obvious from all of the studies already made.)

¹ I don’t mean fraud, I mean that if a hundred teams over the globe try a study of something that doesn’t work, five of them will find p<0.05 results by pure chance and quite possibly only those teams will publish it - so until several good replications come along, it’ll look like there’s a real and well-supported effect. And there can be much subtler problems than this - see, say, how well the studies of psychic powers go.

Note that openai’s original whisper models are pretty slow; in my experience the distil-whisper project (via a tool like whisperx) is more than 10x faster.

Really? This is the opposite of my experience with (distil-)whisper - I use it to generate subtitles for stuff like podcasts and was stunned at first by how high-quality the results are. I typically use distil-whisper/distil-large-v3, locally. Was it among the models you tried?

How’s musk related to this one?

My point is just that nobody really thinks it should be a free for all.

Don’t made judgements about everybody based on one guy. I’m on an instance that doesn’t defederate lemmygrad or lemmy.ml, so I commonly see utterly insane tankie takes in popular, and of course also in various comments - and yet I don’t want those people to not have a platform. Because I trust just about noone to decide whether my opinions should be censored, and if that means also not censoring the opinions of people who I think are very wrong, I’m willing to take that trade.

What’s so hilarious about it?

I don’t think the “scientists” circle is there in reality.

A world in which politicians actually needed to justify their actions by scientific research would be way better than this one. Yes, I know this is unreliable and biasable in a million ways, it’d still be better - it’s harder to make stuff up via a few intermediaries than to just make stuff up directly. Modern politicians are just linked directly to the twitter circle.

The simpler answer is that stock markets are way older than prediction markets and yet it’s not often that you hear about people blowing up factories or murdering people for the sole purpose of manipulating a stock. Similarly, few people would in fact go and help a wildfire spread in order to make money on a YES prediction.

I’m very happy Servo exists but if they want, like, a working browser, it’s no wonder they chose Chromium.

For comparison, from a recent Servo blogpost: “Servo can now run Discord well enough to log in and read messages, though you can’t send messages yet. […] We now support enough of XPath to get htmx working.”.

Servo has been in development for 7+ years and it’s still not able to render modern web. Maybe it never will, since it’s impossible to build a new web browser.

I use Firefox (and forks) myself but wouldn’t donate to it. It’s like Wikipedia - a great project with a shitty parent company which’ll spend all of your donations on shit projects.

“I’ve seen it first-hand” isn’t significant evidence because the frequency illusion effect is a thing. If you see dozens of ads a day and ignore them unless you notice them matching something you talked about, you’ll end up thinking ads can track what you talk about whether or not it’s true.

That’s literally correct for ADHD, yeah - the diagnostic criteria for it is all stuff like “patient says they have difficulty organizing tasks”, which, naturally, depends a lot on what kind of tasks they’re doing.

That’s why ADHD is very common in concentration-requiring professions like software engineering (naively you’d expect the opposite) - there’s people with “undiagnosed ADHD” (low concentration) everywhere, but if you’re in a profession like that you are much more likely to have it impact your job, and go to a doctor, and get a diagnosis and a prescription of Adderall or some other kind of amphetamine.

If you actually read the article, this is just a normal-ish (although peer-to-peer, which is interesting) free VPN, it isn’t actually oriented towards cheating. The funniest part is that if the article is to be believed, the “cheating” consists of simply increasing your ping. Which… you don’t really need a VPN for.