Just to reply in a real and not snarky way, the BBC has a strong anti-trans bias as well. The question is about factuality and reliability. Fox News will run anything that fits their ideology and in the case of trans issues demonizes trans people and trans affirming care.

To be clear, this doctor is making a vague claim of there being “young children” getting “irreversible” medical interventions. I mean technically getting a vaccine is irreversible, getting antibiotics cannot be taken back, and setting a broken bone can never be undone. Irreversible is meaningless in this context. What he is claiming is that there is some sort of harm. This is not true.

Surgery is not done on young kids in general. The rare cases are not really worth considering and do not represent trans care in general. The exception does not prove the rule and honestly I have not seen any evidence of children getting trans surgeries.

What is common is the use of puberty blockers. These are medications used safely for preventing precocious puberty and they delay the onset of puberty. This allows time for the child to work through their gender issues and be able to make an informed decision before starting hormonal transition to trigger the correct puberty for their gender. Putting off puberty has small enough consequences to be reasonable and for trans kids it can be really important for reducing risk of harm.

Fox News is dishonest, this doctor is dishonest and violating their Hippocratic Oath, and this discussion is a bullshit anyway. This constant ranting and raving about half a percent of people is just crazy. Nobody needs to talk about this without a qualification or loved experience. If you don’t know what you are talking about then it is a good idea to say nothing.

Sort of correct, but modern drug tests can distinguish actual ADHD meds from methamphetamine reliably. When I got tested I let them know my dose and what medication and they didn’t have to adjust anything at all.

Who would have thought that a fungus would be resistant to antibiotics? Almost like they are the absolute wrong tool for the job. It turns out antivirals don’t kill weeds either, what a shame.

This is why free software is so important. The company can just lie to you about their product and for some reason it isn’t illegal. I really want to have a dishwasher and washing machine with an ESP32 controller and free software to control it, ideally with Home Assistant integration, but at this point I can’t find anything.

I can see why you would feel that way but I came to a different conclusion. I agree with much of what he says given his position and circumstances.

The project is open source and anyone is welcome to fork it. He is not making something which will make money, provide a living, and secure his station as an open source guru. He is making something because he thinks it should exist and because he finds it interesting. He is not making something for end users, it isn’t for them, it is for people who have enough interest and knowledge to figure it out given the massive leg up he has provided already.

This means he does not do a bunch of things that would pull beginner users in. For example, there is not a simple GUI installer for this. He doesn’t sell kits to root your device. He doesn’t sell little server boxes based on a raspberry pi. He doesn’t have an app for quick discovery and configuration. All of these things would entice beginners and therefore induce them to install unsupported firmware on their several hundred to over a thousand dollar robot vacuum.

This would be hell. Each user with a new and unique way of not understanding the instructions would come up with new failures in an area where bricking your very expensive machine is easy. Can you imagine how much of a dick he would have to be to say “Nah, this is super easy, come give it a go” when the outcome would definitely be causing at least some people to lose hundreds of dollars in a few minutes? That would be him acting like a dick.

What he is doing has a second function. I have just ordered my first custom PCB. I have some components on the way and will be doing my second major electronics project once the parts arrive. I am much more experienced on the software end of things so I get all of the basics around using a terminal etc but now I am learning about using the UART interface and while it is a little bit sink and swim I am at a level where I understand how far outside my knowledge base this is and can take a reasonably informed risk. I am learning and growing and I am actually really excited. If it doesn’t work I will know enough to be helped through by the community but my expectation is I will fail at first and maybe take a few weeks to figure it out. Because of that expectation I am not doing this after my last vacuum broke and now I just desperately need this to work, that would add so much stress, instead I am doing this in the least stressful and most enjoyable way possible.

If I had been correctly scared off early I wouldn’t have lost a bunch of photos accidentally wiping a drive while installing Linux for the first time, so I would have used virtual machines for longer, but I also would have eventually gotten there. I got there by losing some data, but if I had a community around me it would have been better. He actively encourages community building and sharing knowledge. I think that is cool and would be an awesome outcome. I know I will be posting about my spare adapters once I am done making them to see if anyone else wants to learn how to do it.

Just so I am clear, nobody has made the pun “end-to-end-to-end encryption” yet? Really?

I have just purchased a Dreame L10s Ultra and have had the PCB for a breakout board made and components for setting it up ordered. In a few days I should get the last bits and I will be able to root the device and have it connect to Valetudo managed through Home Assistant. Fully local operation with basically the same features but none of the privacy issues. As soon as I can get it connected I will be able to use it just like a robot I actually own should without some random third party being involved in every single operation.

Not necessarily. You don’t actually need the fluid to be perfectly sealed out, just slowed down a lot. This means that you could run it open but with very close tolerances and there would be almost no leakage. You just need to make the gap small enough for the leakage to be trivial.

As for magnetic alignment, that is all about maintaining smooth operation without losing efficiency to friction. Instead of a guide with friction you could use magnetic attraction to keep things aligned.

Yeah, but there are many good options. Magnetic alignment can keep things from touching most of the time, maintaining very good movement without friction. Graphite is a great lubricant and works even in very cold environments, not to mention it will not be all that cold given the heat passing through the system. Redundancy is also a big part of the design, making failures much less impactful. And using sterling engines for the highest draw part of the lifetime of a probe with peltier style generators there for later would allow a failover to a solid state system at lower efficiency.

To be clear though, the two defined states are separated by a voltage gap, so either it is on or off regardless of how on or how off. For example, if the off is 0V and the on is 5V then 4V is neither of those but will be either considered as on. So if it is above thecriticam threshold it is on and therefore represents a 1, otherwise it is a 0.

An analogue computer would be able to use all of the variable voltage range. This means that instead of having a whole bunch of gates working together to represent a number the voltage could be higher or lower. Something that takes 64 bits could be a single voltage. That would mean more processing in the same space and much less actual computation required.

This system is fundamentally broken. In Australia there is no path by which people on Centrelink would not have their payments processed for more than a few days. I remember a bank issue which caused a bunch of people to not get their payments on time and it was a major issue, people were absolutely livid. That was only a couple of days late and was resolved promptly with hardship temporary support available for those who really needed it.

For the system to be able to fail like this means those who designed the system want it to fail this way. They could change the funding mechanism to make sure SNAP is immune to government shutdowns if they wanted to. They have chosen not to so that they can use hurting poor people as a political weapon. Removing this weapon should be the goal of any reasonable party and it should be urgent. There are many similar funding holes that can be closed with reasonable legislation and would take away the impact of political dysfunction from the poorest and most vulnerable of society. Choosing to do otherwise is choosing that harm.

Yep, very much improved. I recking it will turn out like Blender. It sucks right now compared to some other tools like Fusion360, but given time it will improve and at some point it will tip over into being the default. It all depends on buy in. If a few bigger players get behind it because they can avoid predatory fees and costs associated with using a proprietary piece of software they will switch, invest in their own mods, then drive the industry knowledge standard towards FreeCAD. That will break the hold the proprietary apps have as workers gain skills in the new context, leaving the old proprietary stuff to rot. I hope it is soon, but it will happen eventually.

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.

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.

Spangle banging

Just to clarify, it would be wise to avoid a lot of the language around scores and so on. Many of the mass shooters over the last few years have been related to the Terrorgram group, a bunch of idiots who glorify violence in the language of video games. They include the Christchurch shooter who live streamed his attack on a mosque in New Zealand. If you want to use the phrasing around a high score it would be a good idea to be very clear about what you mean as those idiots have a tendency to see anything that is not outright against them as probably in favour. If you are interested a podcast called Weird Little Guys is great for learning more about far right weirdos.

Yeah, it is absolutely insane to think that as a person with a literal disability in attentional regulation I have had fewer collisions than most people who are not disabled. It seems like if it is too easy people stop trying and don’t take it seriously, so they text or change the music or reach over the back. I know I can’t do that without risking a major issue and I actively have to maintain focus, so I simply do not ever “let it slide” or “just this once”. Rules can save lives if followed, but do nothing if ignored.

The unfortunate thing about people is we acclimatise quickly to the demands of our situation. If everything seems OK, the car seems to be driving itself, we start to pay less attention. Fighting that impulse is extremely hard.

A good example is ADHD. I have severe ADHD so I take meds to manage it. If I am driving an automatic car on cruise control I find it very difficult to maintain long term high intensity concentration. The solution for me is to drive a manual. The constant involvement of maintaining speed, revs, gear ratio, and so on mean I can pay attention much easier. Add to that thinking about hypermiling and defensive driving and I have become a very safe driver, putting about 25-30 thousand kms on my car each year for over a decade without so much as a fender bender. In an automatic I was always tense, forcing focus on the road, and honestly it hurt my neck and shoulders because of the tension. In my zippy little manual I have no trouble driving at all.

So imagine that but up to an even higher level. Someone is supervising a car which handles most situations well enough to make you feel like a passenger. They will switch off and stop paying attention eventually. At that point it is on them, not the car itself being unfit. I want self driving to be a reality but right now it is not. We can do all sorts of driver assist stuff but not full self driving.

Something I do not see discussed enough in this context is the fact that whether or not Trump or any other potential asset is an actual knowing asset or not has no bearing on whether they act in the interests of the Russian government. If he does something in the interests of the Russian government it doesn’t really make that much of a difference if he is doing it knowingly or not. The effect of his actions is the same, the only difference is how likely you think he is to do another thing in the interests of the Russian government.

If he weakens the western alliances, withdraws from NATO, creates economic chaos, and makes everyone poorer then the Russian government benefits. Regardless of the cause of his behaviours they are still damaging, he is still destroying the US government, he is still hurting all sorts of people, and he is still destroying the global economy.

Asset or useful idiot, he is still setting the world on fire.