I would strongly recommend There Is No Antimemetics Division. Such a good one shot, fairly short, and absolutely mind blowing.

It depends on what types of books you like.

For sci fi I would recommend The Murderbot Diaries, Bobiverse series, Children of Time, and Gideon the Ninth.

For fantasy I would recommend The Nightrunner series, The Farseer trilogy, The Scholomance series, and A Conjuring of Ravens.

For something weird and gripping I would recommend Perilous Times by Thomas D Lee, absolutely awesome modern imagining of Authurian legend, and those damn Saxons!

For mind blowing, There Is No Antimemetics Division. Nothing I can say will do it justice, now that I can’t unread it I envy you. Well and truly worth it, absolutely gripping, such a cool book.

Also, consider reading an audiobook. It is less demanding on your visual processing which can help if you are struggling to actually read the text. It works for me because I can speed it up to double so my rampant ADHD brain doesn’t get distracted because it is having trouble keeping up.

I hate to use the example, but one of the worst places on the internet actually found a solution for this a long time ago. $10. By having a small, but meaningful, fee for the account people couldn’t have unlimited accounts and there was a cost to getting banned. If you are posting bot slop you will be banned quickly and lose your $10. If you are not being bot like and also not breaking tonnes of other rules many times then you will not be banned and can keep your account.

This works well enough most of the time. Getting a new account after your previous one has been banned can be done fairly quickly but that $10 adds up quickly and can fund the cost of reviewing and potentially banning bad actors. It doesn’t solve the problem in full, but another thing you can add is region gating. In your profile you set where you are going to be dialling in from, including which VPN providers and so on. This means you have a fairly specific pattern of behaviour that is white listed in advance. Now if your account is compromised and starts logging in from other places it can be blocked quickly, and also potentially the login attempts can be blocked and a password reset process initiated.

Another option would be to require a invite only process and have those you invite reflect on you. For example, if someone invites a friend and that friend invites not accounts then both people are impacted. If someone invites 9 good people and 1 abused account their ratio is 0.9, if they drop below some value then they lose invite privileges. If you consistently invite crappy people or abusive bots you get banned, but if it happens only occasionally then you lose your invite rights for a while. Those parameters are all tunable but should help to get things operating more smoothly.

Also, having invite periods but closing invites most of the time can also kill off many bots. People using bots are lazy, they don’t want to wait for months posting stuff and pretending to be a person to then use the accounts to post 3 junk things and then have the whole set banned. They want a large network of accounts they can throw away as needed. Make it slow, expensive, and consequential. Make botting 50 accounts cost $500 and also be a waste of time and the bots will stop coming.

Just a quick clarification. This is a mouse study. This is not a study in humans.

What do mice eat? What do humans eat? Are we closely related to mice? Do we occupy the same niche? No. This tells us about mice eating a ketogenic diet, not about humans doing so.

Monkeys exaggerate, mice lie. Something shown in primates is likely, though not guaranteed, to be similar in humans, though the degree may be very different. Something shown in mice may or may not replicate in humans at all, and the degree is often very different even if it does.

Mouse studies are great in some ways. They are cheap, fast, and very well understood. You can copy the study design from someone else and save a lot of effort designing your study. You can control for really specific factors by choosing what specific mice you use. You can control their diet perfectly, use large numbers at low cost, and see their full life cycle in just a couple of years.

Mouse studies also suck in a bunch of ways. Humans are not mice, so translating the research is not easy or reliable. Something that causes an issue in mice may or may not translate to humans for a bunch of reasons. They make their own vitamin C for example, so you may have to knock out their genes for making vitamin C if you want to make them get scurvy. You have to humanise them and these changes are always approximations.

So this study does show that a high fat diet that causes obesity IN MICE does increase tumorgenesis in the small intestine. In mice. Not in humans. Every claim here needs that caveat to be made clearly and directly. If they do a translational study in humans I will happily read it, but this study? To me it is worse than useless. It is irrelevant at best and misleading at worst.

To be clear, we have more guns now than we did in the 1990s. The big thing that changed was casual, unregisted, random firearm ownership, especially around the major cities. If you were rural you didn’t have much of a change, just registering your guns and vetting rid of any that were no longer legal like sawn off shotguns etc. For someone such as myself living in a major city while growing up I just didn’t see guns. Not until cops started carrying guns, which was a mistake in my opinion.

So we didn’t ban guns. We regulated them. The average person could gain access to a firearm by going through the process of licencing, registration, and so on. The average person couldn’t be bothered and just didn’t. We don’t really have handguns here for the most part, our gun culture is much more focused on rifles and shotguns, things that are useful for hunting and pest control.

Now the criminal side has always had guns. They won’t obey the laws for theft, violence, extortion, drugs, and so on, so why would they obey for guns? The handy thing is they would not have registered guns and if they get caught with those they get serious time, so they only carry when they really think they need it. That means fewer gang members running around with guns most of the time, so fewer options for things to go south all of a sudden in a crowded place. A targeted attack though is still a thing and yes, a drive by shooting is still a thing here, just rare. I was living two blocks down from one in the early 2010s in Melbourne, but that is honestly the rare case that it actually happens.

Given the rise of tobacco as a black market though, we are getting way more violence. The war on drugs is fought on both sides, and society is the bystander.

Is that meant as a sort of joking, the smoking causes the cancer thing? I mean, yes, we all know smoking causes cancer, that isn’t being debated. It is more about the effect of taxation on rates of smoking and this type of strategy seems to have the effect of driving black market tobacco, not reducing smoking.

Yeah, so it makes me think that more people are professing to quit or their data on sales shows a reduction but it is more likely just a shift to untaxed tobacco.

Yeah, it is insane. My partner used a vape to quit and it was actually useful. I titrated the nicotine level down by 10% per refill, usually taking about a fortnight to get through. The use level would increase for the first few days but drop back down by the next refill. By the end when we dropped all the way to zero there was so little nicotine it wasn’t really noticeable. After that it was just the behavioural habit and that dropped by itself after a few months.

Compared with nicotine gum and patches it was way more effective and really did result in a long term quit. They are now approaching 10 years quit and it was absolutely worth doing. Harm reduction would suggest using vapes to help people quit and honestly to replace smoking all together.

In my opinion if it was just a crop like zucchini and you just had to meet agricultural standards, manage exposure to things like e. coli, get the product tested occasionally for heavy metals, and so on, it would be much better. Making it illegal doesn’t work, regulating it out of existence doesn’t work, but dealing with the harms from the other end, setting up programs for getting people off addictive things and using the health system etc, seems much better. I really think getting rid of the control and access these massive tobacco companies have and which was built directly off slavery and genocide would be a good idea.

The price for a 20 packet of cigarettes here in Australia is around $42 in AU dollars, so about $29. The production price is closer to $5, or about $4 USD. All the rest of that is taxes and that means you as a black market producer can make something for $5 and sell it for $30 and make $25 in profit, or you can sell way more at $20 or $15 and still make massive amounts of profit. You could kill the cartels and gangs tomorrow by dropping the tax and it would reduce the market for illegal tobacco to zero. The fact that our government don’t is a good indicator that they don’t actually care.

So this sounds like a good idea and I was a big supporter of it when the prices here in Australia went up, but I was wrong. We increased the prices with the thought that this would reduce uptake for young people and increase quitting or at least reduce use in older people. Instead we ended up creating a black market for untaxed tobacco. Since then we have had a massive increase in the level of gang activity. This means a fair few young people getting involved with these gangs and ending up committing crimes and going through the “justice” system. We have had drive by shootings, stabbings, abductions, and recently a mistaken abduction of the wrong person resulting in his dismemberment and death.

Increasing the price a little can have an impact but once you cross a threshold the criminal side becomes much more attractive and things become dire. The increase in people quitting may be because people have quit smoking, and I sincerely hope that is it, but in my opinion it is likely a significant portion of the change is a reduction of legal tobacco use and an increase in black market tobacco use.

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.

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.

As with all other scientific things someone knows more than me, but I will give my opinion.

The last step is the greatest weakness. The result has to somehow be sent to the website and verified. If you have physical access to the device doing the verification then it will eventually be spoofed. A man in the middle attack would be easy enough given that the device absolutely has to go via a network the user controls.

Beyond the transmission issues, biologically there are not any markers that are a clear and simple age measure. Most biomarkers are more of a range with ages that correlate to some degree. You could say for example testosterone, but that goes up through puberty from a baseline in kids to an adult level, but the adult levels are really varied. Some people are higher than others and some XX people have higher testosterone levels than some XY people, and visa versa for oestrogen. So with the sex hormones out, you would want something that accumulates over time. Unfortunately that is going to vary by where a person lives and what they are exposed to. Honestly it is not at all workable.

That said, a simple solution which would make much more sense than any of this crap is to just have something on the internet account end. If the ISP can offer a check box for “Block adult sites and services” and people can opt in to that then kids will only get access to the full internet when their parents allow it or they are old enough to have their own device on their own internet plan.

If the government want to make a system to protect kids from adult stuff on the internet that is great. If they make it opt in that is all fine with me. But if they make it something you have to verify your age for, using things like state issued ID or facial inspection by an algorithm, then I think it is disastrous. It will be circumvented rapidly by people who are old enough to verify but simply do not want to. That technique will be shared with kids. Kids will be able to bypass it. This nanny state approach is not actually about protecting kids in my opinion. I think the companies involved will use the data, the face images for during verification, as training data for AI models, use the licence data for various profit driven business activities, and in the process make us all less secure. They will eventually have a leak or hack that exposes your data including what site you were on and your licence. The only question is when.

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.

I hope they stick to their guns and keep it fully anticapitalist like the books. Right now is the time for that kind of media, there is a massive appetite for it, so if they fail to do it they are shooting themselves in the foot.

Yeah, exactly, like the idea of Mensa is there but she is shown in a more TV friendly way without completely wiping out what makes her Mensa. Also, the relationship drama from the single perspective of Murderbot is uninteresting, even a little gross, so it is described from a distance. They did not have the internal monologue stuff in the show so they did a lot more showing rather than telling. That makes it much more detailed and clear compared to the distant vantage of Murderbot describing “a sexual relationship”. Different, not worse, not better, but different. Honestly I am surprised how different it is without putting me off.

I feel like the changes to characters are really large. The feelings I have from each character in the books and the show are not close enough to be the same character. Mensa is so much more emotional and reactive in the show than she was in the books, but I like both. Murderbot is much more human than in the books, there is way less internal monologue, so it feels very different, but I still love the character in both. Same for all the rest.

As for the story changes, so far it seems good in terms of changing just enough to make it fit for TV rather than doing something insanely different with only a passing resemblance to the books. I like how the violence is shocking, sudden, and really limited. In the books it is not the whole story, one gory moment after another, and I was worried they would get sucked into the trap of violence being attention getting and shocking and therefore needed in huge quantity.

The visuals are excellent. From a purely technical perspective they have done a great job with making something easy to look at, enjoyable to experience, and mostly visually consistent. There have been very few moments where the colour balance is skewed weirdly, where the lighting requires adjusting the screen, or where the volume levelling was terrible. Great production quality.

Only a small portion of space is almonds, walnuts, and so on, less than half

Pyramid?