dynm

Perhaps on brand for Meta, there appears to be no mention anywhere on this page or any of the docs pages, of any data retention policy. Maybe this is hidden in an agreement you need to sign when making an account? Has anyone actually done that?

I'd like to know how long it takes to write a post like this.

In this case, about three weeks.

The "nicer" sunscreens that use these ingredients often sneak in SPF boosters which are actually derivatives of other chemical sunscreens but are treated differently on the ingredients label, pretty much cheating the system.

Interesting, thank you for pointing this out. I had a little trouble understanding what the link was saying at first, but it seems to (correctly) state that many "mineral" sunscreens contain active chemical ingredients like butyloctyl salicylate. (And they're sometimes labeled as non-active ingredients?)

The FDA did (3 days ago!) finally approve a new ingredient: https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-expa...

My personal hot take is that we should all be using zinc (or titanium) oxide sunscreen which AFAICT maxes out both effectiveness and chemical safety. (And is the best for the fish?) Interestingly, these are the only ingredients that the FDA currently deems both safe and effective.

Ack, I'm sorry you had to waste your time transcribing the data! I uploaded it here: https://dynomight.net/img/coffee/temps.csv

How? By default, state governments can pass basically whatever laws they want. They don't have (theoretically) limited enumerated powers like the federal government.

Before the law, I think the state government or local governments could (by passing a law) restrict computing for any reason, even without a government interest. Now, they'd have to repeal this first.

I think the main content of this law (https://legiscan.com/MT/text/SB212/id/3212152) is just two paragraphs. I'd suggest reading them yourself rather than relying on secondary description:

"Government actions that restrict the ability to privately own or make use of computational resources for lawful purposes, which infringes on citizens' fundamental rights to property and free expression, must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest."

"When critical infrastructure facilities are controlled in whole or in part by a critical artificial intelligence system, the deployer shall develop a risk management policy after deploying the system that is reasonable and considers guidance and standards in the latest version of the artificial intelligence risk management framework from the national institute of standards and technology, the ISO/IEC 4200 artificial intelligence standard from the international organization for standardization, or another nationally or internationally recognized risk management framework for artificial intelligence systems. A plan prepared under federal requirements constitutes compliance with this section."

In particular, I think the reporting is straight wrong that there's a shutdown requirement. That was in an earlier version (https://legiscan.com/MT/text/SB212/id/3078731) and remains in the title of this version, but seems to have been removed from the actual text.

As you say, it's sort of a cat-and-mouse game, and I'd rather not play it. Fortunately, there are plenty of competitors that don't require a phone number.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. It's unusual and harmful to privacy to require a phone number.

Not too interested in debating the semantics of "micropayment", but it sounds like if we swap in "news sites" in place of "LLM providers" everything should still still be possible? Consumers could pay tiny amounts of money for individual articles?

Everything you say makes sense. But can you help me understand why this doesn't also apply to the LLM service I use today? Doesn't that service, in effect, makes a "micropayment" to the LLM providers every time I make a query? Is the key difference that there are only a small-ish number of LLM providers? (Not doubting, just interested!)

There is a lot of hate for the idea of micropayments here, so I'd like to offer a counterpoint. I use a service that provides access to a bunch of different LLMs. Each time I call an LLM I, in effect, pay a $0.001 - $0.05 for the response. (Technically, this is implemented as me having to renew earlier.) Each time I make a call, I don't know if the answer will be useful. I don't even know how much it will cost! And in practice, the answers are often garbage, and I have to pay anyway. I find this annoying, but--to my surprise--only very mildly annoying. This has made me much more open-minded about micropayments for news / articles.

FWIW, the EU is working on zero-knowledge proofs: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-mak...

But I strongly prefer my solution!

What I find puzzling about these proposals is that it SEEMS like they could be designed to achieve 90% of the stated goals with almost 0% of the loss of privacy.

The idea would be that devices could "opt in" to safety rather than opt out. Allow parents to purchase a locked-down device that always includes a "kids" flag whenever it requests online information, and simply require online services to not provide kid-unfriendly information if that flag is included.

I know a lot of people believe that this is just all just a secret ploy to destroy privacy. Personally, I don't think so. I think they genuinely want to protect kids, and the privacy destruction is driven by a combination of not caring and not understanding.

When you have lots of non-randomized dropouts from a randomized trial, that greatly weakens the causal link. The results are effectively non-randomized.

Meanwhile the evidence from actual drinking levels was much stronger (far fewer dropouts) and showed zero effect. Before this trial was done, you may have predicted that there would be positive results for the lab experiment but zero results in ecological conditions. But I think that prediction would be quite unusual. For anyone who expected results in ecological conditions (like me), this was disappointing.

The results for how much people actually drank in daily life were basically zero. No effect at all. The effects you're talking about are for a weird lab experiment where they sort of had people sit there in the lab and drink (or not). A huge percentage of people declined to participate in that experiment, too, which makes causality non-obvious.

I'm surprised that this article doesn't appear to mention the RCT on semaglutide and alcohol use disorder by Hendershot et al. that was published in JAMA Psychiatry in early 2025 (though it's possible I missed it) https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2024.4789

This was largely portrayed as a great result in the popular press although personally I think it was a bit of a disappointment given all the amazing anecdotes https://dynomight.net/glp-1/

Incidentally, this is not a blog that makes it easy to look at the archives!

- No link to other posts

- This post is at https://relaxing.run/blag/posts/top-gun-landing/

- https://relaxing.run/blag/posts/ gives a 403

- https://relaxing.run/blag/ gives a 403

- https://relaxing.run/ gives a full-page picture of some beautiful mountains

- No Atom/RSS link hidden in source

Not a complaint! If this is an intentional choice, I respect it.

Contrary to what many replies are telling you, the link clearly states that if you don't own a smartphone, you can check in online and then obtain a boarding pass for free at the airport.

(Not sure how easy that will be or if they actually verify that you don't own a smartphone, etc.)

I think this is the main content of the law. (Everything below is quoted.)

---

Section 3. Right to compute

Government actions that restrict the ability to privately own or make use of computational resources for lawful purposes, which infringes on citizens' fundamental rights to property and free expression, must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest in public health or safety.

---

Section 4. Infrastructure controlled by artificial intelligence system -- shutdown.

(1) When critical infrastructure facilities are controlled in whole or in part by an artificial intelligence system, the deployer shall ensure the capability to disable the artificial intelligence system's control over the infrastructure and revert to human control within a reasonable amount of time.

(2) When enacting a full shutdown, the deployer shall consider, as appropriate, disruptions to critical infrastructure that may result from a shutdown.

(3) Deployers shall implement, annually review, and test a risk management policy that includes a fallback mechanism and a redundancy and mitigation plan to ensure the deployer can continue operations and maintain control of the critical infrastructure facility without the use of the artificial intelligence system.

Strange, right? Take a look at figure 4 here: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...

This is as in the abstract:

1. drinks/day declined in both groups and somewhat more in the treatment group but wasn't statistically significant 2. number of drinks/day basically wasn't different at all 3. drinks/drinking day didn't change in the placebo group but did decline in the treatment group

(These are all actually regression coefficients computed on non-random samples but nevermind.) Somehow it seems like what's happening is that 3 rises to statistical significance even though 1 doesn't.

OK looking at the original abstract:

Semaglutide treatment did not affect average drinks per calendar day or number of drinking days, but significantly reduced drinks per drinking day (β, −0.41; 95% CI, −0.73 to −0.09; P = .04)

So they didn't find any reduction in (1) drinking, or (2) in the number of days that people drank, but they did technically find (3) a reduction in the number of drinks that people consumed on the days that they drank. So I guess what they said is technically correct... but I still think it's very odd not to mention the headline result that there was no actual reduction in drinking!

A more recent RCT showed that low-dose semaglutide reduced laboratory alcohol self-administration, as well as drinks per drinking days and craving, in people with AUD [72].

I think this quote is... wrong? Or at least extremely misleading? Here, citation 72 refers to a paper by Henderson et al. That paper did (sorta) reduced laboratory alcohol self-administration, but did not find any reduction in the amount that people drank. https://dynomight.net/glp-1/

This paper states:

The study protocol was approved by the Institutional Ethics Committee and registered with the Clinical Trials Registry of India

As far as I can tell, that registry is here: https://www.ctri.nic.in/Clinicaltrials/pubview.php

Doing a keyword search for the first author's last name reveals zero hits. (It's possible I'm missing—that search does not inspire confidence.)

It seems like if anything the current model would end up paying obscure artists more? (If you assume that people who listen to obscure music tend to listen to more music overall, which would be my guess.)

Hmmm, I use https://njal.la/ for DNS. Could spamhaus really just auto-mark every njalla user as suspicious?

This is a bit of a tangent, the whole concept of "domain reputation" can be infuriating. For example, my blog has been marked as suspicious by spamhaus.org: https://check.spamhaus.org/results?query=dynomight.net

As a result, some ISPs apparently block the domain. Why is it listed? I have no idea. There are no ads, there is no user content, and I've never sent any email from the domain. I've tried contacting spamhaus, but they instantly closed the ticket with a nonsensical response to "contact my IT department" and then blocked further communication. (Oddly enough, my personal blog does not have an IT department.)

Just like it's slowly become quasi-impossible for an individual to host their own email, I fear the same may happen with independent websites.

I think there is a "correct" answer to this question! The best book on Monte Carlo methods is this one: https://artowen.su.domains/mc/

It's not published yet, but already a classic. (Might be more intermediate than beginner, though.)

For something a bit more gentle, I also recommend chapter 29 of this book: https://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/book.html

You seem to be responding as if I claimed that population-level correlational studies are bad, or that I claimed that air pollution is not bad for you. But I did not claim either of those things.

What I claimed is that this press release takes a population-level correlational study and presents it in a misleading way that implies causation was established. Which this press release most certainly does.