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It's liquid helium, which I imagine just evaporates into the air.

I can't believe no one has mentioned the FDA toxicology lab near the town [0]. There is good reason they put the lab in the middle of impoverished no where. There has been issues with the lab in the past, including missing primates last year [1]. Maybe I'm a bit tin-foil-hat, but this is literally an isolated place to study toxicity and I think it's a unique risk to relocate near it.

[0] https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/nctr-location-facilities-servi...

[1] https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2023/aug/30/monkeys-gone...

Those technologies were brand new at the time, the discussions about the problem started in 2013. The company (I had zero input) choose a more established vendor with an older product. Given the time and institutional customers that were trusting us with their data, I suspect any cloud based offerings were a nonstarter, and open source felt like a liability.

Of course with 20/20 hindsight that decision is easy to criticize. I suspect their primary concerns were to minimize risk and costs while meeting our customer's requirements. Even today, making a brand new Google product or Facebook backed open source project a hard dependency would be too much risk for an established business.

I learned SQL before I learned set theory. While learning set theory I remember thinking "oh this notation is just SQL backwards." Afterwards I began to find SQL much harder because I realized there are so many ways to mathematically ask for the same data, but SQL servers will computationally arrive at the end differently and with very different performance. This is a minor deal if you're just doing small transactions on the database, because if you are dealing with pages of 100 objects it's trivial to hit good-enough performance benchmarks, even with a few joins.

I was first introduced to the issue of needing hyper optimized SQL in ETL type tasks, dealing with very large relational databases. The company switched to non-relational database shortly after I left, and it was the first time I professional witness someone make the switch and agreed that it was obviously required for them. We were dealing with very large batch operations every night, and our fortune 500 customers expected to have the newest data and to be able to do Business Intelligence operations on the data every morning. After acquiring bigger and bigger customers, and collecting longer and longer histories of data, our DBA team had exhausted every trick to get maximum performance from SQL. I was writing BI sql scripts against this large pool of SQL data to white-glove some high value customers, and constantly had to ask people for help optimizing the sql. I did this for a year at the beginning of my career, before deciding to move cities for better opportunities.

Lately, I've began seeing the requirements of high performance SQL again with the wave of microservice architectures. The internal dependency chain, even of what would have been a mid size monolith project a decade ago, can be huge. If your upstream sets a KBI of a response time, it's likely you'll get asked to reduce your response time if your microservice takes up more than a few percentage points of the total end to end time. Often, if you are using relational SQL with an ORM you can find performance increases in your slowest queries by hand writing the SQL. Many ORMs have a really good library for generating sql queries they expose to users, but almost all ORMs will allow you to write a direct sql query or call a stored procedure. The trick to getting performance gains is to capture the SQL your ORM is generating and show it to the best sql expert that will agree to help you. If they can write better SQL than the ORM generated than incorporate it into your app and have the SQL expert and a security expert on the PR. You might also need to do a SQL migration to modify indexes.

So in summary, I think your experiences with SQL depends heavily on your mathematical background and your professional experience. It's important to look at SQL as computational steps to reach your required data and not simply as a way to describe the data you would like the SQL server to give you.

Maybe this is the hack for managing city growth

You either have an airgap or you don't.

The biggest problem I see is that learning usually requires effort/work and AI requires students to do less effort/work to achieve the same output. So the worry is that the quality of education received will decrease.

Example: no one cares that you wrote 5 pages on To Kill a Mocking Bird. They care that you read the book and thought critically about it. AI allows students to skip the reading and critical thinking portion, which is the most important part.

That's a valid way of testing a student's knowledge. I do think that tests somewhat different skills and knowledge than the 20+ hours I would spend on large undergraduate essays. Most critically, the longer format probably is better at training students to get published in academic journals.

It's absolutely inhumane to expose pregnant women to chemicals unless you are highly certain that they are safe. Clearly it would be better if we tested aspartame exposure on a smaller population and detected this effect. I'm saying that if our confidence of it's safety is high enough to expose pregnant humans to the chemical in scientific studies our confidence of it's safety should be high enough to exposure it to the wider population.

I'm not capable of doing a full analysis on this question. I don't mean to say that this ban isn't worth doing, I meant to acknowledge that this has a downside. Let me throw out a few bullet points of those downsides of reducing the rate of new chemical compounds introduced to society.

* We are often creating chemicals that do the job of existing chemicals safer and more efficient. This ban would probably include a grandfather clause for old chemicals, and thus we might be using inferior products and doing more harm than we otherwise could. Look at refrigerants as an example of a chemical compound that has improved over the decades.

* Many chemical compounds introduced in the last 100 years directly improve productivity. The United States is in economic competition with other regions of the world. We could be creating a disadvantage that reduces our geo-political power.

* Many of these chemical compound increase quality of life. There's a strong unitarian argument for sucralose and polyurethane insulation.

We really need to change the regulations around the introduction of new chemical compounds to our environment on a mass scale.

What specific studies should we have done to notice this association? What specific safety studies need to be done before introducing a new chemical compound into our society?

Historically speaking, the only conceivable way they would have learned this if they feed aspartame to pregnant women and then studied the offsprings. This is fine for a final testing phase of safety, but is inhumane to do unless you are incredibly sure it is safe. Animal models for studying autism are flawed, and wouldn't come at all for decades after aspartame's introduction.

In modern testing, we could theoretically generate a super long list of safety checks to do. This test might look like raising a large generation or two of the specific line of mice used for studying autism. Then checking the offspring autism rate of those exposed to aspartame compared to a control. This would be a single checkbox every new chemical compound would need to do, and there could easily be tens of thousands of similar tests that would need to be done. We would need to add to the list overtime, as our understanding of optimal human health improves over time.

Imagine the investment required to pass these safety tests. It's a minimum price tag of 25M, if the safety tests are standardized and lab techs are trained on them and do them in an assembly line like fashion. I wouldn't be surprised to see the cost be 10-100x. At that level of investment there's two issues. The number of new chemical compounds added into our lives will move to a very slow rate. The other problem is this is just the safety test portion of R&D, after spending so much money this seems like a likely target for corruption and my skepticism for the results of such a test will be high.

I usually take a laissez-faire attitude towards vice, but I am strongly against sports betting because of it's inevitable impact on sport. I love the idea of the extreme meritocracy of sports and view this as threat to it's integrity.

Here is this new thing, and here is how it is different than anything else.

If your goal is to avoid becoming an expert in elisp then it's certainly possible while using Doom Emacs, but you're not getting the full experience.

Grunya Sukhareva was studying (and published about, including in English) what we would now consider Autism in the 1920s. Perhaps it is because she was a woman, or because she was a Soviet, but histories often gives this credit to Leo Kanner or partial credit to Hans Asperger. I understand this is an obituary, but it does no one a service to indicate Donald Triplett was the first person to be treated for Autism.

Society takes the child-incidents more seriously because of how much more vulnerable children are to predators and how much trauma a predator can inflict. We take a snip it in the bud approach with anyone involved in these crimes. I agree that what you are talking about is terrible, and if law enforcement had unlimited resources we would stop all of that activity too.

Being able to find answers to commonly asked questions instead of making demands on people's time by asking is a huge part of maturity. It's very common for Discord servers to have a self-serve faq/resources channel. It's rude to ask questions that can be answered there.

In this situation I find the best thing to do is to link to the resource that answers the question. A 'teach how to fish' approach. If a question is often asked that isn't answered in documentation then I enhance the documentation.

There are probably a half dozen platforms that we could declare 'good enough' and stop all major R&D in. Maybe some changes to the interior/self driving systems as those are being researched for EVs anyway. Maybe some minor tweaks to the internals as issues are identified at scale. The design and production is good today, and it wouldn't be a major loss if they represent the height of consumer ICE while EVs take over.

A large reason why car manufactures update model lines is to comply with updating emissions, efficiency, and safety regulations. This is the environmental condition that forces major model refreshes.

New construction homes are almost universally Value of Land + Cost to build structure + ~10%. The supply/demand aspect of new construction cost only factor into the value of the land, and how increased demand can cause increased labor/material costs.

It's not like real estate developers pull numbers out of a hat to determine how much to charge. Most areas will have several major developers in direct competition to attract new home buyers, and if their costs every get out of hand people will just start buying land and managing the build themselves.

I ride motorcycles, bicycles, and more recently e-bikes. The statistics for injury/fatality are worse than cars. However there's a few things you can do to significantly decrease risk of injury and the severity of the injury. The top three things are

1. Do not combine alcohol with the activity. A disproportionate ratio of fatalities involve the operator having some alcohol in the blood stream. I'll throw things like "being hydrated" and "not tired" into this bullet.

2. Using the correct safety gear. The amount of gear I wear is well above the minimum legal requirements. Specifically the DOT helmet certification is a joke compared to every other motorcycle helmet certification on the market.

3. Rider training. You get significant insurance deductions for taking a course every 2 years. That's because staying fresh on your training actually has a huge impact on accident likelihood.

Hate implies resistance, while acceptance has no resistance. It's this resistance that manifests itself in how they treat men in general.

That person has very strong emotions about gender.

Yours is my favorite comment, and this type of thinking is why I bother to raise this question from time to time. I don't think this invalidates the entire line of research, but I do think it's less than fully transparent to present psychedelic research as if it were double-blind. I imagine the guess rate for a drug like atorvastatin (Liptor) is much closer to 50%. This false double-blind isn't unique to psychedelic research either. I think it's a wider fault of medical science to treat double-blind as a ritualistic silver bullet that controls for placebo instead of considering if it's applicable to all experiment designs.

Here are two ideas that I think are better than subject blinding for psychedelic research. I think the first one is the preferred method, but I think the second option is still better than using a placebo group or active placebo group.

* Have one group receive an established treatment and another group receive the psychedelic treatment. For psychedelic assisted therapy the comparison could be traditional therapies. I'm sure there are methods in the literature that promote increased creativity in subjects that could be used for this study.

* Double the treatment group. If you don't need to divide the subjects into multiple groups then you can put more subjects into the treatment group.

Following a double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-group design, we demonstrated that psilocybin (0.17 mg/kg) induced a time- and construct-related differentiation of effects on creative thinking.

Can we please stop pretending that double-blind is remotely an option for psychedelic research. The purpose of subject blinding is that the subject will not know if they received the treatment so that both groups have equal placebo effect. Psilocybin is active in such a way that it is obvious to the subject if they received placebo or the treatment.

I'd really like to see a psilocybin study where they give one group psilocybin, give another group an active placebo, and ask them if they think they are in the psilocybin group or active placebo group. I imagine people guess correctly >90% of the time.

It's possible to do good medical science without double-blind. Pretending that you are doing double-blind when you actually are not just generates doubts in the methodology.

There's a huge amount of status put into your house too, even though there is effectively zero marketing done in the housing market.

Cars are used to communicate status because:

* They are expensive. For most Americans a car is in their top 5 most expensive possessions.

* You can demonstrate some personality in choice. Which model, which type, which color.

* They go everywhere you go.

* People get a lot of utility from their car.

Electrification happened ~100 years ago. In 100 years it seems likely a combination of photovoltaic and storage will have rendered the grid largely moot.

The electric utilities might be a natural monopoly today, but moving to nationalize it is addressing yesterday's concerns. If we're spending political capital to nationalize natural monopolies the electric utilities would be very far down my list of priorities.

It seems that tracking the genetic mutations would provide an approximation of the computing complexity needed.

How are those two even approximately related?

1. If you want to know about the amount of information inside of our genome then you can just look at the genome directly. You don't need to count the number of mutations.

2. A genetic mutation isn't a computation. It's a random event.

3. Why did you choose a 500,000BC goalpost for anything? Which 500,000 genome do you want to look at? Almost all of them are not-conscious

4. There's no reason to assume biological evolution is an efficient method of manifesting consciousness.

5. Is a genome enough for consciousness? I would argue we would be less conscious without language, which exists outside of our genome.

I thought it was going to be a climate/emissions based argument. Instead it was about how disappointing being a tourist is.

Labour: Having people climb around roofs is dangerous, and people with dangerous work expect higher compensation.

Inverter: Cost of materials, assembly, and QA. You want good stuff for the amount of current passing through.

Cabling: Cabling is mostly materials in cost. Conductive metals are expensive.

Metal Mounting: It's heavy, and requires lots of raw material and expensive equipment to create it.

Methanol specifically is produced during the distillation process. The methanol vapors and ethanol vapors reside next to each other in the distillation column, making it a common impurity that is brought over in the distillation process. Great care needs to be taken to avoid collecting the methanol.

This simple fact is the greatest argument for distillation having much higher legal barriers than the simple brewing involved in beer/wine/mead.