I… think this question is a bit more complicated for this community. Following are only my personal opinion

Prescribed medication? I think so, I’d rather be physically and mentally healthy rather than have the other alternative. And usually medication (even ones with noted negative effects) are meant do do more good than harm so…

Recreational drugs… the line between this and the above is surprisingly not as clear-cut as it seems. I believe there are active lines of study of using various psychedelic compounds to treat mental disorders or other conditions… Personally I would take medically prescribed psychedelics if I am 1) under medical supervision and 2) based on evidence it would help my mental health (maybe that’s the answer to the question?)

Hard drugs: I don’t see how they can make anyone a better person, and no

Probably in K-12? Like seriously everyone in my “friend” groups and half of my classes knew something about me was off, and I believe I was known as the eccentric genius throughout middle/high school (and my HS had a lot of smart students). But the broader culture I was in didn’t believe in mental health so…

Other than that… there were two people I relate to very well on Mastodon (when I first joined), one of whom is very openly autistic; hence why I got tested. That’s probably as obvious as it gets

Not great… I’m not a US citizen yet so voting isn’t possible. Only thing I could do is vote with my feet… so I moved out of Texas for good earlier this year. I think my current location is as safe as it gets in regards to avoiding political violence (since I’m not exactly in a group that the right isn’t threatening) so there’s that

Other than that? Nothing… If the worst happens I’ll just hole-up in the building and ask my boss for permission to work from home

I looked at their individual page (https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/4/psychological-dark-patterns.html)…

If deleting the game and starting over from scratch sounds like a horrible idea and a waste of your investment, then the game has Endowed Value for you. The more time and money that you invest in the game, the more value it has over a fresh copy of the game.

So I guess they are referring to is something more transactional… for example, if I spent $100 on a gacha game or loot boxes to get a bunch of ultra-rare SSRs. I’d be pretty compelled to keep playing since I’ve already spent so much money on it.

They are not counting, for example, that I get hooked on some weird roguelike game because I genuinely want to get better at it but can stop any time. And if I lose my save file I would still happily start from scratch again (which, hilariously, a pattern named Infinite Treadmill is marked for both Slay the Spire and Balatro… https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/14/infinite-treadmill.html)

I clearly didn’t drink enough coffee for this before posting

My bad, the original news article did a good job at explaining the missing link… I misunderstood what you were asking

• C-section babies seem to have more immune system-related diseases (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaci.2015.07.040), so scientists think they would benefit from special treatment
• Scientists tried to fix this by giving the babies vagina-derived bacteria (https://doi.org/10.1038/nm.4039); couldn’t find any more reports on this but it seems like these don’t work super well?
• This is a proof-of-concept by the lab highlighted in the news (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2020.08.047), they tried using fecal matter and it worked
• The abstract featured in the news is now a clinical trial that is in progress

I think that’s pretty much it

This is the study they were referring to: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaci.2015.07.040

C-section babies have slightly higher risks of several diseases related to immune system function, and the hypothesis is that it is because these babies have slightly less developed immune systems

I happen to know a few folks who work in this field (detecting fraudulent scientific papers). This is a bit of an insider knowledge, but there are science sleuths who are fearing for their lives… there might be some seriously shady stuff going on behind research paper mills, but I don’t know who will be the one digging those up.

If it is just on an individual level though methinks Retraction Watch does a decently good job at informing what might or might not be trustworthy

A recent report on Retraction Watch, a PhD student was trying to figure out who’s behind a papermill: https://retractionwatch.com/2024/10/01/hidden-hydras-uncovering-the-massive-footprint-of-one-paper-mills-operations/

This is from Nature News today: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03427-w. Heard a bit about this startup even before so…

Jokes on me, my cats can somehow recognize me from the sound of me walking up to the front door (and only me, not when anyone else is visiting)… No idea if anything can make them not recognize me

This again??

This time once archive.org is back online again… is it possible to get torrents of some of their popular data storage? For example I wouldn’t imagine their catalog of books with expired copyright to be very big. Would love a community way to keep the data alive if something even worse happens in the future (and their track record isn’t looking good now)

Pretty sure the “intimate detail” is just the editor being horny… I didn’t make the title don’t blame me

Hehe

Blame the Nature News editor for this, the paper title wasn’t horny at all

I am not joking; the only thing I can imagine is for some bizarre reason a bowling ball noise followed by a comical noise of striking pins. I know there is a person but I couldn’t imagine that person

This is a good point… I strongly prefer nonfiction over fiction, but it could just be Autism. I really only read fiction if it is really, really good… but I read them in the same way as I would read a nonfiction book as well, I’d be more interested in the themes of the book

Oh my! I didn’t know what to expect, and I have to say… I was quite surprised by some of your answers. Also confirmed to me that I am definitely not normal

Not many replies that are indicative of Aphantasia so… here goes nothing. I tried really hard at this okay

I got curious and wanted to see what method they are using: I believe they are using data from this portal? https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html

Looks like anyone can take this! But I guess that also means… did the dyslexics/dyscalculics self-select themselves?

Edit: took one. There is a demographics questionnaire where you can list whether you have disabilities, dyslexia is in there (but not Autism??)… So it is self-selected. And on unrelated note, I am apparently in the 1% that has a strong automatic preference for physically disabled rather than not-disabled people (facepalm

This is a good point… I’m more used to biomedical papers where this author list would be considered typical or even short, but yeah the affiliations seem to state that there are four PIs on this paper which is wild… don’t know what to make of it. If someone knows archaeology better plz inform

I don’t believe anyone mentioned this yet so… here goes nothing, there is a suspicion that this is due to A/B testing

This is a bug report from the Invidious project; this is back in June 6 (so four months ago), but the hoster of a fairly large instance noted a very bizarre error message on the Invidious project…

Conclusion is that Youtube is very likely rolling out A/B testing of requiring all clients to login before viewing videos

Refreshing will probably work considering this is most likely result of an A/B test, but unfortunately I don’t see a way of this problem going away

I genuinely don’t know… there doesn’t seem to be any ongoing discussion of who or why are these people targeting IA. There are other people who are trying to rescue data stored on IA

Hope this would be over soon…

So it was the physics Nobel… I see why the Nature News coverage called it “scooped” by machine learning pioneers

Since the news tried to be sensational about it… I tried to see what Hinton meant by fearing the consequences. Believe he is genuinely trying to prevent AI development without proper regulations. This is a policy paper he was involved in (https://managing-ai-risks.com/). This one did mention some genuine concerns. Quoting them:

“AI systems threaten to amplify social injustice, erode social stability, and weaken our shared understanding of reality that is foundational to society. They could also enable large-scale criminal or terrorist activities. Especially in the hands of a few powerful actors, AI could cement or exacerbate global inequities, or facilitate automated warfare, customized mass manipulation, and pervasive surveillance”

like bruh people already lost jobs because of ChatGPT, which can’t even do math properly on its own…

Also quite some irony that the preprint has the following quote: “Climate change has taken decades to be acknowledged and confronted; for AI, decades could be too long.”, considering that a serious risk of AI development is climate impacts

Oh my… I had a slightly similar incident. New phone number, had a bunch of random strangers texting me (some even calling!) asking for Ethan. My name is not Ethan, I didn’t know who Ethan is

No idea what was on my mind back then, but I somehow got the contact info of this mysterious Ethan, called him (hilarity ensued since he got a call from someone on his contact list named “Me”), confirmed his up-to-date number, and promptly referred everyone looking for Ethan to the real person for over a year…

Life is strange sometimes