AnthonBerg

Joined 16 years ago

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1,094
Member since
Jul 26
an artist trapped in the body of a computer scientist
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Recent submissions

Comment · 3 days ago
I have a, what, 2019 LG CX OLED TV. 55". Used in anger as computer monitor since new. With complete disregard for burnout. It's… perfectly fine? I can't see any dimming or patterns or faults at all.
Comment · 3 days ago
The quip is that C++ is fool's gold; Flying around in code and getting all the little mechanical details right really feels like getting things done. (It's just wizard- or mastery-flavored busywork. Glitter.)

I've later come to suspect that this glittering is sometimes useful as… fuel? Feeling-of-progress hands-on motivation-fuel.

Comment · 4 days ago
"Maybe they already do it that way" refers to Apple's implementation of the iPad Mini OLED.

It's extremely interesting, and I'll be frank here, that people who just can't tell the difference are usually judgy and kind of status- and comparison-oriented towards people. In my experience. Others may not notice that difference.

Comment · 4 days ago
Why? Because.

Or, jokes aside, I honestly think that you might just have beefier time-integrating sensory-processing circuits in your brain than I do. Really. I do profoundly notice the difference, and it's a gritty and distracting thing. A slight but persistently intrusive and distracting perceptual thing. I honestly wish I didn't notice, but I do. I basically ask this: believe us when we ask for higher framerates and lower end-to-end latency.

And I'm fairly certain that the hardware and software to do higher frame rates across the board is a baseline commodity in the Apple source hardware ecosystem the build and integrate from. And it's certainly a better fit to consider it a line drawn between "pro" and "not pro" for marketing and pricing purposes than any fundamental and meaningful price-of-equipment threshold.

Comment · 4 days ago
Agreed.

If they INSIST that it MUST be 60 Hz, I'd accept the consolation/compromise of 60 Hz but 0ms-ish latency. (Maybe they already do it that way.)

As in waiiiiit until the 16.67ms between frames is almost up while sampling inputs, then bam!, render quicky, bam!, transfer it over a link that could carry more than 60 frames per second, bam!, fast OLED display. Each frame fresh and close to input.

To the why?-sayers: Because the difference is noticeable. We can get all philosophical and discuss whether it's a competitive advantage for someone to not notice the difference, or vice versa. Why the why?, why not just… take us difference-noticers on our word? Like… we're not taking your 60Hz 16.67ms crunchiness away from you?

Comment · 14 days ago
Comment · 14 days ago
because an insufferable man put raspberry pi controlled rapid tire inflation gas canisters on his paws
Comment · 15 days ago
I have to say, I would love to tap into those thought processes. If they are tappable-into?

I remember the feeling of playing Baba is You. The wonder and the sense of… a sort of abyssal depth of the mechanics, once you start to get a feeling for how they expand. And then how that yields to intuition. Hadn't come to such a lovely crack in the metacognitive vessel!, to deliberately pry at. Thanks!

The perspective you offer here makes me want to find or bring about a venue for… this.

Comment · 15 days ago
well spoken are its wheels
Comment · 16 days ago
hahhaha I forgot what thread we were on

it's very funny to have written SO MUCH WORDS under the link "Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?", aaahahah

Comment · 16 days ago
Oh, I assure you that I don't trust my imagination on this!

Hence the disclaimer that it's super guessy what I wrote.

So I come to this perspective having had reason to look into synucleopathic disorders like Parkinson's and Lewy body dementia. Read a ton of literature as best I could. (Regular people can read academic literature. To actionable insight. It just takes some care regarding certainty, and one must work with doctors with anything significant. It's a… help the doctor help you thing.)

And indeed: Pesticides. That New York times article mentions paraquat.

It's interesting to look at how pesticides might bring about Parkinson's. Cell death in the substantia nigra.

It's interesting with paraquat that it's especially and specifically destructive to the lung. As well as generally-yet-specifically inducing oxidative stress, which seems as far as I can tell to kind of be… the cause of death so to speak?, for the crucial substantia nigra cells. The Wikipedia page on paraquat underpins this pulmonary impact reasonably well I think, well enough for the sake of discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraquat

Then there's stuff like this: "Elevated PM2.5 concentrations were significantly correlated with an increased risk of PD among patients with COPD. Furthermore, exposure to high PM2.5 levels can further increase the risk of PD." – Association between PM2.5 exposure and risk of Parkinson’s disease in individuals with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in Taiwan: a nested case-control study, https://www.e-epih.org/journal/view.php?doi=10.4178/epih.e20...

And this: "This nationwide retrospective cohort study demonstrates that [Parkinson's disease] risk is significantly increased in patients with [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease] compared with those of the general population." — The association between chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and Parkinson's disease: a nationwide population-based retrospective cohort study, https://academic.oup.com/qjmed/article-abstract/108/1/39/158...

Then I've been surprised and sort of amazed to read studies of the OTC compound ambroxol in Parkinson's. These seem to show that ambroxol has protective effects against Parkinson's, even seemingly curbing the progression of the full clinical manifestation of the disease. Ambroxol is an over-the-counter mucolytic and "cough syrup" thing. It also happens to have specific antioxidant properties – redox-adjusting properties? – and in general very complex and very interesting effects on neuronal signaling; "Ambroxol is a potent inhibitor of the neuronal Na+ channels, explaining its anaesthetic effect", as per Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambroxol

Ambroxol has extensive effects on fine pulmonary function "through several mechanisms, including breaking up phlegm, stimulating mucus production, and stimulating synthesis and release of surfactant by type II pneumocytes."

And! Get this: "Ambroxol is also anti-inflammatory, reducing redness in a sore throat. It reduces the release of inflammatory cytokines and histamines in cell cultures. It also acts as an antioxidant, scavenging free radicals and hypochloric acid generated by neutrophils.[14] These two effects explain its effect in treating acute lung injury caused by paraquat.[7]"

At that point I was like whoa.

Here's a bunch of research stuff on ambroxol and Parkinson's:

Ambroxol-induced rescue of defective glucocerebrosidase is associated with increased LIMP-2 and saposin C levels in GBA1 mutant Parkinson's disease cells – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26094596/

Ambroxol as a Treatment for Parkinson Disease Dementia – https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2...

Protocol of ASPro-PD: a phase 3 trial of ambroxol to slow progression in genetically stratified Parkinson’s disease – https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00415-026-13683-7

Ambroxol as a disease-modifying treatment to reduce the risk of cognitive impairment in GBA-associated Parkinson’s disease: a multicentre, randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, phase II trial. The AMBITIOUS study protocol – https://neurologyopen.bmj.com/content/5/2/e000535

Ambroxol for the Treatment of Patients With Parkinson Disease With and Without Glucocerebrosidase Gene Mutations – https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2...

It's wildly interesting. I'm super curious.

So a thing with these studies is that it's looks like ambroxol doses for Parkinson's need to be substantially higher than the cough-syrup/OTC-mucolytic doses. Seemingly to get enough to cross the blood-brain barrier. So this doesn't pin down any pulmonary foundation for Parkinson's.

But it is very, very interesting that... practically all of the stuff that impacts Parkinson's for better or worse always has a pulmonary element. All of it, as far as I can tell. But I don't know! I'm just seeing a structure of evidence as leaning a certain way. Could just be my imagination. And I don't trust it. But I'ma keep reading for sure.

Comment · 17 days ago
Indeed, it seems to me that nicotine may indeed have beneficial effects in some contexts.

It is also readily apparent to me that nicotine is bad for us, generally and broadly.

The combination leaves wiggle room for nicotine to be a net-good lever on certain mechanisms. I do think it's best to avoid it; It's a challenging double-edged sword.

The molecular biology of how it's maybe-good and maybe-bad is probably the most useful aspect of it. It's a strange sort of bronchodilator and has weird and ambiguous antiinflammatory properties. (Which seem to tie in to how it is addictive: Short-term bronchodilation and oddly-shaped short-term antiinflammatory properties turn into bronchoconstriction and proinflammatory effects as time passes from taking nicotine, which feels like it would be rather inductive to generating a craving for more nicotine.)

Re. Parkinson's: Wild guess, addled brain hunching on nebulous perspectives, but I do think that nicotine's protective effects against Parkinson's are indeed related to the bronchodilation and antiinflammatory aspects, and more specifically it seems to me that Parkinson's has pulmonary basis. I think we're nuking our lungs in many subtle ways that in some of us cause the dam of cell death in the substantia nigra to break. How might we be nuking our lungs? Say… Air pollution, incl. microplastics and plasticizers, various disruptors of fine pulmonary epithelium and metabolic function and neuroendocrine autonomic control. And I'd think that once we start to lose fine autonomic control by way of loss of dopamine cells in the substantia nigra, we'd be poised to enter a vicious cycle of further loss of pulmonary foundations.

but idk, just sayin lol

Comment · 18 days ago
Ah, you see they are doing something far more random…
Comment · 21 days ago
I'd give it another go!

For what it's worth, I could squeeze latency down to sub-millisecond buffers on Linux on an AMD AM4 machine. With random USB audio devices.

Comment · 22 days ago

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