acegopher

Magnesium absolutely helps, and with our modern farmed diet, most people are deficient. It it part of over 300 chemical reactions in the body.

I've also been seeing a lot of comments about melatonin. For those taking it, as long as you aren't on an SSRI or other seratonin regulator, take 500mg (up to 2g) of L-Tryptophan. It's one of 9 essential amino acids (of like 22) that we only get from food, and is the basis of seratonin. The chemical process in the body is Tryptophan -> 5HTP -> Seratonin -> Melatonin. Again, because of our modern diet, we don't get enough of these essential amino acids. Many people with mild anxiety have gotten off anti-anxiety meds by switching to just taking tryptophan. Anyway, it's helped me, but it gets a bad rap because "tryptophan makes you sleepy after Thanksgiving". Actually, no it doesn't, it's the amount of food you eat, honestly.

I've read the Bobiverse series too :-). Maybe the question then is, do intelligent species have the will to invest the capital and labor required when there is no payoff in those decision-makers lifetimes? I think there are individuals who do, but I think it's an open question if societies can.

I wonder if the "generational problem" is a potential reason for the Fermi Paradox. If it is extremely difficult for a species to expend resources on multi-generational projects, then the species horizon is only that which can be spanned in some fraction of a lifetime of that species.

And when it's offered for free once, it's then a race to the bottom. People in general don't understand the value of curation nor quality, especially when it comes to information. So it's hard for well-curated high quality information to remain because it costs money to make it.

We started with a Betamax player. I think one underappreciated reason for VHS's win was that you could put a movie on one VHS tape, whereas the Betamax required two (at least at the time it mattered). And in an era of movie rental stores, that made a difference. Both in terms of logistics, but also in terms of the consumer having to load a new tape halfway through a movie.

Out of the box Linux Mint, Debian or Fedora Gnome or KDE is similarly "just works". A lot has changed since 2007 Linux.

And you couldn't fit a whole movie on a single Betamax tape. That alone was a reason for VHS's acendancy.

> the entire Amiga hardware and operating system was written to make assembly coding convenient

I am curious what specific examples do you have of the HW and OS being made/written to make ASM convenient?

Is it just me who 15 years ago laughed at the first big April Fools jokes by companies online, but now just cringes when I see headlines like this?