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"Necessity is the mother of invention" - limited hardware has always forced people to find cleverer ways of doing more with less. Current models are clearly nowhere near the efficiency limit (the brain does vastly more with far less power).

Doesn't solve the present shortage, but perhaps this is a good opportunity for software developers to start caring about memory usage again, since consumers may be forced to keep their existing hardware for a few more years.

I’m not an expert in the field, but I am someone who has recovered from depression. The “lack of serotonin” theory always made me laugh. It’s like if your computer was running abnormally and you said it “doesn’t have enough electricity”.

Neurotransmitters send signals. The amount of neurotransmitter tells you nothing about what information is actually encoded in those signals. You can transmit happy and sad music using electricity, for example. It seems to me that you can transmit happy and sad thoughts using neurotransmitters. (And of course the brain is much more complicated than a computer, because a computer “just” uses electricity, whereas in the brain some processing happens at each neuron, and signals coming in on one neurotransmitter can cause signals to leave in others.)

I see the term antidepressant as a bit of a misnomer. A drug that inhibits re-uptake of neurotransmitters will amplify the “loudness” of the signals. If you only have negative thoughts, and you take such a drug, your depression could realistically get worse (and this does happen to some people).

If you can get in to a positive feedback loop (e.g. an activity that leads to positive thoughts that lead to more of that activity) and _then_ start amplifying those signals, then these drugs can do wonders.

No surgeon should be removing healthy body parts, in my opinion. You wouldn’t fit a gastric band to an anorexic person, no matter how badly the patient wanted it, and that’s not even permanent.

I sympathise with all people who have issues accepting the body they were born with. If someone believes their body should be different, but otherwise their body is healthy, I think it’s fair to say that whatever is causing the feeling of mismatch is happening in the mind. It’s no surprise to me that a significant fraction present with other mental disorders.

In an ideal world, there would be some form of therapy that helps people come to terms with and accept themselves with what they’ve been given. But again I do sympathise, because contemporary medicine simply isn’t very good at treating mental illnesses.

Smell the floss ;)

> The guy's voice is almost a whisper, the ambient sounds from the garden or the forest or the road are oddly pleasant, and he's speaking pretty slowly, with none of these glitchy quick cuts you see in a lot of YT content. It's also unusually personal-feeling, like he's just talking to you.

This sounds very much like ASMR. I find the most relaxing/entrancing videos are the ones that are unintentional/not forced, although obviously personal preferences do vary.

This link is indeed a very good explanation of mRNA vaccines, probably the best that I've seen.

After I read it, I noticed that it was the first time anyone had ever tried to explain _exactly_ how these new vaccines worked, like down to the molecular level.

Most explanations I had seen were usually extremely high level (literally just "the RNA gets read by your cells, which then produce the spike protein, then the RNA is destroyed") or used analogies (as you have done here).

I don't consider myself a conspiracy theorist, but I admit I had been harbouring some concerns/fears over these new vaccines. This link is the only thing I have read that actually allayed those fears.

I think there is a lesson here.

I have a feeling that everyone fears stuff they don't understand, at least a little bit.

I know that the high level explanation is technically correct, but here's the problem: Many conspiracy theories are actually _extremely_ detailed. I have personally seen covid conspiracies that appear to be backed up by scientific papers.

This is what the truth is competing against. A basic, high level "ELI5" explanation is never going to convince a conspiracy theorist who is looking at a stack of science papers.

So I think this link is very important, more people need to read and share it.

I know this is an inflammatory topic that evokes visceral feelings but.. you should be aware that when you are trying to change someone's mind, aggressive arguing like this is much more likely to make the other person believe what they already believe more strongly (i.e. the opposite of what you want).

I used to suffer badly with anxiety (and depression) for years. I was fortunately able to get the help I need and eventually recover. Around the same time I had about a month off work.

The day of my return, as I drove in, I noticed I felt physically sick. It took me a few moments to realise it was anxiety, and that I had forgotten what it felt like.

I handed in my notice 3 days later.

I feel like I must be missing something, because I don't understand this author's point at all.

"Lots of websites think “Vertical Screen == Mobile User”!" No, they don't - They think a 720px wide screen is a tablet user, which is probably a fair assumption.

I could equally write "Just because I browse zoomed in 500% doesn't mean I'm on a mobile"

When you zoom in, things get bigger, so fewer of them will fit on the screen... You have a choice between horizontal scrolling, or the website showing you the version of itself designed for smaller viewports.

Looking at the "How it should render" screens - I just checked the Guardian site, and that is exactly how the website looks at 1080px wide. The author admits that because of their zoom solution they are running at an effective width of 720px, so maybe just.. don't do that??

The proposed solution doesn't seem to solve anything, because physical size of the screen isn't the full story, it also depends on how far away from the screen the user is - which the browser can never know.

Given that there is only a finite amount of money/resources available to help people, giving extra to someone based on their race is equivalent to depriving another of help based on their race.