> A high carbohydrate meal consumed prior to caffeine ingestion significantly reduced serum caffeine concentrations and delayed time to peak concentration
I would interpret this as similar to being able to take paper napkins or straws at a restaurant. You may be welcome to take napkins, but if you go around taking all the napkins from every dispenser you'll likely be kicked out and possibly they'll start keeping the napkins behind the counter in the future. Similarly if people start treating "you can contribute AI code to LLVM" as "feel free to submit nonsense you don't understand", I would not be surprised to see LLVM change its stance on the matter.
This is likely satire along the lines of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal. The main giveaways are the directness of the language and the time of writing (on the tail of covid when people were unironically making such proposals).
>on the tail of covid when people were unironically making such proposals
They were? I remember a lot of awful stuff about those years, but this isn't one of them. I remember people making somewhat mean-spirited but understandable comments about (some) older people getting killed off by Covid due to their own actions (refusal to take the threat seriously and take precautions, leading them to catch it, and then have much worse outcomes due to the fact that the disease was much more deadly for unhealthy and older people).
The Lieutenant Governor of Texas, one month into the pandemic, was mulling how it might be best for society if we just carried on as-is and accept that a lot of old people would die:
> As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival, in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren? And if that's the exchange, I'm all in.
The chief science advisor of the UK described his meetings with the PM of the UK in 2020:
> “He says his party ‘thinks the whole thing is pathetic and Covid is just nature’s way of dealing with old people – and I am not entirely sure I disagree with them. A lot of moderate people think it is a bit too much.’”
> Vallance’s diary also recounts how then chief whip Mark Spencer told a cabinet meeting in December 2020 that “we should let the old people get it and protect others”. He said that Johnson then added: “A lot of my backbenchers think that and I must say I agree with them”.
For the past 50 years western society has been transitioning from a high-trust, long-term model of employment to a low-trust, immediate payout model. Once that transition starts everyone involved frequently (rightfully) feels betrayed as the sliding trust-reality falls short of their trust-expectation. This presents as abuse and leads everyone to feel justified to commit further abuses. It takes a rarely strong leader to punch through that and re-establish a higher trust baseline and as society continues to move towards zero-trust the strength requirement to maintain that baseline increases.
As an employer you either accept that you aren't strong enough to fight it and thus try to stay ahead in how little trust you apply. Or you accept that you will pay a price (in being betrayed more than you betray and inspiring others to join in) to create and defend a higher baseline trust.
Knowing how much efficiency is lost in a low-trust environment makes dwelling on this depressing/infuriating. But unless you are a great enough leader to drag a billion people back up to a higher trust baseline, then you need to accept it or go mad in denying it.
I mention all this because in a deepening low-trust environment both employees and employers are incentivized to never acknowledge the damage done by this environment as the status quo of who wears the increasing cost of those damages is constantly renegotiated without the stabilization of trustworthy long-term expectations. All of which can surface as threads such as this one.
My point is that the abuse goes two ways. I do not believe this is a recent phenomenon. One of my historical interests is crime, and there's nothing, nothing new about that under the sun.
My default tendency is to trust people until they prove themselves untrustworthy. It goes back to my experience with Caltech's honor system, which is a high trust system and influenced me a great deal.
BTW, the cash register was invented to stop the catastrophic levels of embezzling done by bartenders.
A friend of mine who works at a large store told me recently that management decided to have a look at their surveillance cameras, and discovered a number of employees were filching merchandise. They were all promptly fired.
Sometimes a manager will tolerate a certain level of theft by an employee, for various reasons. But they'll never promote the thief to a position of trust, and the thief will never realize why he doesn't get promoted.
Ignore the title. The paper looks reasonable. It characterizes the process of break-down which will enable the design of better products in the future.
The definition of the extents of a city is completely arbitrary. For example Manhattan is only part of a city, yet the authors don't even blink at treating it alongside cities that are located all around a hilly harbor with extensive sprawl (Sydney) or that constitute an entire country (Singapore).
This paper is more than anything a showcase for the method they created. I think the point of their visualisations is to make them as appealing as possible, and people want to see how Manhattan looks, but they might now want to see how a certain neighbourhood in Singapore looks. And that choice definitely did help create virality for their research a few years back.
The extent is also culturally specific. In America, Sydney could be regarded as multiple cities. Likewise in Australia, Dallas-Fort Worth would be regarded as a single city.
I am not an expert but it looks like the quanta author has invented a definition for "highly connected" because C-expander was too complicated a concept for them (me too). There are older competing definitions for "highly connected" along the lines of a graph where the number of edges is greater then half the number of vertices which is obviously insufficient to guarantee a loop.
Then they have used networks instead of graphs and added a comma, for no apparent reason.
Causes of loss of smell include but are not limited to:
* Alzheimer’s disease
* Brain aneurysm
* Brain surgery
* Cancer
* Chemical exposures to insecticides or solvents
* Diabetes
* Huntington’s disease
* Kallmann’s syndrome
* Klinefelter's syndrome
* Korsakoff’s psychosis
* Malnutrition
* Multiple sclerosis
* Multiple system atrophy (MSA)
* Paget’s disease
* Parkinson’s disease
* Pick’s disease
* Radiation therapy
* Rhinoplasty
* Schizophrenia
* Sjorgren’s syndrome
* Traumatic brain injury
* Zinc deficiency (why obsess over this one?)
Zinc is not used to treat symptoms, the mechanism (observed in a test tube) is that intercellular zinc inhibits RNA virus replication.
Zinc supplementation above the RDI is NOT recommended for treatment of covid. Long term excess zinc can cause potentially irreversible neurologic manifestations (i.e., myelopathy, paresthesia, ataxia, spasticity).
I have no idea how we get from "x and y are potentially both symptoms of zinc deficiency" to "clearly, this is a dangerous comment that requires warnings against taking excess zinc..."
Not that I actually expect anyone to launch a scientific study based on my hn comment, but that is the only actual course of action I suggested.
The bee results are suss. Bees use pheromones to mark things so there may be no socially learned behavior beyond seeking food at a marked source which is built in. There's also the small sample size which the article mentions. It is still cool that they learned the blue/red trick in the first place either way.
Oh, it's for sure not a done deal. But IIRC bees are known to have at least some capacity for memory, in terms of seeking out known food sources that go beyond just following a pheromone marker. I don't know if the mechanism behind this is well understood, but going by the blue/red trick it seems like they can to some extent 'learn' to recognize various types of flowers and seek them out by memory. Whether this type of information is transferable between bees in ways /other/ than a pheromone marker that guides other bees to the same immediate sensory experience of "blue flower = good nectar source", I don't know. But it's intriguing!
Also worth noting that bees can transfer navigational information to eachother by 'waggle dancing', so they have multiple possible vectors for information sharing going for them.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14402...