- cryzingerI recognize it as a quote from A Year With Swollen Appendices, which is a great read even if you aren't an Eno fan (although I am, which admittedly makes me biased :P)
- When you restart taking it after an "off" period, do you immediately resume whatever dose you were at before? Or do you taper up each time? (Curious because I know for many people, side effects level out after they've been at a given dose for long enough, but temporarily return whenever they increase their dose; not sure how "off" periods affect that kind of tolerance.)
- https://morino-sample.jp/ sells fake-food knickknacks like the ones mentioned in the article, including fridge magnets and keychains. Some of the ones I've bought are more realistic than others--which is fair since they're not for restaurant use anyway--but they're all delightful!
- > I had non-technical family members bragging at Thanksgiving about how they bought at box at their local Best Buy that has an app which plays any movie or TV show they want on demand without paying anything. They didn’t understand what was happening, but they said it worked great.
Sounds like one of these: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/11/is-your-android-tv-strea...
Probably not your problem to play tech support for these people and explain why being part of a botnet is bad, but mildly concerning nonetheless!
- I've seen a lot of references to this "Alexander Technique"[1] lately but no indication that it's anything other than the latest trendy pseudoscience that you can conveniently use to explain just about anything. (There seems to be a fair amount of overlap between it and what I can only describe as "rationalists who think they invented meditation".) Does anyone know why it's so popular now or who's behind the push?
- Ah that makes a lot of sense!
- If we can't predict/model these Turing machines' behavior because of unsolved math problems, what's stopping us from actually creating and running them to see what would happen (and maybe getting closer to solving those math problems in the process)? Is it just a matter of scale and resources?
My knowledge here is very limited, so this isn't a "why has no one tried this one weird trick"-type question. I assume there is in fact a good reason that I don't yet understand :P
- 1 point
- Respectfully, I'm not sure you can draw meaningful conclusions about a 100+ paragraph deep-dive article after reading the first eight or nine. The biography stuff is definitely relevant to the takeaways about Sacks' methodology and style:
> Other doctors had dismissed these patients as hopeless, but Sacks had sensed that they still had life in them—a recognition that he understood was possible because he, too, felt as if he were “buried alive.”
[...]
> Another patient is so aroused and euphoric that she tells Sacks [according to his telling in Awakenings], “My blood is champagne”—the phrase Sacks used to describe himself when he was in love with Vincze.
[...]
> “I know, in a way, you don’t feel like living,” Sacks tells her, in another recorded session. “Part of one feels dead inside, I know, I know that. . . . One feels that one wants to die, one wants to end it, and what’s the use of going on?”
> “I don’t mean it in that way,” she responds.
> “I know, but you do, partly,” Sacks tells her. “I know you have been lonely all your life.”
- Also worth noting that the New Yorker published a lot of essays from Sacks when he was alive. So there's a sort of meta thing happening here with a biography of one of their famous contributors.
- I like how the very first pages for this one are related to emergency procedures. Gotta put the critical stuff front and center!
- I mean, I didn't invent the term--but the literal definition of "exceptional" doesn't necessarily mean that something is positive, only that it's outside the norm.
- > Because they really are both very smart and disabled at the same time.
There's a term for exactly this: "twice exceptional"!
- That's also by Gawande! (And a great article, too.)
If you liked that, here's my own recommendation for something he's written: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/02/letting-go-2
- If it's just using Google search "before <x date>" filtering I don't think there's a way to game it... but I guess that depends on whether Google uses the date that it indexed a page versus the date that a page itself declares.
- That's also my guess, and specifically: if you're a trans man with a uterus, odds are high that you'd like to get it removed. Therefore hysterectomy, therefore hospital.
- Ha, I'm not the author--just a reader who found it interesting :)
- 6 points
- Google's "Messages" client on Android has a feature where, in RCS chats, if you send or receive a message that solely consists of a single applicable emoji (and I believe in response to certain emoji reacts as well?), a little animation plays. The :joy: and related emojis trigger a "haha so funny"-type animation, :cry: and similar trigger a sad, rainy cloud, and so on.
An interesting thing I noticed recently is that :skull: triggers the same "haha so funny" animation as :joy: does! Which kind of surprised me, because I was using the skull to convey "lol I'm dead", so it fit here, but I wouldn't think that's the primary use for it.