I think what happened is Google bought a license for source code and customised it.

In reality, the world works because of human automotons, honest people doing honest work; living their life in hopefully a comforting, complete and wholesome way, quietly contributing their piece to society.

There is no shame in this, yet we act as though there is.

I’m interested too, but don’t have amazing patience to dig into it.

A sane default previously; as news changes and the status quo also, but it makes you even more likely to encounter slop now.

You know this if you have the science degree you're claiming.

As for Google AI Overview: if that's your standard of evidence now, we've come a long way from 'I subscribe to science.'

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...

It found microplastics caused a decrease of 5.99 million/mL in sperm concentration, 14.62% in sperm motility, 23.56% in sperm viability, and a 10.65% increase in sperm abnormality rate. (I copied and pasted these values directly from the source).

You said you'd be "onboard immediately" if someone showed you a rigorous causal link. This is a meta-analysis with an adverse outcome pathway mapping the causal chain from molecular initiating event (ROS) through to tissue-level damage. That's about as rigorous as it gets before human clinical trials, which (for obvious ethical reasons) nobody is going to run.

As for the p=0.056 critique: you picked the weakest single data point from one of four links and declared victory (scientific!). The in-vitro study I linked exposed actual human semen to microplastics under controlled conditions and observed time-dependent decline in motility and increased DNA fragmentation. That's not a simple correlation, it's a direct causal experiment on human tissue. You didn't address it.

The goalposts have moved from "show me evidence" to "show me a meta-review" to "well not THAT meta-review." At some point you have to engage with what the research actually says rather than with what you'd like it to say.

- Microplastics found in 76% of human semen samples, with PET-exposed men showing reduced sperm motility: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12299061/

- Multi-site study across China (113 men), PTFE microplastics linked to sperm dysfunction (published in eBioMedicine/Lancet): https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-39...

- Microplastics found in every human testicle sampled, at 3x the concentration of dogs, with PVC correlating to lower sperm count in canines: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36948312/

- In-vitro exposure of human semen to polystyrene MPs showed time-dependent decline in motility and increased DNA fragmentation: https://www.mdpi.com/2305-6304/13/7/605

The mouse study I linked earlier isn't the whole picture; it's one piece. The "no human evidence" line was maybe defensible in 2022. It isn't anymore.

Also, re: "1000 mg/L is unrealistic".. the study used two doses, 100 μg/L and 1000 μg/L. Raw surface water in Amsterdam has been measured at ~50 μg/L. The lower experimental dose is well within an order of magnitude of real-world contamination. That's how dose-response science works.

Comparing this to homeopathy is… a choice.

That we haven't observed such extreme behaviour in a scientific way in humans doesn't mean it isn't there, it's just that we haven't yet scientifically observed anything. That there is some evidence in favour of it having adverse effects somewhat defeats the idea that it's "provably non-harmful", which is your current stance.

It might be interesting; instead of downplaying the harm, to see if we can observe any patterns that fit with these findings over the course of human history with the introduction of microplastics...

and if we were to do that, we'd find some interesting correlation, even if it's not provably causation yet.

https://www.healio.com/news/endocrinology/20120325/generatio...

We also know that plastics are a source of hormone disrupting chemicals; https://health.clevelandclinic.org/how-environmental-toxins-...

Bury your head I guess? Just make sure it's not a polyester pillowcase.

The exposure from food packaging is many times more prominent than polyester, which slows down leeching over time.

source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12989-022-00453-2

So, it's having an effect of some kind.

Beyond your personal intake though there's bigger fish.

Car tyres are the #1 source for microplastics entering rivers, and it's not even close (they're thought to be the source of up to 85% of all environmental microplastics).

Those particulates don't just vanish, they end up in the soil and the waterways and it ends up inside you, no matter what you do.

And you start reading something so incomprehensible that you start to wonder if there's just this universe hiding in plain sight directly under the universe you've always known.

That is the precise feeling I get when I trying to understand this post.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the exposure, but damn if I'm not sweating trying to understand why this all matters.

And you use them for remote development?

I think this is highly unusual.

I’ve never heard of anyone doing that.

If you use a cloud provider and use a remote development environment (VSCode remote/Jetbrains Gateway) then you’re wrong: cloud providers swap out the CPUs without telling you and can sell newer CPUs at older prices if theres less demand for the newer CPUs; you can’t rely on that.

To take an old naming convention, even an E3-Xeon CPU is not equivalent to an E5 of the same generation. I’m willing to bet it mostly works but your claim “I build on the exact hardware I ship on” is much more strict.

The majority of people I know use either laptops or workstations with Xeon workstation or Threadripper CPUs— but when deployed it will be a Xeon scalable datacenter CPU or an Epyc.

Hell, I work in gamedev and we cross compile basically everything for consoles.

I’ll grant you he’s a Nazi sympathiser, there’s enough evidence for that and its easy to lay it out. But that’s the argument you should be making, with specifics, not just calling him a Nazi and leaving it there. Because the specifics are what actually alarm people. The label just lets them dismiss you.