They had participants spend either 45 mins doing normal smartphone use or 45 minutes watching a documentary, and the results were that both increased mental fatigue but the documentary group did not have reduced cognitive function, whereas regular smartphone use did.

"Results suggested that both watching a documentary and using a smartphone for 45 min increased subjective mental fatigue and drowsiness. Watching the documentary did not impair cognitive performance. Reaction times on the PVT and number of errors on NoGo trials in the Go/NoGo task were higher among the participants in the smartphone condition. These results indicate reduced vigilance and impaired inhibition capacities only after smartphone use. "

I mean, come on.

First claim in the article:

> But correlation is not causation, and research suggests that some of the supposed mental health crisis is an epidemic of overdiagnosis.

Linked paper doesn't support this. Only one study found evidence of overdiagnosis, and the data was both noisy and only focused on ADHD. It literally said "Most reviewed studies suggest that misdiagnosis does occur; however, only one study was able to examine overdiagnosis in child and adolescent mental disorders from a methodological point-of-view. This study found significant evidence of overdiagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder."

Another claim from the article:

> Meanwhile, youth have been doing better on many other outcomes: less crime, less smoking, less drug use, fewer teen pregnancies and fewer high school dropouts. If social media were truly “rewiring” the adolescent brain, we would expect the damage to be more consistent than a selective worsening on some measures and improvement on others.

This kind of muddled thinking is prevalent in the article. The vague term "rewiring" is being argued against, and the author expects that only one specific outcome should be consistent with it, and doesn't admit the obvious other explanation is that social media and internet addiction is replacing the other addictions.

I read the whole article and could deconstruct it more, but I won't--it's tinged with the author's own anecdotal conclusion that they turned out fine, so everyone else will.

> According to the latest figures from Statistics Netherlands (CBS), data centers used 5.1 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in the Netherlands in 2024. That is 4.6 percent of the country’s total electricity consumption, a near doubling in five years. Grid operator TenneT projects that data centers will consume 10 to 15 percent of the Netherlands’ electricity by 2030.

Yeah, so 2030 sounds like a long way off. It's 3 years away. We are not going to be meeting any climate targets.

Billionaires are sitting in board rooms paying millionaires to deal with all that bullshit why they are just trading stocks left and right and play shell games with businesses. They're at a completely different level of capital class and wouldn't touch a blade of grass.

I'm so glad you asked! Many smart people are now eating Snickers Bars(tm)! For you, I think, to get ahead of this trend, it would be the perfect smart person choice right now. It's nutty and has this amazing new invention called Nougat and chocolate!

Here's how it works. First you have to use your fingers to tear open the wrapper. Don't worry, the wrapper isn't going to hurt you. It might be a little effort, but you'll get it. Then you take a bite. Try to use your back teeth to chew it a little. Yeah, I know it's work, but it's good for you. And then just swallow it down!

Anything else I can help with?

> like expecting to use my lawn for your picnic or vegetable garden if I pay you to mow it twice a week.

The analogy is flawed. It'd be more apt if you were selling grass clippings and they were paid to run the business of growing and cutting the grass. If you just own the land and call the shots, then sure, you're doing work too, but ultimately the resource that is of value to other people is primarily produced by the work of others. You've created an apparatus and put in work, and have earned (in some sense) compensation for enabling that. That's what most people would agree is equitable. But now we have corporations and stock; that adds a whole other dimension to this where you have a side hustle of selling future revenues in the form of stock on the open market, but retain privileged stock for yourself. The price of that stock goes up, you get disproportionately rewarded for that price increase. But even worse, when the market has a lot of money available for speculation, it can inflate the price of the stock far beyond what your employees can supply in terms of grass clippings (inflated price/earnings ratio). Your employees get zero of that inflated speculation bubble, but are absolutely the underlying value. In today's hyper growth world, the disconnection between revenue, growth, and valuations is worse than ever. Billionaires exist in this super-inflated valuation bubble that is completely disconnected from the grass clippings business.

What creates wealth? Mining raw materials? Work? Ideas? Services? Do you think any billionaire has created this wealth in these ways? No, they "create" a billion dollars by creating not value, but valuation. If it's a public company, they issue stock, which people buy for money. In the open market, the price of the stock goes up. Their valuation goes up. Their currency goes up.

Billionaires become billionaires by creating indirections of wealth. They create currencies. Like bankers, they create wealth by lending money they don't have. Those stock certificates are a currency, and trading the currency on the open market pumps up its valuation. Who buys it? People who think they too can make money off it in the future. Who pays them back? Maybe with dividends? Who makes those dividends? Who creates revenue? Mostly the organization they create.

There aren't words you say sitting around your desk that will create a billion dollars. But the desks they sit at, they can say words and a billion dollars are "created." I think that's what you don't want to admit. Their decisions are just amplified by a huge apparatus that they sit at, and the market scrambling to snip off a little profit by trading their stock in the future.

Sure they have businesses and things, but holy cow, we lionize the words they say around desks like it's some kind of magic holiness. I just don't get it.

It makes no sense if you reason backward from "I should be allowed to have infinite dollars" as a premise. You simply can't do enough work to create a billion dollars[1]. It is just not physically possible to create that much value through sheer effort, nor is it even possible to keep that much value stored anywhere you can physically defend yourself. We're not talking about some chest of gold you keep in a bedroom closet in your very big house. It's so much more than that. Every billionaire is a beneficiary of a large organization of hundreds, usually thousands of people, that they've managed to put themselves at the top of or make a direct beneficiary of, or owns a special kind of currency that the markets have inflated to a valuation. Similarly, defending the integrity of a sprawling set of assets like that takes a virtual army of security, even if it's just the stock certificates you supposedly have in your name.

And I reject the premise that there isn't a limit on ownership. Ownership is a social construct. Ownership requires a functioning justice system and police force to maintain. Both of said things are collectively agreed upon social contracts that absolutely are negotiated. If you disagree, then by all means, build a moat around your island with a trillion gold bars and man it with automated sentry guns. No one does that because we've negotiated a system that actively helps wealthy people maintain their wealth and defends them against pitchforks, which have a nasty habit of turning up when said justice and organization breaks down and leads to anarchy.

Don't want anarchy where rich people a lynched by mobs? Well, yeah, that's why we negotiate limits. I'm saying the social contract just doesn't let you have more than a billion dollars.

[1] And incidentally, one cannot even enjoy that much wealth, even if they dedicated themselves to it! The kind of enjoyments that us regular people enjoy, like hockey games and surf trips, wouldn't even put a dent in a billion dollars, even if done for a lifetime. It's absurd that we think hundred million dollar yachts and private jets for the lucky ones are a birthright of our system or something. Because that's what we're really talking about--obscene wealth, not just living comfortably.

The fact that we live in a society where people don't bat an eyelash at people who have literally 100,000x the median lifetime earnings of a person (literally, 1000x what I personally consider reasonable) and yet want more says that our society has passed one of these absurdity tests and just suck down whatever stupid propaganda they promulgate.

Oh, I can. The next version of Android won't run on my current phone, and the official FLIR ONE app that drives the plug-in IR camera that I use to hunt for cold spots in my house for better insulation decided it would uninstall itself because they won't support "old" Android--I mean, they won't support the Android they already support.

So my phone just existing for too long has caused the software to commit suicide, making another piece of hardware I paid good money for not work anymore.

That's not so much a reason to "upgrade" as throw good money after bad money by buying a phone that I don't need to get an OS I don't want.

I mean, they could have just left the goddamn app alone. But they didn't.

https://www.bmj.com/content/385/bmj.q781

FTA:

> Some 57% of US doctors received more than $12bn in payments related to medical drugs or devices from manufacturers between 2013 and 2022, an analysis has found.1 “Despite evidence that financial conflicts of interest may influence physician prescribing and may damage patients’ trust in medical professionals, such payments remain pervasive,” says the letter in JAMA.

This entire thread has a lot of "no security issues have ever been found in my code, and I test a lot. Therefore no bugs will ever exist in my code and we're all safe." To see you doing this in an explicitly security-conscious setting is distressing.

If anything, I see assertions like this and juxtaposed with blatant, willful misunderstanding of how C and C compilers work and it does the opposite of inspiring confidence.

Look at CVE-2009-1897; this is the classic example of how C compilers are happy to try to optimize code in the face of UB and lead to worse problems.

> If the above code has any but one of the above 16 outputs

I don't think you understand how insane optimizations in the face of UB can be. Just go look at this issue:

https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/issues/174844?utm_sourc...