Doctors blamed my first afib episode on dehydration. I had been very sick, could not eat or drink for days, and just experienced the highest fever of my adult life, nearly 105F. A few hours after the fever finally broke, I went into afib.
At that time, I was on an opioid pain killer for an abscess. The next time I was on an opioid pain killer, years later, I also had an afib episode. So I wonder if maybe I have some sensitivity to opioids.
I have paroxysmal afib. After my third episode, the doctor told me to quit consuming caffeine. Before quitting caffeine, I had an episode every 2 years. After quitting caffeine, I had an episode every 2 years. So I believe the statement that coffee is not associated with higher incidence of afib (at least in the general case... as the article states, your mileage may vary).
One the other hand, I find that dark chocolate has more negative heart effects: I associate dark chocolate, maybe unfairly, with premature beats (several 1000s per day). For that reason, I've avoided dark chocolate, which I love, for almost 25 years.
There's more variety of content on youtube, whereas I think TV sometimes caters to lowest common denominator (although that's less the case in the era of streaming: TV is much higher quality than it was when this study started in 1987).
On youtube, you could watch lots of silly dancing videos, car crashes, etc., possibly rotting your brain. Or you could watch history lectures, book reviews, documentaries, etc.
I didn't pick up on it. I see this often: comments on HN remarking that something is AI generated, yet it's not obvious to me. Makes me worry that I am an LLM myself[1].
I've seen lot of bizarre, hard to understand or weirdly formulaic writing pre-2023, so I guess that's why I don't assume anything is AI generated.
I watch (or listen to) a lot of youtube on my iPad (and sometimes on my TV, but not too often). I wonder if youtube watching is also correlated with the mentioned brain changes.
>The results indicate a correlation, not necessarily causation
Just to drive that home, "Study participants also did not undergo a baseline MRI", which of course could mean that they already had some of these brain changes, which may have driven more TV watching.
>Sedentary activity is correlated with slightly faster degradation of multiple brain measures.
It seems to matter what you do while you're being sedentary, at least according to this study. From the article: "Strikingly, the sedentary element of TV watching didn’t appear to be the main driver for these changes."
The article seems to change its title from time to time. The above is the title I saw when I last checked the actual link (the archived version has a different title).
A few interesting tidbits:
"Imagine that, in 2076, you’re walking through a residential neighborhood in La Mirada, California, a midcentury, southeastern suburb of Los Angeles, one of the regions at the epicenter of today’s housing crisis. [...] Some bigger houses have been subdivided into two homes. Other lots now hold triplexes, fourplexes, and small apartment buildings that sit comfortably among single-family homes. [...] the hard wall between home and commerce — which is near-universally mandated by local zoning codes today — has softened. Near the neighborhood’s edge, where local streets meet a larger main road, a neighborhood grocery and clinic have opened on what used to be strictly residential lots. And, yes: That is a donut shop running out of a neighbor’s garage. [...] more of the rituals of daily life mixed in, the suburb has gained a richer, more connected public sphere. There are simply more people around — walking, talking, and lingering."
Living in a place where you can just walk for 10 minutes to get to a coffee shop or grocery store, but still have the option to drive, is a joy. Unfortunately, there seems to be a QAnon-style of conspiracy theorists who protest the idea (I've even seen small groups of such protesters on a stroad where I currently live in Canada, even though I've heard no plans to make our stroad-heavy area the least bit walkable).
Also:
"“You have to ensure that every neighborhood is connected to another,” Alain Bertaud, former principal urban planner at the World Bank, told me. “The market does not provide that. The job of the planner is to get involved much less in what is private, and much more in what is public.”"
That sounds great to me. I don't really love the new "carved-out gated community" style of building that seems to be all the rage in Nevada (for example) these days, where you might have to drive for 10 minutes and go through two gates just to get to a house that borders on your backyard (but exists in a different gates community).
A team manager once called and asked me if anything changed in the hypervisor (I used to support and make local modifications to some virtualization software) because her team's daily data processing job failed, which previously had run with no issues and nothing changed at their end.
I commented back, maybe with a little too much confidence, that if their input file changes daily, then their program changes daily. That is, from one day to the next, it may take different paths (or a different combination of paths) through the code's logic. In that way, I claimed, her program was like a language interpreter, and her input files were like programs.
She didn't seem completely convinced, but apparently they got the job running again because there was no follow up on that particular issue.
In my own tiny way, I applied this logic when trying to be a contributor to an existing and popular open source project. I found that puzzling out poorly-written bug report tickets, ignored by the extremely busy experts on the project, I could find work to do.
I started by looking at well written tickets (to-the-point descriptions, minimal reproduction examples), but that method got me no work: some expert on the project would have a pull request for that kind of ticket in just a few hours, whereas I would need at least a week to figure out the root cause and another few days to craft a fix and a test.
So I started looking at ignored tickets, i.e., tickets that had been sitting around for weeks or months with no activity. Those often turned out to be very poorly written tickets with either very little information, or a huge wall of text with much business domain-specific info. If those tickets contained repro examples at all, they were often complex and very long, using external libraries I never heard of, and devoid of table schemas and example data. Sometimes I could get the author to provide more information, sometimes the author would not respond. I might have to infer schemas and make up my own data, try different things based on a stack trace, install libraries I would have preferred to not install, etc. I would work on trying to reproduce the problem for a few days, and at least a few times I struck gold. Then I would work on a self-contained, minimal reproduction case, followed by a week of sussing out the root cause. It was pretty time-consuming, but I was able to get a few fixes merged using that method, such that I was no longer a total stranger on the project (which helped me get other things merged into the code base).
This is from my memory of listening to the full interview a few days ago, not just this snippet: I am not sure he is advocating that people should avoid AI, as long as they recognize its limitations and dangers, and he admits it can boost productivity.
His argument is specific to himself only:
"Many programmers come at programming at a much more business oriented perspective. Their goal is to make a specific thing and sell it ... or release it as a piece of free software. And the goal is just to have the software. They don't really care how they got there. So if you're coming at it from that perspective, whether you programmed it line by line, or whether you use AI, doesn't really make a difference.
...
But for me, I just like the act of programming. That's always been kind of why I did it. It's just kind of a happy accident that I lived in an era where I got paid well to do that. But that wasn't why I did it ... It's not an argument about quality. It's not an argument about productivity. It's about a fundamental love of the act of programming."
I am in the same boat as Casey. I like to program more than I like the finished product (and for me, that's just fine, since I don't work for anyone, so I am not screwing up any company's productivity).
The discussion over work-from-home now seems like such a quaint topic from a different age (even though I was very much in favor of it when it was a hot topic).
>The supreme court ruled last year that prosecutors’ decision to allow a key witness to give testimony they knew to be false violated Glossip’s constitutional right to a fair trial.
Since stuff like this occasionally happens[1], and sometimes needs to be rectified long after a guilty verdict, I don't understand why any state would support the death penalty. Glossip is still alive only because there was a snafu related to the lethal drugs intended to kill him. Had that snafu been overcome, there would be no defendant to retry.
[1] "Occasionally" describes only the cases we know about, of course.
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