The 3D medium had some fantastic art. There were a lot of gimmicks in movies you’d expect, like harold and kumar go to whitecastle (not meant to be a serious movie). But there were also fantastic shots and art direction such as in tron: legacy and prometheus, where 3D provided a much deeper feel of space and made certain shots that much more emotionally resonant and beautiful.

There were a lot more misses than wins, as most directors saw it as a gimmick, but not everyone did. The folks who thought carefully about how extra dimensions would affect a shot (even when it was done in post rather than shot on 3D cameras) made some wonderful art, and it’s a shame so many folks missed out on it because they weren’t able to see past it as a gimmick either.

The quantity of disinformation is irrelevant if people don’t fall for it

I don’t know about you, but I find it increasingly difficult to find unbiased takes and find myself spending more time digging than I previously did. Because of this I find myself increasingly mislead about things, because the real truth might be so obscured that I need to find an actual academic to parse what information is out there and separate primary source from other mislead individuals.

Not to say I don’t disagree with your point, I think you make a fair one, but I do believe that the quantity of disinformation is absolutely relevant, especially in an age where not only anyone can share their misinformed belief online, but one where this is increasingly happening by malicious actors as well as AI.

Just dropping by here to remind you to treat others on this instance in good faith, even when you disagree.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a way to solve everything. But an authoritative body can build credibility and hold onto it. People should still be skeptical and still review, but that’s a normal part of the scientific process. Knowing what’s more and less credible is a normal process of research, and learning to assess credibility is important too. Peer review doesn’t need to be torn down as a concept, it just needs to be taken with a healthy grain of salt, like all processes. This is part of why I mentioned how some journals are more reputable than others - it’s a reflection of how often their peer review misses important things, not a reflection of how bullet-proof their science is. Everyone makes mistakes, the goal should always be to make less.

Also, to be clear, I’m talking about the post-research and pre-publish step, not the pre-research proposal step - that form of peer review can fuck right off.

Also of great importance which I should have probably highlighted in my initial post - this is really dependent on the field itself. In medicine people put in effort for that kind of review. I’ve peer reviewed quite a few papers and I’ve received really good advice from peer reviewers on some of the papers I’m on. Certainly this can happen in environments where this kind of review isn’t necessary, but the institutions that exist do make it a lot easier. An open source self-hosted model would make it really hard to get an idea of how many eyes were on a particular paper, and would make keeping up with continuing education difficult… of course unless groups of people made their career reviewing everything that emerges and putting together summaries or otherwise helping to sift through the noise.

In certain fields, at least, there are important steps these papers provide such as screening and review that are simply not feasible through as self-hosted. People who understand what the paper is about and can sniff out bullshit - be it cooked numbers, incorrect figures, improper citations, etc. are an important part of the process. Heck, even among academic papers out there, some are much lower ‘quality’ than others in that they are frequently bought off or have poor review processes allowing fluff and bad science to get through.

With all that being said, scihub is a thing and even paid journals are often easily pirated.

Framing it as what ‘sparked complex life’ is what makes it slightly clickbait-y. The circumstances which involved the creation of RNA/DNA is arguably more important when we talk about what ‘sparked complex life’, but it’s really borderline and this is an important discovery and previous gap in knowledge so I think it’s excusable here.

Kids have been doing idiotic shit to themselves since the dawn of time. Tik tok or youtube didn’t cause this.

It’s not about who caused it, it’s about responsibility. The responsibility for making it easy to spread, amplifying the message. Kids in your class is very different from millions of viewers. Even in grade school there’s a chance an adult might see it and stop it from happening or educating the children.

Ultimately this is an issue of public health and of education. For such a huge company, a $10m fine is practically nothing, especially when they could train their own algorithm to not surface content like this. Or they could have moderation which removes potentially harmful content. Why are you going to bat for a huge company to not have responsibility for content which caused real harm?

smooth talker

One man, a bartender, avoided a fine by arguing that he was a goth and that was why he had eyebrow piercings, “turquoise hair” and wore a “black T-shirt rolled up to his chest”.

Slightly clickbait-y title, but super cool and important discovery!

I found the following particularly interesting:

They also learned that in pairings that work, both partners adapt to each other — a phenomenon that has been largely overlooked. It wasn’t just the bacteria adapting to a new environment; the host changed too, even in the early stages. “That is a fundamentally important question that people have ignored,” Richards said. “This opens the doors for real advances.”

Would love to see better standards around wattage and throughput, but my understanding is they are trying to work towards that already! Unfortunately that’s a problem for all USB cables and has been a problem since they started adding additional specs besides 5v/1.5a so it can be the next problem they tackle now that they’ve standardized an interface 😄

The Michael Bay method of video game production - overproduced with no substance

The discussions on this have kind of gone off the rails, so I’m locking this post. Please don’t sling insults at each other because you have a disagreement about what is or isn’t propaganda and stop being weirdly defensive of countries as a whole - none of them are a monolith, they are all ran by people.

@alyaza@beehaw.org might know of some additional spaces

Interesting thought piece on the importance of interconnection and what is lost when the connections are obscured. I just wish more people in charge of creating AI were spending more time thinking about what we lose in this compression. Thanks for the link, I appreciated the read.

omg this is so cute! I wish I had a top like that

And thank you for engaging in good faith! Appreciate you 💜

As an aside I have a degree in neurobiology and work in health care and would be happy to discuss things with you if you ever have questions.

Yes, antidepressants are not considered addictive by the same big pharma companies who told us that Oxycodone was not totally fine.

No, I’m talking about how researchers, who do not have conflicts of interest, have to say about these drugs.

What is the difference between a physical dependence and addiction?

Googling this will give you plenty of pages drawing the distinction between the two. For example, here’s a webmd article on the difference. In short, it’s meaningful to draw clear distinctions and definitions around where an urge is coming from. Withdrawing from a substance does not necessarily mean you desire the substance. Taking the substance to avoid withdrawal symptoms might happen because you wish to avoid the negative symptoms, and treating the symptoms could be enough to get someone off the substance causing problems. Addiction, on the other hand, is characterized by a strong desire to continue drug use despite the ways in which it is negatively affecting one’s life. It is possible for addiction and physical dependence to have overlap (and for many drugs this is common) but they are mutually exclusive - one does not necessarily imply the other and the presence of one does not mean there is the presence of the other.

If they aren’t addictive, but cause the same withdrawal symptoms which result from addiction, in some cases severely, then what should we call them?

While withdrawal symptoms can vary with the nature of addiction, one does not need to be addicted to experience withdrawal symptoms. Many common, non-addictive chemicals have withdrawal symptoms. Nearly every drug has some kind of withdrawal symptoms. Withdrawal symptoms are the direct biological consequences of a human changing their equilibrium with the addition of or removal of an exogenous substance or the regular use of said substance and the long-term biological changes it can have on one’s body.

At a high level, I would highly suggest you educating yourself on drug dependence and recovery as well as the psychology of addiction. These are high level basic concepts which are taught to you in any human-centered biology and psychology coursework.

I’m removing this because Sabine has repeatedly been lambasted by the media for junk science, and because she’s a known transphobe.

Antidepressants are highly addictive and it doesn’t get talked about

SSRIs are not addictive and almost no antidepressants have addictive qualities. Many can cause withdrawal symptoms, which is very different from addiction, and a few select agents have been misused in contexts where access to drugs are low and quality of life are low, such as prison, but this kind of use needs to be considered in context, as these individuals are desperate for escape.

Please do not spread misinformation.

It’s a big step up from literally drowning lab rats as an experiment, but we’ve got a long way to go before we get even reasonably ethical with lab animals 😔

To be fair if anyone was gonna not kill them when they’re done, this lab seems like they might be the ones.