Reddit is a worse echo chamber than Twitter ever was.
I gave up on it when I got banned from certain subreddits for posting quotes from congressional testimony. If you post anything that deviates in the slightest from the moderator's viewpoint, you get banned.
The end result is an echo chamber that's getting tighter and smaller, excluding any diversity of opinion. It's no way to run a business.
Reddit's business is to house all of the echo-chambers, though, isn't it? That seems like a great business to be in, during this Heyday of Echo Chamber Construction™.
All of the like-minded echo-chambers. They seem to have no appetite for certain heresies and have walked back Aaron Swartz' original emphasis on free speech as a virtue.
> All of the like-minded echo-chambers. They seem to have no appetite for certain heresies and have walked back Aaron Swartz' original emphasis on free speech as a virtue.
Reddit is ultimately amoral, despite the sensibilities of its moderators, imo. They want to sell ads and IPO, thus they've been increasingly purging communities, posts, and individuals that are either not advertiser-friendly or create trouble.
Even as a casual user of the site, I have noticed a sharp increase in the number of submissions and comments that get Removed by Reddit (i.e., administrators) for no reason. I think they just went completely 'mask-off' after the debacle with Aimee Challenor.
It's not just the mods, the users on Reddit are equally awful and contribute more to the echo chamber imo.
The UK politics subreddit used to be one of my favourite subreddits back in the early 2010s. Back then it was quite a small community and while we had differences of opinions I think it's fair to say we enjoyed each other's company. But around the time of the Brexit vote, then Trump shortly after that, the subreddit started getting flooded with reactionary, low-effort comments and anyone who tried to provide a nuanced opinion or alternative view point was typically downvoted and insulted.
I along with a few other long-time commenters were mostly in favour of Brexit at the time so we would constantly be downvoted and insulted whenever we wrote anything in favour of Brexit. And the worst was when a post made it to /r/all because then you'd an even larger flood of low-effort commenters just downvoting and insulting everyone with a different opinion.
And this wasn't even just minor insults, this was people telling me to kill myself and that I'm a horrible person literally everyday. I'm not sure how much this was a political subreddit thing vs Reddit generally, but it was honestly ridiculous the stuff people would say to me there.
Needless to say, I obviously left the community shortly after 2016, but I've seen similar things play across the site since. There seems to be no room for a difference of opinion there anymore. The mods if anything are just an amalgamation of the average Redditor.
The users being a horrible part of the echo chamber stems from echo-chamber-promoting moderation. Mods instaban (shadow ban) anyone and everyone in an extremely automated fashion based on a long list of rules and filters. You're only left with people that perfectly toe the line.
I like this observation. You could argue that Salesforce did the same thing pivoting from CRM into the platform as a service market. They had the user management, security, configuration tools, reporting, etc, that they were able to take into marketing, call center, etc.
My dad used baby powder as deodorant because he had sensitive skin. Died of lung cancer at age 58, and never smoked. Anecdotal, but this really pisses me off.
The various facets of all transportation industries probably have as much or more asbestos grinding into the air with particulate matter from vehicular brake systems on trains and automobiles, and to a lesser extent aviation.
The soot in the NYC subway is probably ripe with asbestos. Every time I smell that acrid ceramic smell of new brakes on a subway car, I figure I'm catching a whiff of asbestos, and it's a smell I encounter more than talc.
I only know the smell for what it is from changing brake pads on my car a few times, years ago.
Asbestos brake pads are illegal in the US as far as I know (and I’ve heard that the asbestos in the old banned ones was not the same as the really nasty stuff in insulation, even after being ground up during normal use).
Did NYC somehow get a special “kill all the commuters” exemption under the radar, or something?
Asbestos brake pads are NOT illegal in the US, according to the EPA[0]. I have not been able to find any evidence that asbestos brake particulate is safe[1].
There are numerous places online saying that most brake pads no longer use asbestos, particularly OEM brake pads. Though I can't find any numbers to back this up. Also, I have no idea how carcinogenic the replacement materials are; I hope they are less dangerous than asbestos.
I couldn’t find much detail about the sources of home/office radon in the linked site. Is it suspected to naturally occurring ie coming out of the ground or from some product or chemical used?
It rises up out of the ground, and the (expensive) solution is to install a vacuum system beneath the slab that vents the the outside. I know because my parents' house has such a system. More info: https://sosradon.org/reducing-radon-in-your-home
It comes out of the ground naturally in many places and accumulates to dangerous levels in buildings with poor ventilation. There is very little industrial use of radon.
As others have mentioned asbestos increases the risk of a very specific type of lung cancer.
People don’t seem to realize that there isn’t a cause for every case of cancer. Sometimes you just get cancer even having never been exposed to any risk factors.
I had heard that _any_ powder or particulate matter is a danger to lung health long term. Including talc whether or not it has asbestos.
The size of of the particles on the average might not be small enough to matter, but over time and volume there will be more than a few small particles.
I've been listening to the "3 Body Problem" trilogy by Cixin Liu. I'd highly recommend it because not only is it some mind blowing sci-fi, but it also contains one of the most interesting solutions to the Fermi paradox that I've ever seen. I don't want to give anything away because the books are a real treat if you're like me, but the explanation is based on game theory and actually makes a ton of sense.
Try the Revelation Space series for a better, and earlier take on the idea.
The 3 body problem is masquerading as hard SF but isn’t. The author totally misunderstands physics, astronomy, and space faring technology. I hated the books, personally, and don’t see why they are so hyped.
I just learned of the gun,https://github.com/amark/gun project from a downthread post. I was kind of surprised that it didn’t exist and had some really janky sql+git stuff.
> What an absurd statement. The manifesto argues that women are genetically inferior and that most women developers shouldn't have their job.
That's not what he said at all. He said they are, on average, different, but people can't talk about it without resorting to these Trumpish generalizations and accusations. Did you actually read it?
Don't know why you're being downvoted for this, it's actually pretty smart. Like leaking an unsubstantiated rumor to a reporter but probably with more legal ramifications.
It's really sad to me that whiteboard is thought of as an interviewing tool. Opened this thread thinking "cool, maybe there are some brainstorming techniques I haven't heard of from other industries" and there's only stuff about interviewing techniques.
Maybe I can help. If I need to explore some ideas and there's no whiteboard handy I write on the windows instead. Gotta be prepared when inspiration hits!
I am curious to know how you would prevent a child from running into the road given that said child isn't yet mentally developed enough to understand the risk. And they will do it over and over regardless of how well or in how many different ways you try to explain the risk to them.
This treatment does not use CRISPR. It involves the hollowed out and repurposed lentivirus (similar in kind to HIV)[1]. The virus keeps it's own viral 'insert-into-DNA' machinery, but is stripped of its replication machinery as well as the code for its physical shell. The insert-into-DNA machinery is further hijacked so it can insert nothing but the DNA that encodes for the new mutated hemoglobin (HBB [T87Q][2]) that, when the patient's cell reads that new DNA will produce a new version of the protein. That insertion machinery with its new payload is loaded into a viral shell in a lab somewhere (again, its replication machinery and the code for new shells has been gutted).
When this new virus is given to the patients it does indeed infect the patients' cells. It uses its viral machinery to insert itself into the genome of the patient, more or less randomly - and that is not ideal. CRISPR systems are much newer and are being worked on right now, but the technologies you see in use in this article predate CRISPR. CRISPR will only speed up what was here a monumental (and slightly more risky) effort.
Regardless of how the code gets inserted into the genome (lentiviral in this case, CRISPR likely in future therapies), the instruction set to produce the new protein is not only capable of doing the job of the broken hemoglobin, but actually enables the broken hemoglobin to regain some of its function, likely coming very close to actually curing the patient.
In computer terms, someone with sickle-cell disease has a typo in the source code that leads to a buffer overflow error in the oxygen transport module. We found stuxnet can inject live code into a running OS, so we stripped it of its payload, it's ability to replicate but kept its injection capabilities and gave it our hot-fix as its payload. Our patch will be injected into billions of running nodes, inserting a ~500 line patch randomly into the each node's memory stack (yes, that's scary - but if a few of the nodes (cells) go down, it's not a horrible problem, and the current price of doing the patch at all... CRISPR can help here in future versions). That new code provides not only an alternative oxygen transport package, but this new package, so long as its running on >20% of the nodes, actually forces the original code's memory to periodically flush, thus de facto correcting the original typo's overflow bug - allowing both the new package and the old (kinda bug-fixed) package to both now be useful oxygen transport code. No more bug = cure.
The patients had a code regression, and we're applying not just a 1.0 fix, but a very real 1.1 patch on the human hemoglobin instruction set (randomly, into live code, on millions if not billions of cells, using modified HIV technology).
Thank you for this brilliant and detailed explanation showing the differences between CRIPR and the virus method! I haven't seen anyone explain the concept of viruses in the language of buffer overflows! Delightful.
The lentivirus has a number of capabilities - insert into cell, insert into DNA, replicate payload, build capsid, encapsidate payload, escape cell. In this particular case the lentivirus was used both for it's 'insert into cell' as well as its 'insert into dna' capabilities - with all others being stripped.
CRISPR (more specifically, Cas9) is another protein machine that locates particular DNA sequences [1]. It can help take over from the lentivirus with respect to the 'insert into dna' capability. But you're right, we still have no better way to get it into the cell than to use a (lenti)-virus's own 'insert-into-cell' machinery. So a lentivirus might be used along with CRIPSR in order to just get CRISPR machinery into the cell.
This is further muddled by the fact that sometimes you actually want the dna that encodes for your CRISPR system to itself be inserted into the genome, and in that case you might keep both the lentivirus's 'insert-into-dna' machinery AND the CRISPR's own 'insert-into-dna' capability.
At the end of the day, lentivirus's capability to insert into DNA is not predictable, and therefore a bit dangerous (if it inserts its payload in the middle of an oncogene in a predisposed cell you could get cancer). CRISPR is a device which promises to bring specificity to the command, making it 'insert-into-dna-AT'. And in that way it could replace the job of lentivirus in the above gene editing technique.
I gave up on it when I got banned from certain subreddits for posting quotes from congressional testimony. If you post anything that deviates in the slightest from the moderator's viewpoint, you get banned.
The end result is an echo chamber that's getting tighter and smaller, excluding any diversity of opinion. It's no way to run a business.