Neuromancer49 @ Neuromancer49 @midwest.social

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7

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173

Joined

3 yr. ago

I have been dealing with NVIDIA driver issues on my Linux PC because my 1080 was good enough to play my favorite games. A very sincere fuck you to NVIDIA.

I chose EndeavourOS initially because I was relatively new to Linux (I tinkered with Ubuntu in grade school) and wanted out of Microsoft's environment. The support community is amazing and newbie-friendly. They've helped me through a few bricked systems.

Now I'm at a crux because I own a 1080 and am tired of mistakenly breaking my installation because NVIDIA stopped supporting open source drivers for old cards. I felt uncomfortable building my own driver packages and was relying on AUR, but the recent security breach has me skittish.

Rather than switch to another distro (Mint being the top contender), I decided to replace my graphics card and stay with Endeavour because it seems the Arch distros are the only ones staunchly against age verification laws. I'm fortunate enough to be in a position to update and stick with Endeavour. Maybe when I actually get good at Linux I'll switch to pure Arch.

Link to the published article is present within the article, which I always appreciate.

Based on a cursory read of the methods, they included socioeconomic status as a covariate, which is always the first thing I check in similar articles. However, they only consider the mother's cleaning habits, which I find surprising.

Growing up with firearms, my dad was always the one maintaining the guns. He was the vector for any exposure to contaminants. My dad was also a neat freak. I would have liked to have seen the researchers consider the father's cleanliness factor. EDIT: if it was present in the epidemiological data, it may have correlated with safe storage. Clean dads are more likely to store their guns safely, I bet.

Holy crap, you're right! Fixed it

I can't get any banking apps to work. I just use their web version in a pinch. Only loss I've experienced.

X4 is an economy simulator masquerading as a flight simulator. It also goes on sale regularly!

Me and two friends were coincidentally summoned at the same time - 3 different counties across two states. Mine and one of my friend's summons were cancelled, and my other friend just got sent home yesterday from a case as he wasn't needed. But the position has tenure for 3-4 months so we might have to go back.

PIs are trained on science that is likely outdated by the time they become professors, rewarded to churn out as many grants as possible, and never given a day of managerial training. Switching to industry after my PhD was a breath of fresh air.

Monster Train 2. I have 1 more challenge run left before reaching 100% completion of those. Then I might finally pick up the DLC and try to finish 100% of clan combos at max crucible level.

Only then will I allow myself to pick up Slay the Spire 2. I try to avoid early access games, but will make an exception here.

In MT1 last month, I beat 100% class combos at C20. The challenges were less fun because they required you to play at C20, and I felt like that difficulty permanently limited what strategies were viable. Challenges in 2 are zanier and most are at a lower difficulty, so it's altogether more fun.

There are types of dwarfism that can lead to mental impairment, but not all. Calling on a personal anecdote, I work in a highly technical field, with two colleagues who are little people. I know one of them holds a PhD.

There are correlations between height and intelligence, but being tall doesn't make you smart, it just means you have access to good nutrients that make you both tall and smart. Human ancestors had different diets - once we figured out how to control fire, use tools, amd farm, our caloric intake practically exploded. Evolution then took over, and now our brains consume something like 20% of our daily caloric intake. So, feed your brain and stay curious!

I would bet, dollars to donuts, it's less that those parts of the brain have no designated purpose, and more that we just don't know them. Brains are really complicated and the tools we have to study them aren't perfect.

Part of what makes this so difficult to study is that we have very few regions of the brain with a single dedicated function. Outside of sensory and motor parts of the brain, many brain regions seem to do multiple things. Most function of the brain depends on networks of multiple regions firing together. Some regions of the brain can participate in multiple networks.

Then, consider that our best tool to study brain networks, functional magnetic resonance imaging, has poor spatial resolution. You may see the same region of, say, a cubic millimeter of brain tissue, active during two different cognitive tasks like memory and motor control, but it could be different populations of cells that happen to be next to each other. Also, functional MRI is going through some growing pains right now - we just learned in 2026 that fMRI signal isn't necessarily measuring neural activity as well as we thought, so it's back to the drawing board for a lot of these studies.

The biggest predictor of intelligence in the animal kingdom is the surface area of brain tissue, not size. You get more surface area by having more folds and bumps (sulci and gyri) on your brain.

Brains are made of neurons and neurons are organized into two types of brain tissue - gray and white matter. Gray matter is where the cell bodies are located, and white matter is where all their connections (axons) are located. Gray matter tends to be found on the surface of all these sulci and gyri, while white matter is located underneath this layer. More surface area = more efficiently connected brain cells.

I don't know of any literature looking at human intelligence related to folds and bumps, but that's not what I studied in graduate school. You have to be careful when looking at the older literature on intelligence because it was fairly prejudiced and designed to prove old ideas of race theory.

Academic publishing was definitely a contributing factor to why I left academic research.

I also believe we should incentive peer-review. Maybe every researcher should be evaluated on how many articles they peer-review each year, relative to the amount they publish. I knew some researchers who would publish dozens of articles every year, would peer-review zero of them, and then complain about poor quality peer review.

+1 for Endeavour, apart from the unfortunate update of legacy NVIDIA drivers (10xx series of cards losing mainline support) this December I've had 0 issues

This just in, hearing aids are woke?

Here's the original press release for anyone interested: https://newsroom.heart.org/news/long-term-use-of-melatonin-supplements-to-support-sleep-may-have-negative-health-effects

The most important sentence: "They were matched with peers in the database who also had insomnia but never had melatonin recorded in their health records. People were excluded from the analysis if they had previously been diagnosed with heart failure or had been prescribed other sleep medications." There are a few other sentences describing how well the control group was matched. I think it was a well-designed study.

I think there is still a risk of bias present, though, because people who decide to take melatonin might have more severe insomnia compared to people who just decide to just "live with it" and are not using sleep aids.

The next step should be a randomized clinical trial looking at heart failure rate in patients with insomnia dosed with melatonin versus placebo and/or a different medication. Until then, correlation does not mean causation. I don't think such a study will be done in the US because melatonin is considered a dietary supplement and is not subject to the same degree of regulation as medicine. Maybe in the UK, since melatonin is prescription only?

Tiny castle or big banana?

It gets better - the local minor league baseball team is called the Florence Y'alls. And their mascot is a water tower. It's so Midwest.

Jimthew.

By the time I finished graduate school, reddit was dead so I never bothered getting verified on the Science subreddits. It was a bummer!