I'm not an expert but it seems it also lowers PFAs.
> In this randomized clinical trial of 285 firefighters, both blood and plasma donations resulted in significantly lower PFAS levels than observation alone. Plasma donation was the most effective intervention, reducing mean serum perfluorooctane sulfonate levels by 2.9 ng/mL compared with a 1.1-ng/mL reduction with blood donation, a significant difference; similar changes were seen with other PFASs.
The article was pretty much empty: someone trying to be edgy and making their word count. I didn’t enjoy reading the article and wish that for once I read the comments before the link.
an intimate discussion of his life and how it was forever changed by being a telemarketer? It was actually a very interesting and well written read - an autobiography disguised as a sales advice article.
The message seems to be: sales is a soul-sucking job, a demoralizing exercise on psychopathic exploitation in which making people feel something (be it good or not) is the way into their wallets.
The greatest minds of our generation are hard at work creating algorithms to give kids eating disorders, making the next iPhone 3mm thinner, and figuring out how to make a TV dinner that contains no actual food.
Our modern world is so incredible. I wish we could do some good things.
Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy: In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.
I expected to experience something similar, but on reading, it's so over the top that my brain has no problem realizing it's a joke. Violent movies on the other hand I can't really enjoy much anymore.
>Are laws written by mediocre people hence full of loopholes?
Guy once told me his job was to write some law in Spain, or for the EU, or somewhere in between. He submits his writings to his bosses, who tell him (paraphrased): "it's too clear, too watertight. Go back and make it more ambiguous." So he did.
Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing - laws should allow for some level of ambiguity, and should be written for outcomes. The enforcement is a negotiation between agents bound by the law and agents tasked with upholding the law.
It’s like hiring a web design firm and then showing up with a complete mockup - give them room to work.
Tangentially, in his linked page "hall of shame" https://jon-cld.s3.amazonaws.com/test/ahall_of_fshame_SSIMUL... , he argues humans prefer row A to row C. Personally in most cases I prefer row C. It may have less color accuracy, but is often a lot sharper, which in my eyes stands out a lot more.
Did you read the sentence right after he makes that claim?
> At Cloudinary, we recently performed a large-scale subjective image quality assessment experiment, involving over 40,000 test subjects and 1.4 million scores.
This isn't about your, my or Jon Sneyer's individual opinions on these photos, it's the consensus of 40,000 test subjects. And yeah, I agree with you that for a significant number of photos I disagree with the consensus. But given that we're both posting on HN we're both also likely the kind of people who like to prove other people wrong by actively looking for and overvaluing counterexamples, so also keep that in mind. Because to be honest, for a large number of photos I also agree with the consensus.
Psychovisual image quality tests are difficult and complicated. Selection of the population, methods, guiding text, motivation, etc. can lead to strange things happening.
As an example of the difficulties an academy leading corpora TID2013 has a reversal in quality between categories 4 and 5 -- highest quality images seem to get slightly worse quality ratings than the next highest quality images.
I observed a leading image quality laboratory to produce substantially different results for the same codec when the person conducting the experiments changed.
There are hard opinions if images should be reviewed one image pixel to one monitor pixel, or if images should be zoomed like they are in practical use, particularly on mobile.
Should zooming be allowed? Should people be allowed to move closer to the monitor if they want as part of the viewing? etc. etc.
Yes, I agree it is incredibly hard. On the other hand, if anyone has put in the work to give the "least bad answer so far" to this question it's Jon Sneyers.
I don't have time to dig through Twitter just now, but instead of just picking one image metric they've used all of them to also compare the testing methods themselves.
All my own experience and observations also suggest that Jon did an excellent job on this and is likely the first person to ever do it well with crowd-sourcing. In the past I have seen similar quality of results with hand-picked experts (image quality people, photographers etc.), but not with volunteers or crowd-sourcing.
It's also comparing two overly compresses images with encoders which produce very different kind of artificats (bluriness vs. blocks of wrong colors). Which one is better is always going to be subjective (or at least application-specific). Really, as long as the model rates both as shit it is not necessarily a bad model.
