Speaking about backing up...if one were interested in long term archiving, do magnetic platters offer longer lasting data integrity than SSDs in cold storage?
>..do magnetic platters offer longer lasting data integrity than SSDs in cold storage?
Yes. With an SSD the enemy is electron leakage. Minute quantities of electrons trying to escape an unnatural state and return to equilibrium. (yes, I just anthropomorphized electrons.) Magnets however are more stable by nature. (yes there is nothing natural about hard-drive storage. SMR doubly so!)
Anecdote/anecdata: I have been able to retrieve full drives worth of data off of drives that have sat in a cardboard box for 10 years. I also have trouble accessing data on 1-year old USB flash drives.
The JEDEC standard specifies client SSDs have to retain data powered off for a year under worst case temperature. Enterprise drives have a relaxed requirement for three months. This is because lower programming voltages are used to achieve higher total bytes written endurance.
Even hard disks should be powered on occasionally to test backups.
In general I trust the older tech more than newer for long-term archiving. So that would mean HDD (the oldest tech thereof you can find still sold, probably) or tape or DVD over SSD.
But multiple copies in multiple formats cannot hurt, and the most important stuff should have multiple live copies.
>These are dark days for supplements. Although they are a $30-plus billion market in the United States alone, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, selenium, beta-carotene, glucosamine, chondroitin, and fish oil have now flopped in study after study
Since the byline brings up race, its kind an aside but I'm almost convinced that a lot of our large scale nutritional/alternative medical studies give mixed results (and are not reproducable) because researchers are unwilling to sufficiently control for genes. High level categories like "black, white, hispanic, asian" are not enough.
I think its absolutely certain that thousands of generations of specialization for local geographies post africa lead to disparate dietary needs. Yeah, humans can pretty much eat anything, but regularly consuming the same diet may may be ideal for one ethnic group and unhealthy for another.
Hell, look at the distribution of lactose intolerance. Is drinking milk racist?
Lactose intolerant cultures don’t all avoid milk. They develop cultural ways of processing it like kefir that eliminate lactose, or they’re Japanese and just drink it anyway because they’re masochists and think it builds character.
Actually, the most lactose intolerant people I know are totally white and I think actually have worse undiagnosed medical problems but just think they’re lactose intolerant. And Asians I know aren’t lactose intolerant because even though they “are Asian” culturally and would look Asian to you they’re actually 2/3 genetically Scottish.
Testing milk as a supplement would be interesting I guess; I know in the 90s we were all taught it was needed for bones but more recently this is said to not be true because 1. bones need vitamin K which we don’t get enough of and 2. cows milk contains galactose which is bad for bones and may cause osteoporosis.
I strongly disagree. These accusatory virtue signals are everywhere, deliberate, and most importantly antithetical to reason. Ignoring this stuff is how we ended up with diversity quotas. We should all be pushing back at this point, meritocracy is literally at stake when people are hired for race/gender, and the dysfunction is already visible across many of our institutions.
I came here to read an article about sunscreen, not be implicitly lectured with distilled identity politics.
Filter out the chatter and follow the actual information. The article is on some online magazine site, who cares what they write. The original study says nothing about race whatsoever.
I'm with you, but I take a different approach: mercilessly mock the chatter and noise, discuss the information. Encourage information, discourage senseless garbage.
Diversity quotas irrespective of skill, and those that denigrate meritocracy are antithetical to reason.
But from where I sit I do not see any diversity quotas that choose race/gender over skill.
There might be exceptions somewhere, I won't lie. I only know about my corner which is big tech hiring.
What I see is an acknowledgement that much selection in our society (to universities, for jobs, etc) are subjective decisions that incorporate objective and subjective factors. Every student trying to get into Yale has perfect GPA, SATs, and a list of extra-curricular activities as long as my arm. So if they are equal on these measures, why not bring in slightly more folks from races that have been historically disadvantaged to offset past injustices? Is that fair to white students? No. But there is no "fair" way to make a choice like this.
Big tech hiring focus on diversity is much the same - the bar is NOT lowered for women or anyone from a minority race. The last step of hiring before an offer is an objective test of programming ability. And nobody gets through those except on merit. But the FIRST step of hiring for multi-billion dollar companies is to sift through thousands of interview applicants, or contact thousands of applicants on LinkedIn with identical sounding resumes. These steps are HIGHLY subjective and unscientific - they're based on keywords, feel of recruiters, overindexing on past signals (other big tech companies, big universities, etc). The first "screen out" phase of hiring has NEVER been a meritocracy. It's always been a gut feel of who "feels" like they would be a successful candidate.
This is where the diversity initiatives are focused - to try to shift the variables in a subjective non-meritocratic process to - again - offset past racial discriminations to try to even the playing field slightly.
I ask you to have patience with "being lectured about identity politics". I ask you to wonder why you find virtue signals "accusatory" if they're not talking to you or about you. Don't discount those talking about this subject as "woke", or "virtue signalers" or "social justice warriors".
Some of them are overly angry and vitriolic, yes. Some are tired of explaining concepts that are clear and for granted to them, thinking that at this point anyone that disagrees is simply an agitator. Not all show good faith. Some are in it for themselves, and the glory of being holier-than-thou. I'm not going to pretend that doesn't exist.
But most of the concepts being discussed are sound. And there is a lot of fire behind the smoke. There is a lot of past, present, and future "racism" that still needs to be understood, and addressed.
Shorter people (relative to their gender) systematically earn less. Yet we aren't in uproar about this, and they are still allowed to be the butt of many jokes.
Introversion is still taken poorly, as if it is a sin. Despite introversion having almost no relation to job performance without further context.
People who work better on different schedules are still funneled primarily into a 9-6 rhythm, being told to suck it up.
"White students" from poor backgrounds now struggle to move up even more, as they are selected against for "not being diverse enough".
Really, most companies with diversity quotas might not hire Joe, but they'll hire Juan who's basically the same as Joe except he's Mexican and loves Taco Tuesday more than Pizza Friday. It's diversity in the most superficial sense, looking for the same car with a different paint job. They're not in this to combat "racial injustices", they're in this to appease some crowd with too much money in an attempt to get more money out of them.
Remote work should help with this. I have no idea how tall my coworkers are.
> Introversion
In my corner of the world - the tech industry - it's taken to be a baseline, so there is no discrimination.
There IS insufficient accordances made for neuroatypical (ADHD, Autistic) people with interviews, but there is active discussion happening about it.
> "White students" from poor backgrounds now struggle to move up even more
So long as any part of our society remains not a pure meritocracy, of course some people will struggle against others. Money is still the best way to get ahead. So poor people will struggle, and there is not enough opportunities for everyone. White people still get selected to "move up" by the forces that be, they just aren't the ONLY ones that do so. Instead of 99% of the scholarships going to white students, maybe 50%% are. But if that reflects the demographics of the part of society that is making that choice, where is the problem?
> diversity in the most superficial sense
It's a correction for discrimination in the most superficial sense. It's a start. It's a stepping stone towards not having any discrimination, and not needing corrective action like diversity initiatives.
I don't have space to respond to your whole commend but upon skimming these two points stood out:
>Big tech hiring focus on diversity is much the same - the bar is NOT lowered for women or anyone from a minority race.
When employers industry wide are tripping over themselves to hire minorities, then yes, the bar is absolutely lower and pay higher. Its a classic perverse incentive.
>The last step of hiring before an offer is an objective test of programming ability.
Having been on both ends, there is absolutely nothing objective about interviews, and its perfectly possible to even pass a hard leetcode interview while lacking hard/soft skills. This is the basis for the diversity overcorrection: the allegation was that the system was implicitly biased against minorities, and the solution was to apply bias in the other direction.
Except the fundamental premise, all of the "proof" upon which the justification for racist/sexist hiring is a giant conflation; inequality of outcome is not strong evidence of discrimination. Especially when you have a glaring and obvious pipeline problem.
You can't snap your fingers and decide that you're going to hire up a bunch of minorities to senior positions tomorrow when they don't even exist in college today without sacrificing merit. Statistics and the normal distribution guarantee that a smaller pool of candidates will have a disproportionately smaller pool of high achievers and once those are vacuumed by corps virtually signalling for ESG Goodboy points you are forced to either abandon quotas or draw from closer to the mean. It is a statistical inevitability that minority hiring quotas lead to reduced average competence.
> You can't snap your fingers and decide that you're going to hire up a bunch of minorities to senior positions tomorrow when they don't even exist in college today without sacrificing merit.
You can, if OP's premise is sound - that you can get more diveristy hires simply by expanding the pool of candidates being considered.
I am deeply involved in hiring at Amazon, (and am a bar raiser) and we work super hard to make sure diversity candidates want to apply, are being considered fairly, don't fall through the cracks, but when it comes to the final on-site, it might as well be a blind audition. We teach interviewers to refer to candidates impartially and focus purely on the questions, and answers. The analysis and conclusions is reviewed in a group. There is no way to make a hire decision without supportive data from their performance on the coding test, or in their behavioural experience.
I can't speak for the entire tech industry, but I know at Amazon the bar has absolutely not lowered.
>I hated that people around me would put me in a category that was convenient for them. Because race is a pervasive concept in the U.S., it was easiest for people to label me as Black because I look Black. But I’m not only Black.
This woman is an excellent example of the ignorance, blindness, and cultural narcissism of the modern progressive movement. I am a European who grew up in Korea in the late 90s-00s, in a large city.
Everywhere I went, almost every korean within view would silently stare. The children would point, yell "miguk saram! (Korean for American person)" publicly, sometimes yell "puk yoo!" with middle fingers awkwardly displayed and run away laughing when I wasn't with my parents. Yet the author is completely unaware, totally conditioned to believe unquestioningly that the US has uniquely "pervasive" focus on race.
Based on my extensive travel across Asia, the US until recently was one of the least racist countries I have been to. The grand irony here is that it is the identitarian authoritarians who are forcing intersectionality down everyone's throats, and breeding racism.
I'm flagging this post because it is ignorant, narcissistic, political propaganda, and the flawed, accusatory assumptions upon which it is based are flamebait.
> Yet the author is completely unaware, totally conditioned to believe unquestioningly that the US has uniquely "pervasive" focus on race.
That’s weird, given in the very article she described an incident where she was called ugly names for being black while in Korea. Crazy how she didn’t even notice that happening to her, and so obviously believes it’s entirely a US issue.
It is weird. She didn't write just "race is a pervasive concept" - she explicitly added "in the U.S." to it, singling out the U.S. despite her own experience telling her it's just as or more pervasive elsewhere.
I'm not explaining them to her, but to others. If the story had been about two assaults, one by a black man and one by a white man, and then she had singled out only one of them with "violence is pervasive in the black community", you would be perfectly capable of understanding the difference.
Yet make it about countries, and this kind of double-standard exceptionalism gets a pass.
You are taking American conceptual categories and applying them to explain things elsewhere in the world. I think that's a mistake.
"Races" are fundamentally colonial categories. When you are in a world of ethnic nation states, the lines separating the ingroup from various outgroups are based on combinations of ethnicity, culture, religion, language, and history. The differences are often very subtle by American standards. After all, the most important outgroups often consist of people very much like you who happen to live across the border.
In many Asian and European countries, discrimination is primarily based on whether people perceive you as a foreigner or a local, and on how favorably people view that particular group of foreigners. That correlates with what Americans would call "race", but there are important differences. America in contrast focuses much more on "race". You can often fit in better as a white foreigner than a black American, which is weird by European standards. All those differences that separate us Europeans from each other suddenly vanish, and you can easily fit in the ingroup, at least if you don't make too much noise about your foreignness.
>bisphenol A mimics the hormone estrogen and can lead to damage in sperm development.19 Further research has shown that microplastics, and not just those with bisphenol A, can cause damage to the testes and lead to the production of deformed sperm cells that have a harder time reaching eggs.
I'd more interested in hearing what microdosing xenestrogens on a large scale does to our collective psychology. I think this is an extremely important but understudied effect. Much like birth control, which is known to influence decision making and behavior, and probably affects collective behaviors like vote outcomes and such.
I have a haunch that a number of modern western ills are influenced by or rooted in the psychological influence of BC hormones. We know [0] that fertile women have different preferences in men, different risk tolerance, and different social behavior (increased mate seeking)...imagine what dosing tens of millions of women does to a country's politics? Now imagine dosing the entire population with chemicals that mimic estrogen...
Obviously prevention is better than treatment, but my suggestion for men would be to get tested to check their hormone levels and do Enclomiphene to address their deficiency https://www.maximustribe.com/science
The magnitude and duration of exposure is probably lower, since plastic is a western and relatively recent invention.
Moreover, it is precisely because transgenderism is primarily a cultural (rather than biological) phenomenon, that rates between two otherwise identical populations are going to differ based on the culture's attitude toward transgenderism and the likelihood that a doctor is to diagnose someone with gender dysphoria.
That latter point is severely understudied because transgenderism is one of the wests many recent sacred cows which are beyond criticism. But overdiagnosis should be a much greater concern than it is. Especially since puberty blockers and hormones given to adolescent boys will undoubtedly exacerbate any feelings of dysphoria and I am astounded that no one is talking about the reinforcing effects of these "treatments".
But I digress. Point being comparing rates of transgenderism between first and third worlds is like comparing apples to oranges because transgenderism is a cultural phenomenon.
Maybe, though I think it's better explained by the widespread availability of pornography, and the power of the internet in reinforcing cult-like behaviour.
There's a huge amount of "forced feminization" pornography out there now, accessible by children at a very young age. As well as "lesbian" pornography designed for the male gaze. It's no wonder some males end up feeling they should be like the characters in the pornography they consume.
It's controversial to say this these days, but old school transwomen such as Anne Lawrence were very open about the sexually-charged nature of their dysphoria. (And she published extensively on this topic.)
On top of that, there are many trans-encouraging echo chambers in the form of online forums, subreddits, and Twitter - ready to help anyone even vaguely curious to "crack their egg", as they say.
Maybe environmental estrogens play some part in this rise, but I suspect it would only be a small piece of the larger puzzle.
I mean, there's a name for it, I don't think its a new phenomenon: autogynephilia. If it becomes so severe as to interfere with daily life then I don't think indulgence is an appropriate treatment, any more than I would expect telling a schizophrenic to listen to the voices in their head to be responsible medical practice.
We've gone too far with all of this acceptance stuff, because these modern acceptance movements brush off any criticism, however logical or valid, with accusations of bigotry. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then puberty blockers, affirmation treatment, and SRS are premium quality cement.
Edit: hilariously ironic that the wikipedia page for autogynophilia has been deleted from the english wiki, though there is a talk page discussing its restoration[0]...how uncomfortably dystopian. I can only hope that average people are catching onto the games played to justify this irrationality.
What I don't understand is that the verbatim option still exists, it just doesn't seem to do anything. And quotes don't seem to work anymore either. It's all very insulting.
Regarding the quotes, I actually notice they do work. However the difference is that it doesn't highlight where the string was matched in the search result index page.
So for example if you google "Food", all the results _will_ contain the string "Food" somewhere in the page (if you don't believe me, try it). It can also match somewhere in the comments or metadata which is useless..
So the feature is still there but it's nowhere as useful as it once was.
I recall a Google engineer who confirmed this once but maybe one of them lurking in the thread can clarify it?
Quotes haven’t worked for about 10 years now. For my job in 2012 I very often had to google obscure part numbers to find documentation.
Even if you added quotes to the part number (such as “foo123-x”, google would return results for “foo234-x” or “foo123-y” and bold them as if they had matched. The real part numbers could be 10-20 characters long, so it was more difficult to spot discrepancies.
I learned very quickly not to trust the results even when adding quotes. If I had assumed the quotes had worked, I would have grabbed bad documentation without even realizing it.
>Dr. Grace Lordan, Associate Professor and Founding director of The Inclusion Initiative at LSE: "There is evidence that current hiring processes are plagued by cronyism and bias. It is time that humans hand over the hiring process to machines who do not have these tendencies. Biases embedded in algorithms can be mitigated somewhat with more care from those writing them, and compliance folk, who do not have skin in the hiring process can monitor the process to abate any concerns on fairness. Let's progress AI in recruitment and workplace inclusivity at the same time."
Translation: we "fixed" the bias by rebiasing the neural nets to favor "diverse" candidates. It's still racist, just against the right demographic now, and if you want those ESG goodboy points you'd better use it.
>Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is currently trying to buy Twitter, has expressed concerns about the number of fake accounts and a potential crack down could see users such as Biden lose a huge number of followers.
What if Musk was simply on a narcissistic vendetta and never actually intended to go through with the purchase, instead merely aiming expose the hot air on which twitter was running?
>We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even see them on Twitter. We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam, if they can't pass human verification challenges (captchas, phone verification, etc)," Agrawal wrote
How to mislead without lying: fake followers implicitly sanctioned by twitter are not necessarily spam accounts. This could easily be typical corporate speak, deliberately conflating fake follower numbers with spam accounts to suggest that twitter is "working on a solution" as opposed to acknowledging that twitter manipulates followers.
In any case I would imagine that the current board is less interested in the financial health of the company than they are in its use as an unprecedented political tool. Disinformation warnings are an authoritarian's wet dream.
Would they evoke these same reactions if the people weren't aware that they were looking at picassos?
Modern Art is a cultural placebo for the vast majority of admirers. If it has the right signature or is hanging in a museum people will dig for rationalizations of their faux appreciation.
