Taywee (u/Taywee) - Readit News

Taywee commented on Nanoplastic Ingestion Causes Neurological Deficits the-scientist.com/news-op... · Posted by u/pseudolus

ricardobeat · 2 years ago

Indeed the WHO advised against sweeteners just a couple weeks back: https://www.who.int/news/item/15-05-2023-who-advises-not-to-...

Taywee · 2 years ago

Specifically for weight control.

If you're already in the middle of the healthy BMI range and not having trouble keeping a healthy weight, I don't think there's been a demonstrated harm.

Taywee commented on Nanoplastic Ingestion Causes Neurological Deficits the-scientist.com/news-op... · Posted by u/pseudolus

digging · 2 years ago

Changing the container your soda comes in is like sanding off splinters from the sharpened stake you're about to stab into your leg.

Taywee · 2 years ago

That's a ridiculous analogy. What about suger-free sodas, or sparkling water without even artificial sweeteners? What about people who drink soda, but still don't go over the daily recommended sugar intake, and otherwise have healthy lifestyles?

I'd be willing to make two assumptions:

1. A gaping wound in your leg is probably less healthy than a moderately-high sugar consumption.

2. People who are concerned about nanoplastic intake are probably also concerned about deleterious health effects of things like sugar intake.

Taywee commented on Nanoplastic Ingestion Causes Neurological Deficits the-scientist.com/news-op... · Posted by u/pseudolus

DubiousPusher · 2 years ago

I think the biggest material impact for any curb on plastics would largely be felt in medicine. Disposability is huge in preventing infection. Also, many medical implants rely on the combination of elasticity and strength found in plastics.

Taywee · 2 years ago

Medical use of plactic is a minuscule minority of plastic use. The vast majority of disposable, single-use plastic is not actually necessary. I'd be shocked if less than 90% of single-use disposable plastic was from food containers. Hell, I'd be pretty surprised if it were less than 99%.

Taywee commented on Nanoplastic Ingestion Causes Neurological Deficits the-scientist.com/news-op... · Posted by u/pseudolus

kleer001 · 2 years ago

... IN MICE !

Taywee · 2 years ago

They do these kinds of studies on mice because mice have a high homology with humans, and a huge number of the findings extrapolate to humans.

Taywee commented on Nanoplastic Ingestion Causes Neurological Deficits the-scientist.com/news-op... · Posted by u/pseudolus

lm28469 · 2 years ago

> I typically buy two liter sodas in plastic bottles and avoid softer plastics.

If you drink that plastic is the least of your problems

> It's also potentially a reason to switch to an electric vehicle -- to avoid exposure to gas fumes while refueling your vehicle.

Car interiors are off-gassing nasty shit all the time, especially when they sit in the sun

Taywee · 2 years ago

Both of those things are straight-up improvements, even if they're not perfect. You can nit-pick every single thing all you want, but better is better.

Taywee commented on iOS 17 automatically removes tracking parameters from links you click on 9to5mac.com/2023/06/08/io... · Posted by u/belfalas

ArchOversight · 2 years ago

Wait until Google implements something and shoves it down everyones throat in Chrome and then has all the Google fanboys claiming that its the best thing since sliced bread and thus should get implemented by every other browser just because Google did it?

That's how we ended up in the situation where Google shipped U2F, sites implemented their implementation and then when the standard WebAuthN was built it was not compatible so sites had to be updated to be standards compliant, and it took a while to do so.

Or when Google added WebP without clear consensus. Or when they added FLoC or Topics API, or whatever else they have cooked up. Or things like WebUSB, WebMIDI and others?

There's a glut of Chrome only sites out there, and it continues to grow as web developers test just on Chrome but not the other browser engines. It's turning into the next IE 6, I remember the time there were a lot of "Made for IE 6" logos and graphics on sites and they did not render well or at all in Netscape.

Taywee · 2 years ago

"dearth" means "lack" or "scarcity". I think it's the opposite of what you meant.

Taywee commented on Windows 11 calls a zip file a 'postcode file' in UK English twitter.com/JymFox/status... · Posted by u/TonyTrapp

jimmygrapes · 2 years ago

This hampered me when playing the HHGTTG text adventure as a youth. My memory is fuzzy on the specifics, but one of the early things needed is to relieve a headache or similar, and a search of Arthur's home would reveal an "analgesic" eventually. Unfortunately you wouldn't be able to do something else until you consumed the analgesic, and eventually you'd lose the game because the home was demolished while you're in it.

I did not know at the time what an analgesic was, despite having a fairly broad vocabulary. If anything, I assumed it was some dirty adult toy; certainly not a thing to be consumed as a remedy for pain.

It was frustrating because I searched high and low for aspirin, Tylenol, pain-killer, etc. but never got past that section until I had a chance to search the Internet for a solution - many years after I really cared to play a text adventure again.

Taywee · 2 years ago

Analgesic isn't a British word, though. It's used plenty in American medicine.

Taywee commented on Cuneicode, and the Future of Text in C thephd.dev/cuneicode-and-... · Posted by u/g0xA52A2A

cryptonector · 2 years ago

Standards-wise the only answer to this is to deprecate all non-UTF-8 locales and leave non-UTF-8 codesets outside the scope of C.

Basically, non-Unicode needs to always be at the edge, while in the middle everything needs to be Unicode.

From an application perspective it's easy: document that it only works in UTF-8 locales. Really, that is my position for my software. Anything else is ETOOHARD.

Taywee · 2 years ago

I just want reliable conversions. In my situation (duct taping a very old service to a newer one), I needed to read structured files with UTF-16 fields, and process them into an eventual UTF-8 file written to a different location. The host this needed to run on did not have any unicode locales installed (and incidentally, I hate changing locales for my software because it's a program-global switch to flip, and most of my program still wants to run in the user's locale).

I found it ridiculous that there was no way to just convert UTF-16 to UTF-8 without either reinventing that wheel, pulling in an external dependency, or changing global state and having the right system locales installed (as well as knowing the name of at least one of those locales, and guessing a language along with it), despite having the latest C and C++ compilers at my disposal.

Taywee commented on Cuneicode, and the Future of Text in C thephd.dev/cuneicode-and-... · Posted by u/g0xA52A2A

cryptonector · 2 years ago

> You can't just blindly convert to multibyte assuming that it's UTF-8, because it might not be.

I mentioned that. TFA didn't say that specifically.

Taywee · 2 years ago

It sort of did, but in a completely different place past the critique section:

> But, rather than using them and needing to praying to the heaven’s the internal Multibyte C Encoding is UTF-8 (like with the aforementioned wcrtomb -> mbrtoc8/16/32 style of conversions), we’ll just provide a direction conversion routine and cut out the wchar_t encoding/multibyte encoding middle man.

Not sure why it wasn't mentioned up top. When trying to convert between UTF-8 and UTF-16 without doing it myself or pulling in external dependencies, this was the most annoying thing that slapped me in the face. This is the problem that makes reliable charset conversions between specific encodings actually impossible using just the stdlib functions.

Taywee commented on Cuneicode, and the Future of Text in C thephd.dev/cuneicode-and-... · Posted by u/g0xA52A2A

cryptonector · 2 years ago

> Standard C’s primary deficiency is its constant clinging to and dependency upon the “multibyte” encoding and the “wide character” encoding.

What? No, UTF-8 won for a reason, and that reason is not just that C has a deficiency in this area but, rather, that UTF-8 is: a) simple and much saner than UTF-16, b) self-synchronizing in both directions, c) as -or even more- space efficient than UTF-16 on average even for non-Latin text, d) even UTF-32 doesn't make it possible to turn logical character string indices into 32-bit word string indices. (d) is the real killer.

One just cannot assume that a character or glyph requires just one codepoint to express, therefore one can't assume that a character or glyph will require some fixed number of code units to express, therefore one might as well use UTF-8 because it's saner and more efficient than the other UTFs, therefore... <drumroll/> a "constant clinging to and dependency upon the “multibyte” encoding" is NOT a deficiency of C but an advantage of C.

C does have problems here though, namely all the usual problems it has:

  - C strings (NUL-terminated) suck
  - C doesn't have a first class string type,
      only pointer to char
  - C doesn't have a first class string type
      that indicates what encoding the string
      uses

Now, C's wchar_t is not even a deficiency but a disaster.

Taywee · 2 years ago

I don't think that's what the complaint is. The complaint is that "multibyte" is not necessarily UTF-8. You can't just blindly convert to multibyte assuming that it's UTF-8, because it might not be. You can't convert between two encodings by just going through "multibyte", because it might actually not support all characters you might need to support.

So it really is a deficiency in C. It's nearly useless to have a "multibyte" or "wide character" encoding when those can mean anything. Having conversion between UTF-8 and UTF-32 is useful. Having conversion between "implemetation and platform dependent 'multibyte'" and "implementation and platform dependent 'wide character'" strings is nearly useless.