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bildung commented on Study: Older Cannabis Users Have Larger Brains, Better Cognition   news.cuanschutz.edu/news-... · Posted by u/emptybits
misja111 · 5 days ago
From the article:

> However, another brain region saw lower volumes – suggesting the impact cannabis has on the brain is complex and nuanced, requiring further investigation.

bildung · 5 days ago
Further down:

> there was a single brain region where we saw that higher cannabis use was actually associated with lower brain volume – the posterior cingulate, which is part of the limbic system and is implicated in processes like memory, learning, and emotion. That said, some research suggests smaller posterior cingulate volume is actually associated with better working memory, so it’s a little unclear what this means.

bildung commented on Data centers in space makes no sense   civai.org/blog/space-data... · Posted by u/ajyoon
trhway · 6 days ago
>1. The capital costs are higher, you have to expend tons of energy to put it into orbit

putting 1KW of solar on land - $2K, putting it into orbit on Starship (current ground-based heavy solar panels, 40kg for 4m2 of 1KW in space) - anywhere between $400 and $4K. Add to that that the costs on Earth will only be growing, while costs in space will be falling.

Ultimately Starship's costs will come down to the bare cost of fuel + oxidizer, 20kg per 1kg in LEO, i.e. less than $10. And if they manage streamlined operations and high reuse. Yet even with $100/kg, it is still better in space than on the ground.

And for cooling that people so complain about without running it in calculator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46878961

>2. The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low

it will live those 3-5 years of the GPU lifecycle.

bildung · 6 days ago
1 KW of solar panels is 150€ retail right now. You are probably at 80€ or less if you buy a few MW.

(I'm ignoring installation costs etc. because actually creating the satellites is ignored here, too)

bildung commented on Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media   yle.fi/a/74-20207494... · Posted by u/Teever
newzino · 9 days ago
Yep — what I had in mind was Orben & Przybylski, Nature Human Behaviour (2019). They use a specification curve analysis across three large datasets (total n ≈ 355k) and find the association between digital technology use and adolescent well-being is negative but very small (explains ≤ 0.4% of the variance). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-018-0506-1.

I think your cited meta-analysis (Liu et al., IJERPH 2022; DOI: 10.3390/ijerph19095164) is useful too — but it’s answering a narrower question (depression specifically, “time spent on social media” specifically) and it’s based on 5 studies with high heterogeneity, mostly observational/self-report. The paper itself basically says “interpret with caution; motivation/content/engagement matter.” So I don’t read these as contradictory so much as “big-average effect looks small, but there may be real effects for specific outcomes / subgroups / behaviors.”

Also worth noting newer longitudinal work is starting to tease directionality: e.g. Nagata et al., JAMA Network Open (2025) (ABCD cohort) finds higher social media use predicts later depressive symptoms more than the reverse. That to me is the strongest argument that “time” isn’t purely a proxy for pre-existing depression.

On “social media lumps together”: agreed research often names Facebook / Instagram / TikTok etc — but even within one platform, the mechanism differs a ton (DMs / group chat / creating vs passive feed consumption + ads + notifications). That’s why I’m more bullish on regulating business model + engagement features than banning the category.

And on “upward social comparison”: totally agree it’s not “solved” by chronological feeds. People curate; viewers compare. There’s direct work on the “everyone else is happier” perception effect on Facebook (Chou & Edge 2012, DOI: 10.1089/cyber.2011.0324) and adolescent social-comparison/feedback-seeking being linked with depressive symptoms (Nesi & Prinstein 2015). My claim is just that algorithmic ranking + push/autoplay/infinite scroll likely makes that dynamic more frequent/intense, so design changes still buy meaningful leverage even if they don’t make the risk zero.

bildung · 7 days ago
Thanks for the reply, will look into the links. And yes, full agreement, algorithmic ranking is a whole different dynamic, and has to be both researched and regulated differently than a dumb feed. Even the latter probably has levers moderating human reception, i.e. if we evolved in communities of less than 150 individuals, being able to routinely follow the curated lives of e.g. 500 people probobly has other effects than a feed of 50 actual RL friends.
bildung commented on Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media   yle.fi/a/74-20207494... · Posted by u/Teever
bildung · 9 days ago
> The best large-scale work I’ve seen finds the average association between overall screen/social-media use and teen well-being is tiny

Can you share the source? The last time I looked the association was both clear and pretty strong, e.g. "There was a linear dose–response association of TSSM and risk of depression. The risk of depression increased by 13% (OR = 1.13, 95%CI: 1.09 to 1.17, p < 0.001) for each hour increase in social media use in adolescents." DOI:10.3390/ijerph19095164

> “Social media” lumps together very different things

HN does this, but the research is usually pretty clear in spelling out they mean FB, Insta, TikTok and so on.

> If you want a lever that actually changes incentives, go after business model & design

I too would like changes in that direction (mostly because adults are also affected negatively by social media), but keep in mind even a non-optimized, strictly chronological feed produces these negative effects, see keyword (and associated studies for) "upward social comparison", i.e. people are always more inclined to post about things that went well or are fun, and thus even a pure chronologically sorted feed produces a warped perception of normal social reality.

bildung commented on European Alternatives   european-alternatives.eu... · Posted by u/s_dev
PlatoIsADisease · 18 days ago
Ugh, back to nationalism.

I think there is some sort of Darwinistic reason for this. Maybe its inevitable.

Not to say that the US didn't help spur this, but its just sad to see.

When I was younger, I was such an idealist. Anarchy, open borders, free market open trade, pacifism.

Even as Trump started getting aggressive, I kept trying to tell myself: "Well, these other countries surly know that most of the population doesn't support this. Surely they know we are fans of liberalism, democracy, and human rights. One bad election, everyone knows it was influenced by Russia, no big deal. They know a sane person will be elected in a few years."

But I saw the comments of how quickly it seemed the general population of other nations flipped like a dime.

It has shooken me. (And I don't blame that its shooken them)

It has made me the exact person I was against. Now I think we really do need to look toward the national interest. If 1 bad politician can alienate us from 100+ years of debatably good behavior, why shouldn't we be selfish?

bildung · 18 days ago
People in the US need to become more aware of the dramatic impact this current administration has on the world. A paper in the Lancet, not exactly your average leftie rag, extrapolates the deaths resulting from the sudden USAID defunding to amount to about 14 million people. That's about 10x Pol Pot.

People around the world distancing themselves from these actions is hardly nationalism.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

bildung commented on EU and Mercosur countries sign landmark free trade deal   dw.com/en/eu-and-mercosur... · Posted by u/perihelions
iagooar · 23 days ago
I hope you won't get a reality check if one day there is a famine in Europe caused by outsourcing the entire farming to other continents. The very first thing any enemy force would do is a naval blockade, the rest is patience and lots of deaths.
bildung · 23 days ago
Farming already is heavily subsidized in every EU country. The whole sector only exists as is precisely because of the fears you point out. And that is perfectly fine, because statistically speaking it already is a rounding error both in share of employment and share of GDP (1.2% of EU GDP), only kept alive for the exact purpose you talk about.

So even if these lobby talking points would be true, and everything had to be 100% subsidized, that wouldn't be a problem.

bildung commented on EU and Mercosur countries sign landmark free trade deal   dw.com/en/eu-and-mercosur... · Posted by u/perihelions
AdrianB1 · 23 days ago
There is some valid criticism raised by farmers in my country (Romania) related to use of pesticides and other substances that are forbidden in EU, but permitted in Mercosur and products can be imported even with the forbidden substances in it. That sounds pretty bad, consumer protection is the only part that I still like about modern EU.
bildung · 23 days ago
But is that really true, i.e. were you able to find actual facts supporting this? I'm asking because in Germany there are similar talking points driven by the farmer's associations (actually just the big agro corps, actual small-scale farmers don't have much of a voice in these) and everytime I tried to dig into a particular topic, it didn't seem to be supported by actual facts.
bildung commented on EU and Mercosur countries sign landmark free trade deal   dw.com/en/eu-and-mercosur... · Posted by u/perihelions
oytis · 23 days ago
I'm surprised Trump didn't threaten involved parties with tariffs or military action over that yet. As a European, very happy about that happening, for multiple reasons. It's a shame it took so long
bildung · 23 days ago
Well yesterday he already imposed tariffs on several EU countries because they oppose the annexation of Greenland, so I wouldn't be surprised if he does the same in this case.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/trump-vows-tariffs-eigh...

bildung commented on vLLM large scale serving: DeepSeek 2.2k tok/s/h200 with wide-ep   blog.vllm.ai/2025/12/17/l... · Posted by u/robertnishihara
sofixa · a month ago
You can run vLLM with AMD GPUs supported by ROCm: https://rocm.docs.amd.com/en/latest/how-to/rocm-for-ai/infer...

However from experience with an AMD Strix Halo, a couple of caveats: it's drastically slower than Ollama (tested over a few weeks, always using the official AMD vLLM nightly releases), and not all GPUs were supported for all models (but that has been fixed).

bildung · a month ago
vLLM ususally only plays out its strength when serving multiple users in parallel, in contrast to llama.cpp (Ollama is a wrapper around llama.cpp).

If you want more performance, you could try running llama.cpp directly or use the prebuilt lemonade nightlies.

bildung commented on Fahrplan – 39C3   fahrplan.events.ccc.de/co... · Posted by u/rurban
frankzander · a month ago
this wasn't the point ... the point is that the whole thing is getting more and more political and less technical and fun. I was at the camp and some congresses in the past and they where always fun but nowadays it seems like it's like a political movement event for certain strands and ideologies and way less fun and interesting things (thou there are gems) and it seems that you have to think a certain way or at least accept certain positions even if it's not your position because otherwise you are silly or something else.
bildung · a month ago
Or perhaps you changed over the years?

u/bildung

KarmaCake day3985January 8, 2014View Original