Every time I do blood work I almost faint.
I used to have this problem until I was given the tip to tense various muscles throughout my body during the process. Do not listen to the nurses who tell you to relax!
Readit Newsjaneerie commented on Why vampires live forever machielreyneke.com/blog/v... · Posted by u/machielrey
I'll tell you what's not hot: cochlear implants. I wore hearing aids since the late '80s. I wear CIs as of about 5 years ago, and while my hearing is much better and stable than it used to be, I've found that UX for CIs is pretty bad.
For one, unless you use Med-El's Rondo processeor, you're going to have a thin cable connecting your processor to the coil. Taking off your CIs and putting them back on (as one does every day) is going to put stress on the cable. Sometimes the cable frays and you find that out with sound cutting in and out. There's nothing you can do until the manufacturer sends you a replacement cable in exchange for your frayed one. If you want a backup, be ready to shell out $250 for each cable.
Another UX issue is that processors depend on gravity to stay on your ears. Since there's no earmold to anchor to, processors can easily be jostled off and left hanging precariously. Wearing hearing aids, I never had to worry that my hearing devices would fall off if I rode my bike on a bumpy road. Also with cochlear implants, high-intensity interval training requires some kind of hat or bandana to make sure that the processors don't fly out.
Battery life is another disappointment. Rechargeable batteries don't last a full day. If I put them in at 6:30a, they'll last until about 4:30p. With disposable zinc air batteries, I can squeeze out about a day and a half, but then I'm having to dispose batteries. And while I can track processor battery levels with the rechargeable batteries on my phone, disposable batteries are opaque to the app.
One new thing that would be useful in terms of UX would be an configurable indicator, e.g., a blinking LED, signaling that audio streaming is occurring. It's awkward to find oneself in a conversation that already started and having to excuse oneself to turn off the stream.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad I have my cochlear implants, but they're way behind hearing aids in terms of UX.
Two things that we use for my son's CI are a cable wrap, which gives the cable a bit of reinforcement, and what we call the "eagle claw" - a little plastic hook that goes on the bottom and hooks around the ear lobe to give it a bit more stability.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/870982894/cochlear-implant-cabl...
janeerie commented on Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing linch.substack.com/p/ted-... · Posted by u/pseudolus
I'm enjoying this article.
One nitpick is that Black Mirror is usually dystopian in its view of technology but there has been more than 1 happy ending. The author probably only has San Junipero fresh in their mind.
I don't know how one could classify USS Callister and Black Museum as having happy endings! The fates of the bad guys in those episodes are so horrible they still haunt me. Doesn't make it any better that they are bad guys!
There shouldn't be a stand-alone TurboTax-like tool to fill out analogs of paper forms; it should just be a part of the IRS web page.
Why can't I log in, see what information employers and banks and whatnot have submitted about my income, add any pertinent information about deductions or additional income, appeal any inaccurate information, then click 'request refund' or 'pay dues', select which bank account to use from the information they already have, and be done?
Subsiding smaller companies to compete with the larger ones isn't going to fix the problem, it's just going to entrench the industry and empower more lobbyists.
That's the direction Direct File was aiming in. This year it was able to import W-2s and limited other data, but the vision was always to bring in as much info as possible.
janeerie commented on Gene therapy restored hearing in deaf patients news.ki.se/gene-therapy-r... · Posted by u/justacrow
This particular study looks like it's dealing with a pretty narrow condition and solution (protein missing - add gene for protein). I don't think this particular research can be extended the way you hope.
Yes, I would really like to see research targeting Connexin 26, since it's the most common cause of hearing loss, but it seems it's much more difficult to "cure."
janeerie commented on Guess I'm a rationalist now scottaaronson.blog/?p=890... · Posted by u/nsoonhui
Here's a theory of what's happening, both with you here in this comment section and with the rationalists in general.
Humans are generally better at perceiving threats than they are at putting those threats into words. When something seems "dangerous" abstractly, they will come up with words for why---but those words don't necessarily reflect the actual threat, because the threat might be hard to describe. Nevertheless the valence of their response reflects their actual emotion on the subject.
In this case: the rationalist philosophy basically creeps people out. There is something "insidious" about it. And this is not a delusion on the part of the people judging them: it really does threaten them, and likely for good reason. The explanation is something like "we extrapolate from the way that rationalists think and realize that their philosophy leads to dangerous conclusions." Some of these conclusions have already been made by the rationalists---like valuing people far away abstractly over people next door, by trying to quantify suffering and altruism like a math problem (or to place moral weight on animals over humans, or people in the future over people today). Other conclusions are just implied, waiting to be made later. But the human mind detects them anyway as implications of the way of thinking, and reacts accordingly: thinking like this is dangerous and should be argued against.
This extrapolation is hard to put into words, so everyone who tries to express their discomfort misses the target somewhat, and then, if you are the sort of person who only takes things literally, it sounds like they are all just attacking someone out of judgment or bitterness or something instead of for real reasons. But I can't emphasize this enough: their emotions are real, they're just failing to put them into words effectively. It's a skill issue. You will understand what's happening better if you understand that this is what's going on and then try to take their emotions seriously even if they are not communicating them very well.
So that's what's going on here. But I think I can also do a decent job of describing the actual problem that people have with the rationalist mindset. It's something like this:
Humans have an innate moral intuition that "personal" morality, the kind that takes care of themselves and their family and friends and community, is supposed to be sacrosanct: people are supposed to both practice it and protect the necessity of practicing it. We simply can't trust the world to be a safe place if people don't think of looking out for the people around them as a fundamental moral duty. And once those people are safe, protecting more people, such as a tribe or a nation or all of humanity or all of the planet, becomes permissible.
Sometimes people don't or can't practice this protection for various reasons, and that's morally fine, because it's a local problem that can be solved locally. But it's very insidious to turn around and justify not practicing it as a better way to live: "actually it's better not to behave morally; it's better to allocate resources to people far away; it's better to dedicate ourselves to fighting nebulous threats like AI safety or other X-risks instead of our neighbors; or, it's better to protect animals than people, because there are more of them". It's fine to work on important far-away problems once local problems are solved, if that's what you want. But it can't take priority, regardless of how the math works out. To work on global numbers-game problems instead of local problems, and to justify that with arguments, and to try to convince other people to also do that---that's dangerous as hell. It proves too much: it argues that humans at large ought to dismantle their personal moralities in favor of processing the world like a paperclip-maximizing robot. And that is exactly as dangerous as a paperclip-maximizing robot is. Just at a slower timescale.
(No surprise that this movement is popular among social outcasts, for whom local morality is going to feel less important, and (I suspect) autistic people, who probably experience less direct moral empathy for the people around them, as well as to the economically-insulated well-to-do tech-nerd types who are less likely to be directly exposed to suffering in their immediate communities.)
Ironically paperclip-maximizing-robots are exactly the thing that the rationalists are so worried about. They are a group of people who missed, and then disavowed, and now advocate disavowing, this "personal" morality, and unsurprisingly they view the world in a lens that doesn't include it, which means mostly being worried about problems of the same sort. But it provokes a strong negative reaction from everyone who thinks about the world in terms of that personal duty to safety, because that is the foundation of all morality, and is utterly essential to preserve, because it makes sure that whatever else you are doing doesn't go awry.
(edit: let me add that your aversion to the criticisms of rationalists is not unreasonable either. Given that you're parsing the criticisms as unreasonable, which they likely are (because of the skill issue), what you're seeing is a movement with value that seems to be being unfairly attacked. And you're right, the value is actually there! But the ultimate goal here is a synthesis: to get the value of the rationalist movement but to synthesize it with the recognition of the red flags that it sets off. Ignoring either side, the value or the critique, is ultimately counterproductive: the right goal is to synthesize both into a productive middle ground. (This is the arc of philosophy; it's what philosophy is. Not re-reading Plato.) The rationalists are probably morally correct in being motivated to highly-scaling actions e.g. the purview of "Effective Altruism". They are getting attacked for what they're discarding to do that, not for caring about it in the first place.)
One mistake you making is thinking that rationalists care more about people far away than people in their community. The reality is that they set the value of life the same for all.
If children around you are doing of an easily preventable disease, then yes, help them first! If they just need more arts programs, then you help the children dying in another country first.
janeerie commented on IRS Direct File on GitHub chrisgiven.com/2025/05/di... · Posted by u/nickthegreek
> "The IRS will no longer accept returns directly."
Where are you finding that quote, I don't see it on the Direct File homepage [0]
EDIT: Ah, I see now, it was from paxys's original post [1], I assumed it was meant to be an official quote from the IRS somewhere.
This was in the post I was responding to.
I also think that wholegarment knits look kind of cheap and that sewing actually adds structural integrity and durability to a garment.
But anything knitting or clothes related is really fun and challenging and good for them for making a business out of it.
This is an ongoing discussion in the handknitting community. Knitters generally hate seaming (we're not sewers!) so the most popular patterns tend to be seamless. However, many argue that this leads to shapeless, saggy garments that aren't as wearable.