jtrn (u/jtrn) - Readit News

jtrn commented on Thousands of U.S. farmers have Parkinson's. They blame a deadly pesticide mlive.com/news/2025/12/th... · Posted by u/bikenaga

sentrysapper · 2 days ago

Why does that sound untrustworthy? Do you have any idea of what the tobacco industry hid about second hand smoke exposure? How is it somehow more plausible this nurse made up her condition than pesticide manufactures being honest about the impacts?

jtrn · 2 days ago

I don’t think the nurse is lying at all. The medical case is real. My point is that the article omitted the fact that the patient she treated had ingested a massive, lethal dose of concentrate (acute poisoning), and she was exposed to it when extracting it. The journalist used the symptoms of a suicide attempt to illustrate the risks of routine farming, which I think is misleading. It’s not about the nurse making it up... it’s about the article leaving out the context that matters most. Especially when pushing the argument that it causes Parkinson's.

My gut intuition just didn't like the framing. Now that I have read through it thoroughly, my answer is this: It's untrustworthy because it is obviously extremely selective with what it includes, omits relevant base rates, uses graphical examples out of context, and has an obvious bias and agenda. That is just one of tens of examples in the article.

Your tobacco reference can be condensed into: "Large firms are known to lie and cover up things." I agree 100%. They plainly outright lied directly AND lied by covering up. But the reaction to that is not to lie better. And by better, I mean lying by omission, juxtaposition, and framing. These are still methods of lying, just that they are harder for people to detect.

jtrn commented on Thousands of U.S. farmers have Parkinson's. They blame a deadly pesticide mlive.com/news/2025/12/th... · Posted by u/bikenaga

burkaman · 2 days ago

I mean you can click on the source right there, that is literally what happened: http://www.rimed.org/rimedicaljournal/2023/06/2023-06-40-ima.... The description maybe makes it sound a little more extreme than it actually was, but it's the correct terminology and an accurate description of events.

jtrn · 2 days ago

Is lying by omission and juxtaposition. It's manipulation. And it pisses me off to no end. I read the original source. It has NOTHING to do with Parkinson’s. It’s a suicidal dose ingested, and when extracted, it was still a dangerous chemical. If I drank a gallon of gasoline and you pumped it out of me, then it caught fire, it wouldn't explain anything except that gasoline is dangerous and burns. Nobody disputes that with regard to this chemical. So why slip it in like that? And the fact that people don't care just shows why they CAN “just slip it in there” in an article about Parkinson’s... nobody cares as long as it confirms their bias.

I only care about evidence that proves that it causes Parkinson’s, with basic scientific rigor. I’ll eat my hat if any of the cited studies did basic attempt at falsification.

jtrn commented on Thousands of U.S. farmers have Parkinson's. They blame a deadly pesticide mlive.com/news/2025/12/th... · Posted by u/bikenaga

desro · 2 days ago

I was able to find the references (including photos of the mentioned forearms) on PubMed and the RIMJ after a quick search. Paraquat is nasty stuff.

- [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33769492/

- [1] http://www.rimed.org/rimedicaljournal/2023/06/2023-06-40-ima... (via https://rimedicalsociety.org/rhode-island-medical-journal/)

- [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraquat

jtrn · 2 days ago

Yeah, I found it myself. And yes, it's nasty stuff. But in the context of the article, it’s pure nonsense.

Should we ban anhydrous ammonia, chlorine, or gasoline? They are nasty and dangerous too. The article is purely scare-mongering to make it seem true while obviously pushing an agenda. This is not science. See my reply at the same level after I did a review.

jtrn commented on Thousands of U.S. farmers have Parkinson's. They blame a deadly pesticide mlive.com/news/2025/12/th... · Posted by u/bikenaga

jtrn · 2 days ago

The chance this is a trustworthy source for me is close to 0. This just sound like fantastic pseudology:

“Even secondary exposure can be dangerous. One case published in the Rhode Island Medical Journal described an instance where a 50-year-old man accidentally ingested paraquat, and the nurse treating him was burned by his urine that splashed onto her forearms. Within a day, her skin blistered and sloughed off.

jtrn · 2 days ago

I just finished reading article and honestly, my BS detector is going off the charts.

I’m not saying pesticides are health tonics, but this piece feels like pure litigation PR rather than an actual investigation. It prioritizes storytelling over science and engages in what I can only describe as lying by omission. Here are the main issues I found:

The nurse whose skin peeled off just from touching a patient’s urine? The article frames this to make you think, "Wow, this stuff is so toxic that if a farmer uses it, his body becomes a weapon." I looked into the medical case this is likely based on. That patient didn't just "farm" with Paraquat; he ingested a lethal, concentrated dose (usually a suicide attempt). By leaving out that the patient drank a cup of poison, the author conflates Acute Poisoning (death in days, acid urine) with Chronic Exposure (trace amounts over years). If the farmer in the main story had enough Paraquat in his system to burn a nurse’s skin, he wouldn’t be alive to give an interview about Parkinson’s. He’d be dead from multi-organ failure. Omitting this context is manipulative fear-mongering.

Then there is the math: Parkinson’s affects about 1% of the elderly population. There are 2 million farms in the US. Even if Paraquat was essentially harmless water, you would still have tens of thousands of farmers with Parkinson’s purely by chance. The article ignores this base rate to imply that every diagnosis is a result of the chemical. It treats a probabilistic risk as a deterministic cause.

It also ignores confounders (like the "Rural Cluster" Problem). Farming is a "chemical soup" lifestyle. You have well water (a known PD risk), head trauma risks, and exposure to dozens of other chemicals like Rotenone or Maneb. The article presents a direct line: Paraquat -> PD. But scientifically, isolating one chemical from 30 years of rural living is a nightmare. The article doesn't even attempt to falsify the hypothesis or look at other factors; it just assumes the lawsuit's narrative is the scientific truth.

The article also fails basic science standards. It is storytelling, not science. A real scientific inquiry follows Popperian standards—you make a conjecture and then try to disprove it. This article does the opposite: it acts like a defense attorney. It stacks up emotional anecdotes and selective correlations to confirm its bias and ignores the replication crisis in epidemiology where results often don't stick.

This isn't journalism and it’s not science; it’s advocacy via outrage. It uses the real tragedy of these farmers to push a specific narrative, relying on readers not knowing the difference between drinking poison and spraying crops. If you’ve ever wondered why science doesn’t make more progress, and we have the replication crisis, look no further.

jtrn commented on Thousands of U.S. farmers have Parkinson's. They blame a deadly pesticide mlive.com/news/2025/12/th... · Posted by u/bikenaga

jtrn · 2 days ago

The chance this is a trustworthy source for me is close to 0. This just sound like fantastic pseudology:

“Even secondary exposure can be dangerous. One case published in the Rhode Island Medical Journal described an instance where a 50-year-old man accidentally ingested paraquat, and the nurse treating him was burned by his urine that splashed onto her forearms. Within a day, her skin blistered and sloughed off.

jtrn commented on Google Titans architecture, helping AI have long-term memory research.google/blog/tita... · Posted by u/Alifatisk

jtrn · 10 days ago

Here is my amateur understanding of the architecture: Fine-tune on the fly by using degrees of surprise to update a separate/new memory network that matches the base model, and just call that network for each token iteration.

So if we are viewing this through the needle in hey stack lens: The needle was very surprising for the base model, so going forward, when it see anything of the same nature, the memory module will not just give you hay, but the needle, because it made a special note of it when it went through the haystack 1 million tokens ago, because the needle was surprising.

The Transformer's normal attention mechanism is already secretly trying to be a long-term memory system. Every time it writes a new KV pair into the cache, it’s desperately trying to “remember” that token forever.

But it’s doing it in the dumbest possible way: by hoarding an ever-growing pile of raw vectors, then frantically dot-product searching through the pile every single step. It’s like a hoarder who never throws anything away and has to rummage through mountains of junk to find the one receipt they need. Of course it chokes at long contexts.

Titans/MIRAS looks at that mess and says: “Why store memory in a growing garbage pile of vectors? Store it in the weights of a deep neural network instead — and let that network keep training itself in real time, but only on the stuff that actually surprises it.” That’s literally it.

Using the Tim Cook Martian example: The model is cruising through boring financial numbers → attention is doing its normal thing, KV cache is growing, but nothing is really sticking.

Suddenly: “Tim Cook is a Martian.”

Normal attention would just add one more KV pair to the pile and pray it doesn’t get drowned out later.

Titans instead goes: “Holy shit, reconstruction error off the charts → this does NOT fit my current memory at all → massive gradient → actually rewrite huge chunks of the memory MLP’s weights right now so this fact is burned in forever.”

From that moment on, the memory MLP has physically changed its internal wiring. Any future query that even vaguely smells like “Tim Cook” or “Martian” will make the activations explode through the newly rewired paths and spit out a vector screaming “MARTIAN” at the frozen attention layers.

The frozen attention (which is still doing its normal job on the short window) suddenly sees this one extra “virtual token” in its context that is confidently yelling the surprising fact → it attends hard to it → the model answers as if the Martian revelation happened one token ago, even if it was 2 million tokens back.

It looks exactly like a super-attention mechanism that only “primes” or “locks in” the surprising needles and deliberately forgets or ignores the hay. And it is also a way to fine tune one the fly permanently for the current context.

I think…

jtrn commented on Cloudflare Down Again – and DownDetector Is Also Down · Posted by u/bakigul

jtrn · 12 days ago

I have a tentative take, and I kind of feel stupid for even claiming this, since I don't work in Cloud-ops, or whatever, but it's fun to try to participate, and I spent some time articulating what i think is a good perspective on Cloudflare now a days, and as psychologist, I am primary interested in the psychology of things.

Basically, my take is: It’s not a technical monoculture; it’s a billing psychology + inertia culture.

I dont think the internet is fragile simply because Cloudflare is so ubiquitous, because that view ignores the economic factor of why people choose them. The situation is really a perfect bi-modal distribution: at the low end, you have hobbyists and personal sites who use Cloudflare because it is the only viable free option, and at the extreme high end, you have massive enterprises that truly need that specific global capacity to scrub terabits of attack traffic.

However, I think the following perspective is important: For the vast middle ground of the internet—most standard businesses and SaaS platforms—Cloudflare could be viewed as redundant. If you are hosting on AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure, you are already sitting behind world-class infrastructure protection that rivals anything Cloudflare offers. The reason this feels like a dangerous monoculture isn't because Google or Amazon can't protect you, but rather because Cloudflare wins on the psychology of billing. They sell a flat-rate insurance policy against attacks, whereas the cloud giants charge for usage, which scares people.

Ultimately, the internet isn't suffering from a lack of technical alternatives to DDoS protection, nor is Cloudflare a NECESSARY single point of failure; it is just suffering from a market preference for predictable invoices over technical redundancy, and inertia, leading to an extremely high usage of Cloudflare. So basically: Even though we are currently relying a lot on Cloudflare, we are far from vendor lock-in, and there is a clear path to live without them, given that there are many alternatives.

Maybe we could view this as a good thing, since basically medium to large-scale enterprises efficiently subsidize small and hobby-level actors? So to summerize: The 2018-era "just use Cloudflare for everything" advice is outdated, and the following is a better philosopy: If you're tiny: Cloudflare free tier is still a no-brainer. If you're huge and actually get attacked: pay for Cloudflare Enterprise or equivalent.

If you're anywhere in between: seriously consider whether you need it at all. The hyperscalers are good enough, and removing Cloudflare can actually improve your availability (fewer moving parts).

I think Cloudflare thinks this way too, which is why they've been pushing Zero Trust, Workers, WARP, Access, and Magic Transit, to become the default network stack for companies, not just the default firewall.

/wall-of-text

jtrn · 12 days ago

Bah, I think I double-posted. Is this visible? :o