zw7 (u/zw7) - Readit News

zw7 commented on GLP-1s are among the most important drug breakthroughs economist.com/briefing/20... · Posted by u/car

apothegm · a year ago

If they’ve been around that long, what changed to make them suddenly so broadly used?

zw7 · a year ago

- FDA approval for use for weight loss. Previously this was off-label use

- adoption of GLPs into diabetes treatment guidelines

zw7 commented on Plastic chemical phthalate causes DNA breakage, chromosome defects, study finds medicalxpress.com/news/20... · Posted by u/Jimmc414

sktrdie · a year ago

Apart from food packaging, one great way to easily ingest plastic is to use synthetic clothing. Just a basic rubbing of a synthetic sleeve on your nose causes thousands of polyester particles to release in thin air, readily breathable.

Not just clothing, but also bedding is a huge issue. With pillows, mattresses and towels mostly made of synthetic fibers.

My usual instinct is: try rubbing the synthetic material; if it releases thousands of particles in thin air, stay away from it

zw7 · a year ago

I think about this every time I clean out the dryer lint filter and a plume of lint dust comes off of it. I try to avoid breathing it in but it’s likely some is making it into my airways.

zw7 commented on 'That's a bloodbath': How a federal program kills wildlife for private interests npr.org/2024/10/10/g-s1-2... · Posted by u/thunderbong

danaris · a year ago

This is presenting it as much more black and white than it really is.

There is definitely a middle ground somewhere between "kill off any native carnivores that could possibly come near a multi-thousand-acre ranch" and "just let them kill the whole herd lol".

zw7 · a year ago

The article briefly mentions non-lethal methods and that they are underfunded. I worked with a grad student who was doing research (supported by the USDA IIRC) on different dog breeds for use as guard dogs. Ironically, sometimes the guard dogs will kill a calf — they assume due to boredom and playing too rough.

zw7 commented on Nearly all of the Google images results for "baby peacock" are AI generated twitter.com/notengoprisa/... · Posted by u/jsheard

quasse · a year ago

Kagi is not a panacea unfortunately. I pay for it and daily drive it to support a Google alternative, but I still have real trouble with my results being full of AI garbage (both image and text search).

As mentioned, product comparisons are a big one but another worrying area is anything medical related.

I was trying to find research about a medicine I'm taking this week and the already SEO infested results of 5 years ago have become immeasurably worse, with 100s of pages of GPT generated spam trying to attract your click.

I ended up ditching search alltogether and ended up finding a semi-relevant paper on the nih.gov and going through the citations manually to trying and find information.

zw7 · a year ago

I also use it daily. One of my favorite functions is being able to boost certain domains and block or downgrade results from other domains. So I boost results from domains I trust which significantly improves my results. They have a page with commonly boosted/blocked/downgraded sites which serves as a good starting point.

zw7 commented on Nearly all of the Google images results for "baby peacock" are AI generated twitter.com/notengoprisa/... · Posted by u/jsheard

xnx · a year ago

Blogs were great when they supported RSS, you could subscribe to feed and get updates if they happened every day, or randomly months or years in the future. There was no need for refreshing to see if there was something new.

zw7 · a year ago

I feel like RSS feeds made it to easy for me to follow lots of blogs to the point where the amount of content was too much. Being forced to manually review blogs for updates works as a filter in that I only go through the effort (albeit still small) of visiting the page if I was interested enough in keeping up to date with it. Not saying RSS didn’t have great advantages; just that your comment made me think of this potential downside.

zw7 commented on Xylitol is associated with cardiovascular risk academic.oup.com/eurheart... · Posted by u/geox

Enginerrrd · 2 years ago

Just read the paper. In the 2149 participants, detection in fasting plasma was associated with a hazard ratio of 1.57

It was also shown to enhance clotting at the levels detected in fasting plasma (in 10 people) which provides a potential mechanism to explain the effects observed in the larger group.

As for how legit it is... The number of people is significant. My only complaint is they didn't measure xylitol directly, rather they tested for polyol or something.

zw7 · 2 years ago

I believe they confirmed it was xylitol with LC-MS to validate it:

> Subsequent stable isotope dilution LC-MS/MS analyses (validation cohort) specific for xylitol (and not its structural isomers) confirmed its association with incident MACE

zw7 commented on New Florida law signed to prevent protection for workers from extreme heat npr.org/2024/04/12/124431... · Posted by u/ourguile

Alupis · 2 years ago

Nothing has stopped, and nothing is stopping businesses and unions from putting their own protections in place.

The articles says "dozens" of deaths across the country per year are heat related. How many are from Florida? Seems like largely a non-issue - hundreds of people die from falling off ladders every year[1], for comparison.

But... NPR likes to sensationalize and politically charge these sorts of headlines to rile people over "Florida Bad" since it's currently a Republican Governor.

Yesterday you didn't know about this, hadn't put one second of thought into it, and didn't care about it. Today, metaphoric you is outraged by it. ie, you're being played.

[1] https://blogs.cdc.gov/niosh-science-blog/2017/03/13/ladder-s....

zw7 · 2 years ago

The entire existence of labor laws is because businesses tend to not do what is best for their workers and workers need and deserve protections.

Not all workers are in unions. And even if they are, that shouldn't mean local governments shouldn't also be able to put protections in place.

All jobs have risks. Ladders are a necessary tool for jobs. Having workers labor in extreme heat without protections to prevent medical illness is not.

I'm not outraged. But certainly disappointed and hope for better for the laborers of Florida.

zw7 commented on New Florida law signed to prevent protection for workers from extreme heat npr.org/2024/04/12/124431... · Posted by u/ourguile

Alupis · 2 years ago

And... how many people died from it every year? What's the scale of the problem?

zw7 · 2 years ago

Heat related deaths are not uncommon. And likely undercounted[1].

It's one thing to not put in place protections. It's another to actively prevent protections from being put in place. Truly shows lack of compassion for laborers.

[1]: https://health.wusf.usf.edu/health-news-florida/2023-08-15/h...

zw7 commented on Vitamin B6 deficiency leads to social deficits and cognitive impairment nature.com/articles/s4139... · Posted by u/belltaco

gumby · 2 years ago

> I honestly think we’d catch a lot if we did the same [biennial testing] with blood tests. We’d probably save a lot on healthcare with early detections and corrections.

That is definitely not clear. Also every procedure has iatrogenic risk.

Look at cancer screenings in the USA: they have gotten more precise and more frequent, so more cancers are caught earlier and survival time increased.

Or has it? Since we find smaller tumors, we find ones that might never have metastasized at all, but intervene anyway. Even for the dangerous ones, earlier detection means earlier treatment, but was the patient going to at 50 either way? That just means they are a cancer patient for a longer period, which by the metrics counts as longer survival.

zw7 · 2 years ago

These are the over-diagnosis bias and the lead-time bias for anyone interested in learning more.

The book Risk Savvy by Gerd Gigerenzer has a chapter that does a good job of covering these. The entire book is worth a read.

zw7 commented on This page knows your battery charge level (unless you're using Firefox) deepesh-01.github.io/batt... · Posted by u/popcalc

charcircuit · 2 years ago

It is about intentionally hiding it when you know not hiding it would have cost more so that you can save money. The intent here matters.

zw7 · 2 years ago

No, fraud would be if Uber asked for your battery level to determine price and you (or your browser perhaps) lied. Not wanting someone selling you something to know you are desperate -- in this case because your battery is about to die -- is just a rational decision to avoid them taking advantage of your situation. There's a difference between not showing your cards and lying about the cards you are holding.