Rendello

Many people take SSRIs and other medications because they believe the serotonin imbalance theory to be the modern scientific consensus. A doctor would be fired and ostracized for using the four humours, but can prescribe life-altering medication after five minutes to correct chemical imbalance, a theory which has never had much support within the scientific community.

Indeed, a rebuttal [1] to that paper starts with:

> Moncrieff et al. report in a review of reviews that depression is not generally linked with serotonin deficiency. This is hardly news to neuropharmacologists, which Moncrieff et al. tacitly admits, as they justify their review by citing examples of laity and general practitioners believing depression is caused by a “chemical imbalance”, i.e., in serotonin. For instance, already in 1986 did Depue and Spoont point out that serotonin deficiency may not be a general cause of depression or other psychiatric illness. Further, that increasing extracellular serotonin—e.g., with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)—treats depression does not mean decreased serotonin causes depression.

I have a lot of trust in the science of medicine, but almost none in healthcare. It seems like the research is totally divorced from the medieval treatments I see doctors give all the time. "This is hardly news to neuropharmacologists" vs "laity and general practitioners believe ..." indeed.

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-023-02090-3

This one was good:

Interview: Doug McIlroy: https://tmpout.sh/5/2.html

A more accurate quote sidesteps the whole question:

> The question of whether Machines Can Think […] is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.

– Edsger W. Dijkstra

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra#1980s

See also: The Serotonin Theory of Depression: a Systematic Umbrella Review of the Evidence (2022). It's worth reading the introduction and results in full, but here are two important quotes (footnote markers removed):

> Our comprehensive review of the major strands of research on serotonin shows there is no convincing evidence that depression is associated with, or caused by, lower serotonin concentrations or activity. Most studies found no evidence of reduced serotonin activity in people with depression compared to people without, and methods to reduce serotonin availability using tryptophan depletion do not consistently lower mood in volunteers. High quality, well-powered genetic studies effectively exclude an association between genotypes related to the serotonin system and depression, including a proposed interaction with stress.

> The chemical imbalance theory of depression is still put forward by professionals, and the serotonin theory, in particular, has formed the basis of a considerable research effort over the last few decades. The general public widely believes that depression has been convincingly demonstrated to be the result of serotonin or other chemical abnormalities, and this belief shapes how people understand their moods, leading to a pessimistic outlook on the outcome of depression and negative expectancies about the possibility of self-regulation of mood. The idea that depression is the result of a chemical imbalance also influences decisions about whether to take or continue anti-depressant medication and may discourage people from dis-continuing treatment, potentially leading to lifelong dependence on these drugs.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0

> more traffic - more noise - more pollution

These are often true, but not inherently so. I've lived in remote rural, suburban, and dense city environments. My dense city had disadvantages, but it was quiet and had little traffic or pollution. In my experience the suburban environment is the worst for all three once you get off the residential streets, there's loud, polluting traffic (3/3).

In two of the places I lived, I couldn't keep the window open due to the constant tire noise. It wasn't an issue in the densest place I lived, which was a low-car-traffic place and pleasant to be outside in. Now, I live right next to a freight rail yard, but I don't find the train noise grating like the highway noise.

The 8-Bit Guy also built a backyard office and documented it in a series of videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFP-fU0FsF0

A couple of years ago I considered making a simple regex-based web extension to block posts with common AI words: ChatGPT, Copilot, LLM, etc. There was one or two on every page and I didn't want to see them.

Over the next few years it flipped, most of the posts concern AI, and I scan for non-AI topics to engage with. I can't really blame HN for this, it's a massive upset in our industry and the world more broadly.

> It's very likely your printer is secretly adding marks to the page

It's most likely how the FBI caught NSA leaker Reality Winner:

> Both journalists and security experts have suggested that The Intercept's handling of the documents, which included publishing the documents unredacted and including the printer tracking dots, was used to identify Winner as the leaker.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner

Like the Unicode Character Database, which is a series of text files in similar-seeming but disparate formats (it now also has an XML representation):

https://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/ucd/

Stone is a safer bet to survive the centuries, but even those are reused as bricks, like the Rosetta Stone:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone

I was surprised by it too, perhaps I'll find the original source and see what he said directly.

Maybe it's that the girls (and main characters generally) in Miyazaki's films tend to be pretty stoic, whereas Anne is incredibly talkative. Most of the show (and book as I understand it) is just her going on and on and on and on, it's her main personality trait and a source of humour.

The clothing patterns of the Japanese cricket vendors in the article are awesome [1]. By a "Torii Kiyohiro" [1] who seemed to have a thing for drawing/carving intricate clothing [2][3].

1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Torii_Kiyohiro_-_Thr...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torii_Kiyohiro

3. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search?artist=Torii...

4. https://www.artic.edu/collection?artist_ids=Torii%20Kiyohiro

Thanks for the tip, the hidden feeds are much nicer.

I used a great one for FB until it stopped working, it blocked 95% of everything. Andrew Kelley had a good analogy in his Don't Take the Black Pill talk:

> the user-facing software of Facebook is categorically, fundamentally coercive. It's like an arbitrary code execution exploit running on our brains. Scrolling down is the program counter, and the content that pops up is the instructions.

https://andrewkelley.me/post/dont-take-black-pill.html#:~:te...

In the Canadian bush, you'll run into people still running beaver traplines. From what I hear it's mostly for nuisance control since pelt prices are quite low. When I was talking to trappers, they seemed to imply that the government sets prices and buys them like as a cartel, but I'm not sure what the process is or if I understood correctly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapline#Registered_traplines

A broadly generalized super-automaton has long been a fantasy. Suddenly it's not so fantastical.

Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu documents the last day of hot type at The New York Times before the digital changeover. It's one of my favourite documentaries, everything feels so vivid and alive:

https://www.nytimes.com/video/insider/100000004687429/farewe...

> Sorry, we moved this.

Isn't the borrow checker supposed to prevent these things? I was still holding an immutable reference.

I really enjoyed watching this Ghibli background artist pain and explain his process in real time. There's a lot of artistry that go into these films:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hup0lsrY07I

I've also been watching the 1979 anime adaptation of Anne of Green Gables. Hayao Miyazaki worked on it (7 years before founding Ghibli), and although the TV animation is more limited than a film's, I think it looks awesome. It's pretty funny too. Miyazaki's reasons for quitting halfway through production are really interesting to read in the Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_of_Green_Gables_(1979_TV_...

I looked into it because I've always wanted to read Anne of Green Gables, and I had heard that PEI is a big tourist destination for older Japanese women who grew up watching the series. It's one of the few I don't mind dubbed, since it's an adaptation of an English-language work and the acting fits really well. It's probably not supposed to be on Youtube, but the entire series is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2CmEYEeDSU&list=PLV4Ztn9euy...

For those interested, anyone can write a (one-page) article:

https://pagedout.institute/?page=cfp.php

I like page 30: The Subpixel Zoo. It must be hell for text rendering:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpixel_rendering

> cache-aware data structures and algorithms

Maybe hardware- and access-aware more generally.

One of Mike Acton's other talks has a "Is Data-Oriented Design even a thing?" section, which goes over what he means when he refers to DOD:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc&t=741s

Just don't do it like Rust inlining annotations:

<No annotation> – Gently suggests inlining

#[inline] - Really suggests inlining

#[inline(always)] – Really Really suggests inlining (still not guaranteed!)

https://nnethercote.github.io/perf-book/inlining.html

I was wondering if the hash might be unique, then a commenter would say "it's now `kill.<hash xyz>.js`, and the webmaster would be able to connect <hash XYZ> to a user agent and IP. It wouldn't accomplish anything, but it might be fun.

For me it still happens, the file has just been renamed to /js/kill.<giant hash>.js

I'd never heard of ParaSail, so I found this high-level overview [1]:

> All of the objects declared in a given scope are associated with a storage region, essentially a local heap. As an object grows, all new storage for it is allocated out of this region. As an object shrinks, the old storage can be immediately released back to this region. When a scope is exited, the entire region is reclaimed. There is no need for asynchronous garbage collection, as garbage never accumulates. Objects may grow in a highly irregular fashion without losing their locality of reference.

> Note that pointers are still used behind the scenes in the ParaSail implementation, but eliminating them from the surface syntax and semantics eliminates the complexity associated with pointers.

This approach seems to come up in many contexts, where a pointer-based address (raw pointer, reference, slice, etc.) is abstracted into a higher-level address key, usually an index integer (essentially a higher-level virtual pointer). The implementation might reallocate under the surface, or manage chunks of data through some sort of paging where the underlying pointers don't change (I was musing about this here [2]).

I guess I'm thinking out loud here, but most dynamic languages (eg. Python) don't expose the pointers or care about invalidation of the addresses, they just happily reallocate. I've barely written parallelized code, is pointer aliasing really one of the biggest roadblocks? It seems like it can be abstracted away fairly easily, even in a pointer-exposing language.

1. https://www.adacore.com/uploads/papers/parasail-pointer-free...

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49013285

And for an Struct-of-Arrays approach, DuckDB and other columnar databases can have nice advantages (I mentioned this in another comment [1]), including optimizations you wouldn't see in typical code (SoA or otherwise) like column-level compression [2].

The big problem with databases, in my opinion, is the horrible API friction between them and your code (not even SQL per se). It makes sense if you're calling out to a database server and transferring data, but for the small, intermediate values we see in code every day, the relational model is amazing and yet so painful to use within a given programming language.

I've been envying the C# people and their LINQ, and the Java people and their jOOQ, because I'm either making a half-assed database in my own code with structs, arrays, and hashmaps, or I'm constructing some SQL monstrosity, shoveling it out to SQLite or DuckDB through a library, and marshalling the types back and forth.

Why can't I just have everything I want all the time?

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49016824

2. https://duckdb.org/2022/10/28/lightweight-compression

In Rust at least, most things have a with_capacity(n) constructor to ensure there's space for n elements (or n bytes, in the case of strings). I suppose there's no getting around the fact that if your collection has no known bounds, you'll have to do bounds checking + potential reallocation in the hot (push) path or risk having your program SIGSEGV.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/?search=with_capacity

If you click to another tab, the site changes its title and favicon to a random webpage like:

- Pick up lines suggestions – ChatGPT

- Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up - Youtube

- Amazon.com: waifu pillow

When you go back to it there's an overlay chastising you for allowing JS on an untrusted website. I thought it was pretty funny. You can see the list of fake pages in the source (which has the sketchiest URL ever due to punycode + the filename):

https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/js/kill.js