alpos

Probably the most important measure a company could take to prevent lasting harm with this kind of work would be to spread it around a whole lot more than just 36 people. The real risk of long term impact here would probably be with persistent exposure to it all day long. Most people can handle reading or seeing some graphic stuff with proper mental preparation for it but to see nothing but that day and day out would quickly wear you down.

>Is it ever appropriate or ethical to ask humans to voluntarily subject themselves to traumatic experiences in exchange for compensation?

Probably not. Yet people still voluntarily sign up for military service around the world by the millions, and they do so for a bunch of personal, family, idealistic, cultural, and societal reasons that are hard to reduce to a few easy to argue points like a lot of people online try to do with stuff like this.

Personally, I think it's admirable to hold the ideal that we should like to never offer jobs like this, we should also like to never offer jobs that involve going to war, cleaning up hazardous materials, dealing with explosives, working around heavy fast-moving machines, cleaning sewers, or a myriad of other terrible experiences either; but we're probably not in a position to make those better choices just yet. Until then, people are willing to do these things for a dozen different reasons per person, only two of which are the pay and support they get from the employer.

What I've found in traveling the whole country for a few years is that local power generation or storage always forces you to consider just how little power you actually need. You can pretty much never just power the whole house, or even a whole RV. Even 50amps is ALOT of power and trying to provide that from solar/generator/batteries is incredibly expensive.

So your real question is pretty much never going to be, "how do I power my whole house in an outage?" but rather, "What is absolutely essential to spend up to 3000w on?" and even then knowing that a generator putting out 3000w burns 20lbs of propane in about 4hrs and 3000w for 4hr on batteries would require 10 to 12 100ah lithium batteries at $350+ each.

I still agree with you that super efficient heat pumps are the future without fossil fuels but that probably also has to come with greatly improved insulation values in almost all homes regardless of region. Think double the current DOE recommendations. If you're running on electricity, you will feel the cost of every bit of heat you lose through the walls, roof, and windows. More insulation is a one time cost versus monthly, it always makes sense in the long run.

However, we'll need regulation to force home builders to invest in that instead of just adding unnecessary sqft that people never use but have to heat and cool anyway. For some reason people don't want to pay extra for a house that is well built and well insulated, they'd rather go with bigger is better even when it's already absurd, and builders have noticed this.

Such setups are easy to build if you want it and running a 100-200w blower doesn't require too many batteries either. However, if you need to run a compressor, the number of batteries required to power that for 6hours would start to get cost prohibitive.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=2000w+pure+sine+wave+inverter+aut...

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=220v+automatic+transfer+switch+50...

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=100ah+lifepo4+battery

This guy has accumulated essentially everything you could want to know about such setups, at any voltage, any reasonable power range, in various applications: backup systems, full off-grid, mobile power.

https://www.youtube.com/@WillProwse

https://www.mobile-solarpower.com/

For a 240v load, there are inverters that output 220v or you can use one inverter to power each hot line, just buy the batteries at the same time from the same manufacturer and ensure they will stay balanced. In your case you could also use a cheaper manual transfer switch if you don't mind going into the closet to flip it when the power goes out.

For example, when considering questions of crime and punishment / deterrence we probably wouldn't value the preferences of say, psychopathic murderers, on the same level as those of the families of their victims. That would be silly.

However, it would still be good to collect their preferences on conditions within the prison system and host of other topics. And we might still intentionally devalue those preferences too, but that would be a deliberate choice of values as society.

When we fail to collect the data effectively in the first place, we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to determine what we value and what we don't. So we're still going to want to know these things, that way we don't just discover later that we were ignoring a big thing that, turns out, we would have liked to value once we knew about it.

In your particular example, add in the one stipulation that both the Nazi and the family of his victims don't have much discretionary income to spend and yet they live in a world where society's preferences are collected primarily or singularly by way of observing what people spend money on. In that scenario, all of those people's preferences share the equal status of being completely ignored. That seems unfair to victims as well.

Modify the scenario a little differently and say the Nazi is very wealthy while the victims are poor. So then because of the data collection method alone, as a society, we would then be elevating the Nazi's preferences to 100% greater value than the victims.

That outcome seems vastly contrary to what we would actually value if we just fairly and accurately collected the data first and then applied our judgements about what should be valued.

Further notice that in just asking the questions, we can also easily discover at the macro level that this guy is a Nazi, after all, given the chance, he'll tell us so. This means deliberately ignoring his preferences is easy at time of aggregation and now we can do that on purpose, because as a society, we don't value the opinions of Nazis when it comes to questions of how to run things in a democracy.

Therefore if one wants to know what the society's preferences are, that data must be collected in such a way the each individual's preferences are included in the data set.

We might still apply a weighting function at aggregation time, depending on why we're looking at society's preferences in that instance. There are certain group's of opinions that we don't value as much for answers to some questions, but we should like to be deliberate about those choices instead of applying an implicit weighting function during collection.

I've never been worried about blue light. I sleep fine. And stayed away from social media because it seemed unhealthy to me from the start, so I've never been hooked on twitter/instagram/tiktok. I actually feel for the people who are obsessed with it, especially the number of journalists who seem to have defined their jobs and role in life around reporting what was said by whom on twitter. There seems to be a small trend forming around people exiting that particular sink hole and realizing immediate improvements in their life experience. I hope that situation continues to improve, but that's up to each person to decide whether social media is helpful or harmful for their life and goals.

While I do spend a lot of time in front of a screen, I also get up regularly, stretch, walk around, take the dog out for a walk, etc. So I don't get tension headaches. If I feel uncomfortable at all, I do something about it.

Your reply here makes a lot of assumptions about what you know about other people, their situations, what you know about this area of study, and what the solutions are. This is the actual issue that seems to make this light v dark mode discussion more difficult that it needs to be.

What has been properly studied in this area is pretty thin as most areas of scientific inquiry go. So there really isn't much anyone can claim to know here with the levels of certainty you seem to express.

Aside from that, you're being pretty aggressive about giving out unasked advice to people you don't know, whose situations you don't know.

If you can't understand why someone like myself can read and understand everything you just said and none the less enjoy dark mode; if it bothers you that people claim dark mode benefits them in spite of your certainty that they are mistaken and this is just a matter of having the right information, then you might try accepting that people are different, start asking more questions, and dial down the unasked advice. You might happier and more pleasant company for it.

Not everyone needs to be the same for you to be okay with the situation. You don't need to fix people. If anything you just need to understand more.

Not only are the "decide if this string of characters is a word" tests showing a maximum difference of around 30% for dark v light mode in simulated night with small fonts but, that's not what most people are doing most of the time when reading things and it's certainly not what programmers are doing when reading code. So that almost certainly does not translate directly to X% slower reading performance in real world scenarios. This real world vs lab test difference alone can easily account for why so many people assert that dark mode is better for them even though the evidence sometimes suggests it shouldn't be. And that doesn't score a point for either camp. It means there's still much we don't know. So any conclusions are tentative at best.

Studies on the mechanics of reading, especially on the web, have shown that much of the time people are actually scanning and identifying whole phrases or sentences as one pattern. Hence I can write and the cow jumped over the moom and more than half the people who read that will not notice the second m swapped in. Same trick applies with jumped over the room. Which many will literally see as jumped over the moon even though two letters are different now and it's an actual different word at the end. It's even harder to see correctly because I already primed your memory with the typical phrase. Of course, people unfamiliar with that phrase won't have a problem with it. They have to parse each word anyway. No bigger pattern in memory. This is even worse when people are scanning whole web pages looking for patterns that might match content they are interested in. And most of the time programmers are reading blocks of text, it is to find an answer or concept they need in order to continue coding.

Quoting the same group as in the OP: https://creativehandles.com/blog-posts/79/4-types-of-eye-tra...

People do this in speech too, try making a statement to some friends that sounds phonetically similar to a common catch phrase or something you know they'd be triggered by but actually be saying something different and benign. See how often they react as if you said the common or triggering phrase anyway. For extra fun, follow up later and see how many people swear they actually remember you saying the thing you didn't say.

I suspect this pattern recognition trick is even more at play in reading and writing code. When one is fluent in a language, we don't actually need to read the symbols to know what a block of code is doing. Structures are so deliberately similar that one can recognize conditionals and loops for what they are without reading the words "if" or "while", this goes on to the content of those blocks and any function calls as well. Many functions use similar names for similar actions in code regardless of the program space because humans being humans.

To spot this one in action, take notice of how certain ways of writing particular programming patterns are jarring every time you read them, to the point that you feel the need to change it even though it's perfectly functional. It's not the code per se, it's the readability. It's particularly egregious when someone gets a pattern around 70 to 80% correct but then does something different for one or two components of the overall pattern. You get annoyed reading it because it's like hearing someone mispronounce a word or change one word in a commonly used phrase. The pattern is there in your brain, it starts to match, you build up an expectation that the next parts will match. If it does, satisfaction; if it doesn't, frustration. Now your brain has to do more work to read in and learn what the non-matching parts are doing. This expectation tells you that you would rather be pattern matching large blocks of code than reading each syntax element.

When reading in this manner, it's actually more important to have proper syntax highlighting than any specific contrast ratio between the background and the text. I could totally see light mode being a consistent hindrance here too. Not sure about that but it would explain a lot about the prevalence of preferences in general population vs programmers. For good syntax highlighting you want a lot of colors that contrast against both the background and the other syntax elements. Some shades of yellow and green probably don't do as well against a white background as a dark one for example, especially if used for similar shaped elements that often show up close to each other.

Regardless of how that goes, or if we ever even find out whether this matters to the light v dark debate, the nuances around the way humans read differently in different situations are not even being addressed in the studies yet. That observation alone should give people pause before confidently claiming to know anything here and certainly before asserting that someone is wrong to have the preferences they have.

Just something to think about.

You really think you've read enough on this or that there's even been enough study of the topic for you to know with any certainty at all how someone else's eyes are working for them? Pure hubris.

All the data you can read doesn't mean a damn thing for Hosteur's personal experience. Neither you nor anyone you have read has studied that person's eyes, you actually have zero basis for telling them what is easier to read or how much strain they feel in their eyes.

The science on this has been going back and forth for at least the better part of two decades now. Nothing here has been proven, as is the case in most actual science. Any single study merely supports or doesn't support some view or hypothesis. It takes forever to confidently say we know how the eye is even working in these situations, let alone offer some broad recommendation for what every person ought to do.

Aside from that, you are misusing the concept of a categorical proof. The studies at hand don't even address the problem as a categorical concept space. There are no symbolic categories here, no functions mapping objects onto semantic spaces. You are stealing a term you don't understand from a field of mathematics you don't understand to shoot down a person you don't understand.

Stop being an ass and at least try to understand people before you try to tell them what their reality is and what they ought to be doing before bed.

Thanks but I'll let the scientific process play itself out over time. In the mean time, I appreciate that the public debate has induced phones, apps, and many web sites to give me the option to enjoy reading things all day without eye strain.

The fact that more stuff defaults dark mode or follows a system setting also means I spend less time having to re-style sites with a browser plugin.

This is probably already an endless back and forth like the editor wars but I'm okay with that as the long term status quo. It'll mean that most designers learn that they just have to use themes and include an option for either preference. Some even go as far as making their sites look good in both modes. It pleases my counter-culture senses to see them exploring more angles on the color wheel.

That goes all the way down to DNS and connecting a server to the internet in the first place.

ICANN and IANA allow you to have a name and IP address, but you pay a middleman extra (in many cases a whole lot extra) for those because ICANN and IANA don't want to deal with you directly so you do it they way they want you to.

Amazon/Microsoft/Google allow you to have server time and hard drive space, you buy from them because servers are super expensive...because they bought up all the servers and continue to do so.

Also you can't run a server at home anyway because the company that bought the rights to lay network cable in your town/county/city doesn't allow you to.

You might be able to run a server anyway if you buy or rent an office in one of the locations they serve business internet to, but you'll run it they way they allow, for the uses they allow, at the speeds they allow, and you'll pay a lot for it.

If you want to self publish, even with a basic site you probably use Wordpress or something similar because the existence of design platforms has raised the public's expectations for what a site should look like and be able to do. So you design your site the way the design companies allow you to.

If all that's too much and you're just looking to write stuff for people to read on the internet, you most likely use Medium or Substack or something similar. And to do so you agree to their terms of service and end up discovering what gets attention and what gets ignored on that platform. So instead of writing what you want per se, you write what they allow you to.

If you want to share video content, you do it the way YouTube wants people to, right down to reminding people to like and subscribe and hit the bell, in every damn video.

If you want to share your love of crafts, you use Etsy. If you want to sell stuff generally, Amazon again. In both cases, you follow their encyclopedic sets of rules about what and how to sell as well as their convoluted, ever changing, unpublished rules around what shows up where on the listings and searches.

If you want to connect with people, you connect how and to whom Facebook or Tiktok allow you to.

If all this pisses you off and you want to rage at random people, you rage about the things Twitter allows you to.

In theory anyone can do any of those things without the platforms, of course, but in practice they don't and always for a slew of reasons that basically amount to someone got here first and built a moat.

In the most basic cases, anyone trying to do something on their own will at least need to advertise...on the platforms, the way Google, Facebook, and TikTok allow you to. Good luck.

Much like yogurt, it's made by fermentation. Much like table salt, it was discovered to be delicious by people putting just about everything in their mouths back in the day. It can be said that MSG was in the process of being well-studied early on when the sensationalized news fouled up the whole process and made people unnecessarily afraid of something no more harmful than table salt.

Decades and tens to hundreds of papers later, the sensationalized story is still winning in the minds of people who don't understand how science works and don't know where most of the stuff around them comes from. This is the problem with overreacting to a headline. You might be doing yourself a favor health wise, possibly, but you might also be demanding millions of restaurants redesign their menus to feed you less healthy, less delicious food, for no good reason.

The problem is, you don't know. That's why it's okay to take a single paper with a grain of salt.

The problem is, people can be wrong. Scientists have bias too. Sometimes people see trends in data not because it's valid but because that's what they were consciously or sub-consciously hoping to find. Even on review of the work by industry and regulatory panels, people still make mistakes. Products still sometimes have effects no one knew about or intended. On top of that, everything is lethal in sufficient quantities. Even water will kill you through electrolyte depletion if you drink enough a once.

My point is just that science is hard, studies are deliberately narrow and careful to try and add one tiny little fact to the pile of all human knowledge. And even then, most early findings turn out to be wrong in various ways or get refined in a way that makes excited reactions later seem overblown. It takes a long time to prove anything like the broad statements we tend to find in sensationalized news coverage. So while caution is fine, immediately assuming that one small study just recently published, yet to be replicated successfully, using a methodology that leaves a huge number of variables open to question between the lab environment and the real world use cases, is just not something to get too excited about.

Maybe the companies that work on rinse aids will want to follow up this line of research and answer some of those questions...but let's be honest, if you're already assuming the product is harmful based sensationalized news, are any follow up papers funded by the interested parties really going to change your mind? Are you even going to look for those papers six months to a year after you toss out your rise aid and demand your favorite restaurants do the same?

If you want to find the studies you would like industry to be doing, I'm sure they are available. Most of the scientific studies out there have something to do with testing products that exist or finding new things to make into new products.

It's just that most studies of anything at all are not terribly sensational. Like, how boring a headline is "dish soap company finds new detergent compound that binds to grease 2% better than the most commonly used compound, no immediately obvious side-effects, more study needed for FDA approval"?

On top of that, any time you're moving through a fluid your speed is determined by your thrust/drag ratio. When adding more space internally you have parasitic drag and induced drag working against you. Parasitic drag increases as you add surface area and when you grow your forward facing profile. Induced drag increases with the amount of lift you need to fly, more sq.ft, more material weight, more lift needed, more induced drag. Airships mostly fly with lifting gas but still generate a lot of body lift once they start moving.

So if you'd like to go anywhere once you get off the ground, you're going to need to balance cabin size against the size of the engines needed to produce enough thrust to travel at a reasonable speed along with the fuel weight required to travel any distance.

Many of the ideas we all come up with for airships technically will work and the fact that we keep thinking of these things over and over again through the years speaks to how fascinating the concept of an airship is; however, we've never had a problem making an airship that works. That's the easy part. Making one that anyone would want to use for everyday transport is the hard problem.

Most likely you either have to pump a lot of power through the mesh to get field coverage enough to reliably bounce atoms away from the skin or you have to make the wire mesh so dense that you've basically got a layer of copper as your envelope and are therefore far too heavy to lift off.

It seems like too obvious an option to have simply been missed over the decades.

Still, I have to wonder if someone will invent a way to coat a string of fabric in like 1nm thick copper film. Or maybe graphene will save this idea too.

A thermonuclear bomb set off in a giant underground tank of water would make a lot of power and we would have no trouble controlling and harnessing that. We just don't want to do it that way. We already have tons of trouble getting people to approve building a controlled nuclear melting pot anywhere near them, no one would ever agree to let you detonate bombs under their feet. That doesn't mean the tech doesn't work. It means we don't want to use it.

And flying cars have existed since the term was invented. They're called airplanes. You can get a four seat one to fly yourself for about 40k. They are a bit harder to "drive" than regular cars and we don't make as many places to park them so most people don't want one. Plus gas prices already limit how much people drive, try burning 10 gallons/hr.

Airships work too, they just occupy a niche that we do not have a need for other than entertainment value. Cargo ships get lots of stuff across water cheaper, trucks get stuff across land cheaper, and cargo planes get more stuff through the air faster.

Technically you could build an airship that only uses power to get into a jet stream then floats across the Atlantic on the wind saving tons of fuel, but then you've reinvented a sailboat in the sky and the buoyant force of water always beats that of air. So you might as well put your cargo in an actual sailboat and get there faster (see ocean currents v wind above them) without needing to "fuel" the thing with hydrogen or helium.

This is just one example of the cross-section we can't escape. It is as tyrannical as the rocket equation is to space travel. For anything to be a viable transport, it needs to go faster, use less fuel, or carry more cargo than other modes of transport.

You can let it leak out, but then you need to carry extra compressed gas above what is already needed for the same issue with helium.

You can build a tighter, multi-layered envelope, but then you're adding weight and quickly negate the extra lift. This is the category your tens of thousands of sacs idea falls in. The problem there is that you are massively increasing the surface area through which the hydrogen can slip out. You have to keep in mind, to a single hydrogen atom, everything we consider "solid" looks more like a fishing net for catching a whale. Our best designs so far usually involve layering and offsetting those nets so as to at least slow the atoms down as they path through the mesh.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/helium-hokum...

Airships occupy an unfortunate gap in the cross-section of mass moved over distance per time and energy space. Unless they build one that goes faster than a plane for the same fuel or consumes less fuel to get the same amount of cargo across the same distance, it will always be better time/money spent to clear a dirt runway or build a road.

New materials don't get us there. At best, the new envelope saves on how much helium needs to be bought in addition to fuel...but that's competing against other tech that doesn't need to buy helium at all.

And going all electric doesn't do it either. That only forces the trade off between cargo capacity and energy generation/storage. We already know batteries are not more energy dense than jet fuel so that will continue to be a losing trade until batteries equal chemical fuels. This is made even worse by the fact that fuel burns off in flight, making fueled engines more efficient during the flight while batteries are just as heavy empty as they are full.

Perhaps some cheeky person with ready access to such machines might flood the market with clone's of everything Jeff does and see how he feels about his own source of income being so easily taken away. Just a thought.

I did some image searches to find out if this photo was an ordinary reproduction of something commonly done but found only references to this case and a few references to Zhang's other work. Where/how did you find countless other pretty similar images?

In this case the court claims this is an ordinary photo, not an artistic work; okay, that means one should easily be able to find hundreds to thousands of similar photos taken and disseminated in non-professional contexts. Image searching the internet through several search providers brings back only references to this case and more of Zhang's work.

It should also mean that Jeff's pieces are not original art work, do not get copyright protection either, and are essentially art fraud. This ruling should open him up to getting sued by anyone who thought they were buying an original art piece, only to find after this ruling that they bought an average Joe's random photo, this should include the gov't supported exhibit, which should want to revoke Jeff's prize.

With this ruling there really are not two ways about this. Either Zhang's work is original and Jeff copied it without asking, or Jeff's work is not original either and therefore isn't worthy of winning a prize or being sold as original art work.

For this specific case, I'd still rather see the evidence that most dishwashers, when used according to manufacturer operating instructions (or even when used as most people operate them in practice) actually do leave enough dangerous chemical residue on the dishware to be a risk and that significant amounts of this stuff transfers to food before I'd say it's a claim the manufacturers have a burden of defending. Similar claims could be made about ceramics and glazing for instance, and the ceramics would harm us if ingested, but there's no evidence that ceramics from plates transfer to foods as we eat, even if we cut food on the plate with a knife. Of course, ceramics don't tend to dissolve readily in water either so we can presume detergents and rinse aids have some higher chance of transferring to food if present.

Of course the reality is, if enough people take the sensationalist headlines seriously, the manufacturers will have to defend it anyway; but this effect is what makes organization leaders assume most people are too stupid to hear the truth about nearly anything and the root cause of things like bad nutritional advice recycling over and over again.

Many people are still afraid of stuff like MSG, even though it occurs naturally in many foods and has been proven safe over and over again. The root cause of that scare was a science article in the New England Journal of Medicine back in 1968 which was sensationalized by the New York Times. Bad memes like "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" are prevalent enough throughout the history of scientific literature to merit an equal portion of caution before reacting to any single paper with too little skepticism or too much drive to change our lifestyles or behaviors.

  "The residue remaining after the rinse cycle varies between 1:250 to 1:667 for the dishwasher detergent and 1:2,000 to 1:10,000 dilutions for the rinse aid."

  "In the present study, we hypothesized that if the detergent and rinse aid residues are not completely removed, once dry, they may remain on the surface of the dishware."

This line of research really should have started with something like,

  "we swabbed 50 recently washed and dried dishes from 25 different restaurants using different dish-washing machines. Here is the average concentration of detergent and rinse aid residue on the dry dishes".

But that means the only thing this paper actually looked at is: IF there is residue on the dry dishes, and IF that remains in the assumed concentrations by the time you eat off of it, and IF all of that residue ends up attached to your food, and IF all those chemicals make it past your stomach, let's see what that might do to your gut lining.

Not a bad idea for a study, but definitely not what people on the internet are taking this to be.

The news articles are promoting that unsupported claim to an assumed fact that there is chemical residue on all the dishes people are eating from and that this is destroying people's gut lining. Most of the headlines around this are something to the effect of: "Commercial Dishwashers Destroy Protective Layer in Gut".

Which is pure sensationalism, the paper authors never claim this and this idea is not supported by present evidence.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/load-testing/#ove...

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/implementations/distributed...

https://loadninja.com/features/

https://loadium.com/features

Most hosts don't protect you from DDOS automatically, CloudFlare provides some level of protection for free now. You'll have to check with BlueHost to see if they have anything. Otherwise, I think you can sign up for CloudFlare's service even if your site isn't hosted there.

https://www.cloudflare.com/ddos-hub/#DDoS-Page-Pricing-AS

For other common security exploits as well as mitigations, you're probably looking for the OWASP Top 10: https://owasp.org/Top10/

Testing for this sort of thing falls under the realm of vulnerability scanning tools for the languages you are using. Several OWASP projects aim to make this easy and are implemented in many common languages, especially Dependency-Check, FindSecBugs, and APICheck.

https://owasp.org/projects/

You can dig through those projects or go looking for "<language> findbugs/findsecbugs/vulnerability scanner/etc". There are also commonly tools available for codified password detection, dead-code checks, and data-flow analysis, on top of the often used find-bugs and style guide checkers. Several widely used repositories, such as JFrog, provide scanning for stuff you upload and it's dependencies. SonarQube is also a big player in this space with integrations for many repos and CI/CD tools.

https://jfrog.com/knowledge-base/best-practices-for-package-...

https://www.sonarqube.org/