solinent

> Not really. Plenty of theories ended up being revised when humanity's understanding of the world improved. They still had real world applications: even though they were imperfect, they were good enough for a wide variety of uses.

Those imperfect theories are applied today, and still work in lots of contexts. They are complete, but subsets. We can make predictions, given certain initial conditions, with accuracy as close to 100% as you require, the only issue is measurement. Comparing psychology to physics in this manner is pretty embarrassing, and shows a lack of understanding of physics.

Applying imperfect physical theories causes bombs to explode where they shouldn't, nuclear plants to react when they shouldn't. We don't build fusion reactors today because we still need to determine the safety of isolating the plasma.

> We have no choice but to apply these theories. The alternative would be to do nothing until they are perfected. That would be negligence. Antidepressants do not have a 100% success rate. Nothing in medicine has. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be used.

I didn't say they needed to have a 100% success rate. You just need to find the mechanism. I'd be happy with a 0.1% success rate if our determination of the mechanism implies that there is no cure once it reaches that stage.

Let's do a study--I think drinking alcohol has cured my depression. It doesn't have a 100% success rate, but it would be negligent to tell people that they shouldn't get plastered if they're depressed.

edit: Don't drink alcohol to cure your depression. I suspect the mechanism is related to the gut flora. Alcohol kills the gut flora.

> Why would you say that? Do you think that rich people are happy and poor people are depressed?

There are numerous studies showing this, for almost all disease categories. All psychological illness is negatively corelated with socioeconomic status.

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

I'd say it's hard to find good sources of nutrition and the time to exercise when you're part of the lower class.

edit: negatively correlated...

Yes, it's like cancer, we don't know the cure but everyone rushes to tell you that you just need to take a pill and you'll feel better. Which pill?

> Many of these studies also rely on rating scales (typically HAMD or even PHQ9 for depression) that are a measure of depressive symptoms but don't in themselves have the power to make a diagnosis.

This is my point again if you read my original post, thank you. :)

I'd go further and say the DSM-V is pretty bad at narrowing down which medication to use for depression. I know so many people on damn SNRIs whose diet is complete trash.

That's my point. You haven't even come up with a basic taxonomy of depression and you're already applying your theory. In physics this would be blasphemous.

> Doctors must at least try to help depressed patients.

All the help I've received has been useless or actively harmful. No one even told me to exercise or diet, in fact, some suggested I take it easy, stop blaming myself.

That was all wrong. I was to blame. Every morning, by blaming myself, I made better choices w.r.t health. Now I am no longer to blame, I have no depression.

I used to be arthritic and asthmatic, now I am biking for hours straight, doing pull-ups every day.

What's the mechanism? My point is that depression is such a wide category that even if it exists it's useless.

You could say that "being human" is a disease, it always leads to death. I'm not saying "being human" doesn't exist.

I've experienced it to the point where I almost died, and I agree, it's a psychiatric scam.

> To receive a diagnosis of depression, these symptoms must cause the individual clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.

I'd say most of the lower class has this issue.

> But it is certainly not something that includes "almost everyone".

How do you know this?

edit: maybe almost everyone is too much, I mean about 97% of the population.

With epidemology it's hard to tell the difference, there's no identified mechanism for depression or psychomotor retardation.

Perhaps they're in the same category? All psychological disease categories are co-morbid with each other.

What about existential crises? Do people who have those also have depression?

I had severe depression, almost unable to move, complete anhedonia. I was still doing well at work (until the unable to move part got worse), but literally nothing made me happy. There was nothing about my life situation that could have caused it.

The doctors would tell me that I'm completely fine, except my optometrist, who found that my dry eye might have been caused by auto-immune issues. I followed up with a ER doctor (I'm in Canada, very hard to find a good GP) and he ordered a newer test which determined I have anti-ccp antibodies, which signal inflammatory cytokines.

I was having stomach issues at the time, but I thought it was the depression, the primary symptom of depression is felt in the gut, or so I was told.

I found the auto-immune protocol after talking with an elderly woman who had RA. I had to cut out quite a bit of food, and found it very difficult.

Finally, I tried a ketogenic diet. Surprisingly, after one week I was feeling better! My depression lifted, though all my physical symptoms remained, I found myself running for 30 minutes or exercising without even willing it.

I then switched to a pure carnivore diet, which is a subset of the ketogenic diet. I felt even better. I've heard the Wahl's protocol is another similar method to solve this problem.

Right now, every time I eat too many vegetables, sugars, or anything high in fibre I have an issue. I think my issue was a combination of very high insulin resistance (I ate tons of pizza in my uni days) and some allergy. I think I'm allergic to dioxin and glyphosate which is sprayed on all vegetables these days. An alternative to the carnivore diet which seems to work anecdotally is the Wahl's protocol, it's just very difficult to procure and find that much variety of vegetables.

There's this MD on youtube, Ken Berry. I've found the advice he gives to be tremendously helpful.

Liver is a wonderful health food.

It's all based on self-reports, it's very hard to account for individual differences in how people answer the questions and to control for those factors. I agree wholeheartedly.

However, certain types of severe depression seem to have a biological basis. Inflammatory cytokines may play a role. The "leaky gut" theory seems to be what's helped me personally.

The criteria for what "depression" is has changed over time, no wonder our results are changing. Almost everyone has depression given the current criteria [1].

Most people have 2,4,5,6,7.

The criteria is so vague your study would have to control for each item on the list. Here, they're not even using that criteria, and instead just using a simple test which involves self-reports. Placebo could be a huge factor here.

[1] https://www.psycom.net/depression-definition-dsm-5-diagnosti...

Here are some text instructions: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/blob/master/doc/manual-i...

Instead of generating the certs with prosody (there was some issue since my system uses p11-kit), I found it easier to just generate them all with certbot. update-ca-trust doesn't seem to correctly add them to the Java keystore and then you'll encounter problems. Certbot does. If you're on a debian based distro you shouldn't have to worry, however.

All you really have to do is copy/paste configs and then also change the url in the config.

Here's the process for adding the certs using p11-kit. https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/2842#issuecomment... and the comment below.

Yeah, this logic is used often in epidemiology, and this thought comes to my head every single time.

We also don't probably know all the possible heart conditions out there!

Finally, while someone might not have a condition (disease), they also might not have good function of the heart, this is not considered a pre-existing condition. This tends to happen with people who are overweight, leading to arteriosclerosis, but since the norm has moved so far in one direction, our criteria for disease might have moved as well.

Finally, the lungs and heart work in coordination to bring oxygen to the rest of the body. If the lungs stop functioning (which may not have direct symptoms that we expect)... I think it's pretty easy to fill in the rest.

This is true, but it is very impolite to respond to a comment like that with a correction. Context is everything.

> But the second you allow phone dial-in (virtually always a hard requirement), the second you allow cloud recording (which the article acknowledges), E2EE becomes meaningless, because the server itself necessarily becomes another endpoint.

This isn't true if one of the involved parties hosts their own video server. With jitsi I found it tremendously easy to set up a server.

The standard example I've heard is for Trampoline. No one calls them rebound tumblers anymore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trampoline#First_modern_trampo...

I think this is really just a case of lawyers being super-protective. It also pays well, I'm sure.

I think a words like Humvee or even Google have coloquially already lost their meaning--their meaning is polymorphic, it's only a matter of time (100 years is a matter of time) before a better Humvee or Google not released by the original product designer comes along that people will call Humvee or Google anyways.

Location: Canada

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes (Canadian citizen)

Technologies: C++/C#/Java/Haskell/Python/JS/OpenGL/Vue/Flask/Qt/Houdini

I have a mathematics degree from Waterloo, where I was employed through their co-op program for two years as a 3D graphics developer for SideFX's Houdini, working on the 3D viewport. I then moved into augmented virtual reality (as we called it), researching developing mapping systems for a company which sold to Facebook, Sulon technologies. After that I worked for Teledyne Optech, the leading Lidar company, developing their mapping suite software. At the present I am working on building a startup developing an analytics suite software using NLP for M&A law firms. Ideally I would find some part-time remote work (30 hours is still okay) so I can continue with my business, but I am willing to cut my losses given the right opportunity. Thanks!

Résumé/CV: https://asaldanha.com/resume.html Email: a2saldan@uwaterloo.ca

One time I had to create a button for a in-flight software which would control a lidar instrument. The button would enable you to select when to turn on and off the instrument.

We went for a few iterations where the button would light up when the laser was on. There were tons of issues--the state of the laser was not stored in the hardware, so every time the button would disconnect briefly, the state would get reset and lost. After months of back and forth dealing with algorithms to save the state and deal with spurious button presses when the device disconnected, we ended up with a completely useless button, as disconnects would happen very often inside helicopters, rendering the button useless due to the spurious presses near disconnect/reconnect.

Finally, we decided to go with a hardware switch (which I wanted from the start). In about one day the whole thing blew over.

End-to-end encryption is traditionally defined as a means to stop man in the middle attacks. If there's a man always in the middle it defeats the point a little bit.

Here's a good breakdown of crude oil usage I found interesting:

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...

> Now, “falsification” itself is a silly/naive cartoon-ish framework for how to do science. It has its uses, but we mustn’t cling to it too much (which would be cargo culting). We certainly have many other useful approaches as well.

It seems to me scientific realism only worked as long as we kept falsifying things. The main example people point to is the moon landings, which was pretty long ago now. What other useful approaches do we have? I've studied philosophy of science--once the philosophers told scientists that falsification was cartoonish, it seems like they've moved onto more social means of demarcating science, but ultimately a scientific statement has an epistemal value on some spectrum. I'd say it's much more valuable when we are able to falsify--how else can we determine how true something is?

The main progress in science has all come from engineering recently--we have fast computers so we can just throw the problem at the computer. That is ending now, or at least it will end at some point. Ultimately without a better scientific theory we can't give computers harder problems.

I was taught logical positivism had failed, however I don't believe it really has failed.

What successes has this new modern method of science really had? I don't see quantum mechanics really progressing that much beyond filling in the paradigm. Finding a new paradigm is where science really shines, and I think that tends to happen with methods of Popper and Ockham.

Finding simpler, more predictive theories has a much larger effect on society versus finding theories which are extremely complex to only explain 0.0001% of the phenomena.

If you think our current theories are necessarily complex, then you're a Platonist, eeek!

It's a chemosensitizer, I'd say it is.

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

edit: It's still being researched, but it is an anti-cancer drug, just like how chemo drugs get classed.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2...

Chemo drugs aren't really a technical category, but it seems like chloroquine will become part of the anti-cancer family soon.

Given our recent discovery that chemotherapy has only gives you a 2% greater chance of survival (again, your immune system fights of cancer just like it fights off viruses), I'm not so hopeful here.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2...

(summary: chemotherapy actively kills people, some people would have survived without it)

I didn't do it that much justice because I was discovering it independently, my arguments can easily be made rigorous, but you'd need a background in pure mathematics to understand it. However, there's a section on Wiki:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definable_real_number#Definabi...

They start with a stronger definition of a definable number, so they find that they do exist.

I think given the argument above there must be a hole in my own argument, I'd have to go beyond ZFC.

Another argument that's not completely non-constructive.

The real numbers have to be constructed. Typically, a number is represented by a Cauchy sequence or a Dedekind cut.

To determine if a real number is representable symbolically, we simply need a finite sequence of symbols which stands for this Cauchy sequence, lets say.

Theroem: The real numbers and definable numbers are the same set.

Assume a real number exists but is not definable. This means at the very least we have a mathematical statement saying there exists a number such that some logical predicate is valid (we may not even have a construction in ZFC), which can also be constructed using a Cauchy sequence. This mathematical statement is embedded in ZFC, and since we are humans it must be finite. In fact, you could come up with a binary representation for such a statement using methods from Godel, by mapping each symbol to some binary representation. Therefore, this number can be represented as a sequence of zeros or ones, a contradiction.

QED

I've read about benefits not related to zinc, in addition to the zinc-related mechanism. It helps zinc get into the cell which prevents the replication of the virus, but there are additional benefits of this chemo medication. I'd have to take some time to find the particulars, if you read the original French study I think it details all the theoretical benefits.

With any chemo drug I suspect it won't have a huge effect on patients who are mild, in fact it could have a negative effect, but I'm no expert.

The chants might help for people who have certain autoimmune conditions, it's a bit of vocal rehabilitation / voice therapy. Some of the mantras are tongue twisters :)

I know someone whose lupus went into remission after they started chanting, but there was one very particular chant that they found working for them.

I think as soon as you rename it it slowly starts losing its original meaning and connotations.

> form factor that is appealing

I don't think that's so difficult--once you can play games outside using headsets I think they will grow on people. Right now, as a fashion statement they represent people who sit at home and don't go outside. Not that there's anything significantly wrong with that, except it doesn't represent the majority.

Once we have good AR applications which work outdoors, the whole game will change.

> There is no Moore's Law in optics & batteries.

Our optics are already quite good, I don't think we need higher resolution cameras, just higher-speed cameras. I don't think this is impossible, we just don't have the processing power to deal with them yet.

For batteries, we already have some hope with the solid-state batteries of Goodenough.

We would still need more compute than this I believe, but this should get us close.