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bjt2n3904

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bjt2n3904
·4년 전·discuss
No, you've missed my point completely. You are talking about the ends. I'm talking about the means.

Yes, a society with less suicide is a better thing. We can achieve that in many ways -- however, some ways come with significant or unpredictable side effects.
bjt2n3904
·4년 전·discuss
What you're witnessing is a radical restructuring of what is socially acceptable, or seen as good.

This statement about what is "good for society" can't be evaluated by statistics or metrics. It has to be believed, taken on faith.

Oh, they'll cite studies about miraculous results with overcoming addiction and depression. Pardon me for being skeptical about the massive amount of junk science that has over promised, under delivered, or been outright unrepeatable.

This is no different than the "AI" algorithms that are quickly making their way into decision making in society. It's a black box that worked great in the lab, so let's ship it to everyone. Surely it will be good for us!
bjt2n3904
·4년 전·discuss
In a year or two?

You remember Reddit got started by faking a user base, right?

Do you honestly still think that anything is ever genuinely "trending" on Twitter? On YouTube? On Reddit?

It's all been fake for years!
bjt2n3904
·4년 전·discuss
And there you have it. The essence of environmentalism.

Find a small problem, propose drastic measures to counter it, end up making the problem worse.

Then, later, accuse everyone of impeding progress, and that there is an urgent need for even more drastic measures.
bjt2n3904
·5년 전·discuss
This is not the first comment to make such a remark.

History does not editorialize. Especially primary sources: simply portraying them is enough. People will come to their own conclusions. People must think critically, and for themselves.
bjt2n3904
·7년 전·discuss
Just as respectfully -- neither does anyone in this thread. People are speaking very confidently about things that they have no basis to. For instance, are your mental health problems really solved, or only mitigated? If you stop taking the hallucinogens and the problems return, they aren't solved.

Obviously, I'm happy that you're suffering less. However, I'm highly skeptical that hallucinogens "solve" problems, instead of merely masking them. Hallucinogens may provide you with a feeling that you have a place in the universe, but they cannot provide an actual place for you. It takes work to find and create purpose in life. You can't create purpose with pills anymore than you can create strength with synthol injections.

Which is better -- a feeling backed by reality, or a feeling based on chemical reactions in your brain induced by a substance?
bjt2n3904
·7년 전·discuss
I can't help but wonder if instead of confronting the source of our depression, we're simply drugging ourselves to the point we can't feel it anymore--especially that people are now looking to psilocybin as a means of treating depression. Perhaps the depression is a symptom of something bigger, a lack of purpose or meaning in life.

Someone I know was on medication for anxiety, and they remarked how they'd go to see a movie at the theater, and would simply have no emotional reaction to it. A character sacrificing their life for a friend would have the same reaction as tomatoes being sliced for a hamburger.

The medication had an INCREDIBLE affect on them, and it really helped them out of a bad place. But the huge thing is they learned to identify the source of their anxiety and confront it, and no longer depend on the medication.

I just make circuits. Don't take this as medical advice.
bjt2n3904
·10년 전·discuss
Ironically... I'm awful at analog design. I don't deserve this handle :(
bjt2n3904
·10년 전·discuss
The non-LE protocol has been pretty difficult to breach from the hacker-hobbyist level. The communication protocol is incredibly complex, and the hardware simply doesn't exist to interface well with it. A lot of BT2.0 (ie: non LE) "security" comes from the fact it's just darn hard to interface with it.
bjt2n3904
·10년 전·discuss
Hi! RF Engineer here. Bluetooth sucks for a number of reasons, only a few of which actually relate to RF.

First, we're bad at naming things. Is it BLE? Bluetooth Smart? BTLE? Bluetooth 4.0, or Bluetooth 4 Low Energy? And what does this have to do with ANT+? This doesn't seem to be a big problem, but it's a sign of deeper problems with the spec. In the long run it makes it very difficult for developers to implement.

Bluetooth 2.0 is radically different from BTLE. In 2.0, you had one device which acts like a microphone, and another device which acts like a speaker. This was like getting two people to dance together, it takes a lot of practice to get the joined movements right. If one person stumbles, it all goes down like dominoes.

BTLE on the other hand, acts like a (more familiar) client server model. You come up to the bank teller, and have a limited set of operations you can preform (withdraw/deposit money, open/close account). Here's the catch though... the teller is only open for 10 seconds during a 24 hour day, and moves throughout the city. You have to arrive at just the right time, or you have to wait until tomorrow. (This was done for battery saving.) The throughput is also MUCH slower than 2.0, which makes applications like audio out of the question for now.

There's also a lot of bureaucratic hype surrounding it. If you look at the release from the BT SIG, it seems very much similar to Java's claim that it runs on a bajillion devices. All in all, BTLE seems to be a solution in search of an IoT related problem, much like Java.

So in short, the reason I think it sucks is because it's a very complicated protocol with poor and confusing naming conventions. It sure doesn't help that it keeps getting re-invented! (Although BT5 seems to just be add-ons, finally!) Implementers (both on the HW side and the mobile/desktop side) have a difficult time figuring out how to do things correctly, much less why they need to be done. Things are getting better, but until the next "killer BTLE" application comes out, it's just heart rate monitors and useless iBeacons.