Hence the wisdom of the 'already been there': (Mind)set and setting.
A 'clinical' environment, may not be the ideal setting for some patients.
I don't think psychedelics are going to be any different to any other officially approved psychiatric medicine - we don't know enough to know which subset of patients will respond well vs. poorly for psychedelics any more than already available FDA approved (or equivalent similar organisations for other nations) of psychiatric medicines, which in some cases fuck people over for life after a single dose. Large numbers of people have permanently suffered a massively reduced quality of life as a result of a single Invega injection, yet it's still administered regardless.
All I know, is that we don't know enough to know enough.
My personal empirical experience is that I'm wired backwards and have atypical responses to what is now available due to the clinical phase 3 trial majority response, and have personally suffered from supposed experts applying the 'approved' treatments. Even my current psychologist admits they're in foggy territory which makes her better than previous medical professionals I've dealt with.
Advances in physiological medicine changes before and during my lifetime have been incredible. Advances in psychiatric medicine during my lifetime have been a result of capitalist companies gaming systems to create revenue streams rather than improve the overall well-being of humans. The war on drugs just stifled understanding of what options are out there, and what cause-effect mechanisms exist.
It's nice to see independent studies above and beyond the other end of the extremists (e.g. MAPS) contributing to understanding, even though sample sizes are miniscule compared to what we need.
We're currently gambling/playing the probabilistic statistic odds on psychiatric medications without knowing the 'why/how' they work.
We still don't fully understand the mechanisms of action of Aspirin which was first synthesised well over a century ago, and been in widespread use for many decades.
I still remember thinking as a young person (now 50+) that it was stupid leaving all these lights on at night, particularly corporate logos on buildings.
I've moved out of the city and can see most of the stars still, although my eyesight is now failing and I can't see stars I used to...
We are becoming inwardly and selfishly focused as a species and disconnected to the world the alone the rest of the solar system/universe.
Or don't bother with the above - install Windows 10 without an online account and just unplug the network card. Download the Win11 upgrade binary. Run the upgrade and keep clicking no to the many (but not excessive) times it suggests to create a Microsoft Account.
Time intensive, but doesn't require much knowledge or pulling hardware.
Rockbox on a Sansa Clip+ (2009) was my personal peak for portable music - overtaking ye olde mini-disc player. The newer models all sucked usability-wise in comparison - screen-wise/button-wise etc. etc.
It was 2 colour, only had 6 or 7 buttons, I could completely operate it without looking at it, and Rockbox gave it the two main features I really wanted: flac support and gapless playback.
The main advantage I have now is I can have my entire (digitised) music collection on my phone - mostly ripped from CD's or purchased from Bandcamp, because it's > 400GB, and I think the Sansa Clip+ only supported 8GB maximum back in the day. Was considering digitising stuff we only have on vinyl as there is a USB output on our turntable, but decided to just leave it in its pure form. Plus recording at 1x speed is almost like going back to the dual cassette tape recorder era and high-speed dubbing was 'special'.
Hardware-wise the clip on the back always broke quickly and then the headphone socket went at some point. Went through about 5 of them before they were obsolete/or on eBay for $100s, but were good enough and cheap enough to keep replacing. One interesting upside of the space constraint was that it made you curate your own music collection, and then opt for a different set (particularly after a few new purchases).
Looks like Rockbox now does a heck of a lot more than it used to back in the day. It's great you've breathed additional life into it.
Not that I'm against the idea behind the software, but the amount of name-stealing because it sounds cool (sometimes kind of relevant, sometimes not) that software has done, has totally polluted the original words to the point they sometimes don't show up in search results.
Even the two Steve's and their Apple company had this issue (as did record companies etc. etc.). Try searching for python now and 'nary a snake to be mentioned.
To be fair I'm equally pissed off that a bunch of different pharmaceutical companies re-brand identical molecules with different names for each company and sometimes for different countries even within a single company.
Sometimes all this naming cleverness or arbitrariness just makes the world more confusing for everyone.
The last things the capitalist powers that be want, is any sort of socialism. Profit > people, rather than People > profit.
Just a reminder - socialism does not necessarily imply communism, and and implementation of communism thus far has been extremely corrupt.
I lived the in the UK for a couple of years in the early 2000's, the NHS was awesome. It's now a shallow shell of its former self.
Australia where I'm from is trying to imitate the privitisation of health, but my state-local for-profit hospital just went tits up and has been acquired by the government. Partially because a baby needlessly died because profit > caring about human lives, but it wasn't accountable and used tax havens etc. etc.
Fuckin' mess.
I feel for the the UK, because at their best, they probably had the best socialised healthcare system in the world (partly because their population size afforeded them access to medical equipment that other similar countries in Scandinavia etc. can't quite afford).
The US profit motive trumps well-being and healthcare tied to your employment just screws with our heads for most reasonable people. The people that need the help the most are denied it, whilst for the rich - it's built in.
One also has to wonder how much local and non-local political interference was involved as well, considering most speakers were unlikely to support the 'status quo'.
>Of course, many people are building their business on huge AI scaffolding.
It's similar in the way many businesses transitioned their scalability etc. to 'the cloud' starting a couple of decades ago.
It's a combination of loss of control and abdication of responsibility. They can claim to the customer the reason the service went down is now Microsofts or Amazons etc. etc. fault. Ultimately the end-user was the one that ended up losing.
It was a choice. There was something they could do - and keep everything in house, although cost-competiveness becomes an issue at some point and you get priced out of your target market. Everyone loses except for the cloud computing (or now AI) providers.
This guy is a complete dick. He also falsified travel expenses (verifiable via save history) in a Word document so he could complain about an independent local Mayor.
FWIW, mushroom rings are real, at least in the UK. They seemed to be affected by EMF, because I wandered past one centered directly centered under street power lines, I have no idea whether that's where a ley-line intersect it or not. I don't think they were psychedelic mushrooms though, but it was pretty cool seeing them growing in a large circle about 3-4m in diameter.
The main point of the article is that they're psychedelic, but don't contain psilocybin as the active molecule.
In earlier centuries it doesn't seem unreasonable to allow the possibility of the mushroom ingester to describe their experience as visiting the fae realm, whether in the UK or otherwise - as an accidental occurence I don't know how else people from the past would be able to explain what they perceived to others?
I've never used AI except for messing around with Stable Diffusion in its early days (my then-current graphics card didn't have enough ram to run it), played with it a bit after an upgrade and that was it.
Never used a LLM or anything explicitly.
Got annoyed when I had to deal with AI chatbots as front-line customer service - although that only happened once or twice in the last couple of months.
So basically, keep doing what I'm doing.
I like AI for specifically targeted applications: - e.g. 100,000+ AI "eyeballs" vs. a few 100 for diagonstic imaging, working out whether there's something to worry about or not. I hate the idea of generalised AI, LLM's etc.
Lowering the bar to enable 'creative output' from non-creative individuals just fucks up the world, because natural talent is replaced by unnatural talent, especially in (late) capitalism, where money is worth more than human experience to those few control-freak managers.
I'm old. I even earnt enough to buy a house with lawn over 4 years ago during my (pre-AI) career as a Software Developer. Get off my damn lawn.
A 'clinical' environment, may not be the ideal setting for some patients.
I don't think psychedelics are going to be any different to any other officially approved psychiatric medicine - we don't know enough to know which subset of patients will respond well vs. poorly for psychedelics any more than already available FDA approved (or equivalent similar organisations for other nations) of psychiatric medicines, which in some cases fuck people over for life after a single dose. Large numbers of people have permanently suffered a massively reduced quality of life as a result of a single Invega injection, yet it's still administered regardless.
All I know, is that we don't know enough to know enough.
My personal empirical experience is that I'm wired backwards and have atypical responses to what is now available due to the clinical phase 3 trial majority response, and have personally suffered from supposed experts applying the 'approved' treatments. Even my current psychologist admits they're in foggy territory which makes her better than previous medical professionals I've dealt with.
Advances in physiological medicine changes before and during my lifetime have been incredible. Advances in psychiatric medicine during my lifetime have been a result of capitalist companies gaming systems to create revenue streams rather than improve the overall well-being of humans. The war on drugs just stifled understanding of what options are out there, and what cause-effect mechanisms exist.
It's nice to see independent studies above and beyond the other end of the extremists (e.g. MAPS) contributing to understanding, even though sample sizes are miniscule compared to what we need.
We're currently gambling/playing the probabilistic statistic odds on psychiatric medications without knowing the 'why/how' they work.
We still don't fully understand the mechanisms of action of Aspirin which was first synthesised well over a century ago, and been in widespread use for many decades.