I feel… weird. Bowlero Corporation reorganized one of their arcades close to where I live and apparently removed the only arcade cabinet that kept me going there in the first place. This also means that there is only one rhythm game arcade cab left in my city, and that arcade is also managed by Bowlero…

I was already half-seriously contemplating opening an arcade myself, and this incident is getting close to pushing myself over the edge, but I just couldn’t make the idea work with how ridiculously expensive it is & understanding that the type of cabs I’m interested in basically make no money, so… yeah

On unrelated note, work is highly stressful this week, two doctors appointment, so yeah! (cries inside

I genuinely don’t know… there doesn’t seem to be any ongoing discussion of who or why are these people targeting IA. There are other people who are trying to rescue data stored on IA

Hope this would be over soon…

So it was the physics Nobel… I see why the Nature News coverage called it “scooped” by machine learning pioneers

Since the news tried to be sensational about it… I tried to see what Hinton meant by fearing the consequences. Believe he is genuinely trying to prevent AI development without proper regulations. This is a policy paper he was involved in (https://managing-ai-risks.com/). This one did mention some genuine concerns. Quoting them:

“AI systems threaten to amplify social injustice, erode social stability, and weaken our shared understanding of reality that is foundational to society. They could also enable large-scale criminal or terrorist activities. Especially in the hands of a few powerful actors, AI could cement or exacerbate global inequities, or facilitate automated warfare, customized mass manipulation, and pervasive surveillance”

like bruh people already lost jobs because of ChatGPT, which can’t even do math properly on its own…

Also quite some irony that the preprint has the following quote: “Climate change has taken decades to be acknowledged and confronted; for AI, decades could be too long.”, considering that a serious risk of AI development is climate impacts

Oh my… I had a slightly similar incident. New phone number, had a bunch of random strangers texting me (some even calling!) asking for Ethan. My name is not Ethan, I didn’t know who Ethan is

No idea what was on my mind back then, but I somehow got the contact info of this mysterious Ethan, called him (hilarity ensued since he got a call from someone on his contact list named “Me”), confirmed his up-to-date number, and promptly referred everyone looking for Ethan to the real person for over a year…

Life is strange sometimes

A bit off topic… But from my understanding, the US currently doesn’t have a single federal agency that is responsible for AI regulation… However, there is an agency for child abuse protection: the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect within Department of HHS

If AI girlfriends generating CSAM is how we get AI regulation in the US, I’d be equally surprised and appalled

Not a perfectly relevant xkcd but

(From https://what-if.xkcd.com/21/)

• A privacy-respecting mail service: I use mailbox.org since it follows email standards, but I think many ppl like Proton mail/Tutanota. Recommend because they are privacy-respecting, and self-hosting email is way too difficult
• More of a yearly subscription per-se, but a personal domain from any domain registrar. Recommend because why not? There are so many cool things one can do with a domain: custom email, your own blog, professional website for job, …
• A VPS from Linode (or any reliable provider). Recommend because some things are better done on a VPS… and I want a public-facing IP that is not directly from my bedroom
• I used to have subscriptions to the local arcade. Recommend because I basically get cardio workout on the DDR machine (and it costs less than a gym. And easier to cancel)

Thanks! I think this is it… because I guess the more important part to this trope is that “hehe this is actually the world that you - dear viewer - lives in”… the high-fantasy part is secondary and depends on the genre I guess.

I… agree. Did get a lot of great recommendations tho!

East Asia; again, never heard anyone refer to “24/7” specifically (ok maybe at more hipster places that try to imitate American businesses?)… There might be a similar idiom for it but I genuinely couldn’t think of any off the top of my head

I have actually never heard anyone say it this way specifically where I grew up… so technically the answer is “no”?

I tried to dug around and found a Reddit post saying this:

“The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines the term as “twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week; constantly”. It lists its first reference to 24/7 to be from a 1983 story in the US magazine Sports Illustrated in which Louisiana State University player Jerry Reynolds describes his jump shot in just such a way: 24-7-365.”

So this might be a fairly new idiom? Which would explain why it’s not really a thing in a lot of cultures… but I assume they have their ways of referring to this.

number of hours and days are the same

Ok akktually Japan has a rather interesting 30-hour day thing in the context of businesses… but jokes aside, the 24-hour, 7-day week system is indeed quite universal

I realized that I had allergies during the height of the pandemic… so the short answer is it gave me way too much unnecessary stress because I was constantly worried whether I got COVID-19.

• Depends… I felt most times it was just “did I finally catch covid or is this just allergy?”, there was once or twice when it got really bad though.
• There was once when I had such a bad allergy that my eyes both flared up and I could barely see… It was bad enough that I reached out to the allergy department of my provider as soon as I was functional & got me into immunotherapy.
• Not meds, but I did 3+ years of immunotherapy: 1+ year of getting allergen injections every week (thankfully still had a car back then), and then once per month of maintenance after I reached the highest dose. Had to stop because of relocation/insurance nonsense… but I think the treatment worked.
• No you’re not being a big baby, please take your health seriously and stay safe & healthy.

Dash low sodium seasoning

No idea lol… But DASH is a real NIH-supported diet (https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/education/dash-eating-plan).

Edit: the study obviously isn’t sponsored by the seasoning company, but I’m not sure if the DASH diet itself is.

“academic honorable discharge”

I am aware of this happening in multiple cases involving scientific fraud… no idea how exactly this is being done though.

But did the low sodium diet itself serve any factor in the violence that occured in this botched study?

Not sure… but even without dietary interventions, there are a lot of simple explanations to how this could have gone wrong. This was a much larger study than the Camp Calcium series this PI did, a lot of the recruited kids are low income/from problematic households, with very little to no adult oversight, and there were very few activities for entertainment/enrichment… Also the dorm they lived in was technically separated by gender, but let’s just say that it is not difficult to get to the other gender dorm… So yeah.

This got me into a way bigger rabbit hole than I remembered… The person is not officially “fired” since you cannot fire a tenured, distinguished professor and a former department head, but I suspect she was persuaded to leave. The incident is quite wild, I was just a random undergrad hired to do lab tests so I only knew some details.

This is about Dr. Connie Weaver, professor emeritus and former department head at Purdue’s Department of Nutrition Sciences (her ORCiD). She was known for nutrition research where the institution recruits adolescents summer-camp style (similar to a clinical trial), and in 2017 she started to lead a multi-year (lasted one month before it was shut down) study on low-sodium diets in adolescents, Camp DASH. Supposed to be a gold-standard diet study… close to 10 million dollars of NIH money on the line too.

And then things went off the rail. The operation tried to cut a lot of corners: pretty much all of the employees were undergraduates who couldn’t find other things to do for the summer, training was minimal or nonexistent, and the employees-to-camper ratio was very, very low… oddly similar to the recent MrBeast incident where participation oversight seems to be very bad.

This then led to sexual harassment, abuse, etc… one poor girl’s nude was shared online, probably more cases of sexual assault, several adolescents got into serious fights with each other, and from what I’ve heard some of the undergrads who were on supervisory roles were also injured. Several lawsuits were filed, the university stepped in and stopped the study (I just remembered them stop scheduling me to work in July and was wondering what went wrong lol), the issue got elevated to the university president, and more lawsuits…

Obviously tenure means someone should be protected from being terminated at-will like most employment contracts. So the reason I have my suspicion is… Dr. Weaver became a professor emeritus not long after the incident, but is now somehow still publishing work while working from… San Diego State University? Doesn’t seem like someone who retired on their own will to me.

If you are interested in the full detail… here are some news articles on this incident. Exponent is Purdue’s student-run newspaper

• Undark’s report on Camp DASH
• Exponent, 2017-07-24, Camp DASH was shut down
• Exponent, 2017-11-28, president’s statement
• Exponent, 2019-09-20, drama between Dr. Weaver and the school on data retention
• Exponent, 2024-02-11, outcome of a lawsuit

Oh boy. I used to live in Houston, TX, a city notorious for being car-dependent…

I will present three sets of numbers. First is where I first moved to in Houston, in a supposedly highly coveted, super walkable area home to mostly medical students… Second is the place I lived before I moved out (and I used to boast to people how accessible the place was, by US standards). Third is in Chicago, close to city center (“The Loop”).

And FYI I only lived in places that would be considered to be within the city, so these might be as small as they can get…

• To the nearest convenience store: 900m | 750m | 170m
• To the nearest chain supermarket: 700m(used to be 4.2km) | 450m | 220m
• To the bus stop: 160m(never seen anyone there though) | 350m | 71m
• To the nearest park: 950m | 1.5km | 1.6km
• To the nearest big supermarket: 700m(used to be 4.2km) | 450m | 450m
• To the nearest library: 1.2km | 450m | 1.0km
• To the nearest train station: 7.0km | 3.8km | 2.5km

Fun story about the first location! Everything seems so walkable on paper (close to park, close to highway), until you realize that there was no fucking supermarket anywhere within walking distance… H-E-B only opened a store closeby after I moved there. However, even the super-close grocery store is across the highway and I almost never see any sane people walk there so… For parks I am only counting ones that are good enough to be tourist-worthy, otherwise the latter two locations have pretty easy access to lots of green space

And if you are asking about public transit that are not bus/train: respective distances are 1.4km | 1.0km | 280m. The last number in this series is basically how I chose where to live…

The grocery store around the block sells dirt-cheap 2-pc fried chicken + potato meals that I like a lot. I think I used to get the 8-pc fried chicken from Walmart often too…

I sure hope their recent heavy prosecution of the Invidious project isn’t related

I’ve actually been waiting for anyone to mention any rhythm games at all. I think rhythm games in general tend to have low skill floor, but insanely high skill ceilings (Freedom Dive, some Hatsune Miku songs, …), which make them an interesting case on the difficulty scale… Some rhythm games have unintuitive control too (OSU being a prime example with the mouse control, also Taiko series) which makes them even more difficult

Side note: I find it hilarious that the original game which OSU was based on was actually just a “tap a tablet” game though (Ouendan series, use stylus to click bottom screen of NDS)… also some JP arcades stock Reflec Beat and crossbeats Rev, Round1 has an exclusive game Tetote Connect, which are all “tap a button on the screen” games but you touch the screen with your hands instead

I agree, even the hardest non-rhythm games I seem to be able to get accustomed to in 50~100 hours, but not some of these monstrosities

One of:

1. none,
2. lofi, or
3. wild speedcore music beyond most people’s imagination

Although I think options 2 and 3 are more helpful for helping me getting back from being distracted rather than concentration itself…