NB: Many of these older phones already came with metal weights insides to give a feeling of more substance to them. Not always in the handset, though it wouldn’t surprise me if some did have them.
Usually, the base of the phone itself was a sturdy metal plate. So while not the handset itself, the phone unit was usually a pretty decent self defense weapon candidate as was widely displayed in many a fight scene in movies from the time.
Honestly I've been pleasantly surprised with CachyOS, admittedly I've been using Linux for over a decade but it was my first foray into Arch-land and I'm genuinely impressed with it. The stability is very good, and I'm yet to break anything seriously on it.
The idea isn't that it's a 'gaming distro' specifically, and more that it's suited to performance in general which can be a useful thing. If someone's new to Linux and doesn't understand why they might want to run something like CachyOS I agree they should just pick Ubuntu or similar and be done with it, but personally I rate CachyOS as a daily driver.
I like Orwell a lot, especially as a political writer. I do think Newspeak would have got a rethink if Orwell had lived today though; as irritating as algospeak words like 'unalived', 'sewer slide' etc are to read they demonstrate that exerting thought control through language isn't as straightforward as what's portrayed in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Authorities can certainly damage the general ability to express concepts they disapprove of, but people naturally recognise that censorship impairs their ability to express themselves and actively work around it, rather than just forgetting the concepts.
Isn't this idea demonstrably false due to the existence of various sensory disorders too?
I have a disorder characterised by the brain failing to filter own its own sensory noise, my vision is full of analogue TV-like distortion and other artefacts. Sometimes when it's bad I can see my brain constructing an image in real time rather than this perception happening instantaneously, particularly when I'm out walking. A deer becomes a bundle of sticks becomes a muddy pile of rocks (what it actually is) for example over the space of seconds. This to me is pretty strong evidence we do not experience reality directly, and instead construct our perceptions predictively from whatever is to hand.
Pleased to meet someone else who suffers from "visual snow". I'm fortunate in that like my tinnitus, I'm only acutely aware of it when I'm reminded of it, or, less frequently, when it's more pronounced.
You're quite correct that our "reality" is in part constructed. The Flashed Face Distortion Effect [0][1] (wherein faces in the peripheral vision appear distorted due the the brain filling in the missing information with what was there previously) is just one example.
Only tangentially related but maybe interesting to someone here so linking anyways: Brian Kohberger is a visual snow sufferer. Reading about his background was my first exposure to this relatively underpublicized phenomenon.
Ah that's interesting, mine is omnipresent and occasionally bad enough I have to take days off work as I can't read my own code; it's like there's a baseline of it that occasionally flares up at random. Were you born with visual snow or did you acquire it later in life? I developed it as a teenager, and it was worsened significantly after a fever when I was a fresher.
Also do you get comorbid headaches with yours out of interest?
I developed it later in life. The tinnitus came earlier (and isn't as a result of excessive sound exposure as far as I know), but in my (unscientific) opinion they are different manifestations (symptoms) of the same underlying issue – a missing or faulty noise filter on sensory inputs to the brain.
Thankfully I don't get comorbid headaches – in fact I seldom get headaches at all. And even on the odd occasion that I do, they're mild and short-lived (like minutes). I don't recall ever having a headache that was severe, or that lasted any length of time.
Yours does sound much more extreme than mine, in that mine is in no way debilitating. It's more just frustrating that it exists at all, and that it isn't more widely recognised and researched. I have yet to meet an optician that seems entirely convinced that it's even a real phenomenon.
Interesting, definitely agree it likely shares an underlying cause with tinnitus. It's also linked to migraine and was sometimes conflated with unusual forms of migraine in the past, although it's since been found to be a distinct disorder. There's been a few studies done on visual snow patients, including a 2023 fMRI study which implicated regions rich in glutamate and 5HT2A receptors.
I actually suspected 5HT2A might be involved before that study came out, since my visual distortions sometimes resemble those caused by psychedelics. It's also known that both psychedelics and anecdotally from patient's groups SSRIs too can cause a similar symptoms to visual snow syndrome, I had a bad experience with SSRIs for example but serotonin antagonists actually fixed my vision temporarily - albeit with intolerable side-effects so I had to stop.
It's definitely a bit of a faff that people have never heard of it, I had to see a neuro-ophthalmologist and a migraine specialist to get a diagnosis. On the other hand being relatively unknown does mean doctors can be willing to experiment. My headaches at least are controlled well these days.
scoot, you may find the current mini-series by the podcast Unexplainable to be interesting. It's on sound, and one episode is about tinnitus and research into it.
The default philosophical position for human biology and psychology is known as Representational Realism. That is, reality as we know it is mediated by changes and transformations made to sensory (and other) input data in a complex process, and is changed sufficiently to be something "different enough" from what we know to be actually real.
Direct Realism is the idea that reality is directly available to us and any intermediate transformations made by our brains is not enough to change the dial.
Direct Realism has long been refuted. There are a number of examples, e.g. the hot and cold bucket; the straw in a glass; rainbows and other epiphenomena, etc.
Yeah the industrialised world wasn't maligned by Blake as 'dark Satanic mills' or as Mordor by Tolkien because they found it an artistically fulfilling place.
If you cough up for private healthcare maybe, when it comes to the NHS if it's not going to kill you immediately it's more or less 'take a spot in the waiting list and God will sort it out' these days.
> Real engineers can face personal liability and even jail time for negligence.
To be fair, software engineers can face similar liabilities in highly-regulated fields. When you're dealing with software regulated as a medical device for example, senior engineers do sign off on releases. You also see more processes associated with engineering carried out, particularly with respect to testing and documentation.
One problem I've found in my current house is that the connection becomes flakier in heavy rain, presumably due to poor connections between the cabinet and houses. I live in Cardiff which for those unaware is one of Britain's rainiest cities. Fun times.
I think that's a little simplistic, I have liberal (in the British English sense) views specifically because I think humanity is fundamentally flawed. If we are all flawed particularly when it comes to wielding power over others, it's self-evident in my opinion that governments should be limited and the total power any individual or institution can amass should have a hard ceiling. I see explicit anti-authoritarianism as a necessary counterweight to our flawed nature, every exercise of political power is potentially harmful but through the ideas developed in the Enlightenment it can at least be contained and controlled.
Humans are inherently flawed and they're inherently kind. We're evolutionarily primed for competition and cooperation. Antisocial behaviour can be both inherent and environmental. I feel you might be setting up a false dichotomy when the motivations for political beliefs are often pretty complex and varied.
reply