> There's no obvious reason to keep such information secret
... Is this the right assumption to make based on what we know about how US intelligence and the US government works (historically)? There are any number of reasons why these people would have an interest in keeping it secret. It might not seem rational to you because you have completely different priorities and values, but that doesn't mean other people won't think it's rational to keep it secret.
I'm not making any assumption that I know for certain what US intelligence does though I know sometimes the US likes to embarrass it's enemies by describing bad things they do.
The thing I'm pointing out that it's problematic to automatically dismiss contradictions to ones' argument by saying that these are explained by secret government actions when there's no clarity about what would or wouldn't motivate those actions - ie, if you assume secrecy takes care of all contradictions to your theory, you can prove anything.
The only thing secrecy would take care of is why we are missing information. If you rely on the absence of info to contradict a theory, without taking this variable into account, then you will come to a weakly supported conclusion.
A tricky thing about secrecy is that it exists to reduce clarity. If you had another sensitive way of gathering information (an insider, for example) you would not want an attacker to draw that conclusion by just sharing everything, by default. You will want to keep this motivation secret as well. Embarrassing the enemy has the lowest yield.
My understanding was that one was originally the expected NSFW thing, then got taken over and turned into what it is now. I can't find an easy way to confirm or refute this at the moment, though, so this may be mistaken.
Wow, this seems like an impressive step forward for the CPU industry and the kind of change we've been hoping for since Ryzen started giving Intel a run for its money. I can only hope that AMD continues to stay competitive and keep Intel on its toes.
I’m not sure about how much progress was actually made. To me, it seems like they pocketed some extra performance that was previously “unused” due to lower max TDP specs.
These benchmarks suggest they are much slower at bringing the chips to market than AMD, but they’re able to match or beat performance dollar-for-dollar.
Assuming the chips and motherboards are actually available (at normal prices), and that the production systems will perform in the same way as the benchmark systems.
It’s a bit of a complicated matter in terms of pricing as a measure of performance / dollar because with the current Ryzen CPUs AMD increased pricing relative to the previous generation and Intel being in its current position is lowering pricing to remain competitive. So AMD is reducing pricing accordingly and it’s not clear what the margins look like (the 5800X in particular is an awkward chip to produce and now may be forced to even sell at a loss).
There’s many factors to consider in TCO like performance / watt as well combined with motherboard ecosystem which has been a historical AMD weak point. So it’s tough to compare CPU pricing on an apples to apples basis even if the CPUs were otherwise exactly the same performance and pricing
AM4 _and_ prior. Motherboard quality has varied considerably across different manufacturers compared to Intel’s partners. One other example of recent annoyances is the launch situation with B450 and X570 and now with B550 and X570S existing years later basically. Gigabyte’s one manufacturer that has been swapping out parts to lower spec and they don’t get away with it in Intel’s partner network but somehow AMD isn’t penalizing Gigabyte at least publicly to keep this from happening.
For a long time AMD motherboards just had less features. Unsure if he means that specifically, but it was a pain point when I was building an AM4 system.
No, you're right. The whole article misses the forest for the trees. The term "dopamine fast" doesn't literally mean fasting from dopamine. It's about fasting from easy "dopamine hits" from media designed to exploit the way our rewards circuitry works.
I think this criticism is itself missing the forest for the trees. The idea behind dopamine fasting is, (possibly unfairly) reduced to the minimum, that doing less of a harmful behaviour for a while will cure us of our problematic behaviour. In other words, we actually are addicted to dopamine itself, instead of having built up maladaptive cognitions. This is what (I think) the article tried to refute.
Even with the little we know about the inner workings of our brains, this doesn't appear to be true: We have to actively build up alternative behaviour and critically inspect/change the cognitions that actually promote the problematic behaviour.
So if a person has unhealthy bevaviour patterns regarding social media consumption, just doing less of that without also actively changing the cognitions that lead to the unhealthy behaviour in the first place won't help much. We do these things because we have a mostly subconsious theory that doing this is good for us. If this actually isn't, than that assumption has to be challenged, and healthy alternatives have to be built up. Just not doing the thing for a while won't replace the assumption, unless one is abstinent for a really long time (think years).
>So if a person has unhealthy bevaviour patterns regarding social media consumption, just doing less of that without also actively changing the cognitions that lead to the unhealthy behaviour in the first place won't help much. We do these things because we have a mostly subconsious theory that doing this is good for us. If this actually isn't, than that assumption has to be challenged, and healthy alternatives have to be built up. Just not doing the thing for a while won't replace the assumption.
It's not about replacing the assumption. I don't even think there's much of an assumption (that it's good for us), it's rather the opposite: people actually hate themselves for spending so much time on social media, youtube, etc.
So, it's more about kicking a bad habit, than about trying to change some non-existing assumption that it's a good thing.
Seems almost purposefully dense in that way. I'd consider flagging it except, ironically, the headline itself was more informative to me than the article.
Exactly, it's like the author has never hear of the hedonic treadmill. Something I a 24 year old who has taken exactly one psychology course knows about.
This has nothing to do with the hedonic treadmill. The treadmill model describes changed on much larger timeframes and of much larger impact, i.e. how your model of the world changes if you lose both legs, or become a parent, or become rich etc.
Dopamine fasting is a mechanistic model trying to explain unhealthy behaviour patterns that can occur dozens of times a day.
Oh. I noticed that none of the supermarkets around me have had any bags for weeks. I somehow didn't connect the dots that there was a bag shortage. Odd. Why would there be a bag shortage?
Apparently a combination of phasing out plastic bags while there's a pandemic related supply shortage of paper. At least that's what German news are saying, no more details as I can't find anything without a paywall.
Uh...you get what you pay for. I have Sennheisers that are still good 7 years later. I have Audio Technicas that have also lasted just as long. They just didn't cost $10, more like 100-500. But even my "low-end" headphones (which I use far often) are fine years later.
It's a bit disingenuous to compare $10 cans with $240 Airpods. What is this? Reddit?
Honestly, I'd be surprised to find out that most people used wireless 100% of the time. I have a few good wired headphones that I didn't throw out just because I got myself BT earbuds. What do people use with their PCs?
It's weird to see so much praise for ME2 everywhere. I hated the game after ME1. There's basically no main plot. 90% of it is side quests to flesh out side characters. Which, fine, I see why people enjoyed so much, but it felt so pointless to me because the main plot boils down to "throw all these people at a final base and see who makes it out alive". I wanted to see the ME story moved forward, but it took until ME3 before that actually happened.
Also, ME2 committed character assassination of Liara, who, for some reason, unexplainably turned from a nerdy aecheologist into a deadly spy assassin. And the game railroaded the player into working for Cerberus. Ugh.
'lets build this McGuffin thing that we conveniently found at our doorstep at the very right moment and which we aren't even sure how it would work, but we will use resources of the whole galaxy to build it' story was hardly any better.
In the movie Contact the Earth wasn't under a genocidal attack by a overwhelming forces of a highly advanced alien race, they just received some blueprints that they thought should do something. And It was at least known how to activate the thing. With Crucible, they didn't even know until the very end.
Not sure how this is relevant in any way. I've seen dozens of MacBooks where the hard drive had failed. Not to say that they fail any more than other laptops, but unless Apple has come up with some magical technology that makes their hard drives never fail, this is a terrible, terrible change. Water is wet, the moon circles the earth and hard drives fail (eventually, some sooner than others).
Both. SSDs also fail (yes, it's true). I'm not sure why people seem to think they last forever or that they never fail. They do not last forever. They do fail.
