I've always found there to be something hauntingly beautiful about the Thylacine. The idea of this solitary hunter with a frighteningly powerful maw and an almost sad face lurking at the bottom of the world send shivers down my spine. It's my hope that one day a pocket of them are found alive out there but I know thats a pipe dream.
That leaves a few questions though (which I'm not implying that I know the answers to):
Did this planted forest (used for logging) replace another forest that was used as a habitat for animals? Is it counted as an equivalent to non-logging forests to justify the destruction of non-logging forests?
Can this sustainable industry sustain suitable living conditions for animals in the forest? Or can the industry only sustain itself and its own interests in future resource extraction?
Very importantly, the biodiversity of mature old growth forest is exceptionally distinct to a bunch of 20 year old (often single or few species) trees. Take parrots for example. Many rely on old trees with openings or hollows for nesting. Without sufficiently old trees, they literally can't live there. The growth of such critical habitat often takes 100+ years, whereas fungi, reptiles, orchids, insects, and bryophytes may never recover from clear-felling.
If you're not someone's flamebait LLM bot: citation please. I find it very hard to believe that an endangered species chooses to live solely in recently planted forest, particularly with focused legal defense from such an esteemed and long-running NGO as the Wilderness Society. I find it far more likely you are incorrect, and frankly spouting nonsense.
There is nothing 'advanced' and 'sustainable' about clear felling old growth forests supporting endangered species, if you are lucky enough to have them as Australia is (they are vanishing globally at an insane rate). It is about as nuanced as shooting your children in the head.
I'm not sure about that. I can run Qwen 3.8 27B at acceptable speed on an M1 MacBook Pro from 5 years ago. Thats Opus 4.6 Quality, on 5 year old consumer hardware. I think the trend is the opposite - smaller models that can run on hardware people already have are getting better and better.
There is a real lack of transparency in communicating some of the long term impacts of SSRIs to new patients. When I was prescribed sertraline not one doctor mentioned the massive (and sometimes permanent!!) sexual side effects, the likelihood of weight gain or how brutal it would be to taper off.
Also, I ended up ignoring my doctor's (way too aggressive) tapering schedule and managing my own down-dosing with a pill crusher and a milligram scale. I went about 5x slower than the standard advice and avoided all of the worst side effects.
I don't think it would have changed my decision to start taking it but I would rather have known about all this up front so I could make a more informed choice.
It's harrowing to discover how much of the healthcare system can act like the nervous system does not exist, and the tools available to them are the only tools available, whether it's a prescription, or a focused therapy.
The inability to make an informed choice when not knowing the options up front other than the recommendation is truly one of the worst parts of all of this kind of stuff. Medication can be a reasonable reality many times, but increasingly in hindsight it seems like there can be other things to check first, physiologically, etc.
The number of things that are prescribed through guessing at groupings of symptoms vs just testing or imaging where it's applicable is something I truly can never unsee once I learned about it.
Semi related, did you ever come across saffron in your journey and what did/didn't stand out to you about it?
somewhat off topic but i’ve thought about tapering like this, but i’ve got wondered where can one get a calibrated milligram scale? or perhaps it doesn’t matter too much.
You can also taper off by reducing dosage one day of the week at a time. Thats how I tapered off a 10mg Escitalopram prescription: every 4 weeks, I added another day of the week where I reduced my dosage by 5mg. Took about a year to fully taper off and had to pause for a month here and there to stabilize, but it was worth it.
However, it was equally important that I had a support structure & tools to replace what the SSRI was doing. For me that was mindfulness and therapy.
You can also do a volumetric taper if you don’t have an accurate milligram scale (and none of the ones on Amazon are accurate). Dissolve a larger, known amount of medicine in a known amount of water or propylene glycol, depending upon solubility of the medicine. Then dose the liquid by volume. For example, 1 gram of medicine in 1 liter of water = 1 mg per ml. You can easily dose even microgram amounts this way.
This is completely incapable of measuring individual milligrams. Just because it claims to and shows a digit for it doesn’t mean it can.
Even $500 analytical balances like [0] can struggle with 1mg resolution, but I’d trust them a lot more. Generally you need to throw away the least significant digit of precision with digital scales.
The request may have been misguided. They don't need a milligram accurate scale. They're actually wondering how to taper a 10mg doses drug, which is actually comprised of a much higher than 10mg pill, more like 100 to 200mg. The rest is typically binder.
Also, note that while your $500 scale may be necessary for absolute accuracy, splitting 10mg is not the same as finding exactly 10mg.
There's a few modernist cooking tricks that require small amounts - tenths of a gram - for big impacts. Sodium citrate can make any cheese melt beautifully into a smooth sauce, using something like 1% of the weight of the cheese.
Any juice can take the roll of lime or lemon (in cocktails or baking) by adding a bit of citric or malic acid. Orange juice is 1% citric acid, so add 3g citric and 2g malic per 100g juice and now you can make an orange daiquiri or "key" orange pie.
Emulsifiers get goopy if you use a lot, but can make a smooth syrup in small amounts. You can make a nice syrup from any nut milk with a small amount of xanthan and gum arabic.
There's a wide array of ingredients including xanthan and gum arabic used in tiny amounts in gluten free baking
I sometimes wish my scale was precise to below 1g when measuring yeast for long-rising (bread) dough. A recipe may ask for 1g, and adding 2g will make a huge difference.
Mine was a $30 gold scale from Amazon. Probably not accurate but provably consistent which is what I needed. I'd compare each dose and used a calibration weight to verify.
The problem is that psychiatry is an absolute zoo. Ive heard that if you go to 10 doctors you'll get 10 different opinions based on the docs personal experience.
Even if there are trials for these medications, the field is not quantitative in practice. "Standard of care" is a myth.
But how does one know? According to some studies, spontaneous remission happens in about half the cases of depression in a given year.
It's happened to me plenty of times. That's why I refuse to medications. All I have to do is just wait it out.
I am not claiming no one gets any benefits, rather how can one be certain the benefits are actually not from something else? If the goal is to improve, then I suppose it does not truly matter. But I just like to understand things when I can.
I regularly had a depression for years without even knowing it was a depression. Until a neurologist told me, after examination of brain imaging, it's best to take this pill for at least a week. Only after feeling its effect, I knew it was really depression causing the symptoms, even though I did not feel depressed! I felt exhausted and stressed and had several physical side effects like dizzyness and stomach ache.
Part of diagnostic criteria is how long something lasts.
If you have a really good week you aren't going to get diagnosed with mania.
If you have a really good month where you quit your job, move to Italy, and try to start a new job carving marble statues (and you've never carved stone in your life), well those will all be factors in any diagnoses given.
On the other hand, if you feel sad because your dog died, no one should be writing you a script for anything.
But if your dog died and you can't even function enough to go to work for a month, yeah it is probably temporary, but maybe some help is warranted, be that therapy or meds.
Of course, because prescribing pills is the sole job of a psychiatrist. Go to a phycologist or therapist of you want to try to talk it out. If talking doesn't work, they'll send you to a psychiatrist for medication.
I did 10% relative reduction in my dose per 2 weeks, until I got down to ~2-3mg and then went cold turkey from there. Very very conservative. The 10% relative part is important - if you dropped by a constant, say 5mg, proportionally you'd be doing bigger drops each time which is where people get into trouble, especially at low doses.
I experienced a lot of stuff I didn't really notice how bad they were until I was off of them. Anhedonia, apathy, lack of volition, and sexual side effects. I also have trouble remembering parts of my life when I was on SSRIs.
I don't regret trying or even taking them for extended periods. They make the bad thoughts go away and raised the floor for my mood. But they also put a pretty low ceiling on it, too. I was probably on them for too long but clearly medicine doesn't have a perfect framework for handling every corner of this space, so I don't really blame anyone. There's a goldilocks zone for drug, dosage, and treatment length and I don't think I was always in it.
I've talked to many people who have bad things to say about SSRIs. On the other hand, my girlfriend is on one right now and seems very satisfied.
So, this is not supported by the data when people are asked.
Sexual effects alone hit about 50–70% people. Then you could face nausea, insomnia, profuse sweating when you’re still, emotional blunting, and weight gain.
I don’t want to discourage anyone, they can save lives. It is a net benefit for some people, but even then most people will experience side effects and wish they didn’t have to take them.
> The most common side effects reported by patients in the study by Hu et al1 of 401 outpatients taking SSRIs were drowsiness (38%), dry mouth (34%), and sexual dysfunction (34%)
> which was conducted in 1999-2000, questioned patients about side effects via phone interviews within 75 to 105 days of starting antidepressant therapy. The side effects deemed most bothersome were sexual dysfunction (17%)
Just because one study has the number 34% in it, does not prove the numbers I gave were wrong and does not mean they are anecdotal.
This is something that’s been studied from many angles and there’s more than one number that’s defensible based on the context and dataset.
For example, even the study you cited says:
“In a study of 344 patients by Montejo-Gonzalez et al, 58% of patients reported sexual dysfunction when physicians directly inquired”, and “14% with spontaneous reporting”.
Do you think the one 25 year old short-term study that you found by yourself is the only study that has been done, and that anything that deviates from it is a distortion?
FWIW findings about adverse events vary considerably:
> The proportion of patients reporting adverse events ranged from 16% to 98% (median 80%) under SSRI treatment and from 17% to 94% (median 70%) under placebo [1]
So the answer IMO depends on whether we can attribute adverse effects to treatment, which is difficult to disentangle from adverse effects of disease
I’m open to being shown more certainty if available from the literature but meta-analyses are high-strength evidence
What's wild about that? What does the science say?
I've tried a variety and I can't say whether I've experienced side effects. That's just an anecdote but that's the thing with this discussion, that's all you will get. If people don't suffer side effects, they're not likley to get on HN and post about them, etc.
The bigger issue is the person dealing with these issues is taking them because they are not well-off. If you deal with reduced desire, for example, is that a side effect of the medication or is that a side effect of being depressed.
I think your "wild" is a little flippant or telling because it just points back to anecdotes.
They don't post on HN but a cousin post references an entire subreddit dedicated to it.
They are also anecdotal, hundreds, thousands of people suffering side effects. Given dozen of millions people in the U.S alone are prescribed those things daily, that a drop in the ocean. But not everyone post on Reddit either
Yes but again this is the exact example of anecdotes. Those not suffering aren't going to seek out subreddits to post about their non-problems. You can find a subreddit about everything, whether that's representative of anything or not.
I never found a sub reddit talking about the side effects of mineral water, how eating apples regularily lowered their libidos, on that sleeping on a mattress made them senile.
At some point common sense primes over what funded science wants people to believe.
The side effects exist since some doctors do warn about them, one may also find them in the counter indications mentioning those things. It isn't unfounded.
What's taboo today is to criticize SSRIs over prescriptions. Odd, given that over 25% of the U.S population are taking them, or some other form of legal psycho active substance, just to be able to "function".
> Despite considerable improvements in side-effect profiles, antidepressants continue to be associated with a significant burden of side effects that affect, treatment adherence and quality of life. Hu et al1 studied 401 patients with depression who had recently been prescribed an SSRI, and found that, after 75 to 105 days of treatment, 86% of patients reported at least, one side effect, and 55% experienced one or more bothersome side effects.
> In both research and clinical contexts, an important challenge is presented by the phenomenological overlap between side effects and residual symptoms of depression. Thus, fatigue, cognitive impairment, apathy, jitteriness and irritability, and sleep and appetite changes are core features of depression, but may also be related to antidepressant, treatment. In a small study of 43 depressed inpatients,6 which investigated the rate of somatic symptoms and complaints that were present before and after treatment, many symptoms often considered to be side effects of drugs were also present prior to treatment, including dry mouth, lightheadedness, sweating, tremors, and constipation. The distinction between residual symptoms and side effects is crucial, as they call for very different responses.
Not OP, but my primary side effect being on Sertraline from 2002-2012 was lack of control over my anger or violent outbursts. I was primarily ok if things were good, but if something upset me, it would go from 0 to 10 in an instant. I did not even notice this as unusual until I got off the drug and it was a night and day difference how much more mellow I became. I have not been on any SSRI since then.
I was on a very low dose of Bupropion for about 5 years and did mostly well; it only made my existing brain fog slightly worse. I usually recommend that one over SSRIs due to my experiences.
EDIT: I forgot to mention the damn brain zaps on SSRIs. Even if I missed a dose by 18 hours, I would get the zaps.
That's not true. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2719451/ places the figure experiencing side effects at 40%, with 25% reporting those effects as serious. It's also telling that only just under half of those experiencing side effects ever reported those side effects to their providers - likely contributing to doctors getting a skewed perception of the real adverse effects risk.
What's missing is also follow up - for some those effects don't resolve after stopping the drug.
It’s not a myth - the vast majority of women on birth control experience no side effects at all, and many actually get improvement in adjacent conditions like endometriosis and PCOS.
It's cool that you have not encountered any issues but especially birth control pills are also no smarties but many use them as they were candy.
In my personal circle I only new of a single woman who had no issues. The majority had all flowers off issues. During and afterwards. No most of the time it got downplayed or simply ignored but doctors and society a like.
I'm personally glad that birth control pills are not longer sold as a wonder pill because many woman suffered needlessly and the worst part is that many did not knew that is was the pill in the first place.
I already answered why, it's chemistry. Everyone has side effects, not everyone notices them. You can not introduce a medication, or any substance for that matter, into the human body that does not have any side effects — it's impossible.
Normally when people say side effects they mean things that you can actually observe. Hence your earlier point about going off the meds and noticing a difference. If I don't notice any difference other than I don't think your point really stands.
The only medication for Premature Ejaculation that exists currently is a megadose of a special SSRI which has a short half life.
If you are a man, SSRIs are very likely to make you last longer in bed, and that is often a very bad thing.
If you are a woman, whatever the SSRI is treating may leave you better off than before, if you found the depression or anxiety to be an obstacle to your satisfaction.
Many people however don't have an effect that makes a meaningful difference.
That subreddit is awful though. It's full of the same energy as health woo communities.
>It's tragic that this time we won't be able to enjoy GTA 6, after we were able to enjoy Gta 5. Damn everyone who invented these destructive drugs.
You are absolutely right. In fact with the hit on men’s sexual ability sometimes or often times you could consider this a hit hot (very sinister framing) on the practical side, having in the best case no anxiety and being able to meet people and how are you supposed to date? Blue solution?
Men’s inability to perform is causing a huge hit on their psyche. So in any case consider wisely, I heard many accounts of very disappointed men.
It may help women, but that’s a different thing.
For men - only in rare cases to be considered if ever.
You're going to hear about it when it happens because it really bothers people when it happens but you aren't going to hear how often it statistically happens.
I notice reduced desire but I'm depressed, too, it's hard to disentangle the effects, there is a ton of fud.
I don't think it's just because they are "energy efficient". Teslas are heavy, powerful vehicles. The tires they need are usually rated for extra load (XL), and have a high speed rating (W/Y). If you went for EV tyres they likely contain an acoustic lining too as road noise is more noticeable in one. Unclear if that's really needed though. Either way it sounds like you went for premium tires which is probably the right choice for a ~400hp, 2 ton car.
So let me get this straight - a foreign company landed their gear on Greenland without authorisation and is starting to drill for oil without permission. And the government's response is a strongly worded letter?
Why would you not just send the local police to shut it down, impound the ship and expel the people running it? Surely thats trespass, vandalism of public property, theft, illegal importation of goods etc.
> So let me get this straight - a foreign company landed their gear on Greenland without authorisation and is starting to drill for oil without permission
No, you didn't get it straight. When you re-read it you will see they have not started drilling, but are preparing to start once they get permission (their application is currently under processing).
Not equivalent, inclusive of. Starting to do x can absolutely include getting ready to do x.
When I'm starting to go to bed, I usually take the dogs out one last time, go turn the lights off, etc.
When I'm starting a new team, that might mean selling execs on the idea that I need headcount, finding space for them to sit, etc. all of which are also getting ready.
> For one, getting ready means you have NOT started to do the thing.
> When I'm starting a new team, that might mean selling execs on the idea that I need headcount, finding space for them to sit, etc. all of which are also getting ready.
Is a provocation to test the Danish reaction and to make people forget about Iran.
Is also a real risk of a faux flag operation to force the US army to enter the area "in defense of the US citizens that were just doing their drilling job and were unfairly attacked".
See: Rachel Maddow: Is this how we invade Greenland?!
Greenland is a haphazard country of many little islands without connected roads
there's no local police to swoop in and arrest foreigners
that's actually how Landry is getting with it under Trump's support
Denmark must send in their military and destroy all the equipment like they were preparing to destroy runways when Trump was going to invade (this is still a stealth invasion)
That's either very very naive or a joke about how it's absolutely an invasion, but the admin will call it something "inoffensive". Hard to tell these days.
>”They could grant permission for oil drilling, even though the planned wells appear to fall within a conservation area protected by the Ramsar convention on wetlands. Or they could refuse and, some worry, give Trump a pretext to advance his imperialist agenda.”
If you turn your turn signal on while there’s a car in your blindspot that’s just bad driving. The other driver has no way of knowing if you’ve seen them or you’re about to swing out on them.
Disagree. The purpose of the indicator is to signal your intention to others. Indicate first, then shoulder check. If you then discover a car in your blind spot, abort the manoeuvre if necessary or slow down to let them pass you first.
I do agree it's bad form to indicate when you know there is a car in your blind spot already.
Discovering a car in your blind spot should be a relatively rare occurrence if you are driving attentively.
You indictor is an indication of your intensions so that the other drivers are not surprised when they see you car move from the expected path. If you are only a road with light traffic then yes, first adjust your speed so cars are not in your blind spot and then indicate.
But, if you are in tight traffic then a gap will unlikely open up. In this case you use your indicator to signal your intention, and wait until somebody chooses to let you in - making sure they have noticed you before moving in.
A car that beeps at you just because there is a car in your blind spot when you indicate is not suited to Australian road rules.
I feel this should have a note that it's fictional in the title. I clicked this expecting to read about some kind of space race development with China or Russia.
I mean it's pretty obvious from the very first paragraph, isn't it?
> By good luck we have been able to make an emergency landing on this uninhabited space station. There have been no casualties. We all count ourselves fortunate to have found safe haven at a moment when the expedition was clearly set on disaster.
Lots of short stories on HN have just their original title with nothing like [Novella] or whatever, seems fine.
If anything, the poster here likely followed a rule to use the original, non-editorialized page title, and certainly the original page has not had the title set with intent to attract clicks by misrepresenting what it is.
You could write a tale in response, about how you spent seconds, minutes, hours, days, years...a lifetime identifying that the several hundred words at the link were fictional.
>the facade is painting over the underlying motivation which is to reject asylum claims.
That feels like an unfair read. Asylum seekers claiming to be younger than they are is a known reality, and it makes total sense that a system would need to guard against that. Are you suggesting we just take every person who shows up at the border at their word?
> Are you suggesting we just take every person who shows up at the border at their word?
That's not what I said. It's all about the framing. Rejecting is automated, accepting is slow and deliberate. This is reflective of a preference for rejection but presented as neutral and pragmatic. If you cared about false negatives as much as false positives you wouldn't fast-track or preference either branch. The observation that this is the case is value-neutral.
As for my personal opinion, I consider freedom of movement a human right and accepting asylum seekers a moral obligation. Both can be implemented poorly, but it's our duty to try to do them right and allocate these systems the resources they need to succeed and to hold incompetent or malicious leaders responsible for failing to operate them effectively.
"What a computer is to me is it's the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with, and it's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds." — Steve Jobs.
I'm much less optimistic. Even when factoring in the poor thermal efficiency of gas turbines (~30-40%) compared to electric (>90%), the usable specific energy gap remains immense. Jet-A still delivers roughly 14 times more useful work per kilogram than modern batteries. Removing fuel plumbing and tweaking airframes won't overcome that fundamental physics. Also the issue with the high-altitude efficiency argument is that batteries, unlike liquid fuel, don't lose mass during flight meaning the aircraft to haul its maximum takeoff weight from departure to arrival. It's a double whammy.
Well, in this case, we don’t need to argue about theory. The Joby has a tested range of 150 miles. They also tested it with hydrogen fuel cells and got >500.
Right, so when you factor in the legally required reserve flight time the battery powered Joby is only capable of very short hops. And that's fine, it's still potentially useful on a few routes and newer models will improve over time.
This isn’t meant to slot into the role of other planes, though, it’s meant for rideshare. It can take off and land on my suburban lawn. There’s a lot to figure out before we can get to that point, so they’re just displace helicopters for the moment, but it can be a lot more. It’s basically the long awaited flying car, in nascent form.
No, it can't take off and land on your suburban lawn. The wires and trees overhead would make that ridiculously dangerous, a last resort only for emergencies. Plus they need to recharge for the next flight. These e-VTOL aircraft will operate from dedicated pads.
Just talking about what they've talked about as goals in interviews. And I'm surprised you're willing to make definitive statements about my lawn, we have a large enough area with none of those obstructions you're talking about, we live on a few acres. And if it's running 20 miles here and there, it can do a few trips before it needs to go somewhere to charge or battery swap. That would cover our trip to our nearest international airport.
If these e-VTOL aircraft get used for air taxi service at all it's going to be for short hops in denser urban areas. Not in rural areas where people have acres of open land.
Go watch one of JoeBen's interviews. His original inspiration for the company was making something that could make where he grew up in the redwoods of the Santa Cruz mountains more accessible. His stated long term vision is vertiports embedded in communities. In the short term, I agree that they're going to start in denser areas.
Heh it doesn't have to be literally on one's own lawn, it could just be a little helipad per community. And my understanding is that the vast majority of private helipads don't have air traffic control - your hospital's roof doesn't have its own air traffic control. Pilots operate under "see and avoid" rules.
Use your imagination a little. So much status quo bias here.
Who would want to privately own a community helipad? Sounds like an insurance and liability nightmare.
This is an impressive enough achievement, but let's not kid ourselves this is going to revolutionaise suburban or semi-rural transport. Its maximum payload weight (450kg) barely covers 5 passengers with no baggage. It's for hopping from the country club to the golf course.
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