Yes, I'm autistic and I regularly take lactobacillus reuteri which has helped my gut quite a bit. I wouldn't say it was a massive shift, but it certainly has been really nice. There's at least some evidence that this bacteria is deficient in autistic individuals and supplementation can help with that.[1]
I'd like to add a little bit of water to this particular fire. I'm autistic and I've read numerous studies along this vein. In short, yes there's a strong link between gut flora and brain development however autism (and presumably ADHD) is a heterogeneous condition with a variety of interrelated causes.
Personally, I can say that this likely is a proximate cause for me as I got a bad staph infection at just a few months old and naturally I was treated by antibiotics. However, I also have quite a few genes that are associated with autism as well. So while there's an increasingly clear picture, I'd hesitate to say what exactly is and isn't a cause of being autistic.
> Personally, I can say that this likely is a proximate cause for me as I got a bad staph infection at just a few months old and naturally I was treated by antibiotics.
Being treated with antibiotics in infancy is extremely common.
It’s especially problematic right now in some countries where antibiotics are available over the counter, as it’s common practice in some groups to treat every childhood illness with antibiotics. The amount of antibiotic abuse happening in some countries right now is absolutely astounding.
Even in countries like the United States some parents will present to doctors and demand antibiotics for nearly every illness. The medical system here is, in general, better at withholding them from demanding parents when children show no cause for antibiotic use. It’s actually one of the bigger problems that pediatricians face with feedback and bad reviews, though that’s another story.
That said, I wouldn’t ascribe anything in particular to antibiotic use as a child. It’s rare to go through all of childhood without any exposure to antibiotics.
What an interesting tale and gripping read. I've lived in China and surprised that I've never heard of this before.
For those unaware, not a whole lot has changed since that time unfortunately. China has had certain periods where they had opened up somewhat, but those days are long gone to my knowledge. If anything the repression may be even greater these days in some ways, though at least there isn't any kind of mass starvation going on as far as I'm aware.
The current system also seems to be more of a riff on the old imperial system rather than something fundamentally new. In the past it was an imperial examination to join the Mandarin class[1], now it's a test to join the CPC [2]. Either way, if you don't get in your opportunities are limited.
> The current system also seems to be more of a riff on the old imperial system
From a distance it seems like government policy is, in many ways, also the imperial system returned, almost like the CCP is the new dynasty (though not hereditary). The focus on corruption (not among political allies, of course), which the imperial system saw as its eventual downfall - IIRC Chinese history at least traditionally taught there were three repeating phases to a dynastic cycle: ascendency, corruption, chaos, then ascendency again .... The perspective on other countries as inevitably inferior. The attempt, post-Opium Wars, to hold onto power by adopting Western technology without adopting Western culture, such as political, intellectual, and economic freedom (it never went well, as you might expect). Even the nine dashed line geographical claims are, IIRC, from the Qing dynasty.
Yes it does, but they also imported the credit based fractional reserve monetary system. This really does require constant growth for positive (or even near zero negative) interest rates. Although there are a lot of monetary controls, there are really only trade-offs not fixes, if loans are made for which the asset does not cover a loss. You have to pick winners and losers.
That said monetary controls are much stronger than you'd see in an open market country, and one could force a digital currency with negative interest rates.
Constant growth in monetary terms doesn't require real growth. Most currencies are at least somewhat inflationary.
Bad loans, like broken promises, will always be with us. Sometimes you take a risk and trust someone, and it doesn't work out, so you're poorer than you thought. It doesn't mean we shouldn't take risks.
Bad loans usually are not about mistrust and deception, but about business risks that don't work out. Lenders very much expect that to happen, and charge interest accordingly.
When I get a business loan from a bank, I make no promise to pay it back. I promise to pay it back with interest if the business succeeds, and we agree that it might not succeed and they might lose their principal.
When I tell my romantic partner that I won't sleep with other people, it's an absolute promise.
Infidelity happens. So do divorces. Also, people get sick. People die. Society has procedures for these things.
There are very few absolute promises. Most contracts have some provision for what happens when they're broken. If there isn't one, it's poorly written.
"If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government." - Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Though I don't know enough about Chinese politics to tell how much the quote actually fits.
Born and raised and stuck here, I can tell you that it absolutely fits. It is kind of a vicious cycle, the government breed ignorant people and these people cultivate the ruthless authoritarian regime continuously. But I do believe history is on an upward trajectory, just with some twists and turns, or "spirals" as the people here call it. The problem is that maybe few of the people alive will live long enough to reap the benefit of it.
> People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness.
> And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.
In my home country, Indonesia, many of us were not aware of the scale of the genocide of the left, or the massacres of civilians after World War II and the War of Independence. Most people pretend that it never happened and avoid discussing it. Only recently have people started talking about it, but they often face backlash.
Additionally, you will not find books on this topic in the local library.
I think it is normal for a community to choose selected amnesia.
The system described in the second link has a lot of interesting implications. That is one of those systems that reminds me a bit of Enron - it sounds like a good idea, it probably looks like a good idea in superficial results, but that sort of elitism doesn't have a history of working out well.
The comparison to the Ivy League for example. I don't think there has been a plain Ivy League president in the US since George W. Bush. I don't really see how to comment on him without being political, but I note that his presidency was such a success the right wing of politics is uniting behind a man who very publicly said "[Bush] lied us into a war" as an argument for why his family members weren't competent to lead again based on his record. Elitism doesn't lead to excellence outside a fairly narrow definition of the word.
It's a fascinating read, and makes a lot of sense why it's so hard to develop a commercial aircraft that actually ends up being profitable. One thing that got me wondering, and maybe someone here might know this, is why hasn't Boeing attempted to miniaturize the 787 as opposed to continually re-purposing the 737? From the outsider's (and complete layman's) view it seems like this would be a more sensible way to build a successful modern aircraft in that vein as opposed to trying to repurpose a design which is now well over half a century old.
I fly a fair amount an honestly the 787 is an impressive aircraft. I'm surprised that Boeing hasn't tried to take what they learned from their developments there and apply them in a way that could potentially help them recoup the costs of that program.
Scaling up and down aircraft is usually done by changing their length since that's both structurally very straight forward, and it can usually be done with relatively benign aerodynamic impacts.
The 787 is significantly larger than the 737. It's not just built to have more passengers, but also to carry way more fuel so it can go more than twice as far. While you can always take off with less fuel to stave off the worst of the penalty when making shorter flights, a penalty remains.
Scaling down a 787 to hit the 737's operating niche likely means:
* Reducing the body diameter/width
* Shrinking the wings (the 787 wing has 3x the area of the 737 wing)
* Reducing the length
The first two operations are really non-trivial. Certainly not impossible, but challenging enough that calling it a "787 redesign/miniaturization" vs "clean sheet model with 787 heritage" gets really blurry.
The weight and efficiency benefits of current composites vs aluminum lithium (AlLi) frames are not enough to justify their costs.
Also wide-bodies are just different from narrow bodies in length or diameter. Narrow bodies are designed to go through more and frequent pressurization cycles, fit and weigh enough for certain gates and runways, carry different amounts of cargo.
The other variable is the cost to build the plane you describe. The reason Boeing decided to rengine the 737 for the NG instead of the 757 is the 737 costs less to build and operate. The 737 MAX 8-200 and the MAX 10 are very economical to fly on a level a shrunken 787 couldn't reach.
It's also important to remember the 737 Max was kind of a stop gap on the higher capacity variants for the NMA. If Boeing had been willing to give the MAX a slightly different type rating and difference training for the MAX, MCAS would not have been necessary. Then the MAX 9 and 10 could be replaced by the NMA and bought Embraer with stretched E2 jets replacing the MAX 7 and 8 if executives were concerned with more than their annual stock comp.
> If Boeing had been willing to give the MAX a slightly different type rating and difference training for the MAX, MCAS would not have been necessary.
I see this a lot, but MCAS would still be needed to comply with the regulations on control column force curves so I don't think Boeing could have just gotten a different type rating and done that.
The 737 and 787 are fundamentally different designs. The 737 is made to be small enough to deplane using stairs to the tarmac at smaller airports while the 787 is exclusively for modern airports with walkways. The 737 is about 12 meters tall and the 787 is 17 meters tall as a result.
That was the driving factor behind the 737 Max disaster. The most efficient engines are high bypass turbofans which are getting taller and taller to fit the main rotor so they had to place the engine nacelles in front of the wings rather than below in order to fit them. This changed the flight envelope and necessitated retraining which Boeing avoided by implementing MCAS which caused the crashes.
Boeing could recycle some of the core 787 technology to design a new single-aisle airliner. But the concern is that by the time it is certified it might already be obsolete. They are in a holding pattern now, waiting for research results on truss-braced wings. If those work then they could significantly reduce fuel costs.
The article mentions that at the time they were looking at the 737 replacement in the early 2000s they didn't think they could scale up the production to the volume needed for the 737's market. I think this fits the general theme of the article - they probably could if they started work now, but they had to make the decision on replacing the 737 or creating the 737 Max whilst guessing on the future years down the line.
I’m not 100% sure but I think there are some fundamental differences between wide-body and narrow-body aircraft (things aren’t just a different size but different shapes) that mean you couldn’t just shrink it down and change the seat pattern, but I expect they definitely could base a new aircraft on the same materials tech, avionics, etc. as the 787.
The problem is the airlines. They can't be bothered to do any kind of retraining for their pilots. They'll just buy another brand if this is needed. Which is why the whole MCAS thing happened.
Even 787 pilots will have to be retrained if they scale it down to the size of a 737.
GPUI is looking more and more interesting by the day. I haven't had the chance to dig into it. Can anyone with experience comment some more on how it compares to other UI frameworks? Seems like it's a really compelling alternative to things out there. On the surface, seems almost like a rust variant of Qt, but not having to deal with C++ potentially makes it much more widely applicable.
Author here: it is definitely still early and a lot of what you would expect from an GUI framework is missing. It just gives you the bare minimum of building blocks.
You can think of it like building a website with exclusively <div> <img> and <svg> :)
Thanks for the reply! That makes a lot of sense given where it is right now. Hopefully it will flesh out over time, but I'll definitely be giving it a look!
It seems that Warp.dev also might be using GPUI - at least that was my impression based on their website [0] (I might be wrong though). Which is a good think that another popular project is consuming such crate.
[0]
"... we partnered with Nathan Sobo, co-founder of the Atom text editor, who had already started building a Rust UI framework that was loosely inspired by Flutter"
I think they started out using GPUI, but might have diverged. They mention flutter and GPUI v1 was Flutter inspired. GPUI v2 which is what's not released to the public isn't Flutter inspired anymore.
Currently TSMC has the only leading edge chip fabrications plants (fabs) on the planet and they're all located in Taiwan. They account for all new chips for all new Apple products, all new AMD products, most new Nvidia products, etc. Most companies design the the chips, but then outsource the manufacturing of them to TSMC as building a fab has astronomical upfront costs.
TSMC has acquired a lead in this area through a number of different methods. One of the main things is that they focus deeply on manufacturing. Another is that they work 24 hours a day in R&D, running 3 shifts so they basically have the lights on all the time. And as mentioned above, the upfront costs are incredibly high with a fab costing on the order of 20+ billion dollars to construct.
Intel is attempting to catch up, but it will likely be another 3 to 5 years before they are able to do so. Honestly just having R&D up and going all the time is probably a huge advantage for TSMC and probably a big reason behind their success. Regardless, suffice to say basically all cutting edge product shipments would cease in a matter of months if TSMC fabs were destroyed.
They do, but they don't produce any of their leading edge chips in mainland China, just as they won't be in the USA either. Looking at the wording of my post I should have made the leading edge part more clear. My mistake there!
I'd translate "move wafers" as run test batches. What I understand from that is that he can run more tests on his machines.
Honestly, I'm not sure anything of that is real. I can't believe other fabs don't run tests 24/7, and I can't believe they have people that rarely meet changing the same machines instead of only running tests without changing anything.
I used to work in R&D for leading edge node development and we had a couple night shift technicians to unblock long running high priority tests. However, we could have iterated much faster if we had dozens of engineers running additional tests at night. Some tests require you to be there at the tool to change temp and so on. And there are ton of possible tests you can do. If you get a result back in the middle of the night and have engineers to review the results and configure a new test then and there, that’s a much faster learning cycle time.
Another advantage of TSMC is how they have enough fab space dedicated to R&D that they can run prototypes through quicker because they aren’t competing with manufacturing to get processed.
Worse yet, Moore's law was basically an automatic monopoly for anybody that had a much more productive R&D than the others. But we are only noticing the gains now, that the law is gone for years already.
Maybe the culture thing is really pervasive. It wouldn't be a first.
To add to what others said here, another salient factor is that in Taiwan it's pretty possible to get late night food, drink, and other things. These things are almost non-existent in the US which would make working night shifts extra rough.
Depends on where the fab is. I agree if we're talking about rural Arizona, but if the demand is there, I guarantee you that someone will open a franchise (or six) down the street and operate overnight to meet that demand. In and around larger cities though, it's not really a problem. There is usually _something_ open, even if it might not be a long list.
Are we discounting fast food? I can't speak for everywhere, but in Dallas, many chains are open 24/7. Whataburger is a Texas franchise that has been 24/7 for basically it's entire history in all locations. They are closed for Christmas and Thanksgiving only. McDonalds is 24/7 in most major cities. In Dallas proper, there are some smaller (local) chains that are frequently open until 2 or 3am but admittedly they mostly cater to the bar crowd who wants something to eat before heading home after drinking all night. Café Brazil is a local Denny's/IHOP type diner that is open 24/7 including major holidays!
Your addition of "abundantly" makes things more ambiguous, but I think the choices available in most large US cities is _decent_ after midnight. Can you get absolutely anything like NYC? No, probably, not. But burgers, diners, and fast food are all generally available. That's also ignoring 24/7 grocery stores like Walmart that can fill in the gaps if you're craving something hyper specific. Perhaps you can't buy it ready-made, but you can buy the ingredients!
NVIDIA, Apple, AMD, Qualcomm exclusively use TSMC for their best chips. Even Samsung prefers to use TSMC-fabbed Qualcomm SoCs over their in-house design and manufacturing for their flagship phones.
Perhaps Korea or Japan, but in practice nobody, and that's partly by design.
Taiwan being the core producer of the super high end chips is guaranteing them that if a war ever happens, they won't be left as sacrifice to the opponent while the rest of the world goes business as usual.
They critically need to be a strategic and non replaceable producer.
There's very few of these other fabs outside China. They exist, but aren't able to deliver enough at a global scale. That's what we learned the hard way during the chip shortage a few years ago, where car production for jbstance basically came to a crawl.
This is part of the reason why you're hearing posts about TSMC expanding out of Taiwan. As it stands today it would be a fairly large economic hit to have advanced processors stop production. Building out redundancy seems to be a top priority.
It's also worth noting that in the event of a war the US is very, very likely to bomb the shit out of the TSMC plants.
Looping recursive simulation... That sounds very interesting and very very scary somehow.
Now i haven't done any recursive programming except on some basic programs on the ZX Spectrum many many years ago, but it felt kinda weirdly evil and forbidden when i was able to order code to modify itself.
Fellow autistic person here, and in my mind you've hit the nail on the head.
It's an information game for sure, like trying to drink from a fire hose of information and make sense of it somehow. I guess it's a matter of using Fourier analysis in a way, but that's a hard ask to do on your own thoughts, feelings, and sensations.
Not a clinician or anything, but I'm autistic and honestly you sound pretty similar to me. In fact I'm writing this from Singapore where I'm surrounded by folks haha. I don't think being autistic is really what it's made out to be frankly, and the description of the condition is generally the outsider's view not the insider's view.
Some autistic folks will avoid sensory stimulation while others seek it out. I'm definitely one of the ones that seeks it out and I'm pretty extroverted. It's a heterogeneous condition, and indeed a spectrum. Who knows for your situation, but you may be autistic.
That being said though, I think the important thing isn't the neurotype but rather that you've found what matters to you and what makes you happy. At the end of the day that's what counts, not the underlying neurology.
[1] https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/1343/