> many adolescents who start as trans desist and come out as gay
Citation needed. The actual hard evidence with respect to regret rates with GICs are very clear that "desistance", using your word for it, is vanishingly low (less than 1-2%, c.f. knee surgery with 20-30%), and that lack of social acceptance is a huge factor in deciding if someone desists or not — the less social acceptance, the less likely someone is to be able to comfortably transition socially, the more likely they're going to "desist".
In other words — not only is the "desistance rate" for treatment vanishingly small, there isn't a straight line between "desisting" and "not being transgender", and one of the most recurring explanations for "desistance" in the study groups basically boiled down to "society has bullied them into hiding themselves".
> people on opposite sex hormones start developing behaviours and preferences of the opposite sex
Citation needed. In the 70s - 80s there were experiments to try and treat both intersex people and transgender people by giving them the "correct" (cis) hormone, and the subjects involved found it so intolerable they committed suicide.
> body dysmorphia results in distorted perceptions of one's own body
Correct! And given that you know this, you should also know that treatments for body dysphoria do not work for gender dysphoria, and that for almost 100 years now, the only effective treatment for gender dysphoria has been transitioning.
> Citation needed. The actual hard evidence with respect to regret rates with GICs are very clear that "desistance", using your word for it, is vanishingly low (less than 1-2%, c.f. knee surgery with 20-30%)
No, the actual detransition rates are completely unknown because gender researchers had crappy long-term follow-up with patients, eg. they stopped tracking individuals beyond only a few years, and simply dropped people from the data entirely if they ceased communication, which is a clear bias towards favourable stats for transition. The poor quality of the evidence in this field is why virtually all Western nations are taking progressively stricter approaches to trans care to improve the quality of the long-term data.
Furthermore, this 1% regret rate number doesn't even pass a basic sniff test. The regret rate for literal live-saving surgeries, like artery bypass, are upwards of 25%. A 1% regret rate is just completely implausible and I honestly can't believe anybody swallowed it.
The desistance I was referring to are cohorts that experience gender dysphoria for various reasons and then ultimately desist. A large subset of this cohort are gay, sexually confused or uncomfortable with puberty for various reasons, and throw in a bunch of other comorbidities and the affirmative model is a recipe for disaster. The lawsuits from detransitioners have just begun, and I think they will only increase for a few more years. Only the will we have a better picture.
> In the 70s - 80s there were experiments to try and treat both intersex people and transgender people by giving them the "correct" (cis) hormone, and the subjects involved found it so intolerable they committed suicide.
This causation for their suicide is conjecture (trans people have many mental health comorbidities), but I don't see how this is even relevant to the point I was making. Do you really need a citation that testosterone and estrogen supplementation changes behaviours and neurology in accordance with the sex to which those hormones is primarily associated? Just because it does so, doesn't mean it would solve whatever ailed the trans or intersex people, and I never claimed it would.
The point was that hormones alter your neurology closer to that sex, so if you perform an fMRI on cis women, trans women on HRT for a number of years, and trans women not yet on HRT, then those on HRT will look different and closer to females than those not on HRT. This confounds any fMRI analysis that purports to show that "trans brains" have some innate structural similarity to their gender.
> All people fit into sex categories because all people have a definite sex
I mean, no? Not really? There's a whole history of people who do not have a definite sex, and even then, there are lots of people who appear to have a definite sex but their body is varied massively from the "baseline". Such people are actually more numerous than red-headed people or albinism, within society. All of this is pretty trivial in terms of talking points and very well supported within the encompassing scientific literature, which is why I don't actually feel the need to cite myself here — any introduction to biological psychology, or the general subject of sex/gender, from a biological or sociological view, will very easily get you up to speed on this.
> I mean, no? Not really? There's a whole history of people who do not have a definite sex
Phenotypical sex characteristics do not define sex, and developmental disorders tied to one's sex do not somehow refute one's sex. This talk of "appearances" is exactly the kind of confusion I've been trying to argue against. Biology has a more rigourous definition for sex to avoid exactly these confusions. I do acknowledge that even some biologists have fallen into this trap lately, to our detriment.
I'm sorry but I think I'm going to believe the man who wrote the article, who is an editor of Nature and has a Physics PhD[1], over someone who has made it their life's work to argue against established scientists on a website for Venture Capitalists :)
Would you believe two? :-) Bohmian mechanics describes a classical pseudo random number generator that deterministically decides the outcome of quantum measurements, using instant communication between measurements so that conditional probability works. The modern rejection of classical uncertainty as an interpretation of quantum uncertainty stems from Bell's theorem, which shows that any model that achieves a similar philosophical goal as Bohmian mechanics has a similarly dissatisfactory reliance on instant communication. People of Heisenberg's generation had the right intuitions and were guessing in the right directions but they did not know Bell's theorem, or even that it was a worthwhile question.
EPR demonstrated that if you insist on locality and experiments having results in accordance with quantum predictions, then there must be pre-existing elements of reality that determine the results. Bell demonstrated that pre-existing elements of reality and the quantum results of experiments are incompatible with locality. The two together imply that if you assume experiments have results when we say they do in the way quantum mechanics predicts, then there is something nonlocal going on. Hidden variable theories do not add to nor remove the problem of non locality though Bohmian mechanics makes it very clear what the mechanism is.
Many worlds gets around this since experiments do not have definite results in that theory. Instead, the experimenter splits into multiple copies, each of which thinks there is a result of the experiment, but that is an illusion.
No, that is only the case if you assume the experimenter is free to choose the experiment. Bell shows that in that case either locality or realism is violated.
However, there is a simpler explanation, namely superdeterminism. You are in fact not free to choose the experiment, this choice also has physical causes.
If you look at polls of physicists over the past few decades, many believed that Von Neumann's proof ruled out all hidden variable theories. This was wrong. Many others also believed that Bell's theorem ruled out hidden variable theories. This was also wrong, and Bell himself was actually a fan of Bohmian mechanics, which is a non-local hidden variable theory, and one of his motivations for deriving his famous theorem.
All of this is to say that being a physicist doesn't make you an expert in quantum foundations. Neither am I, but I've read a diversity of literature from experts that work on quantum foundations, so I am aware of the range of misconceptions on this.
To "What is the message of the observed violations of Bell's inequality?", a whopping 37% believed that it ruled out hidden variables entirely, even though Bohmian mechanics has been a thing since the the 1950s. 21% said Bohmian mechanics was explicitly incompatible with Bell's theorem in answering the question "What are your reasons for NOT favoring De Broglie - Bohm theory?", which is clear nonsense.
There's still a lot of confusion about quantum foundations, even among physicists. The fight over superdeterminism has only just begun, even though de Broglie's "double solution" to QM has been around for almost a century as the first superdeterministic theory. And this is ironic given GR is a theory of deterministic evolution of objects over a 4D manifold, eg. the future is already written, but taking this same approach to QM is heresy, even though this would provide some conceptual unity that might bear fruits towards unification.
It's surprising given that back in June? 2024 I just extracted the .love zip from the executable, patched a file or two, and merged it into the love android apk and it Just Worked. Just goes to prove the last 5% rule
This. I'm making a game and I have an Android and iOS experimental branches. Even with a multiplatform framework (Monogame), compilation and basic run isn't a given. Then thing like small buttons needs biggee touch target, text input requires adaptation. All those 3 days + 1 day + a week + ... quickly adds up.
I've made games in Love2D for Android and for PC, I also as part of my converting Balatro to android, patched it a few places.
> Even with a multiplatform framework (Monogame), compilation and basic run isn't a given.
This isn't the case for Love2D. The game framework is already compiled for android, and the game is a bunch of Lua scripts. There is no issue with compiling, only very minor differences between the Lua for Android and the Lua for desktop platforms and making changes is instant except for transferring the apk to my phone and installing it to test (I didn't set up a full local android test environment for something so small). Balatro worked pretty much out of the box, except for some small changes I made — the first was to add in my profile from Steam, I didn't have to change the code for this. All the buttons were already reasonably sized. Text input was just adding a call to https://www.love2d.org/wiki/love.keyboard.setTextInput so that the on-screen keyboard appeared and disappeared when it was supposed to. I also patched a small bug that made it go blank on screen-reorientation, which was a one-line fix.
The total time spent was around an hour including codebase orientation, patching, testing and doc lookup (I haven't used the framework in a while).
The desktop UI actually worked pretty much fine on mobile, to be honest. I ran it for a while using the porting methods available from the desktop binaries to an APK. The mobile UI basically just changes the interactions from a small button on the card to a drag-bases UI, which is slightly better on mobile.
The funny thing is that the original Desktop UI is still in the Android version. Sometimes I'll get jokers/consumables stuck in the desktop's "selected" mode, where the tiny sell/use buttons pop out underneath. So the whole drag-n-drop thing seems to have been added on top of the original ui, and sometimes the old ui events still fire.
"(layperson looking at the Intel opcodes listing) The harder they make it to join their club, the more exclusive their service becomes. And thus they can command a higher salary"
I know this might be difficult for those of us who have specialized in computer science and have found a lot of things very easy, but sometimes, other professions are difficult and complicated too! Not everything is gatekeeping, and needing to consult an expert otherwise you'll footgun yourself, isn't a personal blow to you, as a person!
The law is special because everyone has to obey it or face punishment. It is an injustice if most people can't figure out whether things they want to do are legal or not without employing a lawyer.
> The law is special because everyone has to obey it or face punishment.
In theory, yes. In practice, not “everyone”, and very much not equally true of everyone to whom the law practically applies at all, even in the places which tout “equal protection of the laws” as a bedrock principle.
Except we go out of our way in programming to make everything as easy as possible. If you think about it, half the non-video and non-social media internet is just programming related, with guides, tutorials, and various tools to make it as easy as possible to get somebody doing something.
And yes to be fair, yes some stuff in a field is simply complicated and we need to use complicated tools, specifications, processes and other such things in order to describe it accurately. But lets face it - most lawyer stuff is not complicated, the field is just swamped with complexity, "technical debt" and they are relying on processes and fluid human-driven interpretations in order to make it all chug along. What makes the whole thing complicated are the unspoken, verbally and experience-driven pieces of arcane knowledge. Nothing is documented in simple flows, nothing can be automated according to them, and they require actual human actors to drive the process forward from one step to the next.
This is why they are so against automation and simplification of their field. They know that if they automate the processes, that their field becomes very focused on knowledge, and at that point we'll all just realize that most of what they know can be codified in some sort of unambiguous specification format.
Computing has become substantially cheaper and more accessible in the past couple decades. Can the legal industry make any such claims? Is it faster and more efficient to use the judicial system than it was in the 90s, 2000s? Why is the NY bar one of the hardest in the nation? Couldn't have anything to do with all the biglaw and money to be made in the city, no?
The NY bar exam utilizes the same exam as the majority of other jurisdictions (with the notable exception of California) - the Universal Bar Exam. It is not one of the hardest in the nation, it is about the same as the majority of the nation. In fact, New York requires a lower score on the UBE than most other states, so it’s actually one of the easier states to get licensed in.
And the answer to your question about the legal system being faster or more efficient is that it has gotten much slower but this is due to the massively increased caseload across the system (that has not been matched by an increase in court resources) which is, ironically, likely due to an increasing ease of access to the courts caused by everyday lawsuits becoming cheaper and easier to file.
> Working in software breeds some truly wild perspectives on the world.
My personal suspicion is that software is one of the easiest fields in the world to learn, and it has the sneaky benefit that you don't have to brush up against many constraints of the real world, but then — this doesn't explain the apparent god complex many programmers have.
Sure there’s definitely some of that. That doesn’t “explain why” (OP) code is complex nor does it prove there’s a “cartel” (GP) trying to gatekeep software engineering.
Go pick up "The Molecular Biology of the Cell" and come back to me after a month of reading it, and then you will have learned perhaps 10% of the knowledge required to specialize in endocrinology.
Some things are just complex! Programming as a field is "complex" but compared to any actual scientific field it probably the simplest to learn, pick up and understand. There's a reason why Doctors and Lawyers are highly paid and take forever to train.
Techbros have already tried to reinvent the wheel in other fields — crypto payments and metamed come to mind. Metamed learned that "actually, medicine is really absurdly difficult and you can't just instantly automate the job of a doctor with Technology" the hard way, and crypto payments are learning "why financial infrastructure and regulation exists in the first place", the hard way (through losing billions of dollars over and over again through exploits and ponzi schemes). I suspect that soon techbros like you will try to invent the legal system from scratch and learn why laws and the legal system are that way, hopefully it won't be the hard way! (Through a revolution)
> This is commercial only. Free and small is my safeclib
Is it me or does this feel a bit weird? It seems like you're using the comments section here to self-advertise for exposure.
I read it like — "businesses can't use this without paying the OP, however, if you're a business you can get 50% of the way there by using _my_ library, and you don't even have to pay me!". It comes off incredibly rude to try to undercut the OP like this.
See this is where I and the FSF/OSI diverge, because
> the right to use, copy, modify, merge, publish and distribute the Software [as long as you're not selling it or derivatives of the Software]
seems to line up with exactly what the folks involved in Free Software originally wanted — the ability to fix, patch, debug software that runs on their systems. I also think it's incredibly important to have non-commercial clauses given that the vast majority of technical infrastructure in the modern world is built on FOSS, all while the companies give nothing back and developers of FOSS starve.
If Valve can dump hundreds of developers into FOSS and within, what, 7 years? bring Linux almost to parity with and performance of Windows for gaming, imagine what would happen if FOSS developers were actually given funding!
The last time I looked into this, at least one US pesticide* banned in the EU seemed to significantly disrupt oxytocin, notably the pesticide in question seems to be present on fruit, in the store, and can be absorbed through incidental contact. Oxytocin is most notably involved in empathy, giving people a nasal spray of oxytocin and testing them on empathy indicates higher response (in the one story it boiled down to roughly, "how much do you give a shit or relate to the suffering of other people who you do not know") after their oxytocin has been raised.
It does seem like there's room here for a study to see what the general oxytocin level is in the US versus other countries — if it's notably reduced, I wonder if that can help explain why all the US legislation around societal benefits and e.g. healthcare, feels not just apathetic towards, but particularly hostile and mean spirited to people who are suffering.
* - When i originally penned this, I was under the assumption it was Atrazine, but it isn't and I can't find the pesticide in question and don't feel like sifting through a list of "1000 pesticides banned in the EU that the US loves to use" to find the one in question
edit, NB:
HNers that love to skim read and argue based on that, take note — the only claims made here are:
- At least one US pesticide that is banned in the EU disrupts oxytocin (plausible, if not cited)
- Oxytocin is directly connected to expression of empathy (incredibly well-founded)
- US legislation around societal benefits and healthcare feels apathetic and mean spirited (opinion, take it or leave it)
Note that I very carefully do not claim that a {pesicide contact -> reduced oxytocin-> reduced empathy -> mistreatment of the poor and sick} chain is actually the case (I leave that in speculation — "I wonder if"), I only say that it seems viable and worthy of investigation if and only if the first claim in the list above is true. I also do not claim it to be the only cause — that's why I say the words "can help explain". Thank you for reading.
Mm, I did take a quick look but the majority seem to be studying within the cow cervix, which... it seems kind of iffy to then expand that to the wider body, and then jump species from cows to humans. Too many links of indirection to make a reasonable claim about.
It is interesting: I have long wondered if recreational drugs that created long-term feelings of safety and contentment (rather than the anxiety, depression & fear of the current options, especially among uppers) could improve political outcomes.
On the other hand, given European's response to immigration has been to cut their social spending, it seems more likely that the difference in social support can be confidently attributed to racism.
As far as I know we haven't found any chemicals that either create or diminish racism, though it is an interesting direction for future research.
It may be a contributing factor. But reading that I remembered something about NSAIDs (most 'over the counter' pain killers) reducing empathy. First hit (from 2018) for 'NSAID' +'empathy' was https://www.spring.org.uk/2018/02/painkillers-emotions.php
Hey! Maybe microplastics and PFAS/PFOA/BPA do too? Whoo hoo hoo!
I'm no doctor, but if my understanding is correct oxytocin is also correlated with in-group out-group behavior. I think it's a bit reductionist to attribute election results to hormone imbalance. Culture and material conditions probably have a much greater impact on that.
> I think it's a bit reductionist to attribute election results to hormone imbalance.
I very carefully did not attribute election results solely to that cause :)
Russian funding and mass media covert ops are likely more to blame[1][2]
At the same time, I do think that there's room to explain why vast swathes of the US has a very "I've got mine, fuck you" attitude. This also seems to be somewhat recent, because "Universal right to food" was one of the things proposed in, I want to say the 40s-50s? as one of the basic fundamental rights. Which, outright couldn't happen now with the current state of American Politics.
[2]: idk there's a laundry list of news outlets confirming both of these points, if someone wants to argue about it then it's likely we'll never agree in the first place, as the evidence has been widely available for almost a decade now and is very clear in terms of evidence of Russian influence in voter manipulation, general public opinion manipulation, and outright paying off politicians and working to inflate the puritanical right wing.
Oh for sure, I agree with you on that. This reminds me that as far back as during the french revolution, in 1789, some "radical republicans" succeeded in putting a droit de subsistance, right to sustenance, in the very first constitution. That right would guarantee some form of food and shelter for everyone. It was removed in the second constitution by the bourgeoisie, of course.
Those ideas are far from new, and I'm afraid to never see them implemented in my lifetime, but I remain hopeful and will still advocate for them however I can.
My problem with what you're saying is that it relies on affirming the antecedent. Which not a proposition I believe to be correct, and in fact, view as denigration and slander of my countrymen. I do not look kindly on that.
> view as denigration and slander of my countrymen
The fact that you believe it to be incorrect also doesn't really make it incorrect, does it. Notably, I am also not saying that it is correct, but simply making a claim based on if it is correct — which may or may not be true.
I am sorry that you feel that I slandered and denigrated your countrymen but surely the bigger denigration against the american people here is the voting patterns of your countrymen — in repeatedly voting against social measures that would provide aid and care to the poor, sick, and disabled. I would look upon that as something to get insulted, deeply upset about, and use that feeling as a force to try to argue for and push for change politically, as opposed to a random comment on the internet.
> What I am yet to find in any programming language is a reliable way to put my cursor somewhere in the code base, and know exactly all the possible errors which can happen, where they could come from, and whether I've handled them (or might be interested in handling them).
Zig's error types and error unions seem like a decent approach to achieve this.
> You browse the web constantly, so you do it without thought. Not so with your taxes, despite their similar constance and ubiquity, because they are not constant and thus haven't had the same abstractions engineered into their very DNA.
In the UK, the government automatically takes tax out of my income and tax is indicated as part of my pay cheque. It requires absolutely no thought from me.
There's very literally currently a whole wealth of papers proving that LLMs do not understand, cannot reason, and cannot perform basic kinds of reasoning that even a dog can perform. But, ok.
There's a whole wealth of papers proving that LLMs do not understand the concepts they write about. That doesn't mean they don't understand grammar – which (as I've claimed since the GPT-2 days) we should, theoretically, expect them to "understand". And what is chess, but a particularly sophisticated grammar?
Citation needed. The actual hard evidence with respect to regret rates with GICs are very clear that "desistance", using your word for it, is vanishingly low (less than 1-2%, c.f. knee surgery with 20-30%), and that lack of social acceptance is a huge factor in deciding if someone desists or not — the less social acceptance, the less likely someone is to be able to comfortably transition socially, the more likely they're going to "desist".
In other words — not only is the "desistance rate" for treatment vanishingly small, there isn't a straight line between "desisting" and "not being transgender", and one of the most recurring explanations for "desistance" in the study groups basically boiled down to "society has bullied them into hiding themselves".
> people on opposite sex hormones start developing behaviours and preferences of the opposite sex
Citation needed. In the 70s - 80s there were experiments to try and treat both intersex people and transgender people by giving them the "correct" (cis) hormone, and the subjects involved found it so intolerable they committed suicide.
> body dysmorphia results in distorted perceptions of one's own body
Correct! And given that you know this, you should also know that treatments for body dysphoria do not work for gender dysphoria, and that for almost 100 years now, the only effective treatment for gender dysphoria has been transitioning.
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