Disagreed, given that the bodtcams require you to press a button down for 5 seconds before they start recording. Given that fact, it clearly seems like a deterrent (what customer will know this detail? They'll assume they're always on)
However, it does have an "EN" button near the top right. Personally, I think this is as close to a perfect solution as you can get. (Geolocating an IP or something has a whole bunch of problems than just going with your country's official language as a default.)
> If all you need is satellite communication for a few bytes of information, a cellphone can send an emergency message to satellites anywhere on this planet
This month, an unmodified Samsung S21 Ultra achieved 17mbit download speeds from a Starlink satellite, which is. Well, quite something. I do wonder what the upload speed would be.
>>I know I’m focusing a lot on that, but that’s where a lot of the protests in the community are focused. People appear to really love these apps. And, apparently, they think Reddit itself is not offering the experience they’re looking for. People talk about leaving the platform because they can’t use these apps. So if Reddit is going to shut down these apps, you’re going to lose people who loved Reddit, and that still doesn’t quite make sense. So I guess I’m wondering why hasn’t there been...
>90-plus percent of Reddit users are on our platform, contributing, and are monetized either through ads or Reddit Premium. Why would we subsidize this small group? Why would we effectively pay them to use Reddit but not everybody else who also contributes to Reddit? Does that make sense?
>These people who are mad, they’re mad because they used to get something for free, and now it’s going to be not free. And that free comes at the expense of our other users and our business. That’s what this is about. It can’t be free.
I read the article and Huffman seems quite reasonable. Basically that they are asking profit making apps like Apollo to cover server costs, which seems not ridiculous if Reddit is loss making and Apollo profit making. I get the impression that some people who say they don't like corporate doublespeak are upset because Huffman just says pay or move on instead of doing the doublespeak. My biases - I did his python course and thought he seemed ok, also I use old reddit on the laptop and it works fine.
Third party apps aren’t upset that their free API access is getting charged; it’s the ridiculously high price, along with very short notices that make it painfully obvious of Reddit’s intention to permanently encapsulate all traffic in-house.
I was skeptical of the article's claims that anesthetized patients may continue to experience consciousness, but this has definitely shaken the foundations of that belief:
>At doses near the unconsciousness threshold, some anesthetics block working memory (20). Thus, patients may fail to respond because they immediately forget what to do. At much lower doses, anesthetics cause profound amnesia. Studies with the isolated forearm technique, in which a tourniquet is applied to the arm before paralysis is induced (to allow the hand to move while the rest of the body is paralyzed), show that patients under general anesthesia can sometimes carry on a conversation using hand signals, but post-operatively deny ever being awake (21). Thus, retrospective oblivion is no proof of unconsciousness.
Edit: there are some sections of this article that could prompt some interesting discussion from the crowd here. For example, from a subsection "Consciousness and integrated information":
>The evidence from anesthesia and sleep states (Fig. 2–3) converges to suggest that loss of consciousness is associated with a breakdown of cortical connectivity and thus of integration, or with a collapse of the repertoire of cortical activity patterns and thus of information (Fig. 2). Why should this be the case? A recent theory suggests a principled reason: information and integration may be the very essence of consciousness (52). Classically, information is the reduction of uncertainty among alternatives: when a coin falls on one of its two sides, it provides 1 bit of information, whereas a die falling on one of six faces provides ~2.6 bits. But then having any conscious experience, even one of pure darkness, must be extraordinarily informative, since we could have had countless other experiences instead (think of all the frames of every possible movie). Having any experience is like throwing a die with a trillion faces and identifying which number came up (Fig. 2). On the other hand, every experience is an integrated whole that cannot be subdivided into independent components. For example, with an intact brain you cannot experience the left half of the visual field independently of the right half, or visual shapes independently of their color. In other words, the die of experience is a single one throwing multiple dice and combining the numbers will not do.
Many years ago, I received a mild sedative while undergoing an endoscopy via my throat. Apparently, that's not a pleasant experience. I say apparently because I have no memory of it other than asking the nurse when they were going to start ... after the procedure was completed. I remember getting injected with the stuff and I remember me asking that question because I was getting bored just lying there. I don't remember losing consciousness, being asleep, or waking up, or anything like that. It's just a gap in my memory while they did their thing. Amazing stuff. I'm assuming I was conscious and responsive throughout.
I had proper surgery a few days later which involved being knocked out for two hours or so. That's a whole different situation. You start counting down and you are gone within a few seconds.
I've had an endoscopy with no sedatives/anesthetics etc. It was definitely not fun but doable. As soon as the scope went down my throat I went into panic mode. My heart rate was through the roof, and I couldn't stop retching. But after it passed that initial gag reflex point, it settled down. The nurse holding my hand holding my hand soothed me as well.
Then I got up, walked to my car and drove myself home with my brain at 100% (albeit with more adrenaline and cortisol than normal).
The drug they typically give to erase your memory is Midazolam.
You can give someone a small dose of Midazolam, they might report feeling a little dizzy, or say they feel like they’ve had a few drinks, but they will have absolutely no recall of the experience, despite interacting like a slightly tipsy “conscious person” - I like how they call it “conscious sedation” - most people end up believing they were unconscious.
Right, midazolam (aka versed) is a common one. So is propofol (colloquially known as "milk of amnesia").
I've read some horror stories online about people having postoperative nightmares about what they experienced while on the operating table while under versed, so I was really afraid to take it when I went under general anesthesia myself.. but I've had it a bunch of times now, and never experienced anything like that myself.
My postoperative amnesia has been complete, and I'm happy for that.
On the other hand, I still worry about what I might have experienced that I don't remember.
Falling asleep at night after an upper endoscopy, I had a vague recollection of the feeling of retching during the procedure. I know that they try to sedate as lightly as possible, so maybe they undershot slightly in my case. I think I had asked the anesthesiologist what they gave me when I was waking up, because I felt particularly hung over, and they said it was propofol.
At least for some anesthetics, the pain centers will be active while under anesthesia. Rather, interconnectivity between brain areas is disrupted, preventing your conscious experience of pain. Whether or not that is a case of amnesia regarding what you experienced, or a genuine lack of experience, is an open question. Although I firmly believe that brain wide integration is necessary for consciousness and so there is no experience of pain.
I wonder if the pain sensation in your brain , despite not being connected consciously to your experience, has some lingering after effects. Like the engine room of a ship springing a leak but the bridge is just fine and never noticed it when it happened.
I got a small dose of that for my colonoscopy. I was 100 % there, looking at the camera feed, complying with the doctor's orders, I even remember being a little surprised that I feel and remember everything. An hour later, sipping a milkshake at McDonald's I realized I didn't remember the procedure at all. Just these disjoint flashes of consciousness, the sound of the machine, the feeling of the tool moving around, but no real coherent story. Interesting experience.
Startup idea: video content moderation service for big social media
companies with moderators given medically supervised Midazolam; no
more high turnover due to PTSD and no counseling needed
Propofol is also common with endoscopy, and sometimes combinations of drugs, so it's hard to say what GP received.
There's also an interesting thing where the anesthesia you get is likely to be very different for the same procedure if you get the procedure at a hospital versus an outpatient clinic. Because anesthesia at a hospital is typically a department with influence, and turf wars happen.
If you think the tourniquet technique sounds interesting you should read up on “awake craniotomies” - another very interesting area of anaesthesia and consciousness.
Ultimately in anaesthesia, the mind may not recall the experience but the body still feels it. You see this in unparalysed body’s that flinch when they’re cut, or in fully paralysed bodies that signal pain in an observable increase in heart rate and blood pressure.
However, most the time, people are also given substantial analgesics to reduce their likelihood of experiencing pain, but the point I’m trying to make is an unconscious person is still able to feel pain of they have not been given adequate pain relief.
What if the experience of pain is separate to the experience of heart rate rising and blood pressure rising?
Like, you get a cut, and the trigger is the "damage" that then triggers pain and the heart rate rising. It's not the pain itself that triggers the heart rate but the damage. Maybe? Idk
I've read about something similar called split brain where there can be separate consciousness in the brain and maybe elsewhere. Interesting experiments have been done on it and it just all seems so weird. Very tricky figuring out this consciousness thing from the inside.
"But then having any conscious experience, even one of pure darkness, must be extraordinarily informative, since we could have had countless other experiences instead (think of all the frames of every possible movie)."
It is worth asking why this argument does not also apply events like the die-rolling case, and it is because the state of the world immediately after the event is strongly constrained by its state immediately before.
The argument quoted above tacitly assumes there are no such prior constraints in the case of consciousness, but this does not seem to be supportable. If it were so, it would seem that our minds would be constantly taking a random walk through a vast number of possibilities, and it seems inconceivable that there could be consciousness in that case.
As '(52)' in the longer passage is a reference to an early paper by Tononi on his Integrated Information Theory (IIT), I think it is worth pointing out that this argument does not support IIT specifically, or more strongly than any other theory consistent with the premise that the current state of one's mind strongly constrains what happens next.
A childhood fear of mine was that every time I lost consciousness my mind could be going through the worst torture imaginable and I just don't remember it. I still wonder if I'm having horrific nightmares every time I wake up sweaty.
I had the same fear too growing up. I found peace with it and stopped thinking about for many years until now, when I realized that practically it wouldn't affect my waking life if it actually did happen, if I had no memory of it at all, so there would be no use worrying about it.
Being an oldie, I have occasional colonoscopies in which I've always been anesthetized. My most recent one was a couple of years back. I'm not sure what happened, but during the procedure (after evidently going under), I was fully conscious of everything that was going on. I couldn't move and had no feeling for what was happening, but I could hear the doctors talk and could tell what was happening. It was much like a dream, but the most vivid dream one could imagine.
And I'm not an expert in this area, but my understanding is that during a colonoscopy they use a level of anesthesia called "conscious sedation", and the drugs they use also tend to have strong amnesia-inducing properties.
Anesthesia for surgery is more complicated and involves a cocktail of different drugs, administered in a particular sequence, tending to include paralytic drugs as well as special inhaled drugs that we don't even really know how they work (eg sevoflurane). It amounts to a much deeper state of anesthesia than the conscious sedation used in things like GI endoscopy and wisdom tooth extraction.
IANAA (I Am Not An Anesthesiologist) but I like to read about stuff like this and ask my doctors about it whenever it comes up for me.
I had a somewhat similar experience when I got my wisdom teeth out recently.
I consciously remember saying "Wow, this is working way faster than I thought it would" right before the dental assistant told me to go to sleep if I felt like it.
I have some memories of the surgery happening, like my head being jerked around when they pulled teeth out, but it was painless. Immediately after the surgery after I "woke up" I felt like I could remember quite a bit of the procedure but that feeling faded after some time and it all felt like a dream.
It's funny you mention this particular phrasing. I used to work as a 911/police dispatcher so I was often literally the first person you'd tell such a story to. I had so many instances in which I would have greatly preferred people not use the "I hit ___" or "___ hit me"
>"I was on my way to work and this guy just hit me! He just came out of nowhere and hit me!"
Cue the inevitable asking of a) did he strike you with a fist? a weapon? b) did he strike you with a vehicle? c) if he struck you with a vehicle, were you in your vehicle or were you walking?
I got burned -many- times over taking the seemingly obvious interpretation of "I was on my way to work and this guy just hit me!" and assuming a "two-vehicle traffic collision" just to find out the caller was actually exiting a coffee shop when someone physically assaulted him, or was walking back to his parked car when he watched someone back into it, etc..
Even "I was driving to work and someone hit me" leaves such a plethora of questions unanswered that yes, in instances where -clarity- is important (having to be clear and succinct, not casually retelling the story at a bar) I would much rather hear "I was driving my vehicle when another driver collided with me" which isn't meaningfully longer and clarifies many questions about what happened.
An excellent article, cheers! For those scrolling through, the article is written by a developer of Valorant, a recently-released FPS. He talks about his efforts to implement a system to prevent wallhacks and the challenges he encountered while doing so.
>Cheaters use wallhacks to see opponents through walls. In a tactical shooter like VALORANT, this gives them huge advantages when it comes to individual combat encounters as well as strategic decisions for the round as a whole. Wallhacks are especially insidious because they give an advantage that isn’t always obvious - your enemies could be using wallhacks... or maybe they’ve just figured out that you rush B every round. We really wanted to prevent that sense of doubt which lingers with players, poisoning their experiences long after the match.
>At the beginning of development, when we were talking about security goals for the project, the two things that came up over and over again were wallhacks and aimbots.
>League’s Fog of War system works because the game server withholds information about the positions of enemies until a client needs to display it. I knew if I could implement something like this for VALORANT we could solve the problem of wallhacks because there would be nothing for the wallhack to see. If an opponent was behind a wall, we wouldn’t send their location to enemy players, keeping them hidden until they decided to peek the angle. If we could pull it off, this seemed like the ideal solution - but we had no idea whether this would be feasible in Unreal Engine.
>The end user won’t be doing anything with the OS itself.
What makes you think so? The desktop environment will be powered by KDE Plasma.
>Accordingly, the underlying distro just doesn’t seem that interesting.
Valve is pretty clear that in addition to having a gaming mode they want the device to be a full-fledged (linux-based) PC.. hopefully with everything that entails.
>What about the distro could possibly be surfaced to the end user/gamer that they would care about?
Maybe nothing in "gaming mode," but in "desktop mode", it's Arch running KDE Plasma. It's essentially a Linux-based PC with a gaming option. (Or vice-versa, depending on your primary use case and point-of-view.)
Given the fact that the desktop mode exists and is leaned on as an important feature, I'd assume a lot of underlying functionality will be exposed.
>It’s not like Steam will apt dist-upgrade their device: upgrades will be a complete reimage.
I too am interested to see how they will handle this, but based on their website copy I would not be surprised if you could at least apt-get upgrade the desktop portion, with the gaming mode running either on top or separate from it.
>Crimea and Ukraine are geopolitically not very useful. Taiwan is extremely useful, especially if it allows defense access to e.g. American warships.
A large reason for the annexation of Ukraine was the question of control of Russia's only warm-water seaport at Sevastopol. I doubt Russia would have bothered (given the international consequences, i.e. sanctions and potential military intervention) if their access to the Black Sea wasn't threatened by Ukraine's increasing ties with the West.
I think the point is that Taiwan being free of Beijing has a lot of strategic importance to other countries (basically all of the West). Crimea is really only important to Russia and Ukraine.
Yes but if you were Russia and Ukraine was signaling that it wishes to join the EU and NATO at that point how long would you be able to rely on that lease?
This is the same reason why Russia got involved in Syria, it has only a handful of warm water ports and essentially all of them are at a precarious position where they ship need to traverse potentially hostile choke points.
Yes I’m just saying that from a realpolitik perspective, nothing really changed for the rest of the world when Russia annexed Crimea. Russia leased the port before, now they own it. Hence the lack of real response other than some sanctions.
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