> Since it is a big wall of text, let us ask the subject to summarize. Let's see if it did a good job.
That's the whole problem. Now you have to read the summary and the original, just to verify whether the summary was correct — especially if it's a niche topic (admittedly I'm going by the summary here).
Maybe for a certain class of low-interest work, i.e. for texts where I don't care that I would miss something interesting. For things I care about, the error rate has to come down to zero or the possibly-flawed draft is really of no use.
More like propaganda by Big Alcohol, given the following
> Individuals who abstained from alcohol showed lower cognitive scores than those who consumed alcohol, conflicting with previous research that has connected moderate drinking with cognitive impairment. Weekly and monthly alcohol consumption, as opposed to daily drinking, was found to somewhat correlate with lower cognitive scores.
and that need grows exponentially with your understanding of the world until a certain point.
That need can be reduced to a healthy "Mom said everything is fine in moderate amounts" once you choose to not live by conflicting standards, or rather: when you choose to not support implicitly AND explicitly conflicting causes ( many on the left, finboys & fingirls, law enforcement, ... but unemployed who don't work on themselves or their environment as well )
Not really, you need a coping mechanism with all the crap and stupidity across society, and how powerless truth and correct moral behavior can be.
Alcohol is one of the worst ones, you just blunt yourself while still realizing all failures, just temporarily a bit downtuned, next morning back to misery. No solution or even improvement is happening, just basically giving up (or a bit of complaining which is just group psychological therapy).
Sports, meditation, maybe even occasional psychedelics steered in right direction, active vacations, good food, good sleep. Life is much easier in such mode.
Those who abstain entirely are disproportionately likely to be former alcoholics - which explains eg the apparent protective effect of moderate drinking
Maybe in the US where the whole AA thing is popular and widespread. I'd be surprised if that's a factor at all elsewhere. Where I'm from I've never met anyone who would label themselves as 'former alcoholics'.
I'm more inclined to think intelligence often times comes with a good dose of social anxiety and alcohol helps with managing it.
You might have zero contacts with lower working class then. I live very far from the US in a very different society and know many former alcoholics who abstain entirely, or at least try to. Because it's hard enough for an alcoholic to avoid drinking, it's even harder to have just one drink and not slide into a full-blown, months-long binge.
Back then I knew the problem was the *quality* of the alcohol/drinks.
Now, some years later. "My homie Jamal's" liquor costs 5-10 times that much and he puts effort into the mixtures, trying recipes, playing around with accent ingredients and modifiers and stuff. If we drink--we still drink quite a bit. But there's no month long binges no more and the immediate negative side effects on cognition are *GONE*.
Most AA alumni don't call themselves former alcoholics. They see themselves as addicts who are glad they didn't have a drink yesterday and are doing their best to extend that streak through today.
I don’t see how that’s the most likely reason to abstain. A lot of religious people have never consumed an alcoholic drink; at least that is the case for South Asians: Muslims in particular, but also many Hindus and Sikhs.
This type of led to statistical issues that skewed our understanding of the health effects of alcohol consumption. Unless abstainers who previously abused alcohol are excluded or controlled for statistically, their health effects can skew results [0]. Here’s a blurb from a recent NYT article:
> Fillmore was concerned about possible misleading variables in the studies: To start, they included ex-drinkers in the category of “abstainers,” which meant they were failing to account for the possibility that some people had stopped drinking specifically because of illness. The moderate drinkers looked healthy by comparison, creating the illusion that a moderate amount of alcohol was beneficial.
And it's fairly difficult to make it an apples-to-apples comparison, suitable for causal analysis, by excluding the lifelong teetotalers who would have become alcoholics if they had ever partaken.
The Presbyterian church my parents took me to used actual wine (with an option for grape juice) at communion. I think most people participating in the ceremony didn't consider that having a drink any more than if their prescription medicine contained alcohol.
Another factor is that people who have serious health problems are less likely to consume alcohol. These health problems may have an (indirect) effect on cognitive performance.
I haven't read the whole study so maybe it's not the right meaning, but I tend to agree with you if "to abstain" has been chosen for its actual meaning.
Personally I don't drink alcohol, but I would never say that I am abstaining from drinking alcohol. I just don't do it. Same as eating green olives.
Meanwhile, as you're pointing it out, people who say that they are abstaining from alcohol are likely to be former alcoholics.
And say, people who's faith forbid them from drinking alcohol would probably fit in both : some just don't do it, others have to make a conscious effort to not do it.
Every study I have ever read emphasized importance of sleep. Many show grey matter reduction long term the less you sleep. Sleep studies literally use a little alcohol to disrupt sleep. All the research out there indicates alcohol also directly shrinks your grey matter. These findings are hard to believe for sure.
Grey matter correlates with cognition and ethanol consumption, but that doesn't necessarily mean it makes every cohort (age, amount, duration, etc) worse at every cognitive battery.
There are studies that show alcohol consumption is associated with greater novelty seeking, learning capacity, etc.
I generally think the direction is being smarter/curious first and alcohol comes along. Chemically, I don’t see how alcohol can make you have better cognition in the long run. In some narrow ways, I can see it. Long term is more interesting to me than a peak healthy person that also uses alcohol.
The study appears to say alcohol consumption has protective effect on cognition. Those who drank had less cognitive decline compared to those who abstained completely. If this is correct, this directly contradicts the other studies that says alcohol has zero benefits?
A lot of studies that don't control for confounding factors like the fact that many people who 100% abstain from alcohol are former alcoholics show benefits to small amounts of alcohol consumption compared to no alcohol consumption.
However, the studies that make more of an effort to control for those confounding factors have generally found that there are no health benefits, so right now the evidence seems to favor the idea that there are no health benefits to alcohol and in the studies that show otherwise it is due to confounding factors.
This study doesn't seem to have particularly attempted to control for these factors (it just controlled for specific cardiovascular diseases, etc.) so it's not surprising that the results match older studies that showed positive effects from small amounts of alcohol.
This is a situation of correlation ≠ causation, because — as all Rick & Morty fans know — some geniuses are drinking copiously just to slow down their turbo-charged intellects. :-)
You have to put 2 spaces at the head of each line to get code formatting, otherwise your artistic endeavors are fed to the HN paragraph enforcement daemons.
I'm seeing this play out among young people I know who were trying to improve their English writing skills. Everything they post now in any formal or semi-formal context is via ChatGPT. Their self-confidence has taken a nosedive.
There seem to be two different camps here: Copilot-users that use it largely for autocomplete and Cursor/Sonnet-users that use it for generating larger blocks of code. Personally I'm in the former camp; the efficiency gains are substantial and hallucinations are easy to control. Larger blocks are fine if one wants to sit down and review the whole thing, and also as a writer's-block-breaker.
It's the folks generating whole codebases with no ability to review or debug that are in deep Monkey's Paw territory.
Larger blocks are also perfect for scripts and tools for personal use, in this case you can just check if it works or not, Claude 3.5 Sonnet usually does not disappoint.
I tried copilot like 8 months ago for supercharged auto complete only, but I wasn't a fan because it was too high latency. I usually liked what it would write, but the second or so it took would really break my flow and had the overall effect of slowing me down. Makes me wonder if a local LLM could be superior here.
It seems to have gotten much faster recently so it might be worth another look. I also found it much slower while working on remote folders (with VS Code at least).
That's good to know, the first time I tried it I was working on remote folders (just the way things are setup at work). Maybe I'll have to try it on my own computer and see.
I made a chrome extension that does that on youtube videos (can do on any video). Could do basic motion extraction. Got clueless on how to do all the rest of the things he did in that video.
I liked Paul Hudson's Hacking with macOS (https://twostraws.gumroad.com/l/hwmacos) which includes an older AppKit edition of the book. You'll have to account for changes in Xcode since the book was published. Also, there's a chapter that uses the now-defunct Dark Sky API but you can replace it with Pirate Weather's API which is 1:1 compatible.
It should be noted that The Mind Illuminated defines "attention" and "awareness" in specific ways. This is from the TMI subreddit:
> Attention is what is at the focus of your experience, while awareness Is a broader 'knowing' of your field of consciousness. For instance, while reading this, your attention is on the words on your screen, while you are also still aware peripherally of forms around you, sounds, smells, feelings, etc. Awareness is the ability to be conscious of all thoughts, feelings, sensations, etc that make up your experience. Attention is the ability to focus on one thing, and hold that one thing exclusively as the object of your focus. In other words, awareness might be compared to flood lights while attention might be more like a spotlight.
This is very much in line with Marion Milner's book A Life of One's Own and Les Fehmi's work on "open attention" that have been discussed on HN recently.
The "tabs" seem to be arpeggiations of the chords, which might have been some use if the chord detection had worked well, which doesn't seem the case. I see chords and tabs being generated from sections which have only spoken audio, while actual guitar parts are not notated at all. The arpeggios are not consistent either and switch arbitrarily to upstrokes/downstrokes and back to arpeggios.
Apparently it could have been "the large doses of anticoagulants mixed with other medicines" while he was being treated for his injuries that cured his blindness, according to this article:
That's the whole problem. Now you have to read the summary and the original, just to verify whether the summary was correct — especially if it's a niche topic (admittedly I'm going by the summary here).
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