People trot out the whole "correlation isn't causation" thing as if to suggest that finding correlations is useless and misguided: it is not. it is an excellent way to find possible causes. In this case though, there is a more simple reason for the observed correlation. It isn't that improved eyesight improves mental health, but rather that if you are developing dementia you are less likely to seek out treatment for declining eyesight ( i.e it isn't "seek cataract surgery" => NOT dementia, but instead dementia => NOT "seek cataract surgery"

There was a "Viagra cures Alzheimer's" story just yesterday that is he same thing. The more boring and more likely reason for the correlation is that Alzheimer's patients don't ask for Viagra

That is a possible explanation. Note that this wasn't a double blind study: they looked at health insurance claim data. Another could be that when you get Alzheimer's you lose interest in everything, and so when you start to get the disease you stop having a reason to want Viagra. IOW you only want Viagra if you don't have Alzheimer's. I lost my dad to Alzheimer's and the disease comes with significant cognitive decline beyond the forgetfulness that everyone talks about.

Companies with items in demand should sell what they have using a dutch auction. Everyone puts in their highest bid, and the bighest bidders get the available inventory. The price they pay is the lowest bid that won. Everyone wins: Everyone pays less than what they were prepared to, and middlemen are excluded.

That's a simple and good message. If they want to get fancy and feel bad about charging high prices, they can give an optional _partial_ refund of the excess once the price goes back down to normal when there is sufficient supply. (It shouldn't be a complete excess refund 'cos the winners got to have something no-one else could have for quite some time)

Legislation is a stupid and awful solution.

Instead of handwringing about bots, they should sell them using a dutch auction scheme: everyone bids as much as they are prepared to pay, sneakers are allocated in decreasing bid order and everyone is charged the same price: the bid of the lowest winning bid. Everyone wins: the seller gets the market's perceived value for the shoes, buyers get them for less than or equal to what they were prepared to pay, and there is less 'discarded value' for bots to pursue.
https://www.investopedia.com/t...
There is still a bit of market value that is discarded: $100 shoe auction closes for $1000, but there is that one guy who didn't notice the auction and would have paid $10000. The fanboy who bid $10k got his for $1000, and doesn't need more.

As a computer nerd I would love to hear they've licensed Google's generative model. Of course that is really awful and inevitable, and is going to bring us all the trouble we would expect. Remember "let's make a chatbot trained on stuff people say online"? That was great too.

The comment about hurting competition is idiotic. That Hovland guy should be fired. Almost every computer available today is more than capable of managing the 1 every 5 minutes max transaction load of a voting machine.
I bet most of the nerds here with computer experience think banning wireless access hardware is deeply sensible.
There should be a physical record that the voter can confirm.
There should be an efficient way of tallying physical votes at a voting station
Each party should oversee a vote count as a normal part of the counting process.
There should be a mostly automatic voter registry that has federal checks for death and migration
Ballots should be sent to every voter.
The mechanisms for voter fraud prevention should be open and clear
A report of whether you voted or not should be sent to every voter.
The world is not yet ready for electronic voting. The general population needs to trust and understand the system

If the company has any competence at all it knows more or less how its users will vote, and so it can calculate plausibly non-partisan groups to pitch their go-vote campaign to. Probably half the nerds on this forum are capable of formulating a program that will swing the election one way or another. Bet you the campaign is payment for the Tiktok help he got.

Has anyone else noticed how completley rigged this ballot is?

-Choice F - Systemd is placed first ( there is a known bias towards the first item in a list )
-The "allow other init systems", choice is split into essentially 6 different choices. The six alternatives are all vaguely the same and so the people who want an alternative to systemd are not going to be able to co-ordinate to find the right choice.
-The 'ranked choice' system is a mis-direction and will do nothing to offset these biases.
-The systemd only option doesn't clearly say that.

The result is that Debian is going to go systemd only unless 6x as many people vote to stop it