Every time I come across an article about cancer, I'm reminded of that website that catalogued all the things that The Daily Mail said either caused or prevented cancer.
This "joke" usually comes up in discussions like this.
Though it is kind of wasted. Dihydrogen monoxide would be the chemical compound without any salts, minerals or other additives we normally get from water.
It would likely not be beneficial for you to drink it as opposed to water.
The strength of the correlation might be the only useful single variable we can have in discussions like this.
I'm starting to think that "Correlation is not causation" is a kind of slippery slope toward a world where nobody can ever prove the cause of anything. At the same time, just about everything is at least a mild carcinogen including food, the sun, air particulates, etc. But knowing that everything causes cancer isn't useful information. Knowing the strength of the correlations of each of these things is actually useful.
Problem is, doing Y only "causes" cancer after doing it nonstop for like 40 years.
What can you do today that would cause cancer tomorrow or next week? Even next year? Nothing. Yet, just about every environmental thing causes cancer over long periods of time.
Which leads to the absurd: being alive causes cancer.
Establishing a correlation is only a starting point. After that there is an entire field of statistics called causal inference that is devoted to establishing causality using a variety of tools.
The strength of correlation is NOT the only useful metric and should not be mistaken for more rigorous statistical analysis regarding causality.
So they will be replacing themselves with robots then? It's either foreigner workers or robots, either way, the average Joey Japan doesn't end up with any more money in their pocket and therefore many people will still struggle to find the money to have children.
I know someone exactly like that. He runs a very profitable side business (reselling) using only his smartphone to take pictures, upload them, message customers, emails etc. I'm always baffled how he doesn't at least have some small laptop to help him type out stuff when needed, but he's doing just fine.
There was a video on threads earlier today (probably long gone now) of some of the bodies they were finding. Just truly horrific what that amount of sheer force can do to a person.
I miss forums. When they were in their heyday I was an active participant in anywhere from a couple to half a dozen, shifting with whatever happened to be my hobby at the time. And local forums based around hobbies like music and photography were a great way to meet people in person because you already had something in common to start things off.
It was also a place to find really in depth information on a topic. I remember doing research for my multi-day hikes and outdoor travels by browsing the threads in the stormfront survival subforum (note: I do not condone what they represent, but lots of them were paranoid and preparing for "the coming race war" and they just had good prepping and survival info).
To me Reddit and HN have filled the void left by the decline of forums, but it's not the same. Perhaps the thing I miss the most is the ability to have avatars and custom signatures and titles to give your online persona a little bit of personality and flair.
That little bit of personality is what made forums so much fun. The early 2000s somethingawful forums were such a goldmine. I've never laughed so hard in my life at the antics between users. When this person or that guy or some infamous user would show up, it would kick off a thread and it felt so much more "real" and personal.
The ultra niche subreddits have that vibe, but as soon as they get to around 10k users, it turns into nothing but an upvote dopamine chase.
The era of niche subreddits is over these days. Reddit started ignoring subscriptions and just pooling all posts together and suggesting things the algorithm thinks you are interested in regardless of subscriptions.
I think it goes further than that. Since IPO a huge number of subreddits have been shut down and the disappearance of many moderators. I don't have any way of proving what happened, but it seems awfully coincidental and the result of some private policy change. Reddit has a huge thumb on the scale on their own platform and it is not healthy.
SomethingAwful was an important prominent internet culture anchor for a long time, enforcing good moderation and content standards. I checked out of there the day Lowtax died and never looked back. Prophetic truth in the tagline "The internet makes you stupid."
I didn’t participate in its heydays but made an account during covid era and it has disappointed me greatly.
Let’s say that if you wish BlueSky were a forum, it’s the place for you. All I found were a bunch of americans that were simultaneously playing edgy, touchy and uncurious with anything in their cultural blindspot. Dreadful stuff. But the shadow of its greatness was palpable and made me nostalgic for something I didn’t experience.
yeah it's nothing like it used to be. back in the old days it was like the wild west. nothing was off the table unless it was illegal or grossly against the forum rules. now it's just a forum version of reddit or bluesky like you said
Same here. I have very fond memories of old forum culture. I was a mod/admin on several and an actual community developed. With the avatar and signatures it was easier to recognize people and see them as a person instead of just an opponent to debate, especially for the regular posters.
With how long the communities stuck together and the daily posters on the smaller ones, life happened there. People graduated from college, got married, went through parents dying, cancer, career growth, retirement… I had a very good sense of who many of these people were as people, not just faceless opponents for a debate, which often feels like what modern mega sites have become. It’s not a conversation with people you know, it’s a conversation with the hive mind.
Is this another potential OceanGate scenario (SpaceGate?), where one day the ISS just blasts apart suddenly and without warning and the occupants are ejected into the vacuum of space?
There are of course potential failures, but not quite as violent as oceans gate. There is 1 atm of pressure difference between the inside and outside of the ISS. At titanic depths the pressure difference between inside and outside of the submarine was approximately 400 atm.
Thats why the ISS can have small leaks like this that are a problem but not catastrophic like they would be in a deep sea submarine.
The differences in engineers for space versus the ocean are fascinating. You'd think space stations and submarines would be interchangeable because they both deal with pressure differentials, right? Wrong. They'd fail in fascinatingly different ways within minutes or hours in the opposite environment
Zvezda has been leaking since 2019. That doesn't seem sudden and without warning to me. I imagine its going to continue to leak until the ISS is decommissioned.
The return of the leak was relatively sudden. They had done temporary fixes that brought stable pressure for a while, and when it reappeared, the leak jumped back to 1kg/day quickly.
Here's another data point for you all. Last year in April 2025 I bought 32gb DDR5 at $123.69. I checked it this most recent April and the exact same product was $679. All prices in Canadian dollars.
I almost never see people using a left hand mouse these days.
As younger people start using computers they generally will learn with right-handed mice and will thus develop those fine motor skills in that hand. I wonder if this will make right-handedness even more dominant.
As a lefty I never had any problems adapting to a right hand mouse and actually find the keyboard to be better suited as a "left hand" activity and would have a hard time switching it up.
I'm a lefty, but always mouse on my right (keyboard left). This has made me exceptionally good at using hotkeys, to the point where a friend at a LAN party called me a hot-key whore. He wasn't (and still isn't) wrong. After using any program for a while, I will figure them out, including how many times to press tab to get to a field.
Living with laptops with touchpads for a couple of decades as a righty, I can use a touchpad perfectly fine with either hand, but a mouse is still right handed for me.
I mouse right-handed because it’s convenient, but I still naturally default to doing any novel task left-handed. It’s not a matter of fine motor skills, you can learn to do anything with either hand if you decide to, it’s just an unconscious preference.
I have switched between left and right mouse every few years when I was younger, just to see what works best for me. I could adapt to both, even though I can only write and draw with my left hand. I have settled with left-hand mouse because I feel like I can be a bit more precise for graphical works and shooters.
With the trackpad on my Laptop, I switch quite frequently and haven’t yet noticed any difference in precision. The movement is very different than mouse or pen control though and comes more from individual/multiple fingers instead of the whole hand or arm, so I guess that explains it.
I used right all the time. Got RSI.
Now I use left at work all day, and right at home when gaming.
At work, I don't use a left handed mouse. Just those cheaper but common symmetrical ones. And I don't bother changing handedness. I just pick up the mouse and put it to the left of the keyboard.
That seems weird. Bad Apple is up there with doom in terms of "make it run", and a few high profile-ish hackers seem to enjoy touhou stuff (drew devault off the top of my head)
https://web.archive.org/web/20200221175201/http://kill-or-cu...
Too bad it's down, but here's an archive of it.