gila

It is different for simulated blurriness, because simulated blurriness can’t be modulated by your ocular muscles, so they won’t reflexively strain to focus.

You couldn’t really achieve that effect by actually putting any kind of lens in front of your eyes though. That is not a simulation of blurriness, it is actual blurriness.

The primary way it would be bad for your eyesight is by inducing eye strain, itself a primary cause of blurred vision. It’s a reflex of the subconscious brain - either your eyes will be constantly trying to focus, which strains them, or you’re consciously unfocusing them, which also strain them.

If you had eye strain causing blurry vision naturally and didn’t correct it with glasses, likely there’d be no downward spiral unless you have some other condition causing that. It’d potentially cause other issues like headaches or spasms though

I use Shotcut for more or less any video operations that require re-encoding. It’s great for basic editing but also simple transcoding jobs too

They aren’t concerned with deaths, this legislation positions the most harmful and most physically addictive nicotine option as relatively more accessible.

They aren’t concerned with nicotine addiction, else NRT gum wouldn’t be allowed to stock within reach of children in retail outlets.

They’re just NIMBY’s, there’s nothing else to it.

Unscrupulous companies in this case referring to every car manufacturer, they wouldn’t have a systemic incentive to foster an EV monopoly that is anti-consumer and actively stymies the growth of the local EV sector.

Literally the state of California would have lower CO2 emissions today if Tesla didn’t exist.

In Australia our tobacco strategy was to effectively ban vapes and price cigarettes out of existence.

The impact to date has created two totally new black markets: one for vapes after people realised anyone could just hop on AliExpress to buy them in bulk and resell for a 2000% markup. They are banned for import, but nicotine is a colourless odourless liquid and there are no rapid tests for it, no capacity to do expensive GCMS testing on all the random freight entering the country from China (our biggest trading partner by far).

The other new black market is for “chop chop”, the colloquial name for unprocessed tobacco illegally grown and sold by gangs for cheaper than regular cigarettes / RYO tobacco.

There’s also been a big increase in violent robberies at tobacco outlets and even gang turf wars over sales of illegally imported or stolen cigarettes. The excise tax is so high that the gangs can extract enormous sales margin and still undercut the market.

Predictably (and contrary to the rest of the western world) tobacco use has gone up nationally over the past couple of years following a significant downtrend lasting several decades. I’m confident that this strategy, which has been bipartisan amongst our 2 major political parties, will be used as a future case study in why prohibition is fucking moronic. It has continuously demonstrated to be a net detriment to public health, in this case related to a totally preventable yet leading cause of premature death and public health spend.

There is literally no logic to it beyond Lovejoy’s Law, except for some false manufactured statistics parroted by our leaders which blatantly ignore scientific consensus.

I was gonna get it, except they only had it on california rolls with surimi. Can’t stand that smelly processed shit

Originally, undiagnosed ADHD. The pathway to get licensed was somewhat annoying for me, and I couldn’t be bothered engaging with it. I’ve also always had great access to efficient public transport, which I took to school so was accustomed to using it.

There’s been lots of secondary reasons over the years - for a long time I had fines to clear before I could progress getting licensed. The fines were bullshit, and I wouldn’t pay them out of principle. Now they’ve expired, that roadblock is no longer in my way, but I’m still not licensed.

Sometimes it’s annoying, but only really in the sense that I’m proud of my independence / don’t like the rare occasions that I’m dependent on others for travel. I’m in the US on holiday now, and there is comparatively almost zero public transport - that sucks. When I’ve travelled around Europe, Asia, New Zealand, or at home in Australia - the issues are pretty few. I don’t feel held back enough to care, and it seems like a money pit.

I have learned to drive a car, though. I’m just not licensed to, and don’t. M 33

Thanks! Got the script from the TwitchAdSolutions GitHub and it seems to work well

Doesn’t work on Twitch for me (using Firefox). I’ve had some success using ‘Purple Adblock’, but it works by connecting to a public proxy in an ad-free country for the duration of the ad - so it has issues during peak and can get you stuck in a loop

How do I defederate from posts complaining about lemmy.ml admins being tankies? Hasn’t the instance required manual signup approval for the whole last year? Complaints about it being a flagship instance and the resulting bad look for the platform are total non-sequitur. The problem is absolutely, totally, without caveat, solved by lemmy’s blocking functionality. If you don’t like that they created popular communities, tough titties. At the core of the issue is that these complaints are pushing a decentralized platform to conform to their worldview. That just isn’t how it works.

/rant

Firefox blocks statcounter tracking by default. It’s an inherently flawed metric, though Firefox is definitely in the minority still vs Chrome

https://archive.is/96Woj

The company made “more than a dozen technical improvements” to AI Overviews …

… making the feature rely less heavily on user-generated content from sites like Reddit

So it prefers the results that Google normally deprioritizes? I guess we have that in common

Yeah upon rereading the story there’s no shot, tampering with 50+ bottles of eliquid without breaking the break-off band or messing up the plug. Anon is basically a fly by night compounder

But yeah, 35/50mg are the default strengths for majority USA salt nic eliquids off the shelf, the standard set by Juul upon first entering the market (though arbitrarily Juul measures by weight rather than by volume, so their pods are actually 59mg/mL)

It’s possible, but frequency is determined by more factors than simply relief from nicotine withdrawal. It’s also possible that reducing concentration very slightly doesn’t change the overall equation enough to actually drive behavioral change. But I’d agree that outcomes are better secured with conscious intent. I think quitting successfully and meaningfully means learning resilience against compulsion to engage in behaviors driven by chemical reactions in the brain, which this approach doesn’t do at all.

Just as a thought experiment, what you’d really wanna do is change the salt nic formulation, i.e. the acidic compound which is added to freebase nicotine to convert it to a salt. This directly shapes the pharmacokinetics of the resulting nicotinic effect from vaping it, which is what leads to the common knowledge that salt nic hits harder, but doesn’t last as long as freebase. That isn’t universally true at all, but is a result of the salt formulations that are popular in the market.

I worked with a scientist that once formulated a 20mg/mL solution for me that had similar throat hit to the 40mg/mL products I was using & had a very steep onset curve, and I found it to still be very satisfying even immediately after swapping. It wasn’t a successful product though because for the consumer, 20mg = 20mg & 40mg = 40mg

Guess my point is that the novel ways of using tech to improve weaning off nicotine using vaping do legitimately exist, but they don’t have a place in a free market so we won’t have it while regulators stay luddites on the issue

If they were vaping a whole 30ml bottle @ 50mg/mL per week, yeah probably. That’s a pretty extreme dependency. I don’t know anyone ingesting that much nic, after 7 years in vape industry / over a decade vaping myself. I’m not in the US though, Juul kinda fucked things up over there

It also explicitly states in the posted screengrab that the opting-out user’s workspace won’t contribute to the underlying models. How would that be separate from using info on their workspace as training data for any kind of model? My interpretation of that is the data would be used to inference on the models, not train them.

It dominates the market in vertical tabs IMO. I tried Vivaldi, Firefox extension, the works. The best-feeling alternative was Safari

Well, that’d be the mechanism of how GDPR protections are actioned, yes; but leaving themselves open to these ramifications broadly would be risky. I don’t think it’d satisfy ‘compliance’ to ignore GDPR except upon request. Perhaps the issues with it are even more significant when using it as training data, given they’re investing compute and potentially needing to re-train down the track.

Based on my understanding; de-identifying the dataset wouldn’t be sufficient to be in compliance. That’s actually how it worked prior to it for the most part, but I know companies largely ended up just re-identifying data by cross-referencing multiple de-identified datasets. That nullification forming part of the basis for GDPR protections being as comprehensive as they are.

There’d almost certainly be actors who previously deleted their content that later seek to verify whether it was later used to train any public AI.

Definitely fair to say I’m making some assumptions, but essentially I think at a certain point trying to use user-deleted content as a value add just becomes riskier than it’s worth for a public company