NaraVara's recent activity
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Comment on Vaping likely to cause lung and oral cancer, Australian researchers find in new review of evidence in ~health
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Comment on Vaping likely to cause lung and oral cancer, Australian researchers find in new review of evidence in ~health
NaraVara Link ParentBy the time it hits your lungs it’s mostly gonna be cooled to your body temperature. Mouth and esophagus are a different story though. Actually, drinking hot drinks while smoking is associated...By the time it hits your lungs it’s mostly gonna be cooled to your body temperature. Mouth and esophagus are a different story though.
Actually, drinking hot drinks while smoking is associated with markedly higher rates of oral and esophageal cancers. (Drinking alcohol as well, as it dissolves the mucous layer that coats the mouth leaving the soft tissue more vulnerable to damage by direct contact with the smoke).
Also why cigarettes are slightly riskier (slight enough to not be meaningfully different) than pipe or hookah smoking as the pipes smoke cooler.
The most likely thing is just particulates and large-molecules of all kinds end up being taxing for the body to clear out. This, of course, has other implications for things like inhaling brake dust and tire particles from heavy vehicles or even pollen granules.
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Comment on Vaping likely to cause lung and oral cancer, Australian researchers find in new review of evidence in ~health
NaraVara Link ParentCould also be a byproduct of the plastics or dyes in the body of the vape or stem interacting with the hot vapor. Lots of potential sources of contamination!Could also be a byproduct of the plastics or dyes in the body of the vape or stem interacting with the hot vapor. Lots of potential sources of contamination!
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Comment on Vaping likely to cause lung and oral cancer, Australian researchers find in new review of evidence in ~health
NaraVara Link ParentI think one of the main areas for concern is with the abundance of poorly regulated flavor additives of unknown provenance, as well as whatever might be getting into it from the plastics and...I think one of the main areas for concern is with the abundance of poorly regulated flavor additives of unknown provenance, as well as whatever might be getting into it from the plastics and metals that the vapor is in contact with on the way to your mouth.
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Comment on Vaping likely to cause lung and oral cancer, Australian researchers find in new review of evidence in ~health
NaraVara Link ParentNicotine’s more addictive than fingernails so YMMV, but have you considered just using a toothpick? That (along with keeping a nail clipper on hand at all times) sort of broke me of my nail biting...Nicotine’s more addictive than fingernails so YMMV, but have you considered just using a toothpick? That (along with keeping a nail clipper on hand at all times) sort of broke me of my nail biting habit by substituting the oral fixation. It also replaced a habit that causes wear on my teeth with a habit that cleans them (basically works like flossing) which is nice too.
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Comment on Vaping likely to cause lung and oral cancer, Australian researchers find in new review of evidence in ~health
NaraVara Link Parent“Excuse me sir, why is there a nimbus of banana scented mist trailing you at all times? Are you Sun Wukong?”“Excuse me sir, why is there a nimbus of banana scented mist trailing you at all times? Are you Sun Wukong?”
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Comment on Can we talk about rice cookers? in ~food
NaraVara (edited )Link ParentI have both an instant pot and a nice rice cooker and I definitely prefer using the rice cooker. The instant pot tends to make the rice kind of clumpy in my experience, and something about the...I have both an instant pot and a nice rice cooker and I definitely prefer using the rice cooker. The instant pot tends to make the rice kind of clumpy in my experience, and something about the process feels fussier. Also, I’m generally using the instapot for making dal or something else while I also need rice, so I can’t really use it for both at once.
I feel like these convenience appliances are handy enough that our conception of what a kitchen is supposed to look like will need rethinking in the same way that we reworked the entire concept of a kitchen to transition from big hearth fireplaces to all-in-one ranges. Like, we should have the computer and heating element and computer part of the instant pot built into the range and have it be a standard size so people can swap the inner pot easily. The thing already sautés, boils, steams, slow cooks, and pressure cooks. That’s useful enough to be built right in and it would be convenient to have it connected to a vent fan to help depressurize more safely (no hot steam blasting into your wooden cupboards or a curious child or feline’s face).
I think my dream kitchen would just have a counter-height oven, an instant pot, a microwave, and a thermomix all built into some kind of purpose designed appliance. If the sink has a boiling-water tap I don’t think I’d need more than 1 induction burner. Maybe I’d have a spare in the cabinet.
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Comment on Can we talk about rice cookers? in ~food
NaraVara Link ParentDealbreaker for me. I prefer the zojirushi just playing twinkle twinkle.One downside I found is that's it's quite voluminous (but still manageable). Oh and it talks. And in English it has that Tik Tok feminine voice. Maybe I should set it in Korean just for the lulz.
Dealbreaker for me. I prefer the zojirushi just playing twinkle twinkle.
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Comment on Can we talk about rice cookers? in ~food
NaraVara Link ParentFor a parent it’s also dead simple to teach a child to measure out rice and water. They get to help and it doesn’t risk a mess that can’t be cleaned up with a single wipe of a towel or a sweep of...For a parent it’s also dead simple to teach a child to measure out rice and water. They get to help and it doesn’t risk a mess that can’t be cleaned up with a single wipe of a towel or a sweep of a broom. Much more straightforward than having to worry about them burning themselves on a hob or spilling a boiling pot of water.
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Comment on Can we talk about rice cookers? in ~food
NaraVara LinkThe basic $20 rice cooker is fine for just making rice. The fancier ones will make the rice fluffier, have built in timers, different settings for different types of rice or doing other sorts of...The basic $20 rice cooker is fine for just making rice. The fancier ones will make the rice fluffier, have built in timers, different settings for different types of rice or doing other sorts of things like making mochi or oatmeal. But if all you want is something for rice and rice is a sometimes thing then you can go cheaper just fine. (If you eat rice all the time then it’s worth springing for a fancier one.)
Also, obligatory article any time rice cookers are mentioned.
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Comment on I think Tildes moderators and admins may need to make a decision regarding how to handle Harry Potter related posts in ~tildes
NaraVara Link ParentIt really does have the vibe of a sit in protest action rather than a discussion. Ironically I feel like there actually wouldn’t be that much attention on the series if not for the arguing. Like...It really does have the vibe of a sit in protest action rather than a discussion. Ironically I feel like there actually wouldn’t be that much attention on the series if not for the arguing. Like the only reason I even clicked into this (or the other) thread was because there’s like 200 comments on it.
It’s more engagement than Tildes sees on almost any other topic and it is creating an environment of unhealthy beef only thinking.
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Comment on Interesting material types for fantasy resources/macguffins other than crystals or metals? in ~creative
NaraVara Link ParentDeath Mirror reminds me a bit of Ghost Rider's "Penance Stare." He forced you to gaze into his eye sockets and causes you to psychically experience first hand all the pain you've ever caused...Death Mirror reminds me a bit of Ghost Rider's "Penance Stare." He forced you to gaze into his eye sockets and causes you to psychically experience first hand all the pain you've ever caused anyone else. They guiltier you are the worse it afflicts you. Most villains simply go mad.
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Comment on Interesting material types for fantasy resources/macguffins other than crystals or metals? in ~creative
NaraVara (edited )LinkDoes it have to be materials? There’s only a finite number of types of elements and states of matter so you’re limited in what you can work with and one will look or be interacted with in roughly...Does it have to be materials? There’s only a finite number of types of elements and states of matter so you’re limited in what you can work with and one will look or be interacted with in roughly the same way regardless of what it is. I’ve seen lots of other ways beyond that as well. Bones and teeth and stuff have already been mentioned. But you can have people inhaling smoke, using powders to be mixed into a drink or sprinkled on people or things (pixie dust), drinking potions, drawing sigils or runes, etc..
Witch Hat Atelier makes it so there’s magic ink and you can do magic by writing or drawing with it. You can also imagine printing cards that can be drawn to do spells. Lots of actual real world religions have “amulets” that are knots of string or strings dipped in various kinds of dyes or spices that have certain significance, or sutras written or even embroidered onto paper. They can also have tattoos, which is something Full Metal Alchemist uses too.
Generally if you want spellcasting that’s more dynamic seeming you can do something like that. Maybe like, magic string that can have different effects based on knots you tie. Magicians duel each other by doing a cats-cradle type of game weaving their fingers around. Bones or teeth can work, maybe in some way imbued with aspects of the originating animal. Even in the real world fortune tellers claim to divine the future by casting bones and stones and analyzing how they fall, reading entrails of animals or the blood splatter of a bird that they kill, or looking at the patterns of tea leaves or coffee grounds. The presence of certain animals and appearance of clouds can themselves be omens.
There’s materials with some exotic properties as well, but once the material has exotic properties then the magic ends up being leveraging the behavior of the material as the interesting thing instead of randomly making it do unrelated magic. Take Ice Nine as an example. Or an even more mundane example, water is unusual in that it gets bigger when you freeze it but we don’t think of this as “magical.” Or mundane but still exotic example, iPhone batteries are secured to the frame with a special type of adhesive that loses its adhesion when a low-voltage current is applied to it and then becomes sticky again once the current stops. That’s magic if you ask me! Or what of fucking magnets!?
Even plastics as a building material used to be pretty magical. Much of what we use plastics for now used to be made of bone, ivory, or especially hard woods like ebony that had to be carved into shape. It’s laborious and there’s a lot of processing to prepare the materials and waste of material as you carve it off. Now we just have pellets that we melt down, inject into molds, and allow to harden meaning we can do it at insane scales.
There’s a lot about electricity that’s pretty magical seeming if you think about it. Microchips and PCBs are refined sand that can think based on the patterns of designs drawn on it. Some aspects of these designs can be modified by moving items around at the cost of having it be bulkier and heavier (FPGAs), and in other cases you can do stuff by adding material to modify the patterns (soldering). In olden days people used to do this by bottling lightning in a glass to guide it through a maze (vacuum tubes).
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Comment on New ‘Lord of the Rings’ movie From Stephen Colbert and his son in development at Warner Bros in ~movies
NaraVara Link ParentI don’t think “Let’s focus on Tom Bombadil” is really where you would go when you’re being timid about what kind of story you want to tell.It just sounds like writers trying to create a story continuing the series but with a level of timidity that doesn’t let them truly tell a great story.
I don’t think “Let’s focus on Tom Bombadil” is really where you would go when you’re being timid about what kind of story you want to tell.
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Comment on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone | Teaser in ~tv
NaraVara Link ParentOne of the problems is that the Harry Potter books themselves didn’t really finish strong. The ending was serviceable but nothing that would have stood on its own if not for the decade of...One of the problems is that the Harry Potter books themselves didn’t really finish strong. The ending was serviceable but nothing that would have stood on its own if not for the decade of investment from its fan base compelling them to see it through. So by the time it was done I think people were ready to put it on the shelf and say bye to the universe.
If the Fantastic Beasts series was really good it may have revived it, but by then Rowling was already terminally Twitter brained into doing weird retcons of her own mythos. I don’t quite remember the timeline on whether she had gone through making her dark pact with the ruinous powers yet, but she was well into becoming an aggro culture warrior and I think most normie-tier fans stopped caring enough to give her stuff a try by that point.
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Comment on Digg has shutdown (again) in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentIt also means bans can have teeth because doing something ban-worthy is functionally getting you slapped with a fine.It also means bans can have teeth because doing something ban-worthy is functionally getting you slapped with a fine.
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Comment on Digg has shutdown (again) in ~tech
NaraVara (edited )LinkI did hang around there and use it for a while but basically everything they said about the issues, and then some, was definitely an evident problem. Even beyond the bot traffic issue, the quality...I did hang around there and use it for a while but basically everything they said about the issues, and then some, was definitely an evident problem. Even beyond the bot traffic issue, the quality of discussions and content was basically on the floor. It was full of people trying to recreate our own Reddit with blackjack and hookers rather than a concerted effort to do anything new. And the rest was just content mill slop. It is not an issue of just bot traffic, there’s plenty of actual people trying to get their content off the ground by just posting like commercial marketers. It’s a cultural problem with the internet as a whole now. The dream used to be to make enough money by building an loyal audience to quit your job. But I think as soon as the expectation became being able to get “fuck you” money the game just changed. Everyone is traffic farming by posting optimized slop now and it drowns out sincere contributions by people who just want to interact with a community. I’m not sure the problem can be solved any way besides intentionally keeping a community small and curating it, as Tildes does.
And as is usual when the entire site ethos is purely reactionary to something else, almost all the discussions pivoted back to complaining about Reddit. No funny memes, the current events discussion was performative liberal engagement/rage bait combined with barely veiled Nazis thinking there’s some kind of conspiracy getting all their takes downvoted and yelled at rather than them just sucking. There was absolutely ZERO “look at this cool thing I did” which is what the “golden age” of these sites was about.
All that said, I don’t really hold it against them that they took a swing and missed but the fact that this stuff they’re saying is some kind of surprise to them should, frankly, be extremely embarrassing and sounds like they didn’t do any actual research into the problem domain AT ALL. This is all stuff tech and culture writers, and basically every online publication with a comment section (that hasn’t devolved into a PE acquisition slopfest) could have told them. Like they didn’t have a conversation with anyone who produces content on the modern internet before locking in their business strategy? They just had an idea and then dove in with a bunch of money to do what’s functionally a hackathon?
This is no way to run a business man!
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Comment on “This technology disrupts [...] Democratic—voters, [and] increases the economic power of [...] male, working-class voters” in ~society
NaraVara Link ParentThis isn’t the first dumbfuck thing he’s said. I also have degrees from prestigious universities and I’ve met and dealt with lots of idiots along the way. They might be able to recite references...This isn’t the first dumbfuck thing he’s said. I also have degrees from prestigious universities and I’ve met and dealt with lots of idiots along the way. They might be able to recite references about the specific thing they studied, but simply be idiots at everything else. This means their average take (which probably won’t be about the thing they studied) is going to be stupid.
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Comment on “This technology disrupts [...] Democratic—voters, [and] increases the economic power of [...] male, working-class voters” in ~society
NaraVara LinkKarp is an idiot who evidently does not know what the fuck he’s talking about. LLMs, if anything, increase the employability of “feminine” humanities and liberal arts types, and they definitely...Karp is an idiot who evidently does not know what the fuck he’s talking about. LLMs, if anything, increase the employability of “feminine” humanities and liberal arts types, and they definitely benefit from having a college (or a very good high school) education to use them well and not shoot yourself in the foot. Many of the core skills needed to use LLMs and agentic workflows productively are management skills.
Being able to clearly articulate needs objectives, being able understand trade-offs between different courses of action, being able to monitor delegated tasks to ensure they’re being done correctly and aligned to the ultimate goal, being able to effectively allocate limited time and resources, etc. Anyone who actually does things besides making grand pronouncements at investor panels understands these are rare skills that are difficult to hire for.
And on top of the management skills, you need some different fundamentals than are usually recruited for. These are language models and interacting with them requires a mastery of language, a thing you learn from spending a lot of time writing. You not only need to be able to write coherently and succinctly so it has a clear idea of what you want and doesn’t need to burn tokens inefficiently on parsing pointless digressions. You also need to understand that the model is trying to predict what response to give based on real world training data. This means that it will reflect back to you how you write to it. If you talk to the LLM like a rube, it will talk back to you like the kind of person who regularly has written correspondence with a rube. If you want medical advice from an LLM (you shouldn’t, but this is just an example), you are far more likely to get a good response back if you talk to it like a very informed patient having a knowledgeable discussion with a doctor that you respect because the most statistically likely sorts of comments you would get to that would be the sorts of comments a knowledgeable and respected physician would make. If you, in contrast, try to talk to it like a crunchy granola woo hippie then you are increasing the odds of getting a response that a snake oil salesman would give. (There’s complicating factors here, the actual chatbots do a lot of post-training and impose rules to steer them away from providing undesirable replies like that regardless of how dumb you’re being, but these are countermeasures to mitigate against an outcome that is inherent to how it works so it won’t be perfect.)
Really the sort of person who will thrive here is someone with a broad foundation in general knowledge, very strong language skills, decent logical reasoning skills, and has read broadly enough and possesses sufficient empathy to be able to understand how to talk to elicit the kind of response you want. To get really deep into using them for specific professional purposes they will reward a very strong knowledge of theory and logic but deprioritize a lot of technical execution competencies. You don’t need to know syntax or basic operations as a programmer, but you will still need to understand why you would choose one sort of architecture over another and whether its doing things in ways that line up with your long term vision. It’s sort of in the same way that easy search and lookup tools made it much less important to have a lot of general fact knowledge in your head. We don’t strictly need to remember everyone’s phone numbers anymore so we just don’t.
I actually think people who practice improv might actually get pretty good at this, because the whole deal there is to understand how your scene partner thinks and do your bit in a way that leaves enough raw material for them to pick and build off of. Either way, toxic incel dweebs would think all of these skills are “gay” or “femoid” or whatever.
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Comment on AI was eroding trust in my classroom — so I got rid of typed papers and bought my students notebooks instead in ~life
NaraVara (edited )Link ParentThat’s kind of funny because growing up one of my least favorite things about writing assignments was having to type them up neatly on my mom’s digital typewriter after I already hand-wrote and...That’s kind of funny because growing up one of my least favorite things about writing assignments was having to type them up neatly on my mom’s digital typewriter after I already hand-wrote and proofread my draft.
And that was WAY better than having to do it on the even older mechanical typewriter because I had a delete key and could edit in line without having to commit each keystroke to print.
Reinforcing the natural satisfaction of the tactile ritual with a hit of nicotine probably makes the addiction click doubly hard.