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Our group has been playing together weekly for more than 25 years. I wouldn't say there was anything therapeutic about our sessions other than the basic benefits of having fun in a structured social setting (which are, to be sure, quite substantial) with people you've known for a very long time...

Leaky gut (increased intestinal permeability) is, like gluten intolerance, a real thing. But, like gluten intolerance, it's only a real problem for a relatively small percent of people. The quacks are the ones who claim it's basically responsible for just about everything that goes wrong in...

Yeah, just nose breathe works great when you've got allergies or a cold. 🙄 Self-righteous internet warriors lacking any shred of empathy should just smarten up, too.

TIL: How did I not know that already? Thank you, Beth! (I read sanitation and disinfection guidelines for fun.) I've also had personal experience with Norovirus: no diarrhea, but vomiting so relentless I was left gasping for breath between heaves and thought I was going to die from pulmonary...

Ahhh. So that's why we periodically lose internet access and have to reboot the router to get it back? It's our ISP's way of securing the routers they sent us. Brilliant.

Yes, of course... because that's a strategy that's been proven to work. /s

If the ads didn't make the site loading slow to a crawl, I'd be happy to view ads. But Ars, along with many other sites, is unusable on my cheap tablet without a blocker. When I'm on my desktop, not so much a problem, so I'm a part-time supporter. But a part-time supporter who occasionally...

He could occupy a position, but Musk would never serve.

This is so very true. But also true everywhere on the planet, it seems. But in states with abortion bans, asking the doctor if they're willing to be the one who does an emergency abortion if it's medically needed after your contraception fails might persuade them that sterilization is a better...

One ought to offer their beloved a computer when they propose. And let's make it gender neutral, while we're at it. Nothing like a $15,000 multimedia set-up or workstation to get a marriage off on the right foot. :D

It's elephants all the way down.

It may be a problem for newer players or those that play online. For those who've been playing tabletop for decades, meh. I mean, once you own the edition you like, there's no contract saying you can't keep using it. And if you get a new player who can't find a copy of an old PH, you can just...

Well, the terms are that the terms can change at any time without notice. That's fairly boilerplate for social media (and increasingly so for other online services). They might as well say that the contract is that there is no contract. And you're asking them to clarify what doesn't actually...

There are plenty of truly remote places around the world that are only accessible by boat, floatplane, or helicopter, and only in good weather, where transmission of a novel pathogen may not happen for months, if ever. But, of course, if you live there, you risk dying of much more mundane...

I don't believe that's strictly true. Diffusion models are shockingly resistant to creating things that don't appear fairly frequently in their data set. And the more fine-tuned the models are to producing realistic (anatomically correct) output, the harder it gets. Just ask anyone who has tried...

I'm deeply curious about that. Do you have links to that research handy? I've read about model collapse, which -- I understand, perhaps incorrectly -- is not exactly the same thing. But I also know that fine-tuning diffusion models on human curated AI outputs can improve the models...

Contributors to this discussion, we are showing our age. I've been told that these days the very word, "cool", isn't any more.

If I used social media, I'd want my feed to be comprised of content by users I had specifically chosen to follow and nothing else. And if those users started posting too much rubbish, I would, you know, stop following them. The news feed incorporating posts from people/pages outside friends...

You know you've gone too far when even the Peevester thinks you're weird.

"An online world without any recommendation algorithm" sounds perfect to me. I don't want or need automated recommendations from platforms. There are plenty of reasons to despise them, from extremist rabbit holes to the tendency of cultural aesthetics to become globally generic look-alikes to...