Category: Tech / Science

Not Everything You Like is Bad for You – Coffee and Visceral Fat

Body fat serves all sorts of valuable functions in your body, from storing certain vitamins to keeping you warm. But there’s one type of body fat that’s not-so-friendly for your health: visceral fat. Inside your abdominal cavity, this form of adipose tissue (fat tissue) surrounds critical organs, such as your stomach, liver and intestines. Fortunately, there’s one drink that can help you reduce visceral fat. Java lovers, rejoice! It’s coffee.

Research has linked drinking coffee to reductions in body fat. For instance, a 2025 study of over 45,000 people found that those who drank coffee (an average of 1.7 cups per day) had significantly lower visceral fat than non-coffee drinkers.

https://www.eatingwell.com/best-drink-to-lose-visceral-fat-11721048

The Sound of the Void – Quantum Randomness

If you’re being random on a budget, the Australian National University has you covered. They have set up their own quantum random-number generator by listening to the sound of nothing. Even in a vacuum of nothingness, there is something going on. Thanks to the quirks of quantum mechanics, it is possible for a particle and its antiparticle mate to spontaneously appear from literally nowhere and then annihilate each other faster than the universe can notice that they shouldn’t be there. This means empty space is actually a writhing foam of particles popping in and out of reality.

In the Department of Quantum Sciences at ANU, they have a detector listening to a vacuum, converting the quantum foam into random numbers, and then streaming them live at https://qrng.anu.edu.au, around the clock. For tech people, they have a great range of secure delivery systems (never use the built-in random.random() function in the Python programming language again!). And if you are a background-noise hipster, they have an audio version so you can listen in to the sounds of random.

Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World
Matt Parker

This website offers true random numbers to anyone on the internet. The random numbers are generated in real-time in our lab by measuring the quantum fluctuations of the vacuum. The vacuum is described very differently in the quantum physics and classical physics. In classical physics, a vacuum is considered as a space that is empty of matter or photons. Quantum physics however says that that same space resembles a sea of virtual particles appearing and disappearing all the time. This is because the vacuum still possesses a zero-point energy. Consequently, the electromagnetic field of the vacuum exhibits random fluctuations in phase and amplitude at all frequencies. By carefully measuring these fluctuations, we are able to generate ultra-high bandwidth random numbers.

https://qrng.anu.edu.au/
https://qrng.anu.edu.au/random-bernoulli-noise/

DotCom Bubble – 25 Years Since Peak

The dotcom era was a wild ride. When the NASDAQ peaked on March 10, 2000, it was double its value of a year before. Historically, it takes seven years for a market to double in value on average. So to say the dotcom era was overheated is an understatement.

And it’s a misnomer to call it a boom. In a boom, someone’s actually making money. Amazon didn’t have a profitable quarter until Q4 of 2001, and it was a modest profit of $5 million. It didn’t have a profitable year until 2003. Google was more promising, as it was turning profits before its IPO.

But Google was the exception. A company didn’t have to be profitable for its stock to boom. Netscape was the poster child for this. It created a necessary product, but Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark couldn’t figure out how to make it profitable. Andreessen is only rich today because he and Clark managed to convince AOL to pay $10 billion for the company before they could finish running it into the ground. Transmeta was another example of a company with interesting technology but no profits. Competing with Intel wasn’t any easier during the dotcom bubble than it was in the years right before it.

The stereotypical dotcom business model went something like this: Find something nobody’s selling on the Internet. Register a domain name. Start selling that product on the Internet. Then wait for profits to happen like magic. And without a solid business plan that included things like logistics, those profits rarely happened and typically weren’t sustainable when they did. Just like in any other business. But since this was the Internet, it was going to be different this time, somehow.

When the dotcom bubble burst
Dave Farquhar

Diet and Healthy Aging

Participants were asked to provide regular surveys of their diet, assessing whether they adhered to eight healthy dietary patterns as well as their intake of ultra-processed foods that are high in sodium and saturated fats.

The study found that 9.3% of participants aged healthily, being able to avoid chronic diseases by the time they reached their 70s.

The study used the Alternative Healthy Eating Index score to determine a person’s diet quality. The score graded people based on their high intake of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, legumes, and healthy fats, and low consumption of red and processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages, sodium, and refined grains.

Those who scored in the top 20% were 86% more likely to avoid chronic diseases than the rest of the population.

Healthy eating habits in midlife may prevent chronic illness in later years, research finds

Bit Rot – Defined and Examples of

I installed a wireless network at home. It worked for two years – and then suddenly it failed. For the whole world, I could not find out how to re-configure it. Embarrassingly enough, I couldn’t even remember how to get into the damn thing.

And I had a very helpful plug-in for my web browser. But after the browser had updated itself, it announced that the plug-in wasn’t compatible anymore. I searched for a replacement, but the list of plug-ins had 5000 items and the search function couldn’t find anything of the same kind…

And I used to access the voicemail on my mobile phone by just pressing a button on the keypad. But unexpectedly it stopped working. Perhaps it happened when I switched operators … but I could not figure out how to get it back. Nor even whether the problem was on my phone, or with the new operator.

You might think I’m just hopeless with new technology. I’m not. Rather the opposite: I’ve been working with computers for more than 30 years. I really belong to the “early adopters”; I’ve often been one of the first users of new technologies.

But every so often, I wind up a “somewhat-later abandoner”.

Digital technology may contain no moving parts but it still, somehow, gets worn, splintered and corroded. It rots. It decays. The rot, though, is mostly invisible (and un-smellable). Still, one day, the thing is broken.

Onceability: The consequence of technology rot
Jonas Söderström

Code often suffers from what people call “bit rot” when it isn’t actively maintained. Data can suffer from the same type of problem; that is, people forget the precise meaning of specialized fields, or data problems from the past may have faded from memory. For example, maybe there was a short-lived data bug that set every customer id to null. Or there was a huge fraudulent transaction that made it look like Q3 2017 was a lot better than it actually was. Often business logic to pull out data from a historical time period can get more and more complicated. For example, there might be a rule like, “ if the date is older than 2019 use the revenue field, between 2019 and 2021 use the revenue_usd field, and after 2022 use the revenue_usd_audited field.” The longer you keep data around, the harder it is to keep track of these special cases. And not all of them can be easily worked around, especially if there is missing data.

Big Data is Dead
Jordan Tigani

AI Software Development – Slashdot on

Replit CEO on AI Breakthroughs: ‘We Don’t Care About Professional Coders Anymore’

Replit, an AI coding startup platform, has made a dramatic pivot away from professional programmers in a fundamental shift in how software may be created in the future. “We don’t care about professional coders anymore,” CEO Amjad Masad told Semafor, as the company refocuses on helping non-developers build software using AI.

The strategic shift follows the September launch of Replit’s “Agent” tool, which can create working applications from simple text commands. The tool, powered by Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI model, has driven a five-fold revenue increase in six months. The move marks a significant departure for Replit, which built its business providing online coding tools for software developers. The company is now betting that AI will make traditional programming skills less crucial, allowing non-technical users to create software through natural language instructions.

Black Parrot
In my experience, business “analysts” don’t know what the hell they want, let alone how to specify it.

I’ve been asked to create reports that add pounds + gallons, and it’s almost impossible to get them to understand why that’s nonsense.

caseih
Maybe AI would be able to tell them what they want makes no sense, whereas a human programmer has to worry about tact and of course not getting fired.

AleRunner
My main experience with AI in programming is that it regularly produces things that don’t exist. References to libraries that have never been made. Function calls that should exist but don’t and so on. There are things that it’s useful for and can do much more quickly and accurately than a human but immediately the smallest amount of thought is needed, it does what you tell it to whether or not that’s possible. I expect that we’ll get a bunch of cars soon where the code is set up to use the “eco brake” for emergency breaking because there ought to be an eco brake so it makes sense to use it, even if nobody has invented such a thing yet.

Given their own hallucinations, I doubt the AI is going to save us from product management that has no idea what could and couldn’t work. Rather just allow them to get lots further before they find out that what they are trying to do is impossible.

Bad Habit of Overthinking

But looking at it from another angle, if we’re able to control our mind, maybe we’ll be able to stop the continuous thinking that goes on in our head, dictating how we behave. The problem here is that the mind has a habit of looking for stronger stimulation and can get out of control if we let it. Because negative thoughts have a much stronger impact on our brain than a mild, gentle sense of happiness, it’s hard to prevent that from happening.

The Practice of Not Thinking: A Guide to Mindful Living
Ryunosuke Koike

Does a humidifier make your house feel warmer? Asking Google AI

AI Overview

Learn more

Yes, a humidifier can make your house feel warmer, even though it doesn’t actually raise the air temperature, because increased humidity slows down the evaporation of sweat from your skin, making you perceive the temperature as higher; essentially, you feel warmer due to the moisture in the air, not because the room is physically warmer.

Key points about humidifiers and temperature perception:

Sweat evaporation:
When the air is humid, sweat evaporates more slowly from your skin, causing you to feel warmer.

Body temperature regulation:
Your body uses sweat evaporation to cool itself, so less evaporation in humid air means you feel warmer.

Comfort factor:

Proper humidity levels can significantly improve your comfort level, making a room feel warmer even if the actual temperature remains the same.

User Names – Programming Snags with

tonyHawkandthetaleofFeaturenotabug
byu/GoldenBaby2 inProgrammerHumor

Classy_Mouse
I know some people that only have a given name. No family name. So when they came over to Canada, they had a lot of issues with official forms. Some of them split their name into 2 names, some just repeated their given name twice

Toloran
True story, I went to middle school with a kid whose entire name was ‘Rainbow’. I initially assumed his parents were hippies or something, but it turned out they were hippies and indecisive: They both had different last names, but couldn’t decide which to give him. So they just didn’t give him one.

EODdoUbleU
My first name is a single letter. The amount of shit I can’t do without creating some bastardization to fulfill the mUSt cONTaIn a miNImUM Of tWO ChAraCTeRS bullshit is annoying as fuck.

Airport kiosks are absolutely the fucking worst because their system won’t let me put my legal name in, but I have to use my legal name to pass security.

FormerGameDev
aye, like Metallica’s longest lasting bass player, Roberto Agustín Miguel Santiago Samuel Trujillo Veracruz

thrye333
I like the point near the end about names being consistent across systems, because when I was getting ready to go apply to colleges, I found out that most of them had my last name misspelled. I have a common English first name as my last name. I have never seen it spelled how 75% of those colleges spelled it.

I have no idea how they got that spelling. I don’t even know how they had my info. But that’s college mailing lists, I guess.

Dalimyr
I used to work in a hospital, sharing an office with another team who told a story about how people testing in their system (in prod, because you’re lucky to have a proper test environment in the public sector) would use Simpsons characters for their tests. People who knew this got accustomed to filtering out “Bart Simpson”, “Lisa Simpson” and all that…until one day this instinctive behaviour impacted a patient (I can’t remember what happened – if it was an appointment being deleted or something like that) because their name was Margaret Simpson and someone had erroneously thought this was just test data.

I don’t think this incident actually stopped the person from continuing to create Simpsons test data, but yeah, that shit happens from time to time.

AaronTheElite007
I wonder if someone has the last name ‘null’?

IMightBeErnest
I heard a story about a guy who made his license plate “null” and ended up getting assigned all of the tickets where a license number wasn’t known (or bugged, or something). Point is, he got like a bajillion fines he had to contest.

Problem Solving Ants

Ants making a smart maneuver
byu/well-ok-I-am-in inDamnthatsinteresting

In the group challenge, however, the picture was completely different, especially for the larger groups. Not only did groups of ants perform better than individual ants, but in some cases they did better than humans. Groups of ants acted together in a calculated and strategic manner, exhibiting collective memory that helped them persist in a particular direction of motion and avoid repeated mistakes.

Humans, on the contrary, failed to significantly improve their performance when acting in groups. When communication between group members was restricted to resemble that of ants, their performance even dropped compared to that of individuals. They tended to opt for “greedy” solutions—which seemed attractive in the short term but were not beneficial in the long term, and—according to the researchers—opted for the lowest common denominator.

“An ant colony is actually a family,” Feinerman says. “All the ants in the nest are sisters, and they have common interests. It’s a tightly knit society in which cooperation greatly outweighs competition. That’s why an ant colony is sometimes referred to as a super-organism, sort of a living body composed of multiple ‘cells’ that cooperate with one another.

Health Care Reform Attempt – $7.50 Shot vs $75 Shot

Gruber: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think that, ultimately, it’s providers. First of all, if I was the health-care czar, I wouldn’t just pay what Europe pays. I would do a study of what’s the value of a hip replacement, and I’d pay according to that study. Answer one. Answer two is, who’s going to scream? It’s going to be providers, in particular the specialists and the hospitals. And let me tell you a story that illustrates that, Derek. If you get a shot, a drug injected at the doctor—not one you buy at the pharmacy, but an injectable drug, like for cancer, at the doctor—the way the government reimburses you under Medicare, that’s our universal coverage for the elderly, is the doctor gets paid 7.5 percent of the cost of the drug.

So if I give you a shot, Derek, that costs $100, I get $7.50. If I give you a shot that costs $1,000, same effort, same risk of carpal tunnel, I get $75. That’s stupid. That makes no sense. So 20 senators wrote a letter to President Obama saying, “Look, the system’s broken, we should fix it.” So President Obama and his advisers came up with a new system where doctors would largely be paid a flat amount per shot. Budget neutral. We paid the same amount of money to doctors in total, but you get a flat amount per shot. Shortly thereafter, 80 senators, including most of the original 20, wrote a letter to him saying, “How dare you propose this radical revitalization American health care? You must stop this at once. It’s socialism.”

What happened? Well, the oncologists, the cancer doctors, are the ones that give the $1,000 shots, and they got upset and they lobbied. That is the challenge, Derek.

Why American Health Care Is a “Broken System”
plain-english-with-derek-thompson

You’ve Come a Long Way Since the Primordial Soup

Was there to be any end to the gradual improvement in the techniques and artifices used by the replicators to ensure their own continuation in the world? There would be plenty of time for improvement. What weird engines of self-preservation would the millennia bring forth? Four thousand million years on, what was to be the fate of the ancient replicators? They did not die out, for they are past masters of the survival arts. But do not look for them floating loose in the sea; they gave up that cavalier freedom long ago. Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins

Earth and Moon, Photo of

The moon passed between Nasa’s Deep Space Climate Observatory and the Earth allowing this rare pic showing the dark side of the moon
byu/SmallAchiever ininterestingasfuck

KnightOfWords
It looks a bit weird because the Sun is almost directly behind the camera, so there are no shadows on the crater walls. This makes the Moon look very flat. Also, the far side of the Moon doesn’t have the large dark maria (“seas”) to break up its appearance.

Dynamic range is also a challenge in a picture like this as the Moon is far less reflective than the Earth. Presenting the Earth well results in a limited range of brightness for the Moon, so it has low contrast.

DSCOVR has a monochrome camera and takes a rapid succession of images through different coloured filters (red, green, blue, perhaps some other wavelengths such as UV and IR). These are combined into a colour balanced image. (Consumer cameras also have monochrome sensors but with colour filters directly grafted to them, called a Bayer filter. Neighbouring pixels see different colours.)

This is fine for DSCOVR’s day job, observing the Earth. But here the Moon is orbiting the Earth and moving across the field of view. As a result the green channel is slightly misaligned, if you look closely there is a green fringe around the Moon.

AI Transcription, Problems With

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Tech behemoth OpenAI has touted its artificial intelligence-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near “human level robustness and accuracy.”

But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences, according to interviews with more than a dozen software engineers, developers and academic researchers. Those experts said some of the invented text — known in the industry as hallucinations — can include racial commentary, violent rhetoric and even imagined medical treatments.

Experts said that such fabrications are problematic because Whisper is being used in a slew of industries worldwide to translate and transcribe interviews, generate text in popular consumer technologies and create subtitles for videos.

More concerning, they said, is a rush by medical centers to utilize Whisper-based tools to transcribe patients’ consultations with doctors, despite OpenAI’ s warnings that the tool should not be used in “high-risk domains.”

Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said

Peak Human Experience, Database of – ChillsDb

https://www.chillsdb.com/

Abstract
We introduce ChillsDB the first validated database of audiovisual stimuli eliciting aesthetic chills (goosebumps, psychogenic shivers) in a US population. To discover chills stimuli “in the wild”, we devised a bottom-up, ecologically-valid method consisting in searching for mentions of the emotion’ somatic markers in user comments throughout social media platforms (YouTube and Reddit). We successfully captured 204 chills-eliciting videos of three categories: music, film, and speech. We then tested the top 50 videos in the database on 600+ participants and validated a gold standard of 10 stimuli with a 0.9 probability of generating chills. All ChillsDB tools and data are fully available on GitHub for researchers to be able to contribute and perform further analysis.

Background & Summary
Aesthetic chills are a universal marker of human peak experiences across the arts, sciences and world religions. Best characterized as the feeling of cold down the spine or goosebumps while engaging with music or film, chills are the sensation associated to shivers: short thermogenic tremors of skeletal muscles. Though ordinarily involved in the regulation of temperature (or as an immune response during fever), chills can also be triggered by information-related processes (e.g., music, stories, speeches), independently of changes in temperature (i.e., psychogenic shivers, thereafter “chills”).

Nature