u/acdha

Quite likely, yes. You can see things like this due to caches reaching their maximum size so it’s possible that trend would stabilize over time, but Node.js is also famous for struggles with sizing since the async model means slow connections can hold resources open longer than expected. 

Whet you might want to do is monitor metrics and dump the heap a few times and see whether there’s a trend in what’s open. For example, if you notice that the number of active requests is slowly growing that might be telling you that you need more timeouts for slow requests so e.g. visitors with dodgy internet connections don’t keep a response buffered for a long time before eventually failing. 

I think that’s the more likely explanation, especially if their problems have a social component they don’t get in person, so they spiral into more time with a sympathetic community and less counter-pressure. 

I’m thinking about how after getting divorced my dad’s friends and family all agreed it was his fault and he should’ve dealt with some problems (this was absolutely correct) but there was a community of middle-aged very divorced dudes at the local bar who all sat around blaming their exes and feminism for their lives being over. I only met a few of them but it sounded like it had bad effects on everyone, limited only by the fact that this community was only available at night, took driving, and cost enough that it wasn’t every night.  Online communities are available anywhere you have service and usually cost nothing so it seems like there’s even less to break that spiral. He didn’t commit suicide but he talked about it a few times and I sometimes wonder whether he would have if that had been a 24x7 stew of negative reinforcement. 

I didn’t before this year but it’s been dozens. I assume that it’s probably more organic — not North Korea but a scammer in Nigeria with an LLM — but I do wonder how many takers they find, or if they branch out into things like shipping you a “deliverable” which has something a VSC auto-run credential stealing task. 

Please stop letting fossil fuel lobbyists give you talking points. Solar panels require orders of magnitude less pollution, as do batteries and the latter are getting even better as new chemistries are developed which do not require rare earths or heavy metals. 

Yes, reducing oil usage in other ways is still good—and raising the cost is a great way to do that—but the fossil companies have spent billions encouraging people to think of alternatives as bad or requiring Herculean efforts and extreme sacrifices because everyone who believes that delays progress for many profitable years. 

This is especially important to think about from the perspective of switching cost: replacing plastic everywhere is not easy and will require whole supply chains to change while things like bioplastics are developed but the vast, vast majority of transportation and home usage could easily switch to renewable power. The planet is enormously better off if, say, you buy a heat pump which has plastic parts but can switch to renewable electric power as soon as sources come online rather than buying a gas or oil system which locks in multiple decades of carbon emissions. If everyone who could use an EV in the United States did so, we’d be saving something like the total emissions of Mexico and buying time to figure out alternatives for the small percentage of people who can’t switch. That is a much more tractable message than saying “give up your current life and become a subsistence farmer on land you don’t currently own”. 

Yes - the full paper goes into more detail but that's one of the factors they look at, along with general population health factors like hypertension or diabetes rates and the recent pandemic.

One of the interesting things is that the highest reported rates are American Indian / Alaska Native populations, where limited healthcare access and other economic disadvantages would be highly plausible explanations, the highest change between 2013 and 2023 was among young White people (going from 4.4% to 9.6%) and among younger adults with higher education (3.7->7.3%) and higher income (2.2->6.6%). That would seem to be very compatible with the idea that the stronger social stigma in the past kept people from self-reporting things like ADHD, with older people from those generations continuing not to report things which haven't caused problems to the point of requiring clinical diagnosis.

Anecdotally working as a software developer with exposure to the academic research community, I've heard quite a few stories about people who went through life being “odd” or “quirky” but didn't get diagnosed until they had a child who was flagged because when we were kids the popular perception was often that, say, ADHD meant you were probably a future hoodlum and medication put you in a quasi-vegetative state. The Americans With Disabilities act only dates back to 1990 so it's not like this was entirely unfounded: I'm sure there were people who had an idea but weren't going to breath a word of it to a potential college or employer lest it be held against them.

It'll be really interesting to see how further research starts quantifying how much the different possible factors actually contribute. If something like COVID turns out to be a greater factor than expected, that might be helpful for getting people to understand that prevention campaigns are more important than they might seem for something which doesn't have tons of people dropping dead in the streets. I'm not very optimistic about that currently, however, and less so that we'd be willing to change some of the factors behind the connection with lower socioeconomic status and access to healthcare.

Nobody questions the Bible as a historical document of great value. The difference is that most people of faith are looking to reinforce the conclusion they already hold, namely that their preferred holy writ is special compared to all other human works, while a scientist or anthropologist would be looking at all of them as well as searching for evidence about the cultural context in which they were created. 

For example, the story of creation of the earth and animals, followed by humans and then going wrong with an uprising and unhealthy human expansion, culminating in a divine flood wiping out everyone but a faithful priest goes back to the 18th century BC Atra-Hasis, the epic of Gilgamesh, and later the Hebrew bible. There are notable commonalities whether you use the name Atrahasis, Ziusudra, or Noah but we know they can’t all be right. This is not a problem for an anthropologist since they’re comfortable treating these as common stories remixed by different people for centuries but they confront biblical literalists with a harsh dilemma: drop literalism or accept that their faith is no more special than was the faith of the people who used to propitiate Enki.

That’s how it used to work but the Republican Congress and Supreme Court have made it clear that they only care about what their most loyal voters want. As they’ve gerrymandered districts to be reliably Republican, the concern of being replaced by the other party has shifted to being primaried by a more extreme member of their own party. 

Have you ever wondered about all kf the anonymous sources in news stories talking about the government doing something wrong or breaking promises? They’re usually government employees or contractors who strongly disagree with some decisions made by people much higher up the org chart. 

BLS has thousands of employees, and federal agencies have a wide range of people from across the political spectrum (anyone who says it’s all Democratic loyalists is lying to you). It is beyond unlikely that BLS has somehow managed to organize a perfectly hermetic conspiracy, unlike the DOD, DOJ, White House, etc. which have been leaking like sieves.  They don’t get paid enough to have golden handcuffs and they’re big enough that there are plenty of people who were laid off, fired, or retired and would thus no longer care about that threat while in many cases have a motive to seek vindication or revenge. 

It makes sense when you remember Wilhoit’s law: “ Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” They do not believe in accountability for their own actions no matter how much they want to police others, which is why there’s an entire genre of “snowflake” jokes from the same people who decry people voting with their dollars as “cancel culture”. None of this makes any sense unless there are separate rules for in-group and out-group behaviour. 

I think you’re especially right to consider this because they aren’t comparably neutral choices like whether you like tea or coffee, but instead one with a huge negative social stigma among a fairly large chunk of the population (even people who aren’t rabidly homophobic often see it as degrading). Nothing we know about human cognition supports the idea that people won’t incorporate that at a formative age. 

It’s human society so there are always complex factors – e.g. having children later and relocating for school/work means that fewer people have help from grandparents, while suburban sprawl increases costs across the board, especially related to commute time – but we generally solve those by spending money so it’s a convenient shorthand even though it’d be spent in different ways. 

As an example, a huge barrier in many countries is childcare. If it’s hard to find or has gaps in timing, it’ll discourage people from having children or more than one if e.g. you’re struggling to fit a single daycare/school into your schedule. The solution for that is hiring people in the areas where people live, but that’s expensive because the younger kids are the higher the adult:child ratio needs to be and you need multiple shifts to accommodate parents who have to work full time themselves. Not impossible, but not cheap - and if you save by having only one shift a bunch of parents won’t be able to work normal schedules. 

A huge concern for American parents is college. We’ve told basically everyone that their kids need to go, but that means hundreds of thousands of dollars per child in some combination of savings and debt. We could remove that concern entirely by going back to pre-Reagan levels of support for state schools, which is a very different kind of spending than hiring childcare workers but similarly comes back to needing to increase tax revenue to fund it. 

I would say “support” rather than “convince” – it’s hard not to look at the massive cost of having a child and not conclude that those women are making decisions which aren’t just economically rational but almost compulsory in the United States for anyone whose income isn’t in the top 5-10%. Beyond the cost of housing, food, healthcare, etc. there are so many cases where you hit the implicit assumption that all children have a parent who works at most part time or has an unusually flexible schedule (e.g. my son’s school has free aftercare, but that still means you can’t be at work before 9am and have multiple days every month where there’s no school or you have to be free for pickup at 3pm).

I can’t help but think that better funding for families would have huge knock-on effects even for child free people because there’s so much workplace disruption from stuff like that even before you consider the economic benefits of more consumption and workers. 

I agree that it’s a bit much but it’s not just living their life. Those large vehicles pose a safety risk to everyone else – the vehicles they crash into, the children they can’t see over the high hoods, etc. – and the extra pollution causes higher health risks near roads (particulates, noise) and affects the climate multiple times as much. 

Even if all you care about is money, the increasingly-common levels of luxury trim mean higher insurance costs for everyone else, too. 

Do you have a cite for that 50kg figure? That’s an order of magnitude greater than the estimates I’ve seen in e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02222-1

Moreover, sodium-ion batteries are already on the market – BYD and VW are using them – so I suspect this problem will be relatively minor in comparison to getting American drivers not to feel they need to commute to work in huge trucks or figuring out how to reduce the carbon footprint of the steep frames. 

It reminds me of those idiots who were going around harassing people on the street demanding that they shout BLM slogans. They were so counterproductive that it was not unreasonable to ask if they were secretly counter-protesters trying to discredit the movement. It’s hard to imagine this will get a single person in the country to change their position, but I guarantee footage will be used on right-wing media for years to paint all protesters as vandals and I’d be surprised if it didn’t get more people to question whether they want to support the Palestinians in public if it means being associated with these assholes, and anyone who is actually doing real work there is going to have to divert time and energy to distance themselves from this. 

Now do the comparison we’re talking about: if you invest in mutual funds which are taking 4+% off of the top when you add up the direct fees, trading costs, and other things like the games they play to juice short-term reporting numbers, etc. then you’re seeing considerably lower returns versus an index fund — for example, if the market does 8% over 30 years that $1,000 is either $3.3k or $10k.

You also get the ability to make serious mistakes or simply misjudge the actual return rates, and the difference is that you won’t have any help when that happens. The best personal investors are going to do better managing their own retirement fund but the median person is likely to be better with a defined benefit plan. The former group has far more people who think they’re in it than actually are.

It doesn’t help the people contributing nothing but it does help anyone who is saving something: if your annual rate of return is a few points lower, you need to contribute considerably more to have the same amount when you retire.

And investment funds sometimes disappear in a cloud of fraud or mismanagement. In both cases, the answer is robust regulation, not giving up on the concept.

No, but I do think many people are seeing lower effective rates of return than they would if they had simply bought index funds.

Legally compliant pension funds don’t disappear when a company goes bankrupt. Similarly, a company can’t fire you to get out of paying unless they can prove something like fraud where you weren’t doing the job – a pension is part of the compensation they agree to in a legally binding agreement and they can’t take it back without mutual consent any more than they could claw back your paycheck.

The problem with 401ks is that it puts everything on the individual, and key details are unknowable. If you’re affluent enough to max out contribution matches with out adverse lifestyle impact, and have the time/skills to make good investment decisions this can work out well - because at that level of income almost everything will.

Unfortunately, many millions of people don’t have enough money to ensure a comfortable retirement and so they’re faced with trade offs like weighing the odds of whether they’ll live to 70, 80, or 90 – vastly different in terms of the amount of money needed by the time you retire - against things like replacing a car which is starting to generate unpredictable maintenance costs, if they can buy a house and where / how much they can afford, etc. Pensions are great for smoothing that over because surprises are handled at the population level rather than individually – if I luck into being a centenarian and require many hundreds of thousands more dollars for those extra decades, that’s a huge difference for me but it won’t change the actuarial calculations because statistically very few of my coworkers will also do that.

That’s true but the 401k switch also meant that things like fund management fees and investment choices became the individual’s problem rather than something a few professionals deal with. That choice bought a lot of yachts for fund managers but it also means that a lot of ordinary people are seeing lower returns because they made the mistake of trusting the ad copy and if they live longer than expected they’ll hit a wall. Neither of those are great, although we do have to compare that certainty with the odds of a pension plan being underfunded or mismanaged.

No, it requires proof of misinformation. If I do a survey showing that people who use Facebook are more likely to believe ivermectin cures COVID, they’re misinformed even if there aren’t bodies stacking up in the street.

A single study isn’t going to address every topic. Africa has different risk factors (age, percentage of time spent indoors due to weather conditions, etc.) but there’s a growing body of evidence suggesting that part of the explanation is simply that limited testing kept the reported numbers low compared to the actual numbers:

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/12/12/e066763

I think it’s easy to underestimate people who are well-meaning but oblivious, or who might not appreciate why something they witnessed is more serious than they assumed at first. It’s easy to forget just how much effort goes into letting white people avoid acknowledging racism. There are tons of people who’ve never been pushed to question why the suburb they grew up in was 97% white, or how while their church might pride itself on being open and accepting everyone that was talking about a lot of people only in the third person. (Similar “all they have to do is work hard” messaging often shows up for sexism, too)

The problem is that most companies are doing this as a legal defense so they treat this as the end, rather than the start of a deeper effort. It’s like buying some running shoes and saying you’re halfway to your New Year’s resolution of running a marathon.