Brain imaging studies show that in people with congenital cortical blindness, this area is often repurposed for tasks such as language, memory and reasoning. … Without visual input generating a constant stream of ambiguous or unpredictable signals, the brain may settle into more stable ways of interpreting the world, reducing the risk of the misfiring predictions that characterise schizophrenia.

If that’s true, do congenitally bind people show improvements in general prediction tasks? Could that be why there are so many legends about blind soothsayers?

RSS feeds seem like the obvious replacement—how is your vibe-coded solution better?

So my proposal would be: votes are only sent to the author of a post. The author then sends an Update activity to their followers and the magazine the post belongs to. […] These properties then contain a Collection with a property called totalItems and not a list of the people who actually voted

What’s to prevent the author from faking upvotes, if the votes themselves aren’t public?

Your self is the private reservoir of knowledge and experience you draw on to interact with the world in a way that’s distinct from anyone else (and that couldn’t be predicted without access to that internal knowledge).

So a chess player that exploits an opponent’s weakness is hacking?
A snake that finds an entrance to a gopher burrow is hacking?

“Finding vulnerabilities” is the kind of dangerously overbroad generalization that gave us the DMCA.

Did he try offering them FIFA Peace Prizes?

Nah, they’ll just add a “for entertainment purposes only” disclaimer to the government itself.

“I’ve already bought one justice system, yes. But what about second justice system?”

It’s not like he went bad as a result of serving too many terms—he was a corrupt neoliberal from day one. Term limits aren’t a cure for that.

So he’d have deported Einstein, then?

The original “lingua franca” was actually a mix of dialects from Italian sailors—in the middle ages and the renaissance, most people in the rest of the world referred to all western Europeans as “Franks”.

I can’t see how Lamarck’s theories can be seen as aligned with more “dynamic” theories like the extended evolutionary synthesis. The idea that an organism’s evolutionary potential is completely embodied by its current traits (even including epigenetically-transmitted traits like niche construction) renders it purely reactive: inert clay whose every change is dictated by the external pressures of natural selection.

A separately-transmitted genome with some components hidden from selection is the only way for organisms to evolve dynamic strategies for reacting to selection in ways not completely determined by their expressed traits.

Pope Leo leads most public figures in the US in approval ratings.

In theory, could the Pope run for president (given that he’s a U.S. citizen by birth, etc.)?

It doesn’t take much to boost the price of a stock by 400% if the stock is already practically worthless.

Now see, strokes are a different matter. Studies from China (where naturally-occurring fluoride levels in some places can range from 1.2 to 4.5 mg/L, far exceeding the U.S. recommended level of 0.7 mg/L) have indeed found a correlation between very high fluoride exposure and stroke risk.

To fight forces like big oil, we need to be able to focus our efforts appropriately. Indiscriminately attributing everything to big oil serves their purposes as much as complacency does.

Those kinds of issues would come into play if they were trying to establish a correlation between two things—it’s notoriously hard to eliminate confounding variables, spurious coincidences, etc.

But it’s far more straightforward to establish a lack of correlation, which is what this study does.

I wouldn’t say it’s not bad because of a study and “experts.”

While there are always biased studies, the data in this case comes from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, a broad health and social sciences study conducted by the University of Wisconsin that’s been ongoing since 1957. You can access the data yourself here.

Everyone is dumb as shit now

That wouldn’t implicate fluoride, because not everyone was exposed to it. And the study indicates that fluoride exposure (on a community level, which would take into account soil and food) doesn’t make a difference.

Just need to replace the eagles with vultures.