That you can see improvements in people with long covid by giving them SSRIs isn’t clear
evidence it’s partly fake or a “social contagion”. Whatever improvements recorded are just as easily explained by the fact that being sick for months is depressing and alienating and a bunch of people think you’re faking it.
On top of that, the SSRI article you linked suggests a biochemical mechanism by which SSRIs might be acting (i.e. not by making something “fake” go away, by actually treating the cause of something real)
Morgellons isn’t a real disease. It’s a mental health condition.
SSRIs do not “work on” those other conditions, but depression is highly comorbid with serious chronic illnesses. SSRIs improving some symptoms is to be expected when depression symptoms overlap with the condition.
I'm somewhat open to this line of thinking, but it seems in these cases, there is a very fuzzy boundary between the symptoms of depression and "the real illness": brain fog, lack of energy etc.
I've seen healthy, active and successful people be affected, where the cause of "long covid" seems unlikely to be psychological. But there is no denying that, shall we say "a certain type" of person seems to be overrepresented in these cases, and for them it is very attractive to attach the label "long covid" to something that previously existed.
I guess that until we have discovered the biological mechanism underlying this phenomenon, it will be hard to cleanly separate these two cases, but from what I've seen I find it likely that this bipartition really exists.
Like all dumbphones, it suffers from the same problem. Specifically, your set of dumb apps isn’t my set of dumb apps. Idgaf about uber, but i need Signal and Slack. You dgaf about those, but you need facebook messenger and google maps. Etc.
I think the solution is not a dumbphone but a full android e-ink phone. Horrendous for everything that involves video but runs every app and can be used as an ereader.
Unfortunately I have to found one that speaks to me, as they are all from Chinese manufactures with questionable quality.
I like the idea here and tried this. It took 3 months to ship. The keyboard was really frustrating to use. Maybe a landscape layout keyboard that slides out would have worked better. I'm surprised anyone can use this comfortably because I have very small fingers.
It also is a pretty big brick to carry around. I remember it being sort of randomly buggy but haven't used it in months, so I don't remember the specific things that were issues.
This was the way for me.
I spent a good few years trying proper dumbphones, but I always needed an app for something. Carrying two phones didn't work, no off the shelf 'Smart, yet dumb' phone had the particular mix of features I needed.
The best half way house I found was a Nokia 2720, it runs Kai OS (Formerly Firefox OS), so very easy to throw a quick app together and add new features as needed. Unfortunately all the important apps were similarly thrown together, battery life was awful, calls, alarms and messages came through when they felt like it, the T9 predictive text was diabolically bad.
I went back to basic android for a while, tried all sorts of settings and methods to cut back, but I am just too vulnerable to their flashy attention grabbing tricks.
But the e-ink? Hot damn it worked. Everything I actually needed, and just enough friction that I don't use any more.
The lack of colour certainly neutralises a lot of the attention grabbing tactics, but I think the real difference for me is the lack of fluidity. It's always just a device, and never reaches extension of self territory. It is truly refreshing how many times I've left the house without it and only noticed a few hours later.
As for manufacturers and quality, I went with a Hisense A9 as it seemed to have the best open source support at the time. It was a bit pricey considering the general specs, but when the screen is the bottleneck you don't miss the processor speed or camera quality.
(I actually quite like the lousy photo experience, it feels a bit more like film, or early digital where you just have to shoot and hope it comes out ok)
Despite that, I've ended up sticking with the manufacturer ROM with just a few tweaks.
Perhaps its selling all my data to the CCP, but it's rock solid and much more polished than any cheap android phone I've used previously.
It's really well set up to get the best from the hardware too, in a way that the lineage port couldn't quite match.
If you think it might work for you, I'd definitely recommend giving it a try.
The main caveat I'd offer if you're trying to reduce your screen time is that it doesn't work if you primarily waste time reading. Reading is a joy with this, and I am much more likely than before to pick up an e-book or finish a long article I'd otherwise have skimmed.
Other quirks of the A9 if anyone is considering it:
- The GNSS receiver is atrocious, it regularly fails to get a fix in clear open fields.
- It's a small battery, low power phone. I usually get most of a week out of a charge, but one heavy background app can drop that to less than a day. Discord was the worst until stopping all background activity, WiFi hotspot is also pretty brutal on the battery.
- The stock OS has a deliberately very limited notification system. Get used to intentionally checking for messages every now and then
- Doesn't play nice with non-chinese carriers. Out of the box I had intermittent SMS, no VoLTE and regular call drops. All fixable via shuffling some files around over ADB though, see XDA for the how to
- All specs are OK. The camera is OK. The speakers are OK. The processor processes. That's all you get.
- Some apps are just not E-Ink friendly. Spotify and google maps are the worst I use regularly. Scrolling, full screen movement, contrast and dark themes are the enemy. They are both totally useable, but it can take more than a glance.
- No IP rating, I don't go swimming with it but it sure rains a lot here and I don't like having to care
+ The 3.5mm output is gorgeous, sounds fantastic with any headphones I've tried. Easily the best of any smartphone I've used
+ It is very nice E-Ink. Lots of totally useable apps for the A9 would not be so on a lesser screen.
+ Though I rarely use it, the frontlight is very nice to have and intuitively controlled
Because someone made a video glamorizing their life working at microsoft? I don’t get the issue here - she’s basically doing free promotion for the hiring department
I’ve read all the stuff about how llama.cpp is much faster and better than ollama, and i believe it - but good god llama.cpp isn’t user friendly.
You’d think in an era where “code is free” there would be an easier story around running local ai than compiling llama.cpp by hand and then spending hours researching flags - only for it to crash from an oom error every ten prompts or so.
You're supposed to use a cheap ChatGPT subscription to run optimization loops over llama.cpp flags with a self-contained reproducible benchmark script and just let it burn for hours/days until it is fully optimized ))))
Very generous of you to blame the screw up of one of the largest companies in the world on a jr engineer.
I’ve been a jr engineer at a large company. I had the power to implement absolutely jack shit on my own. I deeply doubt the security flow for account recovery in meta ai account security was a single jr engineer.
What i think is actually going on is basically a soft form of ai psychosis. Senior engineer gets ai to code ai account recovery feature, that same or a different engineer asks ai to review the feature, and then it gets pushed to prod. Move fast, break things. The ai coded it, the ai reviewed it - the people trusted the ai because it sounds confidently right.
Just like how the ai doesn’t know if you should walk or drive to the car wash, the ai doesn’t understand exploits like this one.
Timing. The core 2 generation was right before we hit a plateau in processors. An i5/i7 macbook from 2014-2015 felt pretty good for 5-6 years, until the m1 came out, and you can coast for another 2-4 years being annoyed some people have a faster machine before they start baking features into the OS that make your machine feel even slower. That’s 7-9 years of use depending on your tolerance for being behind the curve. Mine’s high, so I got 10 years out of it.
Conversely if you bought an i7 macbook in 2019 it would have felt out of date in just 2-4 years, when everyone has an m1 or better and things are starting to slow down from OS changes that expect apple silicon.
If you bought an m1 just a year later in 2020, i’d guess you’re feeling fine 6 years on.
On top of that, the SSRI article you linked suggests a biochemical mechanism by which SSRIs might be acting (i.e. not by making something “fake” go away, by actually treating the cause of something real)
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