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Comment I believe in (some) red light (Score 1) 55

OK, this is my personal anecdote and might or might not be related to the brain injury treatment - but I'm confident more and more red (or more accurately: various long wavelengths) light therapies will get proven in future.

So I'm a middle aged male and miss a box-jump at Crossfit one fine day. Superficial shin injury that turns out to not want to heal, turning nasty. Doctor explains as we get older, we have less blood circulation in the lower limbs especially. Sedentary IT job doesn't help either. Lots of cellulitis (tissue inflammation around the wound) and at a stage it turns septic too. Get on first-name terms with the nurses at a nearby wound-care clinic. Eventually its getting onto a month with only marginal improvement.

In the mean time, a dermatologist appointment comes up; I need some suspicious dark spot checked out. After the whole body scan, she also asks: what's going on under that plaster on your shin, and can I have a look? She suggests I come in for a few sessions with a laser she has, Nd:YAG it says on the label and apparently it emits near infrared. They use it for cosmetic purposes, to promote collagen formation and what not, but she claims it will also do wound healing a lot of good. She offers the treatment for free, so how could I decline?

So they hammer the area on my shin with the pulsed laser. When it starts to get too hot to tolerate, they press a cooled tip against the skin to cool it down, then continue, until the pre-set dose is delivered. Next day I can see with my own untrained eyes a marked improvement. I go back for 2 more sessions over the next week or so. By the end of that, the skin has closed over and I can stop wearing waterproof dressings. This was borderline miraculous to me. Too bad about the scar/reminder....

So there are a few mechanisms that are proposed to work here: the heat increasing circulation, and/or causing slight damage which triggers increased healing mechanisms on, and/or the specific wavelengths stimulating the mitochondria to make them work better, etc.

Other comments have mentioned sunlight (especially early morning or late afternoon, when UV is low and long (red) wavelengths predominate). The wound care nurses have recommended sitting in the sun too, and I am sure that might also help somewhat, but in my case the laser worked much better.

Of course all the usual disclaimers apply like me not being a medical professional, no medical advice was given, or your mileage varying.

Comment Good for her (Score 1) 142

Our team's scrum master, who doesn't know how to code, has recently become an eager AI user. First it was some python projects to collate project and process stats. Then he grabbed some user story regarding improving integration test cases for a web app, and let AI do it. All raised spirits and dopamine because of the additional productivity - until it hit the Pull Request. There we scrum slaves shot it down due to unnecessary operations based on zero understanding from the AI of the data and logic, as well as injecting substantial amounts of JavaScript code into the web app to effect certain actions - needless to say, almost impossible to understand without spending considerable man-hours to read through it line by line. On the other hand, we also used an AI to check the pull request, which wrote up a clear if verbose report with headings on all the shortcomings. "I'll get my AI guy to speak to your AI guy regarding these changes."

I strongly doubt that she read and understood all those 100K lines of code; I'll bet she just ran it and saw it works, or maybe got AI to test it. We still have the requirement in our org that the human is ultimately responsible for the code, so my approach is that it still should be readable and understandable to the meat sack dev. Your lightyears-per-gigawattage may differ.

Comment Did they stop to ask themselves (Score 1) 78

The yeast breaks down the components of plastic compounds and agricultural byproducts like discarded plant stalks into proteins, fats, acids, and flavorings that we can eat.

We can eat it, but should we?

When these are combined together, the mixture is fed into a 3D printer that spits out cookies of any desired shape.

Look, if even a printer spits them out, I probably will too.

Comment Re:One little step (Score 0) 22

Now we need to start fighting for another door they just closed. Developers must now be registered at Googles mercy to be able to develop androidaccepted apps. Opensource, yeah right. Only if your nuts are in our hand.

Visit https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fkeepandroidopen.org for the details, if you don't know about what parent is talking.

Comment Re:For me, f-droid.org is the only "app store" I n (Score 1) 22

When was the last time you visited https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ff-droid.org? It has a pink banner over the top, linking to https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fkeepandroidopen.org. The latter explains why f-droid (and many other apps) may soon not want to, or be able to, function on Android any longer.

Comment ban kiddie unsafe content (Score 1) 58

Sometimes I think the Internet and the world would be better off if it just didn't have content (and also no entities profiting from such content) that people in certain groups shouldn't have access to. Guess the worms are out though. Some person's sewerage is sacred to another person - to repurpose the idiom.

Comment where AI tangent? (Score 1) 125

I find it significant in the RTO debate of late, that I have not yet heard something along the lines of "Return to office or we'll give your job to AI!" (Perhaps with the argument added that any sufficiently digital artifact-based job that can be done remotely, can also be done by LLM.)

Perhaps this says more about the current state of AI than it does about this article's topic. Or perhaps not. Thoughts?

Comment Data harvesting? (Score 3, Insightful) 61

They sure seem to be keen on collecting a lot of facial and related data on individuals, examples being this, and the upcoming registration of Android app developers which requires Gov ID for each one.

Yeah, I also don't use fingerprint or facial recog on any of my other devices. That's like leaving post-it notes with your password on it pasted on every glass and door handle you use, or tattooing it on your forehead and walk around in public. In the stupid way I see things. (Also, I have quite faint fingerprints - presumably congenital - and every damn electronic fingerprint scanner takes multiple tries. Paper and ink seem to work fine though.)

Comment Old news (Score 4, Informative) 189

Here is a sample from the first page of /. search results for "cup coffee".
* Drinking 5 Cups of Coffee a Day Could Reduce Heart Risk - 2026-07-21
* 2 To 3 Cups of Coffee a Day May Reduce Dementia Risk. But Not if It's Decaf. - 2026-02-10
* Drinking Tea and Coffee Linked To Lower Risk of Head and Neck Cancer in Study - 2024-12-24
* Caffeine May Reduce Body Fat and Risk of Type 2 Diabetes, Study Suggests - 2023-03-15
* Drinking Several Cups of Coffee a Day May Be Linked To Longer Lifespan in Study - 2022-10-04
* Coffee Drinking Linked To Lower Mortality Risk, New Study Finds - 2022-06-02
* Tea and Coffee May Be Linked To Lower Risk of Stroke and Dementia, Study Finds - 2021-11-18
* Drinking Coffee May Cut Risk of Chronic Liver Disease, Study Suggests - 2021-06-22
* Could Drinking Coffee Lower Your Risk of Heart Failure? - 2021-02-21

Of course, gym rats have used coffee for a small energy boost before workouts, as well as a recovery drink after, for a couple of years now. Biohackers have drunk "butter coffee" aka "bulletproof coffee" for some years now for energy. (You have to know how different additions will affect your aims.) The general idea of course is to "stack" benefits from various practices: exercise, antioxidants, ketones, fasting, circadian rhythm/sleep, etc. etc.

Comment Re:so which is the cause and which is the result? (Score 1) 100

That seems to be much more likely than the stated order, since people with more youthful minds would be more likely to be learning new languages than others with older, less-flexible minds?

Or stated another way, "younger minds encourage multi-lingual" rather than "multi-lingual encourages younger minds".

I started out this comment trying to argue in the other direction, because of growing up (and still living) in a multilingual country. But then I started to think of the general population around me, which are all bi- or multilingual to some degree out of necessity. Some are sharp as nails, some are dull as bricks (if that is even an appropriate approximation for "young minds"?) I think the more general trait that keeps minds "youthful" (or vice versa) is an insatiable curiosity about everything around you - including other languages. I have a strong suspicion it works more like a positive feedback loop: exercising the mind makes it more healthy, but a healthy mind is also more likely to seek out opportunities to be exercised.

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