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This sounds like complete anecdata. Just because jart is skilled at coding doesn't mean there is a statistically high proportion of trans people in the "skilled coders" demographic.

Definitely anecdata but I can +1 that all sorts of people outside the mainstream enjoy safety in online communities because of the anonymity. This has always been a draw since the early internet up through now. You can rise through the ranks of open source using only your words and your code.

There are statistical studies that find Autism Spectrum Disorder is over represented in both trans and computer programmers.

It is likely that this is more than anecdata.

And trans are also over represented because of this connection.


Have a link to the studies?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11127512/

>There is an elevated co-occurrence of autism in trans individuals, with recent meta-analyses suggesting that 11% of trans individuals are autistic. The presence of autism in trans young people can create clinical challenges by adding complexity to the presentation, assessment and management of those presenting to gender clinics. Although many trans young people display traits of autism, how these traits relate to the nature of their gender diversity is unclear.

https://sites.asee.org/se/wp-content/uploads/sites/56/2021/0...

>Despite the study’s limitations, the initial pilot data gives reason for additional research to be conducted. Similar to Wei, Christiano, Yu, Blackorby, Shattuck, and Newman’s 9 findings, this study also supports the commonly accepted assumption that individuals with ASD are very likely to major in Computer Science.

--- And to clarify, I did not vet these, it was a very lazy google search.


That fits with the common observation that men who identify as women typically understand women even less than other men, and often have some oddly inflexible and sexist ideals of womanhood - because their ASD traits make it difficult to understand people generally and can lead to underinformed mental models of the world around them, including human behavior.

If you just look at women and not men then it could be possible. Among the competitive female gamers the top spots with most overall money winnings are all trans, you have to go down a few spots to find a born female. Of course there are hundreds of men with similar winnings as those trans women, but point is that among extreme successes there can actually be way more trans women than other women.

Is this proof that the universe cannot understand itself? It seems weird that there can be a set of information in the universe that can be hidden from the rest of the universe.


Not entirely. Cryptographic primitives are based on hardness assumptions. For example, we assume discrete log cannot be computed in probabilistic polynomial time when we leverage things like Diffie Hellman. No one has yet proven whether this assumption (and many others like it) is true or false, but so many people way smarter than you or I have tried and not made much headway and so it's safe enough to rely on it.

If someone were to prove one of these assumptions is true, then I suppose the answer to your question is yes, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for such a proof :)


Does the toe know what the head thinks? Do you know when a cell on your heel dies?


> Is this proof that the universe cannot understand itself?

What does “understanding” means when talking about an inanimate thing?

> It seems weird that there can be a set of information in the universe that can be hidden from the rest of the universe.

Why should the rest of the universe “know” anything about other parts of the universe?

Ascribing “understanding” and “knowledge” to the universe sounds questionable from the start, it doesn't seem weird to me that the universe doesn't have these properties.


It seems kinda vital to me - there needs to be an informational bottleneck somewhere.


This is why it annoys me when journalists say P!=NP is about scheduling flights.


> What I miss the most is coming into contact with people with a huge variety of backgrounds. > Which surprisingly were the people with who I had to spent the most amount of time explaining how software works.

How is this surprising? I read this as "huge variety of backgrounds", meaning, all kinds of backgrounds which are NOT software. It would make sense to me they don't understand how software works.


I took it to mean that you’d think it would have been annoying to have to repeatedly explain things, but he misses them.


What makes that dubious? It makes this advantage rest on a single factor, but the advantage is still there, no?


I'm the furthest thing from an economist, but I'm guessing that it feels like we're in a vulnerable position.

I.e., that it indicates our "wealth" could be pulled away from us on very short notice.

Contrasted to, e.g the wealth being from sales of some commodity that the rest of the world will need for the next decade: crops, certain metals, or (maybe) oil/LNG.


Well the US is a net exporter on oil and LNG, pretty much even on agriculture and every few months a new "world's largest deposit" of some critical material article comes up.[1,2] So I think we really are debating whether the chicken or the egg came first, and the answer is that dinosaurs were laying eggs before chickens started clucking.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/worlds-largest-deposit-lithiu...

[2]https://www.theearthandi.org/post/estimated-2-34-billion-met...


The difference here is we're talking about a person's health, not their motor vehicle, so a different calculus is in play.


You don't have to be an "active" patient and "self-advocate" if you trust your medical professional to make the decision that is in your best interest. Ergo, if you're advocating active medical involvement, you don't trust your medical professional either.


I can't trust my own mother, so I'll look up things myself before committing to one decision. as far as I can remember, as an adult, I've only been to the doctor's once without diagnosing myself, and I've never been wrong yet (the handful of times I've needed medical care anyway).


That's great but the trouble is that as you get older medical conditions become harder and harder to find out. They also become more dangerous.

I'm telling you this because my father was the same way you are. he avoided going to the doctor at all and diagnosed himself.

He also smoked for 60 years. Yeah. He had his first heart attack in his 30s. Very avoidable. His second in his 40s. Then another in his 50s. Finally died of lung cancer in his 70s. Honestly a miracle he made it that far.

You can tell if you're feeling okay. But a lot of diseases have no symptoms. The reality is you cannot run your own blood tests. If you're young, maybe it's fine. But as you get older it no longer flies. What happens is you will become very sick, realize it's due to something like high blood pressure or diabetes, and you're WAY too far gone to fix it. The earlier you get on top of bad markers, the better. You don't want to live 30+ years with something like high blood pressure or high cholesterol.

Maybe you don't smoke (good for you), but that doesn't save you. Neither does living an active lifestyle. You can get high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, heart failure, etc regardless of your lifestyle. There're people who die MUCH younger than my father did while being much healthier.


oh it's not an issue for me, I've been suicidal since I was 12, but don't have the guts to off myself. a few years ago I gave up entirely and decided to wait it out the long way, but the sooner something takes me out, the better. but thank you for the concern :-)


This actually didn't do away with my concern. I'm much more concerned now.

If it helps, keep in mind most medical issues don't kill you. They just lower your quality of life, sometimes a lot. So, if you've decided to stick it out, you might as well try to live the best life you can. Nobody wants to be chronically fatigued, or have bathroom troubles, or lose their hair, or whatever.


you don't need to worry, once I gave up on mental health, I've never been better. nothing really bothers me anymore.


It's testing ability to on-command manipulate orbits in space with very low fuel, which is useful for anything we throw up in space.


What's misleading here? He was using that as an example of usage of the word 'expedient', not actually suggesting climate change solutions.


A lot of people in this thread seem to think OP was suggesting that geoengineering is a possible way forward right now, when they were just positing it as an example.


Since OP provided a different example, an expedient solution would be to edit OPs post and remove that paragraph about geoengineering, and delete all comments referring to it.


Why is it difficult to measure the phase directly for optical wavelength as opposed to radio? Is it purely because the shift is smaller?


It's really fast. Visible frequencies are in the THz to PHz range, while radio frequencies are in the kHz. Modern electronics are fast enough to sample the latter but not the former.


Radio frequencies are in KHz to THz range. There is equipment already operating in sub-THz bands but not yet close to the frequencies of light.


Why do you think emissions levels are what the kids detected that changed their behavior? I would posit reducing emissions levels had a knock-on effect that had some other effect, etc. until the last effect in the chain was what made the kids change their behavior.


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