Some of the insights match my personal experience and preferences. At $dayjob we're migrating from Mongo to TimescaleDB (now TigerData ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) which is basically a PostgreSQL extension for time series data and couldn't be happier. We are getting better performance and massive storage savings.
On the analytics side of things we are starting to use DuckDB for some development efforts, but we are keen on potentially replacing some or all of our Snowflake usage with DuckDB.
It is the main database for a huge Rails app. They adopted Mongo right when its popularity started to decline. I always thought it was a very poor choice since the day I joined.
It is a especially bad choice considering that a lot of the data stored in it is IoT-like and the system creates a single document per event :facepalm:
I'm sorry to hear about your bad experience. From your comment I take it that you weren't using a time-series collection to store data in mdb which uses industry-standard compression techniques?
Interesting timing, they have recently reached out to my $dayjob. We will be probably be running a workshop on our (massive) dataset with them. I'd like to evaluate the performance of a couple of analytical models we've manually built against whatever this model can do based on some prompts. Exciting times!
I'm short on time and couldn't read the whole article, but apparently metabolic health is a huge factor that doesn't seem to be pointed at here. Obese parents, both mum and dad, multiply the likelihood of child autism by something like 4x. It could be that the obesity epidemic is the cause of the rising autism rates. Same goes for other metabolic health impacting factors such as diabetes, hypertension, and the likes.
The paper says there is no epidemic and never was. The only increase is in diagnosis. That is due to a number of causes like changing the criteria for diagnosis, adding incentives to be diagnosed, and several other things. The two strongest arguments presented were that autism isn't rarer in adults, and some studies that involved testing with tests that haven't changed over the period didn't see a change in actual scores even though diagnosis increased. My personal thoughts are that autoimmune conditions that have similar effects to some aspects of autism are demonstrared to increasing, and when that happens in young people it gets diagnosed as asd because that has a name and gets extra services vs having some poorly understood autoimmune thing.
How does obesity correlate with IQ? As the article points out:
> So much spending on care for autistic people is wasteful. Someone with a mild case of Asperger’s does not need to hit a mandated spending cap for their condition, and someone with mental retardation who convinced a clinician to give them a more favorable diagnosis should not be receiving treatment intended for autistics and found to be useless for the merely mentally retarded.
More importantly, even if the article didn’t specifically address your concerns about metabolic health, it certainly gave a plethora of reasons for why the “rising autism rates” are not rising in truth.
> So remember this:
> There is not, and has never been, any credible evidence for a “real” epidemic of autism or for any of its proposed environmental causes. Answering the question of if there is a “real” autism epidemic has provided a complete answer to the question of why there might be.
> Obese parents, both mum and dad, multiply the likelihood of child autism by something like 4x. It could be that the obesity epidemic is the cause of the rising autism rates.
Even assuming the first sentence is correct going from 0% prevalence to 100% prevalence of something with a 4x risk increase would explain only a very small part of the increase in the various proxies by which the prevalence is estimated, whereas (as the article argues) change in diagnostic criteria and reporting practices can easily explain all of it. So, sure, to the extent there is any real increase in prevalence (which is not at all clear), factors like parental obesity, parental age, and other things that have some indication of being either risk factors or proxies for unidentified risk factors may either play a role or be indicative of things that do, but we can be fairly certain what the main driving factor in the numbers is, and it is sufficient to explain the observations, and invoking anything else is a violation of the principal of parsimony.
I'm talking about it in another thread too, but large birth weight is apparently a pretty significanly correlated risk factor for developing ASD. Studies show that obese mothers are more likely to give birth to higher weight children.
Very unfortunate for us, then, that there's dozens of independent multibillion dollar industries who are not going to like that that's the root cause :/
Fortunately, there are independent multibillion dollar industries who would prefer to solve it with semaglutide, tirzepatide, and retratutide.
Of course, the article makes the case that there's no epidemic so none of this is really important. We don't have to go "oh woe is me oh woe is me" constantly.
Wyrd Sisters (first Witches novel in which the characters have more or less settled down to what they’ll be for the rest of the series) or Guards, Guards (first Vimes novel, and first ‘normal’ Ankh Morpork novel; an Ankh Morpork shows up in earlier novels but that version is more or less entirely retconned away quite quickly.)
The only reason I disagree is that L&L jumps in with some very well established characters that had been built up earlier. But I do love his (historically accurate by lore?) description of elves. He put a lot of research into re-establishing the myths and lore of his little corner of the world.
(Along those lines I would also recommend Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell” which builds its own parallel history set in the early 1800s Britain, with Fairies taking the same role as elves in discworld.
I think Susannah Clarke is the only living author I can think of who would inspire the same enthusiasm from me upon news of a new book from them. Alas, she is not quite as prolific as PTerry :)
Mustn't grumble though, it's not like Jonathan Strange was a pamphlet!
Nice! I drive a 2005 Audi with all physical controls. I intend to keep it for as long as it keeps running, so if the trend continues and more manufacturers join it I may be able to skip the whole huge touchscreen madness altogether
I’d love to buy that config as my personal laptop, but the problem is that my 512/16 M1 Air still works so well for my use case that I can’t find enough reasons to justify the expense. M6 Air maybe!
What amazing creatures! One of the coolest experiences I’ve lived scuba diving was an interaction with a cuttlefish. It would come towards me in its alien like swimming style and crazy eyes, while pulsating super cool colors, getting very close to my face and then quickly swimming back and forth and up and down, speeding up and slowing down, like performing some kind of ritual dance.
I think it was trying to hypnotize me, like Futurama’s good old Hypnotoad. What was the motivation behind, I will always wonder
The colors understanding is even more remarkable given that they are colorblind in the sense that they do not have different color cones, and likely rely on a very imperfect process of chromatic aberration that they can somehow translate back into color.
I spent 15 minutes watching a group of about 8 cuttlefish on a reef. There were clearly lots of complex group interactions going on between them. It is also amazing fast they can change colour.
I’m going through a very similar process after breaking my ankle in a motorcycle accident. Tibia and double fibula fracture with dislocation and open wound, an ugly one which needed 2 titanium plates and 18 screws.
I was out of my plaster after week 2 so that I could start moving the ankle, and started physical therapy on week 5. I'm currently on week 7 and have already started _walking_ with the "moon boot".
I can stand on the brokenish ankle with 90% of my weight on it. It's kind of scary to be doing all this to the ankle when the bone is still not fully fixed, but it improves the recovery time and final outcome. I will probably be out of the boot on week 10-12. I'm 10 degrees away from full dorsiflexion range, and apparently it will still take some time and effort to get to the full range, if at all.
Treatment for these kind of injuries have definitely come a long way, this is a massively different experience from breaking my ankle 20 years ago playing football in the US and being on a cast forever, plus dealing with ankle pain for a year after the injury as I didn't get any physical therapy
I also broke my ankle about 20 years ago. Once I was out of the cast, I regained all function, and only recently has my ankle been starting to ache. The doctor I saw about it even commented that it was as clean of a fix as he'd ever seen!
I also didn't do much physio, but that was mostly due to me being a 23 year old moron (which, believe it or not, also had a lot to do with me breaking my ankle in the first place!)
I can relate, 21 year old moron in my case. No surgery needed and clean fix. The problems were gone after a year when I decided to get some help in the form physical therapy. It never hurt again until recently when I broke it again
If it's not an articular injury and they fix all the bones, you can more or less walk on these immediately. I've read about protocols like two weeks, and even immediately (albeit that has issues with wound healing)
On the analytics side of things we are starting to use DuckDB for some development efforts, but we are keen on potentially replacing some or all of our Snowflake usage with DuckDB.