only people who’ve taken LSD can receive the messages.

December 3, 2023 9:59 PM

52 things I learned in 2023, by Thomas Whitwell (SLMedium)

pre vi ous ly

posted by Gorgik (35 comments total)

Someone find the xkcd comic for #21!
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 10:55 PM on December 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

Here it is: https://xkcd.com/327/
posted by DreamerFi at 10:57 PM on December 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

The "specialness spiral" (number 8) was interesting to read about. I've actually done that with socks, used as an example in the interview with one of the researchers. And I've got a very nice pen that gets very little use on the same basis. It reminded me of something Erma Bombeck once wrote: “If I had my life to live over I would have burned the pink candle sculpted like a rose before it melted in storage.”
posted by bryon at 11:11 PM on December 3, 2023 [5 favorites]

I've done lots of LSD. What's this about messages?
posted by philip-random at 11:24 PM on December 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

Love little Bobby tables. A great kid.
posted by Windopaene at 12:07 AM on December 4, 2023 [7 favorites]

Oh, I have to be currently tripping to see the messages? Well, I mean, that just sounds like a recipe for paranoia
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 12:58 AM on December 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

The UK's forest cover is due to tree farms, both abandoned and active. True forests (that are not monocultures) cover much less of Scotland. I remember reading 1%, but I can't remember where. They'd a reason the Caledonian forest is so protected.
posted by Hactar at 1:09 AM on December 4, 2023

#10 is intriguing. I'd like to know how they define 'productivity' in that context. I'm guessing they mean 'it takes 2 times as long for a bad coder to write a bad piece of code as it does for ChatGPT to write a bad piece of code'. But we don't know how much longer it takes for a good coder to fix a piece of bad code written by a bad coder than it does for a good coder to fix a piece of bad code written by ChatGPT.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 2:01 AM on December 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

"How much code would a coder code if a coder could code code?"
posted by Paul Slade at 3:03 AM on December 4, 2023 [6 favorites]

I am impressed that he is so wide-read and gets his info from so many different sources. How can I get out of my limited source bubble?
posted by zardoz at 3:49 AM on December 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

I want the Russian champagne. I detest all the champagne people actually have at events, my mother and sister love it as a symbol of celebration so I suffer through a least several glasses every year. A demi-sec or doux are hardly much better, and no-one ever gets them for their events anyway.
posted by Audreynachrome at 3:51 AM on December 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

Canadian researchers gave homeless people $7,500 in a bank account that they could spend on anything they wanted. They spent it on food, clothes, and rent. Many moved into stable housing and saved enough to give them some stability.

imagine fuckin that, huh
posted by Kitteh at 4:30 AM on December 4, 2023 [13 favorites]

imagine fuckin that, huh

Previously.
posted by jackbishop at 4:37 AM on December 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

Good bye Random House UK.
posted by hat_eater at 5:25 AM on December 4, 2023

I thought #21 sounded like an apocryphal corruption of the XKCD comic, but after searching I found its registration by a Samuel Pizzey. A professional computer systems penetration tester according to LinkedIn.
posted by justkevin at 6:07 AM on December 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

Big gains in job satisfaction "come from work/life balance and the performance review process"?

the performance review process???!!!!

Unsurprisingly, there's no actual mention of that in the linked article. But I'd like to quote from the work of Gordon Sumner et. al. on the subject:

"...every single meeting with his so-called superior
Is a humiliating kick in the crotch"
posted by PlusDistance at 6:20 AM on December 4, 2023 [13 favorites]

#19. Three-quarters of the murders in Chicago are caused by arguments, altercations that have gone too far.

So you're telling me that when people carry guns all the time, they'll actually use them when they get mad? Who would have thought?
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:21 AM on December 4, 2023 [11 favorites]

There’s been a colony of 15,000 wild scorpions living in the walls of Sheerness Dockyard, Kent, for over 200 years.

Are there any domesticated scorpions anywhere?
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:16 AM on December 4, 2023 [6 favorites]

Interesting, but: 44. Windows are the enemy of the art dealer. is literally just a parenthetical unexplained quote deep inside the article. I believe it's a reference to basically not being able to hang art where a window is.
posted by achrise at 8:25 AM on December 4, 2023

I never wanted to go to Kent anyway.
posted by biffa at 8:33 AM on December 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

I have long enjoyed such compendiums...
posted by jim in austin at 8:35 AM on December 4, 2023

OpenAI just bought the patent for that "tiny flexible battery" powered by human tears.
posted by mittens at 8:36 AM on December 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

zardoz, that's a really insightful question. One thing that I have started in the last few months is listening to The 7 podcast by the Washington Post. They go over 7 news items every weekday in under 10 minutes, and one of them is almost always either a recent science thing, or something happening in pop culture, or something else non-political. Having to find one of those every day leads to them finding things I wouldn't have heard of otherwise. Sometimes I then see these posted to MeFi, but sometimes not.

This used to be the kind of thing I would suggest MeFi for, and it definitely helps, but hasn't been the ultimate source for me in awhile. I'd love any recommendations people have.
posted by Night_owl at 8:44 AM on December 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

Are there any domesticated scorpions anywhere?

Yes, but you'll not see them 'cause they're inside calling birds on tablets and smartphones.
posted by thecincinnatikid at 8:54 AM on December 4, 2023

I've done lots of LSD. What's this about messages?

I don't really know but you can read about it here.

I don't have time to do acid right now to verify of any of it but I'm curious. On a related note I've been convinced that Pink Floyd did this in an auditory way.
posted by Liquidwolf at 9:18 AM on December 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

The "specialness spiral" (number 8) was interesting to read about. I've actually done that with socks…

I do that with food; I’ll see something I’ve always wanted to cook, or an unusual ingredient at a good price, and save it for a special occasion that never comes and the food eventually goes bad.
posted by TedW at 9:30 AM on December 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

When Italy banned Chat-GPT, productivity of coders in the country fell by 50% before recovering.

Nonsense. The productivity of a coder cannot be quantified, therefore you cannot operate on it with percentages.
posted by jimfl at 9:47 AM on December 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

#10 is intriguing. I'd like to know how they define 'productivity' in that context.

I've always found the idea that ChatGPT could possibly help me in my job to be ludicrous. Our main product has about a million lines of C++ code, another 150K lines each of C# and Fortran (mostly 77 but some 90) and a smattering of other stuff. If I have to debug something I'm not going to ask a glorified chatbot.

I find it telling that these sorts of things always refer to "coders" rather than software engineers.
posted by Foosnark at 9:55 AM on December 4, 2023

44. Windows are the enemy of the art dealer.

OSX doesn't think much of art dealers either.
posted by Foosnark at 9:57 AM on December 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

A specialness spiral is when you wait for the perfect time to use something, then end up never using it at all.

AKA "The Mega-Elixir Conundrum"
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 10:30 AM on December 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

#40: 40% of people shown a photoshopped image of themselves riding in a viking ship as a child claimed to remember the (fictional) incident. This replicates a similar experiment from 2002 involving a fictional balloon ride. [Miriam S. Johnson & co]

Looking at the paper it seems the experiment was a lot more involved than that blurb suggests:

Those participants who could not recall the pictured event were reassured by the interviewer that “many people can’t recall certain childhood events at first because they haven’t thought about them for such a long time,” which was followed by a few-minute break to concentrate on retrieving the memory for the pictured event. If the participants still could not recall any details, they were told that another purpose of the study was to assess the efficacy of different memory retrieval techniques, including context reinstatement (CR) and guided imagery (GI).

In the CR procedure, the participant was mentally taken back into the scene of the event. For the Viking ship ride, the interviewer instructed the participants to close their eyes, imagine being back on the Viking ship, and to think for a minute about details, such as what the event might have been like, who was present, what the weather was like, and what they saw when they were onboard the ship.

It seems like they are testing specific techniques for deliberately implanting false memories.

I wonder how the test subjects felt when they were finally told the truth.
posted by swr at 12:13 PM on December 4, 2023 [7 favorites]

Tom Whitwell is the realistic “person I would be if I could be anyone”. 50% DIY synth guru, 50% find out interesting new facts for companies for a living wage. He also seems like a nice person. Love these lists.
posted by q*ben at 12:28 PM on December 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

I find the titular tidbit #4 Psychedelic cryptography is a way of concealing messages (normally in videos) so that only people who’ve taken LSD can receive the messages. to be fascinating. The link in TFA Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness Contest: Psychedelic Cryptography offers a link to How to secretly communicate with people on LSD that has a simulation of a very basic example of how this might work, if you're scratching your head. I fully expect, as various authors point out, that this will be a thing at festivals and such.
posted by achrise at 1:15 PM on December 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

ahem, psychedelic steganography surely
posted by away for regrooving at 11:41 PM on December 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

It seems like they are testing specific techniques for deliberately implanting false memories.

Of course, we've known about this for a long time, at least since the aftermath of the Satanic panic and the McMartin trial. People, especially children, can have very vivid memories of things that never happened to them, if prompted to believe them.
posted by jackbishop at 10:26 AM on December 5, 2023 [1 favorite]