Majority of the "AI inside" software and solutions. It's in a bubble and everyone is throwing crap to a wall hoping it sticks.
"AI" is the new "blockchain". It's a solution looking for a solid problem to tackle, with some niche applications
I mean, at least Ai has SOME useful applications, the blockchain was just wasting energy for some numbers.
Blockchain also has some useful applications. Most (but not all) of them are also possible with technology and such that existed when bitcoin was first created, at far lower cost for a minor tradeoff in accuracy. On top of that, almost none of them are related to speculative markets.
It's a way to do distributed transaction logs in a non-refutable and independantly verifiable way. That's useful and important, but it was a solution in search of a problem. Even for the highest security, most at risk transactions, the existing international fincancial systems are "good enough" to ensure reliability of transaction logs.
In the end, blockchain and now AI are just falling victim to con men trying to milk as much money as they can from things before people build a working understanding of them. They'll just keep moving onto the next big thing as it comes.
I just wish people had long enough memories to see the cycle for terms like these. Some new word catches vogue, companies fall over themselves trying to find ways to implement them for shareholders and consumers who have no idea what they actually represent. As that fades, a new term arises.. it's sad.
And virtual reality gets a free revival every other technology, while we're at it.
I'm predicting VR coming back into the limelight, try again, shortly after everyone loses interest in AI.
Also, I'm still pissed that flying cars aren't in the limelight more. I was promised daily updates, and I'm not seeing them. That's the biggest proof that the media is completely disconnected.
We have flying cars. They're called helicopters, and they suck for most activities
I am so over hearing about AI. It's getting to the point that I can assume anyone dropping the term at work is an idiot that hasn't actually used or utilised it.
It's this LLM phase. It's super cool and a big jump in AI, but it's honestly not that good. It's a handy tool and one you need to heavily scrutinise beyond basic tasks. Businesses that jumped on it are now seeing the negative effects of thinking it was magic from the future that does everything. The truth is, it's stupid and people need to learn about it, understand it, and be trained in how to use it before it can be effective. It is a tool, not a solution—at least for now anyways.
The truth is, it’s stupid and people need to learn about it, understand it, and be trained in how to use it before it can be effective.
So, like a hammer. A very expensive, environment-destroying hammer.
That's actually a pretty good analogy.
I think more like discovering making fire or something. 90% of all the energy burnt is people worshipping it as it blazes away, never actually fulfilling any practical use except being marvelous to be around.
But once the forest is all chopped down, people are forced to understand fire and realise a couple small logs in a contained place was all they needed to have it be incredibly effective.
Oh, but that's too hard. It's magic right now. All hail the AI bonfire!
I equate an AI to an intern. It's useful for some stuff but if I'm going to attach my name to it I'm going to review it and probably change a lot about it.
notice how all of those crypto features were quietly removed from platforms after people realised they were paying millions for some numbers, i think that will happen with Ai
I just got a notification on my phone telling me that I can chat with my PDF documents. Why the fuck would I want to do that? Do these companies realize that literally no one is asking for this shit? I also saw an ad for a computer mouse that had AI inside it. Whatever that means.
I just got a notification on my phone telling me that I can chat with my PDF documents
I belive you got that notification but I honestly have no idea what it even means.
It's from the Adobe Acrobat app. Basically you can ask it to give you a summary of whatever document you're reading.
My research was literally on AI back in college. Most AI solutions are just basic algorithms and don't use real AI solutions. There's a huge difference.
It's even better than that. A lot of companies are taking NVIDIA's pre-built workflows, running their data through them and selling the results as their own AI. "We build proprietary RAG AI!"
I can't wait to get a Smart AI refrigerator that tells me I have a bunch of food that isn't really in there even when I didn't ask it to.
As a medical device engineer working in spine - absolutely chiropractors.
What about osteopaths?
I was not familiar with this term and had to look it up. From my brief search, it also seems like snake oil, and I don't know why someone would not go to a real physical therapist instead.
I absolutely had a PT after a car accident that used spinal manipulation and it seemed to help. She also had me using elastic bands for stretching and hydrotherapy, so there's that
Fair, I do have a number of MD DO consultants. The initial look I had was not within the DO licensing.
Osteopaths (who have a Doctorate of Osteopathy and are often referred to as DOs) go to medical school and receive training that's almost exactly the same as an MD.
the difference (so i'm told) is that DOs are trained to take a more holistic, full-body approach to diagnostics and treatment rather than only focusing on one set of symptoms/treatment. They also do their residencies and internships alongside MDs.
Yes, I've heard some people say that they trust DOs more because they're more deliberately trained to look at a larger picture of a person's health. I don't have my own opinion since I've never met with a DO.
DO are real doctors. Rarer than MDs because there are less schools but totally real docs. My Mom with 30 years nursing experience says their training is basically identical, but DOs are generally nicer.
It depends on the country. Everywhere but the US, I believe, osteopaths are witch doctors on the same level as chiropractors. In the US, they were originally like that, but their professional organization basically pushed it into being a real medical degree.
Now they go to the same length schooling as MD's, and take the same exams as far as I know.
The core of the whole discipline, osteopathy, is a pseudoscience, though. While they are usually competent doctors they still have that core of pseudoscience. They like to market themselves as more "holistic", but that's usually a good dogwhistle term to let you know information not supported by science is going to follow. They bring up that they are the same as MDs, but with additional training in osteopathy, but that can't be true because the schooling is the same length, so to fit in the pseudoscience, they get less science.
The real reason why we have DO's is that we don't have capacity in our country to educate enough MDs, so we have this weird parallel system.
I sometimes come across influencers pushing chrio "treatments" on pets or newborns, saying it makes them "breathe better" or be "more energetic"
It's infuriating
its a bit more than infuriating, thats straight up dangerous.
I've told this story before, but newborn chiropractors are a thing, and many new parents will take their BABIES to get their neck and back snapped around. It's frankly fucking disgusting.
I used to see a lot of threads on reddit about people who got injuries from cheap chiropractors.
Problem is, people go to chiropractor when they don't have access to real doctor, problem either the money or/and most doctors in your city/state can't/refuse do anything about your problem, desperation is one hell of a stimulus
most doctors in your city/state can't/refuse do anything about your problem
There's almost nothing a chiropractor can do if doctors aren't treating you. Except lie and steal your money.
I can somewhat understand this. I have IBS, and most people with a bowel issue will tell you that IBS is basically your doctor saying ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Instead of getting help from your doctor, you go online and you hear about people finding relief through taking weird supplements, or eating only rice, or taking pre and probiotics of varying types. None of it has any proof, but it's better to try something than to struggle - and sometimes you're lucky or you find some short-lived relief.
The difference is that there often isn't evidence for these things working, whereas there is plenty of evidence out there that says that chiropractors are doing legitimately dangerous practices to your body. The difference is that someone is trying to make a profit from this lack of knowledge.
Holland and Barrett sell supplements. Some people do need to take a vitamin d tablet a day. I do but I've got a prescription for a vitamin d and calcium tablet because I've been low for years.
I work 3rd shift, so I take Vitamin D because the sun is my nemesis.
Be careful with vitamin D though. That is one of the very very few vitamins that you can actually take too much of because it's fat soluble, not water soluble, so excessive vitamin D will build up in your fat cells rather than just getting peed out. It's called vitamin D toxicity (VDT) and it can have some unpleasant neurological effects among other things.
So it's probably a good idea to get your levels checked anyways just to make sure you're taking the right amount if you need it.
I take vitamin D about 5 months out of the year. Stupid fall back daylight saving time is part of it. Makes me furious my already battered mental health has to get worse from changing the clocks.
Essential oils. Homeopathy. Chiropractic. Reiki. Juice cleanses. Perineum sunning. Internet accelerator software. Iridology. Faith healing. Organic food. Oil pulling. Gold plated digital audio cables.
It’s worth noting that gold plated connectors are not snake oil. Gold is a good conductor and doesn’t form a nonconductive oxide layer. That means it’s going to be more durable and won’t corrode together or apart like those old ass sheet metal tube sockets that all need to be cleaned.
Everything marketed audiophiles, not only gold plated cables, but also anything that uses vacuum tubes because "they sound better"
There’s a LOT of snake oil in the audio world. Especially home theater and home studio setups. I’m a professional audio technician, and some of the “audiophile” setups I have seen are just outright asinine.
Use balanced signal for runs over ~3 feet. Use the cheapest star-quad cable you can get, and the most basic $4 Neutrik connectors. Why? Because that album you’re using to test your “hi-fi” sound system was recorded using exactly that: Cheap ¢30/foot cable and basic Neutrik connectors.
It’s also what concert setups use. You think a concert with six combined miles of cabling is going to be paying $2000 per cable? Fuck no, they’re using the cheap shit (which was hand soldered in bulk at the warehouse workbench by their lowest paid shop tech), to run that million dollar audio system. Their money goes to the speakers, amps, and mixer; Not gold plated wire, robotic soldering, or triple insulated jackets. In double-blind tests, audiophiles can’t hear the difference between a $500 cable and a couple of plasti-dipped coat hangers twisted together.
The people who complain about digital audio also can’t tell the difference in double-blind tests. Because modern audio hardware is able to perfectly emulate old analog gear. Google the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem for a breakdown of how we can perfectly capture and recreate analog audio with digital equipment. Vacuum tubes were groundbreaking when they were first used. But they had a lot of issues, and have very little relevance in today’s systems. They’re prone to burning out, notoriously fragile, and can be emulated perfectly.
The Norquist-Shannon rate sampling theorem only asserts that for a given maximum frequency, you only need another other given maximum frequency of sampling to represent it.
It does not say you can “perfectly” reproduce a signal. Only that you can reproduce all fourier components of the signal that are below half your sampling rate in frequency. It perfectly does that, yes.
But the signals that only contain a finite number of frequencies all below a certain maximum frequency are abstractions used in signal theory classes for teaching that theorem, and in engineering to hit a “good enough” target, not a “perfect” target.
Any frequencies bouncing around the room at over 22 kHz are lost at least to something using the 44 kHz sampling format.
TL;DR: Norquist-Shannon lets you completely reproduce signals with finite information in them. But real life sound doesn’t have finite information in it.
It's Nyquist–Shannon. Norquist is taxes.
Also frequencies greater than half the sampling rate aren't lost they fold into lower frequencies unless filtered out.
But if you think it's easiser to capture those room acoustics with analog equipment the non linear amplification and distortion of any analog system is going to change the sound just add much if not more then a good digital system.
So yeah both lose or distort the signal but digital does it in avery predictable way that can be accounted for and it does have a frequency region that it captures precisely. Analog doesn't.
Nyquist, thank you.
aren't lost they fold into lower frequencies unless filtered out
If by “fold into” you mean they add noise to and hence distort the readings on the lower frequencies, that’s correct. But that just takes it further from a perfect reproduction.
I was buying a toslink cable recently and I shit you not, there was a gold plated optical cable...
Fucking Toslink: one round optical fiber in the middle, but it plugs in in only one position out of four, and you can't feel which way the female connector is. EU should fine the assholes responsible.
Doesn‘t that defeat the entire purpose of Toslink cables ? The light can‘t go through gold?
Fully analog tube amps do definitely produce a warmer/richer sound with less complicated things to go wrong. Artists like them because they are reliable, generally user serviceable, (usually just need to replace bad/old tubes) and makes each recording sound relatively unique.
The thing is, is that it really only works during production. Unless being cut direct to a master record, the sound will get saved in a digital format to produce the user-facing media, which can include digital-source vinyls.
Those products marketed to audiophiles try to take the digitally recorded/archived products to "try" making it sound like the original.
I remember buying some bits and pieces to setup my home theatre in a new house years ago, and the guy at the store tried to sell me a $100 TOSLINK cable. When I asked why a $12 cable was going for so much, he pointed out that it was the "premium" cable, to ensure the highest quality audio.
I couldn't stop laughing. Like their special cable scrubbed the photons before sending them or something.
Oil pulling, if you're also OOTL. Swishing fancy oil around your mouth.
One of my co-workers went for that whole hog. I remember him telling me there was no need to brush any more - just swirl oil around your mouth for ten minutes. I don't know if it works, but brushing only takes two minutes...
Well, there’s nothing wrong with using coconut oil for gum health. Some people even use it as a mouthwash because it was some antibacterial properties. It doesn’t replace the need for brushing your goddamn teeth, that’s an insane thing to think. But there is actually benefits to coconut oil for sensitive teeth (along with a change in diet), antibacterial properties, as well as the normal benefits of consuming coconut oil. It’s not all complete hogwash.
How do you bundle up organic food with the rest of that ?
At best, organic food offers the same nutritional value as non organic food. At worst, it’s less nutritious and more expensive.
meh. nutritional value is about the same, yeah, but that's not the point of organic food. people who claim that eating an all organic diet makes you better are yahoos.
The point of organic farming is that it is just all-around better for the planet, the soil, the organisms therein and less polluting.
The only real issue I see with organic food is that it excludes GMOs
GMOs are an issue for nations' food sovereignty, but organic food modt importantly means no phytosanitary products (such as the infamous roundup), which persist in the plants and cause all sorts of cancers
Hi-resolution audio, especially for streaming. The general idea is that listening to digital audio files that have a greater bit depth and sample rate than CD (24-bit/192Khz vs 16-bit/44.1 KHz) translates to better-sounding audio, but in practice that isn't the case.
For a detailed breakdown as to why, there's a great explanation here. But in summary, the format for CDs was so chosen because it covers enough depth and range to cover the full spectrum of human hearing.
So while "hi-res" audio does contain a lot more information (which, incidentally, means it uses up significantly more data/storage space and costs more money), our ears aren't capable of hearing it in the first place. Certain people may try to argue otherwise based on their own subjective experience, but to that I say "the placebo effect is a helluva drug."
Conversely low res audio clearly sounds like trash.
Up to a certain point, yes. >192k AAC / OGG / Opus sounds just as good as FLAC in a blind test, though. Even with good equipment.
Yeah, I'm thinking of circa 2000 MP3s. 128k was the good stuff and lower was still common.
Back when a 4 minute song was like 1.5MB so you could fit more music on your 256MB mp3 player because you could not afford an iPod.
Oh yeah. 128k rips from back then were rough. MP3 has gotten somewhat better since then, to be fair. V0/V1 VBR is still perfectly fine to listen to; it's just not as efficient as the newer codecs.
which, incidentally, means they use up significantly more data/storage space and cost more money
All of this is very true, but this is the only issue I really disagree with here.
I am in an era where a good quality rip of a movie can be almost 50 gigabytes by itself. That means for every terabyte of storage, I can store just 20 of movies of this size.
Don't even get my started on television series and how big those can balloon to with the same kind of encoding.
An entire collection of FLACs, thousands of albums worth, is still less than 500 gigabytes total, in other words half a terabyte. (My personal collection anyway)
I mean, the average size of one of my FLAC albums is around 200-300 megabytes. Even with the larger "hi-res" FLAC files you're still not getting as obscenely big as movie and television files.
Sure, it takes up more space than an MP3 or a FLAC properly encoded to CD standards (my preferred choice, for the reasons outlined above), but realistically, the amount of space it takes up compared to those is negligible when compared to other types of media.
Storage and energy to operate storage has become incredibly cheap, especially when you're dealing with smaller files like this.
This is true, especially if you are storing files locally. However, even compared to "CD quality" FLAC, a 24/192 album is still going to be around three times larger (around 1GB per album) to download. If everyone switched over to streaming hi-res audio tomorrow, there would be a noticeable jump in worldwide Internet traffic.
I'm personally not ok with the idea of bandwidth usage jumping up over 3x (and even more compared to lossy streaming) for no discernable benefit.
I’m personally not ok with the idea of bandwidth usage jumping tenfold for no discernable benefit.
An extremely reasonable position to take! Because even if the increase in energy usage is negligible locally, when widespread, those small chunks of energy use add up into a much larger chunk of energy use. Especially when including transferring that over an endless number of networks.
I always talk about this in regards to automobiles and manual roll-up/down windows versus automatic windows. Sure, it's an extremely small amount of energy to use for automatic windows on a car, but when you add up the energy used on every cars automatic windows through the life of each and every car with automatic windows and suddenly it's no longer a small number. Very wasteful, imho.
I've always kinda wondered about this. I'm not an audio guy and really can't tell the difference between most of the standards. That said, I definitely remember tons and tons 'experts' telling me that no one can tell the difference between 720p and 1080p TV at typical distance to your couch. And I absolutely could and many of the people I know could. I can also tell the difference between 1080 and 4k, at the same distances.
So I'm curious if there's just a natural variance in an individual's ability to hear and audiophiles just have a better than average range that does exceed CD quality?
Similar to this, I can tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps, but not 60 to 120, yet some people swear they can. Which I believe, I just know that I can't. Seems like these guidelines are probably more averages, rather than hard biological limits.
It's a fair question. Human hearing ability is a spectrum like anything else, however when it comes to discerning the difference in audio quality, the vast, vast majority of people cannot reliably tell the difference between high-bitrate lossy and lossless when they do a double blinded test. And that includes audiophiles with equipment worth thousands of dollars.
Of that tiny minority who can consistently distinguish between the two, they generally can only tell by listening very closely for the very particular characteristics of the encoder format, which takes a highly trained ear and a lot of practice.
The blind aspect is important because side-by-side comparisons (be they different audio formats, or 60fps vs 120fps video) are highly unreliable because people will generally subconsciously prefer the one they know is supposed to be better.
Blue light filter on glasses. When I got my glasses, the lady said they come with blue light filter for free, and I said, “I don’t want that, my job requires that I see colors accurately, so I can’t have any sort of color filter.” She said don’t worry, it doesn’t filter any colors. Ok, then what the fuck is it exactly?
She was just upselling, not actually knowledgeable. They filter some blue spectrum, not the whole color blue.
They literally have no blue light filter in them. It was just marketing snake oil. I don’t even know why they do that. Who would want that in their glasses?
I thought it was a coating, like what they use to filter UV light. I have Theraspecs that do it, but those are sunglasses.
Hmm wasn't expecting an actual answer on Quora but I was pleasantly surprised
I practice polyphasic sleep and reducing blue light is pretty important there to avoid messing your circadian rhythm.
The community recomends wearing the orange laser protection glasses, the same ones laser cutter operators use. Because that's what glasses actually have to look like to filter blue light.
Anti virus software. To protect your computer let's constantly run this software with root privileges!
I remember mcAffee webadvisor came preinstalled with a crappy asus vivobook i got when i was younger, i could not delete it, i had to manually remove the files from the programfiles folder but it reinstalled itself every time it updated, the laptop bricked itself recently anyway so it doesn't matter.
Chiropractic anything. John Oliver covered it quite well.
What episode was that?
Shampoo and conditioner with vitamins in it.
Your hair is dead. It can't metabolize anything.
I don't know anything about how it works, but I assumed it was absorbed by the skin on your head not the actual hair.
I still doubt that putting vitamin whatever on your head everyday will actually make a difference
This is correct. It’s about a healthy scalp. Like lotion for your head.
Yeah but you gotta remember "vitamins" is just a dumbed down term to refer to fats and compounds. It's not actually like food or anything nourishing for the hair. Like a lot of haircare stuff has vitamin e in it, which is supposed to help protect hair from hot blow drying damage and also make it shiny. A lot of the stuff is also moisturizers for your scalp.
I always thought the point was for the vitamins to be absorbed by your skin. Human skin absorbs all kinds of stuff so as long as the vitamins make contact it sort of makes sense?
Though I suppose for most people it won't have much of an impact unless you have a severe vitamin deficiency.
VPNs for internet access, at least the way they are advertised
I'm sure plenty of them have nice little deals with the NSA lol
Most of them are owned by one company. The only independent ones are Mullvad, Proton, and IVPN. For the most part, you want to Tor and never sign into anything if you are being ultra private about your browsing.
The Mayers Briggs Type Indicator test. It was developed with the same rigor as horoscopes, yet I still hear people I know are smart proudly tell me their four letter personality code.
Yeah, it's corporate astrology
I've always felt that the Myers-Briggs shit was utter nonsense, having been forced many times to go through it at several employers over the years.
Any chance you've got a decent source that debunks it? I'd love to have it in my pocket for next time...
If you look into it further, neither of the people who designed it has any background in psychology except having read a book by Jung once.
Nice one. This statement in particular sums it up nicely:
Jung did not see the type preferences (such as introversion and extraversion) as dualistic, but rather as tendencies: both are innate and have the potential to balance.
I remember reading elsewhere that it'd be like drawing a line down the middle of a table of people's heights, so that those who were 5 feet 10 inches and under would be the "shorts" and those 5 feet 11 inches and taller would be the "talls".
Anything sold by Gwyneth Paltrow in her online shop, which I will not name here so as not to promote it. In the best case, goods sold there will be harmless and entirely useless. In the worst case, they will cause serious harm.
You mean leaving porous stones in your vagina for a long time can cause damage?
Any "quick fix/all-in-one" fitness or nutrition solutions. While there are minute optimizations for elite athletes, 99.99% of the population can adhere to the general consensus of nutrition and health science.
Do something that gets your heart rate up for at least 30 minutes a day. Speed walk, bike, row, shoot hoops, jump rope, doesn't matter, just get your heart pumping hard for at least half an hour a day.
Roughly a third of your food should be fresh leafy greens & veggies. A third should be whole grains and unprocessed starches and sugars like sweet potato and fresh fruit. The final third should be a protein. Lean meat like fish or chicken, or if you're veg/vegan, beans, tofu, seeds, peas, etc.
To build strength, general bodyweight exercises combined with stretching is fine for most people. If you wanna get really strong, get a few kettle bells or adjustable dumbells on the used market for $50-$100. You don't need an expensive fitness club membership or one of those all-in-one $2,000+ fancy machines that mounts on your wall.
Don't drink often, don't smoke, don't pound stimulants like caffeine or nicotine.
Brush your teeth well.
Get 6-8 hours a night of good quality sleep.
Keep your brain engaged, read, play music, play games, learn a language, etc.
I'm speaking from experience, because I have fallen for stuff over the years that promised fast results and optimal methods with minimal effort. Fact is, unless you're training for the Olympics or you have very specific heath conditions, those basic bullet points will cover the vast majority if general health and fitness.
The problem is thinking anything cures the cold or flu. Once you have either, you have it until it runs its course. The only way to cure either would be to completely eliminate them or how they function in the body with medicine that doesn't currently exist.
AI, particularly in how the likes of microsoft are marketing it to businesses.
ML/LLMs applied sensibly is definitely not snake oil.
Peddling ML/LLMs as AI and saying it will be the biggest paradigm shift ever seen is definitely snake oil and a lot of people just looking to capitalise on the latest fad, just like blockchain, "Big Data" or the metaverse.
Tech companies were struggling to raise funds in the bearish market that followed the pandemic tech boom. They were desperately looking for something big and shiny to use to persuade investors into loosening their wallets, and they've struck gold with "AI" because it sounds so cool and it can "basically do anything", including replacing loads of staff with bots. Investors are being very easily bamboozled by this. Of course FOMO plays a big role here too.
I think "AI" is close to its peak of inflated expectations on the Gartner hype cycle curve below and it will take a while for people to wake up to the realisation that the "Bright AI-fuelled Future" they had been sold is nothing more than a thin wrapper around a ChatGPT API with a pretty bow on top.
Cleanses. You don't need a cleanse if you have a liver and kidneys, and if you don't you need dialysis.
It works well for the developers. Denuvo games take a while to get cracked (if ever). Valorant cheats are really expensive.
Denuvo also prevents easy modding in many cases, causes issues on top of increasing system requirements. Valorant cheats possibility destroys the purpose of the system. But at least valorant anticheat is not being sold as a service to other devs I think.
Not "snakeoil" per say; employers will care about your history of education: but as an aspiring computer engineer currently in CC looking to move to a university, I've learned exactly 0 useful things at community college. Outside of the piece of paper you get at the end, it's all useless busywork, testing how much bullshit you can put up with. Everything useful I've learned in life has been for free, provided kindly by passionate communities. Hopefully this changes in university.
I think the value employers place in modern education in the United States is snakeoil, however.
I’ve learned exactly 0 useful things at community college.
Funnily enough, this is why I left my university and went to a CC. The opportunities for me at a CC have been much greater (especially when it comes to part-time employment positions). The smaller course sizes in my digital design classes in Quartus Prime (which were not present in the lower division curriculum at my original university) allowed me to excel so much that I ended up as a TA for my class. In addition, because I wasn’t asphyxiating myself in a tiny auditorium of 400 people, I found it much easier to approach my professors 1 on 1 to talk about physics outside my course curriculum, which has helped me network and prepare to line up REUs next year. I feel as though the people at my CC are also more down to earth and hardworking than those at my university. The student leadership there didn’t feel as daunting, and felt action-oriented (as opposed to being a pure popularity contest), so I was able to join student government. What I have been achieving over the course of 6 months at a CC is infinitely better than what I was getting at a full university, and I am no longer depressed.
Everyone’s experience is different. In my case, my original university was highly hyped, and very expensive, but left me sorely disappointed, and I was not happy with what I’d be learning according to my course roadmap.
I definitely learned useful things in community college -- at least in so far as general education courses can be considered useful. There were some duds, of course. However, I don't feel like I got much more out of university classes of the same level.
With that being said, you may just have the misfortune of attending a lackluster school.
Almost 30 years into my career as a software engineer, I'm now making a computer game that takes place in Space and were planets and comets follow Orbital Mechanics, so I'm using stuff I learned at Uni all those years ago in Degree-level Physics, since I went to university to study Physics (though later changed to an EE degree and ended up going to work as a software developer after graduating because that's what I really liked to do).
I've also had opportunity to use stuff I learned in the EE degree for software engineering, the most interesting of which was using my knowledge of microprocessor design during the time I was designing high performance distributed systems for Investment Banks.
(I've also used that EE knowledge in making Embedded Systems - because I can do both the hardware and the software sides - though that was just for fun)
Also, pretty much through my career, I would often end up using University-level Mathematics, for example in banking it tended to be stuff like statistics, derivatives and integrals (including numerical approach methods) whilst game-making is heavy on trigonometry, vectors and matrices.
So even though I never formally learned Software Engineering at University, the stuff from the actual STEM degrees I attended (the one were I started - Physics - and the one I ended up graduating in - Electronics Engineering) were actually useful in it, sometimes in surprising ways.
At the very least just the Maths will be the difference between being pretty mediocre or actually knowing what you're doing in more advanced domains that are heavy users of Technology: I would've been pretty lost at making software systems for the business of Equity Derivatives Trading if I didn't know Statistics, Derivatives, Integrals and Numerical Approach Methods and ditto when making GPU shaders for 3D games if I didn't know Trigonometry, Vectors and Matrices.
And this is without going into just understanding stuff I hear about but are currently not using, such as Neural Networks which are used in things like ChatGPT, and Statistics are invaluable in punching through most of the "common sense" bullshit spouted by politicians and other people played to deceive the general public.
Absolutely, you can be a coder, even a good one, without degree level education, but for the more advanced stuff you'll need at least the degree level Maths even if a lot of the rest of your degree will likely be far less useful or useless.
Classic computer science thingy. You learn nothing at all there if you already passionately learn programming
So I got my AA at community college and my bachelors in computer engineering at a university. Other then math and physics there wasn't a ton of useful classes in CC.
But if you are going to an ABET accredited school (or similar if outside north america) you are going to learn a lot in university.
You should learn how to analyze basic RLC circuits. How semiconductors work at a atomic level. How to design basic transistor circuits. Logic gates both design and analysis. Flipflops (the simplest computer). Computer architecture. A programming language or two and some basic assembly. How to use an oscope, logic probe, and multi meter. Basic digital signal processing, fourier transform, and linear controls.
There is a ton to learn and it's not stuff you can just pickup on the job.
Organic food versus GMOs. I think big farma is in on the organic food prices and put false narratives about the dangers of gmo foods.
They're also not even the same category. Organic vs. non was about what kinds of chemicals amwere allowed to be added. Herbicides, pesticides, that kind of thing. GMOs are about whether a certain technology was used to genetically engineer the plants (artificial selection vs. the techniques of molecular biology). But they get all mixed up together as a result of marketing and a public that does not receive information any other way.
There are dangers with GMOs but they're about farming sustainability and corporate power, particularly the use of IP law. The food itself, so far, is perfectly safe.
Also, organic food is not necessarily safer. You can still put fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides on organic crops, you're just restricted to the use of certain kinds. You still need to wash organic produce to get rid of potential residue.
People don't know about the U.S. seed mafia and it shows
I wish the debate around gmos didn't focus on bs about poison so that we could talk about it's moral issues and the disgusting behavior that some gmo producers practiced
Aren't bananas and corn both genetically modified, at least in the analog sense? Both wouldn't exist without humans altering them.
By that logic a lot of vegetables are GMO.
If by "a lot" you mean "nearly all commonly grown crops in the last 200 years or more", then yes. There are very few crops we haven't altered in our quest to feed more people with less work, and even things such as heirloom produce are just varieties that breed true (and may have been around longer than the other varieties).
I have some concerns about GMOs, mostly because we aren't very good at it yet. When we start producing things with the behavior of cucumbers producing cucurbitacin (not a desirable trait, but highly targeted), or if we're adding benign genes that make something produce beta carotene, I'm all for it.
"Artificial Intelligence": CEO's create a copy of themselves in a computer, creating an expert bullshitter program.
Customer Service: Most pre-recorded phone loops are actually built to try to frustrate people into giving up and not getting their issue resolved. Further, they record calls not because they care about your experience, but so they can collate tons of data to further exploit you and their workers. CEOs have purposefully insulated themselves from ever directly having to deal with a customer and hide behind "well we didn't tell employees to break the law!" while demanding employees hit numbers that... aren't... possibe... without... breaking... the... law.
If it's from a corporation and the PR says its to "benefit consumers" it's fucking Snake Oil, by default.
Tesla driver here.
When I first heard the announcement that they were going vision-only, I thought ah shit they're boned.
I replied on maybe a Reddit thread (?) that there was no way it'll work up north in any kind of snowy conditions, and people called me an idiot etc
Fast forward a few years later, when I got to experience it first hand. Anytime I drive the car at night, warnings pop up on the screen like "front left camera is blocked or blinded"
Cue Surprised Pikachu.
In the snow, sometimes it can't even detect a road.
I tried the free trial of FSD and, while it's a neat gimmick, I think I was able to make maybe one or two short trips (2km) without needing to disengage it.
It was really bad
Full Self-Driving
Any idea that comes out of that prick's mouth is snake oil if we're going to be truthful about it.
Vitamin and mineral supplements. You only need supplementation if you have a specific deficiency, and deficiencies are not extremely common. Most people who take supplements do not need them and are just peeing out all the extra things they're putting in their bodies while shelling out ridiculous prices to "natural remedy" companies.
If you think you have a deficiency, explain why to a doctor. A blood test to know for sure is simple. A doctor will know what kind of supplementation would best serve you, and there may be an underlying reason that can be treated to fix it. Also eat some god damn vegetables you fat little piggy
Except vitamin D, deficiency is very widespread
And iron for most women
And sometimes magnesium for sports (which we should all do)
The same goes for pregnancy, where you essentially gain a deficiency because you're building another person inside you.
If I don't take magnesium, I'll get cramps. While a lot of supplements are superfluous, I think you're overgeneralising.
If you think you have a deficiency, explain why to a doctor. A blood test to know for sure is simple. A doctor will know what kind of supplementation would best serve you, and there may be an underlying reason that can be treated to fix it.
I didn't say "no one should take supplements ever," I said most people who take supplements are doing so unnecessarily, and you should do so under the supervision of a physician.
You may have a specific deficiency, but your story does not constitute data.
There have been many studies that have addressed this specific issue. Literally billions of dollars are wasted every year on these supplements. If you have a healthy diet, you are very unlikely to need supplementation.
This is the availability bias, because your experience is normal for you, you unconsciously think your experience is more normal than it is.
Perhaps you can help me with a question? I don't see any way to meet the daily recommend amount of vitamins. Iirc to get enough vitamin k I'd have to eat 200g of spinach every day or some such. Then we haven't covered the other stuff yet.
So what am I not getting here?
Are you finding yourself deficient in vitamin K based on some symptom you're experiencing? Vitamin K is in soybeans, cashews, broccoli, chicken, grapes, blueberries, and a bunch of oils, including soybean, olive, and canola oils, and the list goes on and on. Vitamin K deficiency in adults is extremely rare.
Like every other vitamin and mineral, eating average healthy (and even lots of unhealthy) foods will meet your RDA.
CBD oil. It doesn't matter which exotic ailment you're talking about, someone will ask you if you've tried it and that they think it might help.
Also, CBD honestly needs the same warnings as Grapefruit since it works on the same metabolic pathways and can decrease effectiveness of certain drugs.
...like my cancer drugs.
If your drugs say to avoid grapefruit... You should probably consider skipping CBD as well.
oh, that's useful info...
Had a patient with a really bad reaction to a topical chemotherapy agent because he was moisturizing with CBD oil and wasn’t telling anyone about it. In trying to understand what was going on, it turns out that CBD specifically slows the metabolism of this particular chemotherapy, so it was building up in his skin.
this is the first thing that came to my mind too….
there is some medicinal value to it, but usually not what they claim it to be, and usually not in the form that it’s in….
Crypto. Most LLM based AI. 80-90 percent of the startup world after 2009.
Anything related to toxins or detox. Keto and Carnivore diets.
Most online college programs.
Those vibram finger shoes and barefoot running. Most gym memberships; honestly half of the gym bros need to diet more than they need to slam weights and HIIT
Probably ozempic, since people going off it immediately balloon back up
I've wondered for a long time what the long term impacts of aggressive teeth bleaching are on enamel, too, but not sure if I'd call that snake oil; it works entirely as intended
Ozempic suppresses your appetite, so you eat less when taking it. When that turns off, people tent to eat more, which makes them gain weight.
Keto works, but whether the supposed science behind it is the reason it works, I have no idea.
People say something about ketones and so on, but for me, it's just that eating carbs makes me hangry again soon after I'm done eating them, so I'll want to eat again. Eat less carbs, get less hangry, easier to eat less.
The current discourse around AI and how we are close from agi. Meanwhile we are just using machine learning... With a shit ton of gpus... All of that to approximate a math function.
There was a brief window after ChatGPT when I had a twinkle in my eye and thought "this is an impressive start, how will they improve it? How will they make it more efficient?".
That went away when all the tech companies in unison slurred out "make it bigga!" then pushed to production.
Accupuncture. It is a placebo at best. At worst it is the ccp’s way of expanding its influence In the world.
It is medical astrology is what it is.
The core slikt of anti aging creams and other hydration products.
I can get like, one. But god damned, my wife has so many different products
They can't all possibly be needed
Go to a place where it's sunny all the time. Then go to somewhere where it's cloudy all the time. You'll notice the difference when looking at older people's skins. So hydration and sunscreen are for sure helpful. All the other aging stuff... Dunno, but I think at least some of them are.
Hydration, sleep, proper nutrition, limited sun, and a bit of a cream/oil/barrier for those with naturally dryer skin is important. Stay away from things that cause you inflammation, like smoking, alcohol, and drugs, that cortisol will age you so fast.
Be careful she doesn't OD on anti-ageing serums and turn into a baby. It would be seriously annoying being married to a baby.
There was no 'Rich Dad', it's all made up snake-oil.
Most, if not all, of these books talking about how to get rich are how the authors get rich in the first place. While there may be some good advice in them, the real way to get rich is to sell others on the idea that they could be rich if they buy your products/services.
The new age environment comes to mind, with everything from colonic washes to crystals.
What's wrong babe? 😥 You haven't done your bi-weekly coffee enema yet
I'm shocked that no one has said Essential Oils yet.
They smell nice, if you put them in those burner thing, they have that going to them.
Some also do have specific use cases where they work really well, like Tea Tree Oil for acne and nail fungus or Peppermint oil for nausea. Most of them don't do anything though.
Clove oil is a decent anti-mildew agent. I have used it in a past apartment, and use it on my boat to knock out the mildew scent.
They are just allergic reactions waiting to happen.
Tea tree oil was the only one I think to actually have merit, but I imagine we've been able to reproduce the beneficial part of in a lab. (with minimal risk of triggering allergies)
Wait, are essential oils supposed to be anything more than fragrances you stick in a humidifier thing?
It’s like having a cadre of political officers in your team.
Not a product, but life coach feels like the snake oil version of therapy.
Not like Death coaches. They're a legitimate service to help you achieve a sweet end.
I mean isn't it obviously homoeopathy and a significant part of the rest of alternative medicine (not all of it I guess). It is a billion euro business in Germany alone.
My eye Dr recommends the blue light filtering and "digital lenses" so I got them. I haven't noticed any difference in how my eyes felt. The info packet that came with the glasses noted at all claims regarding these features are not supported by any medical studies.
The American "food" industry, the American "health care" industry, American politics, the prison industrial complex, the military industrial complex, entertainment, right off the top of my head.
The American Dream... because you have to be asleep to believe it.
Standing desks - stationary standing is just as bad as stationary sitting.
Blue light filter stuff - it's my understanding that there's no evidence that blue light causes eye strain.
I always thought the point of standing desks was, that you could periodically switch between standing and sitting. That should be at least somewhat beneficial right?
Standing alternating with sitting doing desk work does alleviate some tension and probably thrombosis. I won't say a lot, but it does help.
The blue light filters are hilarious because most devices already support night mode
Night mode kind of differs. I think there was one piece of software that did it way before operating systems got night mode, and with the help of some measuring device they found out that most competitors turned the screen red but did not actually lower the amount of blue light much, negating the whole point (as the theory behind this stuff is that blue light messes with your sleep schedule). Your screen turning reddish yellow does very little if the effect is achieved by turning on more red and green pixels.
Blue light doesn't damage the eyes unless there is a burning amount of it (or a burning amount of UV), but people with bad eye focus may find it more straining to read things in blue due to the greater light scatter of the color. The solution is wear your reading glasses, I guess.
What really strains the eyes is focusing on close up objects for hours on end. American eye doctors everywhere have the 30/30/30 rule (every 30 minutes, look at something 30ft away for 30 seconds) as a "let your eye muscles relax for a bit" exercise for those of you always working on something up close.
That said, night filters are good just to help with your circadian rhythm, since the brain looks for a persistent abundance of a particular chunk of blue wavelength to determine "daytime".
Yeah if your desk is stuck just in one position that's obviously going to be bad. Most 'standing' desks are actually height adjustable. You can spend some time standing some time sitting. But maybe even more important, you can adjust the desk to the right height rather than just adjusting your chair.
You can at least move a bit more when standing at the desk. Also, my past boss was recommended one due to back issues by his doctor at one point
I called my standing desk a dancing desk. Didn't just stand there. I don't have one now we are back in the office though, some people do but they are all short - I'm taller and it seems too odd to be looking into everyone's workspace.
But how else can you easily assert dominance over the peasants?
Yearly bug and pest deterrent spraying around exteriors of buildings
Self help books
Apps like Nerdwallet
Do you remember that influencer that started her day with alkaline water with lemon juice, the lemon juice being acidic neutralises the alkaline and makes it not alkaline water.
Those self help books just parrot the same things you would find in a wikihow article.
That's snake oil peddler Gwyneth Paltrow if I recall
CBD oil. I bought some about 5 years ago and it did nothing but grease up my tongue
If you buy good quality, you can feel the effects. But the vast majority is trash.
That's my take. I use a CBD vape or oil for arthritis pain and it noticably makes a difference. The oil takes awhile to kick in but it makes me get pretty goofy at higher doses, even without THC in it.
They sell CBD oil with this little droppers for dosing, but when you read the studies the dosage is like a mouthful of oil. It's like the exact opposite problem of melatonin dosing.
In a somewhat metaphorical but nonetheless very real sense - most politics is effectively snake oil.
There's a set of people who exhibit a particular combination of mental illness and natural charisma, such that they feel an irrational urge to impose their wills on others, a lack of the necessary empathy to recognize the harm they do and the personal appeal necessary to convince others to let them do it.
There's another set of people who feel an irrational sense of helplessness - who want to turn control of their lives and their decisions over to others, so they can just go along with a preordained set of values and beliefs and choices rather expending effort on, and taking the risk of, making their own.
And just as in any more standard "snake oil" dynamic, the first group, exclusively for its own benefit, preys upon the weakness and hope of the second. Just as in any other such dynamic, the people of the first group make promises they have no intention of keeping ultimately just so that they can benefit, and the people of the second group continue, irratiomally, to believe those promises, even as all of the available evidence demonstrates that the promises are empty.
Too cynical a take to be real.
The above happens sometimes, and is maybe more common among older entrenched politicians (that we have in spades right now with the aging out of one of the largest generations ever). But most of the time it's real people with real beliefs who want to change things. Governments are usually set up to change slowly, if at all, so often little seems to happen, but those gears do grind slowly based on how they're pushed.
So, your take is definitely a way to make it so the political class can continue to exploit people - you need more people upset and willing to change if you want to make a difference, not lots of powerless apathy.
If you want orange flavored water, squeeze an orange in your water, damn it! You don't need a subscription service for some chemicals that taste like orange
Any weight loss pill, drink, or food. It's all scams built in top of scams.
Those new ones based on diabetes medicine seem nice, but as soon as you stop taking them their effects wear off. They're a medically induced crash diet. The real hard work, fixing your bad habits long-term, still needs to take place.
I tried one if those weight loss food systems once. I'll say it's not really a scam, but if you knew what you were doing, you could do better.
They basically controlled what you could eat so that you ultimately consumed less calories so you could lose weight without having to count calories, or manage macronutrients. But it was also expensive and the food was terrible, and as you said, as soon as you get off of it, you go back to the way you were. ****
However, I do have to thank it for opening my eyes and helping me understand calories and macros a whole lot better. Not to mention proving to me that I could in fact lose weight, back when I thought it was just the way I'd be forever. Because then I started looking into why it worked and what I needed to do to stop buying that crap and eat real food again.
Oh, that's not what I meant. Weight loss programs, especially the ones designed to help you maintain weight for the long term, work well. I'd say they're probably the best way to lose weight if you can't do it alone (and very few people that really need it can). There are some bullshit ones, but there are also great alternatives.
What doesn't work is the "drink a bag of this powder every day and you'll lose weight automatically" bullshit. Sometimes this bullshit is also sold as berries, sometimes it's some foreign kind of nut, but new "magical weight loss food" bullshit pops up a few times per year and desperate people will fall for it over and over again.
The latest Super Foods. Remember when coconut and especially coconut oil was called a super food and was all the hype, yet coconut oil is full of saturated fats (higher than in butter) and actually raises cholesterol levels when consumed regularly.
Coconut oil is a superfood because you can eat it and use it to do butt stuff.
I'm not disputing that certain super foods are just marketing but I would also say that almost no food is healthy when consumed in excess.
"Regular consumption of coconut oil may raise cholesterol levels and is high in saturated fats". How regular are we talking about? Every day? Every week? What amount of oil? A few ml or 3L? And what kind of cholesterol are we talking about here? The good one or the bad one?
Coconut oil may well be a nutritious, healthy oil when eaten sensibly, just like eating nuts is very good for you but you don't want to eat too much at once because they are very high in calories.
"Almost everyone" seems a bit broad. Lots of people watch porn and illegally download stuff that they don't want their ISP to know about, especially in countries like the USA where ISPs are allowed to sell browsing statistics of their customers for marketing purposes.
I take offence to the "protect against hackers" bullshit those ads keep repeating, but for their intended purpose, VPNs are a good solution.
Your ISP selling your browsing data is the hacker.
Who do you trust more? Your isp, or a random vpn Company that not only own one vpn-service, but surprisingly many. (Nord security owns NordVPN and Surfshark, Kape owns ExpressVPN and Cyberghost). And wouldn't it be need if you, as NSA, would have a direct connection to the data people concerned with there privacy? It's not like their "no log" policy really exists if the have to write logs by law.
But if you don't use a VPN with military grade encryption hackers can steal your money from the banking website that only uses military grade encryption!
So your saying I should keep an eye on the War Thunder forums?
Considering Nord (and most VPNs, especially the ones that advertise themselves) are all owned by one company, who has a huge conflict of interest (they're an ad company) with VPNs to begin with.
Dietary advice based on the food pyramid/MyPlate. Before the late '70s, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, and mental illnesses were all rare in the general population.
We need to be eating fewer carbohydrates, not basing our diets around them. We need to be getting most of our calories from fat, not demonising it.
Thankfully, we have people like Dr. Ken Berry, Dr. Chris Palmer, Dr. Anthony Chaffee, Dr. Georgia Ede, Dr. Shawn Baker, Dr. Paul Mason, Dr. Tony Hampton, Dr. Jason Fung, and others spreading this message.
IoT, AI, much of consensus based academia and press.
I feel like there is legitimate uses for IoT and Ai but it gets shoved into everything where it isn't necessary.
How is IoT snakeoil? A great chunk of the world's infrastructure runs on IoT devices. Your electric, gas, and water meters are almost assuredly IoT if you are serviced within the US.
Poor design and implementation. The S in IOT stands for security. So many devices connected to the internet that don’t need to be. I get that it’s cool to control devices from your phone, but why is it necessary to send data from the device to a company’s server so I can retrieve it with an app? I should be able to connect to the device directly from the app, across my local network, without having to send private data to the cloud.
I don't disagree, but that's not "snakeoil".
Snake oil is a term used to describe deceptive marketing, health care fraud, or a scam. Similarly, snake oil salesman is a common label used to describe someone who sells, promotes, or is a general proponent of some valueless or fraudulent cure, remedy, or solution.
Yes it does, but for everyone else you are talking about the stones that Gwyneth Paltrow keeps in there, for Kegel exercise I guess I'm not going to look into it that much.
MS Windows
Insurance corporations
To be honest, the oil of a snake is probably pretty nutritious and would surely correct certain deficiencies
Car engine injector cleaner and almost any add-it-yourself fuel additive.
I would have to disagree on this one. Working in the auto industry has helped me see that they do help in long term circumstances. Like every 20k miles or so. Knocks off some of the impurity burn offs that stick on the valves.
Yeah agree. They're kind of sold as a cure all, which they're not, but if you have a very specific problem they'll help. I think the thing is a lot of times people use them without addressing the root cause. But it's definitely saved me a deep clean before.
The best treatment you can put through a gasoline engine is ethanol-free gasoline.
Quite literal. The Chlorine Dioxide Solution scam came to me through a podologist a year or so ago. What makes this outstanding to me, it's they succeeded at having some academic backup, though, completely out of context. It's an absolute rabbit hole, you are warned.
Majority of the "AI inside" software and solutions. It's in a bubble and everyone is throwing crap to a wall hoping it sticks.
"AI" is the new "blockchain". It's a solution looking for a solid problem to tackle, with some niche applications
I mean, at least Ai has SOME useful applications, the blockchain was just wasting energy for some numbers.
Blockchain also has some useful applications. Most (but not all) of them are also possible with technology and such that existed when bitcoin was first created, at far lower cost for a minor tradeoff in accuracy. On top of that, almost none of them are related to speculative markets.
It's a way to do distributed transaction logs in a non-refutable and independantly verifiable way. That's useful and important, but it was a solution in search of a problem. Even for the highest security, most at risk transactions, the existing international fincancial systems are "good enough" to ensure reliability of transaction logs.
In the end, blockchain and now AI are just falling victim to con men trying to milk as much money as they can from things before people build a working understanding of them. They'll just keep moving onto the next big thing as it comes.
I just wish people had long enough memories to see the cycle for terms like these. Some new word catches vogue, companies fall over themselves trying to find ways to implement them for shareholders and consumers who have no idea what they actually represent. As that fades, a new term arises.. it's sad.
And virtual reality gets a free revival every other technology, while we're at it.
I'm predicting VR coming back into the limelight, try again, shortly after everyone loses interest in AI.
Also, I'm still pissed that flying cars aren't in the limelight more. I was promised daily updates, and I'm not seeing them. That's the biggest proof that the media is completely disconnected.
We have flying cars. They're called helicopters, and they suck for most activities
I am so over hearing about AI. It's getting to the point that I can assume anyone dropping the term at work is an idiot that hasn't actually used or utilised it.
It's this LLM phase. It's super cool and a big jump in AI, but it's honestly not that good. It's a handy tool and one you need to heavily scrutinise beyond basic tasks. Businesses that jumped on it are now seeing the negative effects of thinking it was magic from the future that does everything. The truth is, it's stupid and people need to learn about it, understand it, and be trained in how to use it before it can be effective. It is a tool, not a solution—at least for now anyways.
So, like a hammer. A very expensive, environment-destroying hammer.
That's actually a pretty good analogy.
I think more like discovering making fire or something. 90% of all the energy burnt is people worshipping it as it blazes away, never actually fulfilling any practical use except being marvelous to be around.
But once the forest is all chopped down, people are forced to understand fire and realise a couple small logs in a contained place was all they needed to have it be incredibly effective.
Oh, but that's too hard. It's magic right now. All hail the AI bonfire!
I equate an AI to an intern. It's useful for some stuff but if I'm going to attach my name to it I'm going to review it and probably change a lot about it.
notice how all of those crypto features were quietly removed from platforms after people realised they were paying millions for some numbers, i think that will happen with Ai
I just got a notification on my phone telling me that I can chat with my PDF documents. Why the fuck would I want to do that? Do these companies realize that literally no one is asking for this shit? I also saw an ad for a computer mouse that had AI inside it. Whatever that means.
I just got a notification on my phone telling me that I can chat with my PDF documents
I belive you got that notification but I honestly have no idea what it even means.
It's from the Adobe Acrobat app. Basically you can ask it to give you a summary of whatever document you're reading.
My research was literally on AI back in college. Most AI solutions are just basic algorithms and don't use real AI solutions. There's a huge difference.
It's even better than that. A lot of companies are taking NVIDIA's pre-built workflows, running their data through them and selling the results as their own AI. "We build proprietary RAG AI!"
I can't wait to get a Smart AI refrigerator that tells me I have a bunch of food that isn't really in there even when I didn't ask it to.
Chiropractic.
Everything in Holland and Barrett.
As a medical device engineer working in spine - absolutely chiropractors.
What about osteopaths?
I was not familiar with this term and had to look it up. From my brief search, it also seems like snake oil, and I don't know why someone would not go to a real physical therapist instead.
Not saying anything about the source, but https://www.webmd.com/pain-management/osteopathic-medicine
I absolutely had a PT after a car accident that used spinal manipulation and it seemed to help. She also had me using elastic bands for stretching and hydrotherapy, so there's that
Fair, I do have a number of MD DO consultants. The initial look I had was not within the DO licensing.
Osteopaths (who have a Doctorate of Osteopathy and are often referred to as DOs) go to medical school and receive training that's almost exactly the same as an MD.
the difference (so i'm told) is that DOs are trained to take a more holistic, full-body approach to diagnostics and treatment rather than only focusing on one set of symptoms/treatment. They also do their residencies and internships alongside MDs.
Yes, I've heard some people say that they trust DOs more because they're more deliberately trained to look at a larger picture of a person's health. I don't have my own opinion since I've never met with a DO.
DO are real doctors. Rarer than MDs because there are less schools but totally real docs. My Mom with 30 years nursing experience says their training is basically identical, but DOs are generally nicer.
It depends on the country. Everywhere but the US, I believe, osteopaths are witch doctors on the same level as chiropractors. In the US, they were originally like that, but their professional organization basically pushed it into being a real medical degree.
Now they go to the same length schooling as MD's, and take the same exams as far as I know.
The core of the whole discipline, osteopathy, is a pseudoscience, though. While they are usually competent doctors they still have that core of pseudoscience. They like to market themselves as more "holistic", but that's usually a good dogwhistle term to let you know information not supported by science is going to follow. They bring up that they are the same as MDs, but with additional training in osteopathy, but that can't be true because the schooling is the same length, so to fit in the pseudoscience, they get less science.
The real reason why we have DO's is that we don't have capacity in our country to educate enough MDs, so we have this weird parallel system.
I sometimes come across influencers pushing chrio "treatments" on pets or newborns, saying it makes them "breathe better" or be "more energetic"
It's infuriating
its a bit more than infuriating, thats straight up dangerous.
I've told this story before, but newborn chiropractors are a thing, and many new parents will take their BABIES to get their neck and back snapped around. It's frankly fucking disgusting.
I used to see a lot of threads on reddit about people who got injuries from cheap chiropractors.
Problem is, people go to chiropractor when they don't have access to real doctor, problem either the money or/and most doctors in your city/state can't/refuse do anything about your problem, desperation is one hell of a stimulus
There's almost nothing a chiropractor can do if doctors aren't treating you. Except lie and steal your money.
I can somewhat understand this. I have IBS, and most people with a bowel issue will tell you that IBS is basically your doctor saying ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Instead of getting help from your doctor, you go online and you hear about people finding relief through taking weird supplements, or eating only rice, or taking pre and probiotics of varying types. None of it has any proof, but it's better to try something than to struggle - and sometimes you're lucky or you find some short-lived relief.
The difference is that there often isn't evidence for these things working, whereas there is plenty of evidence out there that says that chiropractors are doing legitimately dangerous practices to your body. The difference is that someone is trying to make a profit from this lack of knowledge.
Holland and Barrett sell supplements. Some people do need to take a vitamin d tablet a day. I do but I've got a prescription for a vitamin d and calcium tablet because I've been low for years.
I work 3rd shift, so I take Vitamin D because the sun is my nemesis.
Be careful with vitamin D though. That is one of the very very few vitamins that you can actually take too much of because it's fat soluble, not water soluble, so excessive vitamin D will build up in your fat cells rather than just getting peed out. It's called vitamin D toxicity (VDT) and it can have some unpleasant neurological effects among other things.
So it's probably a good idea to get your levels checked anyways just to make sure you're taking the right amount if you need it.
I take vitamin D about 5 months out of the year. Stupid fall back daylight saving time is part of it. Makes me furious my already battered mental health has to get worse from changing the clocks.
Essential oils. Homeopathy. Chiropractic. Reiki. Juice cleanses. Perineum sunning. Internet accelerator software. Iridology. Faith healing. Organic food. Oil pulling. Gold plated digital audio cables.
It’s worth noting that gold plated connectors are not snake oil. Gold is a good conductor and doesn’t form a nonconductive oxide layer. That means it’s going to be more durable and won’t corrode together or apart like those old ass sheet metal tube sockets that all need to be cleaned.
Everything marketed audiophiles, not only gold plated cables, but also anything that uses vacuum tubes because "they sound better"
There’s a LOT of snake oil in the audio world. Especially home theater and home studio setups. I’m a professional audio technician, and some of the “audiophile” setups I have seen are just outright asinine.
Use balanced signal for runs over ~3 feet. Use the cheapest star-quad cable you can get, and the most basic $4 Neutrik connectors. Why? Because that album you’re using to test your “hi-fi” sound system was recorded using exactly that: Cheap ¢30/foot cable and basic Neutrik connectors.
It’s also what concert setups use. You think a concert with six combined miles of cabling is going to be paying $2000 per cable? Fuck no, they’re using the cheap shit (which was hand soldered in bulk at the warehouse workbench by their lowest paid shop tech), to run that million dollar audio system. Their money goes to the speakers, amps, and mixer; Not gold plated wire, robotic soldering, or triple insulated jackets. In double-blind tests, audiophiles can’t hear the difference between a $500 cable and a couple of plasti-dipped coat hangers twisted together.
The people who complain about digital audio also can’t tell the difference in double-blind tests. Because modern audio hardware is able to perfectly emulate old analog gear. Google the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem for a breakdown of how we can perfectly capture and recreate analog audio with digital equipment. Vacuum tubes were groundbreaking when they were first used. But they had a lot of issues, and have very little relevance in today’s systems. They’re prone to burning out, notoriously fragile, and can be emulated perfectly.
The Norquist-Shannon rate sampling theorem only asserts that for a given maximum frequency, you only need another other given maximum frequency of sampling to represent it.
It does not say you can “perfectly” reproduce a signal. Only that you can reproduce all fourier components of the signal that are below half your sampling rate in frequency. It perfectly does that, yes.
But the signals that only contain a finite number of frequencies all below a certain maximum frequency are abstractions used in signal theory classes for teaching that theorem, and in engineering to hit a “good enough” target, not a “perfect” target.
Any frequencies bouncing around the room at over 22 kHz are lost at least to something using the 44 kHz sampling format.
TL;DR: Norquist-Shannon lets you completely reproduce signals with finite information in them. But real life sound doesn’t have finite information in it.
It's Nyquist–Shannon. Norquist is taxes.
Also frequencies greater than half the sampling rate aren't lost they fold into lower frequencies unless filtered out.
But if you think it's easiser to capture those room acoustics with analog equipment the non linear amplification and distortion of any analog system is going to change the sound just add much if not more then a good digital system.
So yeah both lose or distort the signal but digital does it in avery predictable way that can be accounted for and it does have a frequency region that it captures precisely. Analog doesn't.
Nyquist, thank you.
If by “fold into” you mean they add noise to and hence distort the readings on the lower frequencies, that’s correct. But that just takes it further from a perfect reproduction.
I was buying a toslink cable recently and I shit you not, there was a gold plated optical cable...
Fucking Toslink: one round optical fiber in the middle, but it plugs in in only one position out of four, and you can't feel which way the female connector is. EU should fine the assholes responsible.
Doesn‘t that defeat the entire purpose of Toslink cables ? The light can‘t go through gold?
The connector was gold plated. Not a golden wire.
I agree, but with one caveat.
Fully analog tube amps do definitely produce a warmer/richer sound with less complicated things to go wrong. Artists like them because they are reliable, generally user serviceable, (usually just need to replace bad/old tubes) and makes each recording sound relatively unique.
The thing is, is that it really only works during production. Unless being cut direct to a master record, the sound will get saved in a digital format to produce the user-facing media, which can include digital-source vinyls.
Those products marketed to audiophiles try to take the digitally recorded/archived products to "try" making it sound like the original.
I remember buying some bits and pieces to setup my home theatre in a new house years ago, and the guy at the store tried to sell me a $100 TOSLINK cable. When I asked why a $12 cable was going for so much, he pointed out that it was the "premium" cable, to ensure the highest quality audio.
I couldn't stop laughing. Like their special cable scrubbed the photons before sending them or something.
I'm sorry WHAT
I've not heard of this but I assume it's irradiating your taint/barse/grundle with sunlight. Although for what purpose is beyond me.
Edit: Wikipedia link
Oil pulling, if you're also OOTL. Swishing fancy oil around your mouth.
One of my co-workers went for that whole hog. I remember him telling me there was no need to brush any more - just swirl oil around your mouth for ten minutes. I don't know if it works, but brushing only takes two minutes...
Well, there’s nothing wrong with using coconut oil for gum health. Some people even use it as a mouthwash because it was some antibacterial properties. It doesn’t replace the need for brushing your goddamn teeth, that’s an insane thing to think. But there is actually benefits to coconut oil for sensitive teeth (along with a change in diet), antibacterial properties, as well as the normal benefits of consuming coconut oil. It’s not all complete hogwash.
How do you bundle up organic food with the rest of that ?
At best, organic food offers the same nutritional value as non organic food. At worst, it’s less nutritious and more expensive.
meh. nutritional value is about the same, yeah, but that's not the point of organic food. people who claim that eating an all organic diet makes you better are yahoos.
The point of organic farming is that it is just all-around better for the planet, the soil, the organisms therein and less polluting.
The only real issue I see with organic food is that it excludes GMOs
GMOs are an issue for nations' food sovereignty, but organic food modt importantly means no phytosanitary products (such as the infamous roundup), which persist in the plants and cause all sorts of cancers
Hi-resolution audio, especially for streaming. The general idea is that listening to digital audio files that have a greater bit depth and sample rate than CD (24-bit/192Khz vs 16-bit/44.1 KHz) translates to better-sounding audio, but in practice that isn't the case.
For a detailed breakdown as to why, there's a great explanation here. But in summary, the format for CDs was so chosen because it covers enough depth and range to cover the full spectrum of human hearing.
So while "hi-res" audio does contain a lot more information (which, incidentally, means it uses up significantly more data/storage space and costs more money), our ears aren't capable of hearing it in the first place. Certain people may try to argue otherwise based on their own subjective experience, but to that I say "the placebo effect is a helluva drug."
Conversely low res audio clearly sounds like trash.
Up to a certain point, yes. >192k AAC / OGG / Opus sounds just as good as FLAC in a blind test, though. Even with good equipment.
Yeah, I'm thinking of circa 2000 MP3s. 128k was the good stuff and lower was still common.
Back when a 4 minute song was like 1.5MB so you could fit more music on your 256MB mp3 player because you could not afford an iPod.
Oh yeah. 128k rips from back then were rough. MP3 has gotten somewhat better since then, to be fair. V0/V1 VBR is still perfectly fine to listen to; it's just not as efficient as the newer codecs.
All of this is very true, but this is the only issue I really disagree with here.
I am in an era where a good quality rip of a movie can be almost 50 gigabytes by itself. That means for every terabyte of storage, I can store just 20 of movies of this size.
Don't even get my started on television series and how big those can balloon to with the same kind of encoding.
An entire collection of FLACs, thousands of albums worth, is still less than 500 gigabytes total, in other words half a terabyte. (My personal collection anyway)
I mean, the average size of one of my FLAC albums is around 200-300 megabytes. Even with the larger "hi-res" FLAC files you're still not getting as obscenely big as movie and television files.
Sure, it takes up more space than an MP3 or a FLAC properly encoded to CD standards (my preferred choice, for the reasons outlined above), but realistically, the amount of space it takes up compared to those is negligible when compared to other types of media.
Storage and energy to operate storage has become incredibly cheap, especially when you're dealing with smaller files like this.
This is true, especially if you are storing files locally. However, even compared to "CD quality" FLAC, a 24/192 album is still going to be around three times larger (around 1GB per album) to download. If everyone switched over to streaming hi-res audio tomorrow, there would be a noticeable jump in worldwide Internet traffic.
I'm personally not ok with the idea of bandwidth usage jumping up over 3x (and even more compared to lossy streaming) for no discernable benefit.
An extremely reasonable position to take! Because even if the increase in energy usage is negligible locally, when widespread, those small chunks of energy use add up into a much larger chunk of energy use. Especially when including transferring that over an endless number of networks.
I always talk about this in regards to automobiles and manual roll-up/down windows versus automatic windows. Sure, it's an extremely small amount of energy to use for automatic windows on a car, but when you add up the energy used on every cars automatic windows through the life of each and every car with automatic windows and suddenly it's no longer a small number. Very wasteful, imho.
I've always kinda wondered about this. I'm not an audio guy and really can't tell the difference between most of the standards. That said, I definitely remember tons and tons 'experts' telling me that no one can tell the difference between 720p and 1080p TV at typical distance to your couch. And I absolutely could and many of the people I know could. I can also tell the difference between 1080 and 4k, at the same distances.
So I'm curious if there's just a natural variance in an individual's ability to hear and audiophiles just have a better than average range that does exceed CD quality?
Similar to this, I can tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps, but not 60 to 120, yet some people swear they can. Which I believe, I just know that I can't. Seems like these guidelines are probably more averages, rather than hard biological limits.
It's a fair question. Human hearing ability is a spectrum like anything else, however when it comes to discerning the difference in audio quality, the vast, vast majority of people cannot reliably tell the difference between high-bitrate lossy and lossless when they do a double blinded test. And that includes audiophiles with equipment worth thousands of dollars.
Of that tiny minority who can consistently distinguish between the two, they generally can only tell by listening very closely for the very particular characteristics of the encoder format, which takes a highly trained ear and a lot of practice.
The blind aspect is important because side-by-side comparisons (be they different audio formats, or 60fps vs 120fps video) are highly unreliable because people will generally subconsciously prefer the one they know is supposed to be better.
It's for all the pets at homes hearing the same audio, now with original insects and birds outside and mice in the walls.
True. There's something to be said for pleasuring any passing bats who might be in the vicinity.
Right you are, but don't start telling everyone so I can't silently download my lossless albums from Tidal, Deezer and Qobuz anymore.
Blue light filter on glasses. When I got my glasses, the lady said they come with blue light filter for free, and I said, “I don’t want that, my job requires that I see colors accurately, so I can’t have any sort of color filter.” She said don’t worry, it doesn’t filter any colors. Ok, then what the fuck is it exactly?
She was just upselling, not actually knowledgeable. They filter some blue spectrum, not the whole color blue.
They literally have no blue light filter in them. It was just marketing snake oil. I don’t even know why they do that. Who would want that in their glasses?
I thought it was a coating, like what they use to filter UV light. I have Theraspecs that do it, but those are sunglasses.
I have a blue light filter on my glasses. I opted in because I sometimes use screens close to bed time for work.
I'm not going to tell you they work better then a placebo, but they work as good as one, and that's all I need.
They are 100% yellow tinted. Anyone who tells you they don't block blue light is a liar.
Here's an expert explaining why they're a scam: https://www.quora.com/If-blue-light-on-smartphones-causes-macular-degeneration-shouldnt-it-be-illegal/answer/Bill-Otto-5
Hmm wasn't expecting an actual answer on Quora but I was pleasantly surprised
I practice polyphasic sleep and reducing blue light is pretty important there to avoid messing your circadian rhythm.
The community recomends wearing the orange laser protection glasses, the same ones laser cutter operators use. Because that's what glasses actually have to look like to filter blue light.
Anti virus software. To protect your computer let's constantly run this software with root privileges!
I remember mcAffee webadvisor came preinstalled with a crappy asus vivobook i got when i was younger, i could not delete it, i had to manually remove the files from the programfiles folder but it reinstalled itself every time it updated, the laptop bricked itself recently anyway so it doesn't matter.
That's when you wipe the os and install linux
Good endpoint protection doesn't run with any root privileges.
I have a couple from the hip actually, because America has grifting baked into it's soul. In no particular order:
As more of these come to me, I'll try to expand the list.
Update: I can't believe I forgot chiros! They turned themselves into a religion at one point to try to dodge medical licensure laws.
I would say that a lot of stuff being peddled through tiktok and Instagram are scams. Those anti-5g dongles come to mind.
Tin foil hats are much better anti5g solution.
Baker Bucket is a good name for a gravity bong setup.
Chiropractic anything. John Oliver covered it quite well.
What episode was that?
Shampoo and conditioner with vitamins in it.
Your hair is dead. It can't metabolize anything.
I don't know anything about how it works, but I assumed it was absorbed by the skin on your head not the actual hair.
I still doubt that putting vitamin whatever on your head everyday will actually make a difference
This is correct. It’s about a healthy scalp. Like lotion for your head.
Yeah but you gotta remember "vitamins" is just a dumbed down term to refer to fats and compounds. It's not actually like food or anything nourishing for the hair. Like a lot of haircare stuff has vitamin e in it, which is supposed to help protect hair from hot blow drying damage and also make it shiny. A lot of the stuff is also moisturizers for your scalp.
I always thought the point was for the vitamins to be absorbed by your skin. Human skin absorbs all kinds of stuff so as long as the vitamins make contact it sort of makes sense?
Though I suppose for most people it won't have much of an impact unless you have a severe vitamin deficiency.
VPNs for internet access, at least the way they are advertised
I'm sure plenty of them have nice little deals with the NSA lol
Most of them are owned by one company. The only independent ones are Mullvad, Proton, and IVPN. For the most part, you want to Tor and never sign into anything if you are being ultra private about your browsing.
What about airvpn ?
The Mayers Briggs Type Indicator test. It was developed with the same rigor as horoscopes, yet I still hear people I know are smart proudly tell me their four letter personality code.
Yeah, it's corporate astrology
I've always felt that the Myers-Briggs shit was utter nonsense, having been forced many times to go through it at several employers over the years.
Any chance you've got a decent source that debunks it? I'd love to have it in my pocket for next time...
The Wikipedia entry for it is pretty scathing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indicator
If you look into it further, neither of the people who designed it has any background in psychology except having read a book by Jung once.
Nice one. This statement in particular sums it up nicely:
I remember reading elsewhere that it'd be like drawing a line down the middle of a table of people's heights, so that those who were 5 feet 10 inches and under would be the "shorts" and those 5 feet 11 inches and taller would be the "talls".
Anything sold by Gwyneth Paltrow in her online shop, which I will not name here so as not to promote it. In the best case, goods sold there will be harmless and entirely useless. In the worst case, they will cause serious harm.
You mean leaving porous stones in your vagina for a long time can cause damage?
Any "quick fix/all-in-one" fitness or nutrition solutions. While there are minute optimizations for elite athletes, 99.99% of the population can adhere to the general consensus of nutrition and health science.
I'm speaking from experience, because I have fallen for stuff over the years that promised fast results and optimal methods with minimal effort. Fact is, unless you're training for the Olympics or you have very specific heath conditions, those basic bullet points will cover the vast majority if general health and fitness.
Homeopathics, though sometimes even a placebo can have beneficial effects.
Definitely this one, the products are sometimes placed right next to legitimate ones and worse:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/marketplace-homeopathic-products-1.6254025
The thing is, placebos can work even if the patient knows it's a placebo. Which I think is crazy and amazing.
But it doesn't look good for homeopathic grifters.
Obligatory Vic and Bob.
The problem is thinking anything cures the cold or flu. Once you have either, you have it until it runs its course. The only way to cure either would be to completely eliminate them or how they function in the body with medicine that doesn't currently exist.
AI, particularly in how the likes of microsoft are marketing it to businesses.
ML/LLMs applied sensibly is definitely not snake oil.
Peddling ML/LLMs as AI and saying it will be the biggest paradigm shift ever seen is definitely snake oil and a lot of people just looking to capitalise on the latest fad, just like blockchain, "Big Data" or the metaverse.
Tech companies were struggling to raise funds in the bearish market that followed the pandemic tech boom. They were desperately looking for something big and shiny to use to persuade investors into loosening their wallets, and they've struck gold with "AI" because it sounds so cool and it can "basically do anything", including replacing loads of staff with bots. Investors are being very easily bamboozled by this. Of course FOMO plays a big role here too.
I think "AI" is close to its peak of inflated expectations on the Gartner hype cycle curve below and it will take a while for people to wake up to the realisation that the "Bright AI-fuelled Future" they had been sold is nothing more than a thin wrapper around a ChatGPT API with a pretty bow on top.
Cleanses. You don't need a cleanse if you have a liver and kidneys, and if you don't you need dialysis.
Homeopathic remedies
At least you'll never have to worry about overdosing on it.
Software/game DRM/anticheat (as a service/product) that involves code obfuscation and/or kernel driver.
It is an anti consumer practice wrapped in pro consumer propaganda.
The thing is that there are other choices and people need to start voting with their feet. Do you really need to buy 12th of call of duty?
Asking for a friend.
It works well for the developers. Denuvo games take a while to get cracked (if ever). Valorant cheats are really expensive.
Denuvo also prevents easy modding in many cases, causes issues on top of increasing system requirements. Valorant cheats possibility destroys the purpose of the system. But at least valorant anticheat is not being sold as a service to other devs I think.
Apple products
Not "snakeoil" per say; employers will care about your history of education: but as an aspiring computer engineer currently in CC looking to move to a university, I've learned exactly 0 useful things at community college. Outside of the piece of paper you get at the end, it's all useless busywork, testing how much bullshit you can put up with. Everything useful I've learned in life has been for free, provided kindly by passionate communities. Hopefully this changes in university.
I think the value employers place in modern education in the United States is snakeoil, however.
Funnily enough, this is why I left my university and went to a CC. The opportunities for me at a CC have been much greater (especially when it comes to part-time employment positions). The smaller course sizes in my digital design classes in Quartus Prime (which were not present in the lower division curriculum at my original university) allowed me to excel so much that I ended up as a TA for my class. In addition, because I wasn’t asphyxiating myself in a tiny auditorium of 400 people, I found it much easier to approach my professors 1 on 1 to talk about physics outside my course curriculum, which has helped me network and prepare to line up REUs next year. I feel as though the people at my CC are also more down to earth and hardworking than those at my university. The student leadership there didn’t feel as daunting, and felt action-oriented (as opposed to being a pure popularity contest), so I was able to join student government. What I have been achieving over the course of 6 months at a CC is infinitely better than what I was getting at a full university, and I am no longer depressed.
Everyone’s experience is different. In my case, my original university was highly hyped, and very expensive, but left me sorely disappointed, and I was not happy with what I’d be learning according to my course roadmap.
I definitely learned useful things in community college -- at least in so far as general education courses can be considered useful. There were some duds, of course. However, I don't feel like I got much more out of university classes of the same level.
With that being said, you may just have the misfortune of attending a lackluster school.
Almost 30 years into my career as a software engineer, I'm now making a computer game that takes place in Space and were planets and comets follow Orbital Mechanics, so I'm using stuff I learned at Uni all those years ago in Degree-level Physics, since I went to university to study Physics (though later changed to an EE degree and ended up going to work as a software developer after graduating because that's what I really liked to do).
I've also had opportunity to use stuff I learned in the EE degree for software engineering, the most interesting of which was using my knowledge of microprocessor design during the time I was designing high performance distributed systems for Investment Banks.
(I've also used that EE knowledge in making Embedded Systems - because I can do both the hardware and the software sides - though that was just for fun)
Also, pretty much through my career, I would often end up using University-level Mathematics, for example in banking it tended to be stuff like statistics, derivatives and integrals (including numerical approach methods) whilst game-making is heavy on trigonometry, vectors and matrices.
So even though I never formally learned Software Engineering at University, the stuff from the actual STEM degrees I attended (the one were I started - Physics - and the one I ended up graduating in - Electronics Engineering) were actually useful in it, sometimes in surprising ways.
At the very least just the Maths will be the difference between being pretty mediocre or actually knowing what you're doing in more advanced domains that are heavy users of Technology: I would've been pretty lost at making software systems for the business of Equity Derivatives Trading if I didn't know Statistics, Derivatives, Integrals and Numerical Approach Methods and ditto when making GPU shaders for 3D games if I didn't know Trigonometry, Vectors and Matrices.
And this is without going into just understanding stuff I hear about but are currently not using, such as Neural Networks which are used in things like ChatGPT, and Statistics are invaluable in punching through most of the "common sense" bullshit spouted by politicians and other people played to deceive the general public.
Absolutely, you can be a coder, even a good one, without degree level education, but for the more advanced stuff you'll need at least the degree level Maths even if a lot of the rest of your degree will likely be far less useful or useless.
Classic computer science thingy. You learn nothing at all there if you already passionately learn programming
So I got my AA at community college and my bachelors in computer engineering at a university. Other then math and physics there wasn't a ton of useful classes in CC.
But if you are going to an ABET accredited school (or similar if outside north america) you are going to learn a lot in university.
You should learn how to analyze basic RLC circuits. How semiconductors work at a atomic level. How to design basic transistor circuits. Logic gates both design and analysis. Flipflops (the simplest computer). Computer architecture. A programming language or two and some basic assembly. How to use an oscope, logic probe, and multi meter. Basic digital signal processing, fourier transform, and linear controls.
There is a ton to learn and it's not stuff you can just pickup on the job.
Keep at it and good luck.
Organic food versus GMOs. I think big farma is in on the organic food prices and put false narratives about the dangers of gmo foods.
They're also not even the same category. Organic vs. non was about what kinds of chemicals amwere allowed to be added. Herbicides, pesticides, that kind of thing. GMOs are about whether a certain technology was used to genetically engineer the plants (artificial selection vs. the techniques of molecular biology). But they get all mixed up together as a result of marketing and a public that does not receive information any other way.
There are dangers with GMOs but they're about farming sustainability and corporate power, particularly the use of IP law. The food itself, so far, is perfectly safe.
Also, organic food is not necessarily safer. You can still put fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides on organic crops, you're just restricted to the use of certain kinds. You still need to wash organic produce to get rid of potential residue.
People don't know about the U.S. seed mafia and it shows
I wish the debate around gmos didn't focus on bs about poison so that we could talk about it's moral issues and the disgusting behavior that some gmo producers practiced
Aren't bananas and corn both genetically modified, at least in the analog sense? Both wouldn't exist without humans altering them.
By that logic a lot of vegetables are GMO.
If by "a lot" you mean "nearly all commonly grown crops in the last 200 years or more", then yes. There are very few crops we haven't altered in our quest to feed more people with less work, and even things such as heirloom produce are just varieties that breed true (and may have been around longer than the other varieties).
I have some concerns about GMOs, mostly because we aren't very good at it yet. When we start producing things with the behavior of cucumbers producing cucurbitacin (not a desirable trait, but highly targeted), or if we're adding benign genes that make something produce beta carotene, I'm all for it.
Full Self-Driving: For sure next year... maybe.
"Artificial Intelligence": CEO's create a copy of themselves in a computer, creating an expert bullshitter program.
Customer Service: Most pre-recorded phone loops are actually built to try to frustrate people into giving up and not getting their issue resolved. Further, they record calls not because they care about your experience, but so they can collate tons of data to further exploit you and their workers. CEOs have purposefully insulated themselves from ever directly having to deal with a customer and hide behind "well we didn't tell employees to break the law!" while demanding employees hit numbers that... aren't... possibe... without... breaking... the... law.
If it's from a corporation and the PR says its to "benefit consumers" it's fucking Snake Oil, by default.
Tesla driver here.
When I first heard the announcement that they were going vision-only, I thought ah shit they're boned.
I replied on maybe a Reddit thread (?) that there was no way it'll work up north in any kind of snowy conditions, and people called me an idiot etc
Fast forward a few years later, when I got to experience it first hand. Anytime I drive the car at night, warnings pop up on the screen like "front left camera is blocked or blinded" Cue Surprised Pikachu. In the snow, sometimes it can't even detect a road.
I tried the free trial of FSD and, while it's a neat gimmick, I think I was able to make maybe one or two short trips (2km) without needing to disengage it.
It was really bad
Any idea that comes out of that prick's mouth is snake oil if we're going to be truthful about it.
Vitamin and mineral supplements. You only need supplementation if you have a specific deficiency, and deficiencies are not extremely common. Most people who take supplements do not need them and are just peeing out all the extra things they're putting in their bodies while shelling out ridiculous prices to "natural remedy" companies.
If you think you have a deficiency, explain why to a doctor. A blood test to know for sure is simple. A doctor will know what kind of supplementation would best serve you, and there may be an underlying reason that can be treated to fix it. Also eat some god damn vegetables you fat little piggy
The same goes for pregnancy, where you essentially gain a deficiency because you're building another person inside you.
If I don't take magnesium, I'll get cramps. While a lot of supplements are superfluous, I think you're overgeneralising.
I didn't say "no one should take supplements ever," I said most people who take supplements are doing so unnecessarily, and you should do so under the supervision of a physician.
You may have a specific deficiency, but your story does not constitute data.
There have been many studies that have addressed this specific issue. Literally billions of dollars are wasted every year on these supplements. If you have a healthy diet, you are very unlikely to need supplementation.
This is the availability bias, because your experience is normal for you, you unconsciously think your experience is more normal than it is.
Perhaps you can help me with a question? I don't see any way to meet the daily recommend amount of vitamins. Iirc to get enough vitamin k I'd have to eat 200g of spinach every day or some such. Then we haven't covered the other stuff yet.
So what am I not getting here?
Are you finding yourself deficient in vitamin K based on some symptom you're experiencing? Vitamin K is in soybeans, cashews, broccoli, chicken, grapes, blueberries, and a bunch of oils, including soybean, olive, and canola oils, and the list goes on and on. Vitamin K deficiency in adults is extremely rare.
Like every other vitamin and mineral, eating average healthy (and even lots of unhealthy) foods will meet your RDA.
Extra expensive digital hifi cables.
Anything sold as a "detox"
Rehabs?
CBD oil. It doesn't matter which exotic ailment you're talking about, someone will ask you if you've tried it and that they think it might help.
Also, CBD honestly needs the same warnings as Grapefruit since it works on the same metabolic pathways and can decrease effectiveness of certain drugs.
...like my cancer drugs.
If your drugs say to avoid grapefruit... You should probably consider skipping CBD as well.
oh, that's useful info...
Had a patient with a really bad reaction to a topical chemotherapy agent because he was moisturizing with CBD oil and wasn’t telling anyone about it. In trying to understand what was going on, it turns out that CBD specifically slows the metabolism of this particular chemotherapy, so it was building up in his skin.
CBD does ... something. It makes me sleepy. So at least for some people it can serve as a sleep aid.
Not to me though I just tried it out of curiosity, I have no desire to be even more sleepy
this is the first thing that came to my mind too….
there is some medicinal value to it, but usually not what they claim it to be, and usually not in the form that it’s in….
Crypto. Most LLM based AI. 80-90 percent of the startup world after 2009.
Anything related to toxins or detox. Keto and Carnivore diets.
Most online college programs.
Those vibram finger shoes and barefoot running. Most gym memberships; honestly half of the gym bros need to diet more than they need to slam weights and HIIT
Probably ozempic, since people going off it immediately balloon back up
I've wondered for a long time what the long term impacts of aggressive teeth bleaching are on enamel, too, but not sure if I'd call that snake oil; it works entirely as intended
Ozempic suppresses your appetite, so you eat less when taking it. When that turns off, people tent to eat more, which makes them gain weight.
Keto works, but whether the supposed science behind it is the reason it works, I have no idea.
People say something about ketones and so on, but for me, it's just that eating carbs makes me hangry again soon after I'm done eating them, so I'll want to eat again. Eat less carbs, get less hangry, easier to eat less.
Keto diets demonstrably work for some people.
AI
Middle managers
"Enterprise solutions"
Student loans
The current discourse around AI and how we are close from agi. Meanwhile we are just using machine learning... With a shit ton of gpus... All of that to approximate a math function.
There was a brief window after ChatGPT when I had a twinkle in my eye and thought "this is an impressive start, how will they improve it? How will they make it more efficient?".
That went away when all the tech companies in unison slurred out "make it bigga!" then pushed to production.
Accupuncture. It is a placebo at best. At worst it is the ccp’s way of expanding its influence In the world. It is medical astrology is what it is.
Subscriptions.
The core slikt of anti aging creams and other hydration products.
I can get like, one. But god damned, my wife has so many different products They can't all possibly be needed
Go to a place where it's sunny all the time. Then go to somewhere where it's cloudy all the time. You'll notice the difference when looking at older people's skins. So hydration and sunscreen are for sure helpful. All the other aging stuff... Dunno, but I think at least some of them are.
Hydration, sleep, proper nutrition, limited sun, and a bit of a cream/oil/barrier for those with naturally dryer skin is important. Stay away from things that cause you inflammation, like smoking, alcohol, and drugs, that cortisol will age you so fast.
Be careful she doesn't OD on anti-ageing serums and turn into a baby. It would be seriously annoying being married to a baby.
Rich Dad, Poor Dad
There was no 'Rich Dad', it's all made up snake-oil.
Most, if not all, of these books talking about how to get rich are how the authors get rich in the first place. While there may be some good advice in them, the real way to get rich is to sell others on the idea that they could be rich if they buy your products/services.
Not all, but a lot of coaches. Like the 23-year old just out of school "executive coach", or the "lifestyle coaches", "energetic coaches" etc.
The new age environment comes to mind, with everything from colonic washes to crystals.
What's wrong babe? 😥 You haven't done your bi-weekly coffee enema yet
I'm shocked that no one has said Essential Oils yet.
They smell nice, if you put them in those burner thing, they have that going to them.
Some also do have specific use cases where they work really well, like Tea Tree Oil for acne and nail fungus or Peppermint oil for nausea. Most of them don't do anything though.
Clove oil is a decent anti-mildew agent. I have used it in a past apartment, and use it on my boat to knock out the mildew scent.
They are just allergic reactions waiting to happen.
Tea tree oil was the only one I think to actually have merit, but I imagine we've been able to reproduce the beneficial part of in a lab. (with minimal risk of triggering allergies)
Wait, are essential oils supposed to be anything more than fragrances you stick in a humidifier thing?
They are essential!
If you run a website: Paid SSL/TLS certificates. Free ones like Let's Encrypt and ZeroSSL are just as good, and can be automatically renewed.
Essential oil.
really? I thought they just smelled nice, like incense?
The snake oil part is companies claiming health benefits from them
"Social" "networking"
Agile Coaches.
It’s like having a cadre of political officers in your team.
Not a product, but life coach feels like the snake oil version of therapy.
Not like Death coaches. They're a legitimate service to help you achieve a sweet end.
I mean isn't it obviously homoeopathy and a significant part of the rest of alternative medicine (not all of it I guess). It is a billion euro business in Germany alone.
Gamer glasses
My eye Dr recommends the blue light filtering and "digital lenses" so I got them. I haven't noticed any difference in how my eyes felt. The info packet that came with the glasses noted at all claims regarding these features are not supported by any medical studies.
If I'm sitting in front of a computer for 6+ hours without stopping they help with headaches. But now most computers cone with light filter options.
Upward mobility
The American "food" industry, the American "health care" industry, American politics, the prison industrial complex, the military industrial complex, entertainment, right off the top of my head.
The American Dream... because you have to be asleep to believe it.
Standing desks - stationary standing is just as bad as stationary sitting.
Blue light filter stuff - it's my understanding that there's no evidence that blue light causes eye strain.
I always thought the point of standing desks was, that you could periodically switch between standing and sitting. That should be at least somewhat beneficial right?
Blue light filters may not help with eye strain, but I've definitely benefited from them for circadian rhythm reasons.
Blue light filters can still be nice at night right? As the blue light can keep you awake.
I find it easier on my eyes when its 3am and i am still scrolling.
Standing alternating with sitting doing desk work does alleviate some tension and probably thrombosis. I won't say a lot, but it does help.
The blue light filters are hilarious because most devices already support night mode
Night mode kind of differs. I think there was one piece of software that did it way before operating systems got night mode, and with the help of some measuring device they found out that most competitors turned the screen red but did not actually lower the amount of blue light much, negating the whole point (as the theory behind this stuff is that blue light messes with your sleep schedule). Your screen turning reddish yellow does very little if the effect is achieved by turning on more red and green pixels.
The software you're probably thinking of is f.lux
Blue light doesn't damage the eyes unless there is a burning amount of it (or a burning amount of UV), but people with bad eye focus may find it more straining to read things in blue due to the greater light scatter of the color. The solution is wear your reading glasses, I guess.
What really strains the eyes is focusing on close up objects for hours on end. American eye doctors everywhere have the 30/30/30 rule (every 30 minutes, look at something 30ft away for 30 seconds) as a "let your eye muscles relax for a bit" exercise for those of you always working on something up close.
That said, night filters are good just to help with your circadian rhythm, since the brain looks for a persistent abundance of a particular chunk of blue wavelength to determine "daytime".
Yeah if your desk is stuck just in one position that's obviously going to be bad. Most 'standing' desks are actually height adjustable. You can spend some time standing some time sitting. But maybe even more important, you can adjust the desk to the right height rather than just adjusting your chair.
You can at least move a bit more when standing at the desk. Also, my past boss was recommended one due to back issues by his doctor at one point
I called my standing desk a dancing desk. Didn't just stand there. I don't have one now we are back in the office though, some people do but they are all short - I'm taller and it seems too odd to be looking into everyone's workspace.
But how else can you easily assert dominance over the peasants?
Finance courses promoted by various youtubers.
the vast majority of skincare products.
Do you remember that influencer that started her day with alkaline water with lemon juice, the lemon juice being acidic neutralises the alkaline and makes it not alkaline water.
Those self help books just parrot the same things you would find in a wikihow article.
That's snake oil peddler Gwyneth Paltrow if I recall
CBD oil. I bought some about 5 years ago and it did nothing but grease up my tongue
If you buy good quality, you can feel the effects. But the vast majority is trash.
That's my take. I use a CBD vape or oil for arthritis pain and it noticably makes a difference. The oil takes awhile to kick in but it makes me get pretty goofy at higher doses, even without THC in it.
They sell CBD oil with this little droppers for dosing, but when you read the studies the dosage is like a mouthful of oil. It's like the exact opposite problem of melatonin dosing.
It's an anti-inflammatory at best. If you could feel the effects you probably have way more pressing issues than bum weed.
I wish we'd focus on hemp for building on an industrial scale.. This CBD crap needs to stop
Snake-scented oil. (1% snake oil)
In a somewhat metaphorical but nonetheless very real sense - most politics is effectively snake oil.
There's a set of people who exhibit a particular combination of mental illness and natural charisma, such that they feel an irrational urge to impose their wills on others, a lack of the necessary empathy to recognize the harm they do and the personal appeal necessary to convince others to let them do it.
There's another set of people who feel an irrational sense of helplessness - who want to turn control of their lives and their decisions over to others, so they can just go along with a preordained set of values and beliefs and choices rather expending effort on, and taking the risk of, making their own.
And just as in any more standard "snake oil" dynamic, the first group, exclusively for its own benefit, preys upon the weakness and hope of the second. Just as in any other such dynamic, the people of the first group make promises they have no intention of keeping ultimately just so that they can benefit, and the people of the second group continue, irratiomally, to believe those promises, even as all of the available evidence demonstrates that the promises are empty.
Too cynical a take to be real.
The above happens sometimes, and is maybe more common among older entrenched politicians (that we have in spades right now with the aging out of one of the largest generations ever). But most of the time it's real people with real beliefs who want to change things. Governments are usually set up to change slowly, if at all, so often little seems to happen, but those gears do grind slowly based on how they're pushed.
So, your take is definitely a way to make it so the political class can continue to exploit people - you need more people upset and willing to change if you want to make a difference, not lots of powerless apathy.
AirUp/Flavored water companies
If you want orange flavored water, squeeze an orange in your water, damn it! You don't need a subscription service for some chemicals that taste like orange
IPhone.
Any weight loss pill, drink, or food. It's all scams built in top of scams.
Those new ones based on diabetes medicine seem nice, but as soon as you stop taking them their effects wear off. They're a medically induced crash diet. The real hard work, fixing your bad habits long-term, still needs to take place.
I tried one if those weight loss food systems once. I'll say it's not really a scam, but if you knew what you were doing, you could do better.
They basically controlled what you could eat so that you ultimately consumed less calories so you could lose weight without having to count calories, or manage macronutrients. But it was also expensive and the food was terrible, and as you said, as soon as you get off of it, you go back to the way you were. ****
However, I do have to thank it for opening my eyes and helping me understand calories and macros a whole lot better. Not to mention proving to me that I could in fact lose weight, back when I thought it was just the way I'd be forever. Because then I started looking into why it worked and what I needed to do to stop buying that crap and eat real food again.
Oh, that's not what I meant. Weight loss programs, especially the ones designed to help you maintain weight for the long term, work well. I'd say they're probably the best way to lose weight if you can't do it alone (and very few people that really need it can). There are some bullshit ones, but there are also great alternatives.
What doesn't work is the "drink a bag of this powder every day and you'll lose weight automatically" bullshit. Sometimes this bullshit is also sold as berries, sometimes it's some foreign kind of nut, but new "magical weight loss food" bullshit pops up a few times per year and desperate people will fall for it over and over again.
"Sun crystals". They're made of glass, which is NOT long range ordered
The latest Super Foods. Remember when coconut and especially coconut oil was called a super food and was all the hype, yet coconut oil is full of saturated fats (higher than in butter) and actually raises cholesterol levels when consumed regularly.
Coconut oil is a superfood because you can eat it and use it to do butt stuff.
I'm not disputing that certain super foods are just marketing but I would also say that almost no food is healthy when consumed in excess.
"Regular consumption of coconut oil may raise cholesterol levels and is high in saturated fats". How regular are we talking about? Every day? Every week? What amount of oil? A few ml or 3L? And what kind of cholesterol are we talking about here? The good one or the bad one?
Coconut oil may well be a nutritious, healthy oil when eaten sensibly, just like eating nuts is very good for you but you don't want to eat too much at once because they are very high in calories.
VPNs like NordVPN for almost everyone.
"Almost everyone" seems a bit broad. Lots of people watch porn and illegally download stuff that they don't want their ISP to know about, especially in countries like the USA where ISPs are allowed to sell browsing statistics of their customers for marketing purposes.
I take offence to the "protect against hackers" bullshit those ads keep repeating, but for their intended purpose, VPNs are a good solution.
Your ISP selling your browsing data is the hacker.
Who do you trust more? Your isp, or a random vpn Company that not only own one vpn-service, but surprisingly many. (Nord security owns NordVPN and Surfshark, Kape owns ExpressVPN and Cyberghost). And wouldn't it be need if you, as NSA, would have a direct connection to the data people concerned with there privacy? It's not like their "no log" policy really exists if the have to write logs by law.
But if you don't use a VPN with military grade encryption hackers can steal your money from the banking website that only uses military grade encryption!
So your saying I should keep an eye on the War Thunder forums?
Considering Nord (and most VPNs, especially the ones that advertise themselves) are all owned by one company, who has a huge conflict of interest (they're an ad company) with VPNs to begin with.
Television. I cannot understand why anyone would willingly pay money to be advertised to constantly.
Dietary advice based on the food pyramid/MyPlate. Before the late '70s, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, and mental illnesses were all rare in the general population.
We need to be eating fewer carbohydrates, not basing our diets around them. We need to be getting most of our calories from fat, not demonising it.
Thankfully, we have people like Dr. Ken Berry, Dr. Chris Palmer, Dr. Anthony Chaffee, Dr. Georgia Ede, Dr. Shawn Baker, Dr. Paul Mason, Dr. Tony Hampton, Dr. Jason Fung, and others spreading this message.
First Past The Post voting
CBD products
IoT, AI, much of consensus based academia and press.
I feel like there is legitimate uses for IoT and Ai but it gets shoved into everything where it isn't necessary.
How is IoT snakeoil? A great chunk of the world's infrastructure runs on IoT devices. Your electric, gas, and water meters are almost assuredly IoT if you are serviced within the US.
Poor design and implementation. The S in IOT stands for security. So many devices connected to the internet that don’t need to be. I get that it’s cool to control devices from your phone, but why is it necessary to send data from the device to a company’s server so I can retrieve it with an app? I should be able to connect to the device directly from the app, across my local network, without having to send private data to the cloud.
I don't disagree, but that's not "snakeoil".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil
Vagina rocks.
Agree, it definitely rocks!
Yes it does, but for everyone else you are talking about the stones that Gwyneth Paltrow keeps in there, for Kegel exercise I guess I'm not going to look into it that much.
MS Windows
Insurance corporations
To be honest, the oil of a snake is probably pretty nutritious and would surely correct certain deficiencies
Car engine injector cleaner and almost any add-it-yourself fuel additive.
I would have to disagree on this one. Working in the auto industry has helped me see that they do help in long term circumstances. Like every 20k miles or so. Knocks off some of the impurity burn offs that stick on the valves.
Yeah agree. They're kind of sold as a cure all, which they're not, but if you have a very specific problem they'll help. I think the thing is a lot of times people use them without addressing the root cause. But it's definitely saved me a deep clean before.
The best treatment you can put through a gasoline engine is ethanol-free gasoline.
Political solutions to Global problems.
Quite literal. The Chlorine Dioxide Solution scam came to me through a podologist a year or so ago. What makes this outstanding to me, it's they succeeded at having some academic backup, though, completely out of context. It's an absolute rabbit hole, you are warned.
Trickle down economics
Social media definitely. The whole internet probably.