As someone who works with CPR data in Denmark, this does not surprise me at all. Private companies access the data through an API, and anyone who works at such a company can look up CPR data as they please.
>“No way. They’re partying all night.” But they can, because there’s no top-down pressure to go into the office at 8 a.m. They’re free to catch supplemental sleep as needed throughout the 24-hour period.
This feels like the key point to me. These societies follow their body and go to sleep when they are tried, while us in the west have to sleep at a specific time to fit our schedules.
>while us in the west have to sleep at a specific time to fit our schedules.
This does seem to work great at group level. Considering we're in a competitive setup and all that.
I also recognize I personally benefit from others having this schedule. It would quickly go sideways if the firefighter felt like he wanted to sleep a bit more, or the police officer didn't really feel like it whenever is an emergency.
Firefighters and police are quite strange examples to choose, since they both have to offer 24hr support. Surely they could benefit from sporadic sleeping and shift work?
For example if they're able to have some firefighters napping at the station, whilst others keep watch for alerts, that would seem better than enforcing strict wakefulness for the whole squad so they are all tired if the call comes in at the end of a night shift?
Obviously there would have to be some communication and understanding about who stays awake and who takes a rest, but I could see it working.
That was the low hanging fruit, after I set the stage for the real state of things. Again, we are in a competitive setup, globally, which imposes a certain gameplay. If we're not organized we're not as efficient. Or functional for that matter. You are either putrid rich and can afford to pay others to keep it together for you, or you need to do what you don't really enjoy, but must be done. As always basically.
In the past we were facing famine mostly, so we had to do what we had to do. There were times for partying but we always had to do what we do not enjoy doing. It's nothing new really, it's just the way we're doing it that's different.
So coming back, what would be your solution? Because you cannot simply ignore the global competition for resources and basically power. If you slack you get taken over. As in, slacking might work for a while, sure. But that will inevitably be seen somewhere, in some numbers, statistics, resources etc. Sooner or later. What do you do then? One just needs to look at some current wars footage to get a sense of how bad it can be.
Also don't get me wrong, I'm all for world peace and all that. Very hard feat though, considering human nature.
> Historical texts and recent research suggest an alternative view: that sleep can be naturally segmented into two periods across the 24h cycle – a pattern known as biphasic sleep
There is a lack of historical writings clearly describing segmented sleep as a normal practice over monophasic sleep. If it had been the standard sleep pattern, one would expect abundant evidence for it.
Roger Ekirch’s theory, meanwhile, is based on what one could call a biased interpretation of a hand-picked selection of ambiguous sources.
I wonder how much time zones and seasons impact things. For example, in my city in the winter, it is often dark for 14 straight hours. No average, healthy individual would sleep for that long on a nightly basis. So, even if one slept for 7 hours at sunset, then there would still be 7 hours of darkness remaining upon awakening.
Point being, if one slept for 4-5 hours, wake up for a similar chunk, and slept the same amount again, then that'd be a great way to pass the time one could likely not use to do outdoor labor.
I asked if there's abundant evidence for monophasic sleep in historical writings. Or do we just assume it was monophasic, because there's not much written about sleep either way?
You were asking for historical backing. Sleep is definitely abundantly mentioned in historical writing, while segmented sleep is not. I take the absence of the latter as historical backing.
This is tantamount to saying that the Egyptians from the 18th Dynasty onwards did have horses but no black or white ones because while the historical records concerning warfare did mention horses a lot, nowhere is there a mention of black or white horses. I conclude the ancient Egyptians only had brown horses q.e.d.
I would posit that the null hypothesis should be that uncoerced human sleep patterns and historical sleep patterns are similar to A: modern human sleep patterns, and B: the sleep patterns of a majority of diurnal mammals and especially those primates most closely related to us: namely "one big stretch of sleep while it is dark a majority of the time when not disturbed by external stimuli or illness".
If historical evidence does not do much to disambiguate this from the alternative hypothesis, then the null hypothesis would be the default presumption.
We have evidence that during the medieval period people did take two-sleeps. Whether this is the more "natural" organization is debatable. But it made sense for that time.
But the article discussed here also points in that direction when it mentions the importance of people on the lookout at night. The article also mentions primitive tribes partying all night, so that is yet another direction.
My boy when very young (just months) went thru a phase where in the middle of the night he would suddenly sit bolt upright, swivel his head to scan the room, and then conk out again. This was not caused by noises.
I found this reassuring and slightly amazing, that he is wired to do his part as a nighttime lookout.
Assuming you are not jesting, I am not certain I would qualify that behavior as any indication of being wired for some sort of nighttime patrol duty based on those details alone.
Fascinating. Also, not that you implied this by any means, but I was not trying to say "you are wrong, I'm right." Rather, who knows? Do all behaviors happen for a reason? Idk.
I would also imagine a single block of sleep is relatively new due a host of various factors. Especially when considering untreatable medical conditions, chronic pain, parasites (bed bugs, lice, etc.), lack of comfortable bedding, cohabitation with others, and plenty of other factors all had major impacts.
I don't think consciousness is an is or isn’t. Something can be more or less conscious. Humans are quite conscious. Fish are probably also somewhat conscious, but less so than humans.
I'd say that an LLM perhaps represents something that would make a machine slightly more conscious.
The human brain also calculates a response based on some input, it's just a lot more complex.
If we build a machine that is as complex as the human brain, then yes, I would say that this is consciousness.
The fact that we are able to explain how it works should not matter.
If a human is a 100 on the consciousness scale, an LLM (with memory) is perhaps a 4 or something. The interesting question is how far on the scale do you have to be to have certain rights etc. This is something that people are already discussing in regards to animals, i.e. a dog has more rights than an ant.
This is cool. Could be used for training.
But it's a bit too easy when it's a game where you are expecting dangerous commands. The real fatigue comes from accepting hundreds of obviously safe commands during a work day. Then it's easy start accepting everything without really reading it.
Interesting. I noticed that many people have hay fever in Japan, but I always just assumed it was genetic or something. I wonder if living there for a long time will make you more sensitive to pollen
As someone who has suffered from hay fever for my entire life, and also lived in many different locations, almost every move came with a 2-3 year reprieve from my symptoms while my body "discovered" the fun new local allergens.
I actually seemed to grow out of hay fever when I was in my early 20s. Perhaps coincidentally this is also around the time I developed an allergy to cannabis from overuse. Wonder if they’re related somehow.
Poison ivy/oak sensitivity varies with lifetime exposure. On rare occasions, it is inverse: careful exposure can sometimes lead to resistance. More commonly: you get more sensitive over your lifetime, and some "once immune" people end up catastrophically changing due to incautious exposure.
it's a bit of a balance. based on this advice, there was a long time recommendation to avoid giving young children peanuts. however, this advice was rescinded after it turned out to increase peanut allergies.
Yes. I developed hay fever after living here in Japan for a couple years. Was fine the first few years, though it was amusing to watch "yellow clouds of pollen" being blown from the trees with random gusts of wind. Now it's not so amusing. My car windows are dusted with a new layer of "light yellow" every couple days now (in season).
It's super easy to be allergic to cedar pollen because it is such a fine pollen. I developed a cedar pollen allergy within a couple years of moving from somewhere with no cedar to a heavily forested area with cedar. No other allergies to anything, I don't think I'm particularly prone. I tried doing the allergy shots for it for a while but it didn't seem to do much. What works is staying inside with the house sealed up and air filters running, or just getting the hell out of town for a month+.
I would assume it has more to do with less exposition to hay/pollen in urban areas, for instance in years in Beijing I've had hardly allergies since it is not exactly green, though I went to parks, but here in Prague right now with everything blooming it's nuts.
Actually now that I think about it never head really problems with allergies even in Southeast Asia, though I was in very green areas, maybe humidity helps as well?
I think the humidity has to play a role in that. Very dry air is not good for the nose even without allergies. This year the spring is very dry and also quite cold in Central Europe which makes things worse.
In Japan, however, it's almost always very humid. Today, for example, it's over 70% relative (when the sky was still clear and mostly blue, now it's raining so it's much worse). And, as said in that article, there's a lot of allergy in Japan. My wife (native) has a little bit of it, and I myself also reacted for a while, but given time it seems to have left me (as I mentioned elsewhere I grew up on a farm with exposure to everything and I never had an allergy before).
There's one guy I know who lives more or less in the middle of a forest with both Sugi and Hinoki, and he's suffering a lot. But he still likes it much better there than in the huge city where he grew up. I noticed that among the locals in that place (just a bunch of houses, not even a village) I didn't see anyone else with that kind of allergy.
> In Japan, however, it's almost always very humid.
Yeah I realised that's a little bit of an issue in my theory. Of course if it's very humid I would also expect that most buildings have aircon that's keeping the humidity down and can contribute to the allergies.
Buildings, as in large buildings, maybe. Homes don't use that much aircon. We actually never do, except if we have guests, and in any case it's never used the way I experienced so often in the US - that it's actually cold (and very uncomfortable). When used in Japanese homes it's used sparingly. There's also typically a "dehumidify"-only setting, but that's mostly a losing battle, what with the house being surrounded by humid air (and until very recently even new homes were far from airtight), so mostly you just live with it.
I got hayfever on my 3rd year of living here, and it seems like quite a common pattern among immigrants I've noticed. I have hayfever back in the UK too, but I guess I didn't have a Cedar allergy - so it took time to develop.
I have been living in Japan for almost 8 years now, and I didn't have any allergy ever until a month ago when all of sudden it hit me like a hammer. Good god was it painful...
Their lives are probably not that more complex than others. They’re just neurodivergent or too task oriented in how they operate and need that structure to give them comfort and confidence.
>I do find it interesting that people don't mind AI content, as long it's "their AI." The moment someone thinks it's someone else's AI output, the reaction is visceral...like they're being hoodwinked somehow.
The problem is that getting an AI to answer a question is trivial. If I wanted to know what an AI has to say about the topic, I would just ask myself. Sending AI output has, as the author writes, the same connotation as sending a LMGTFY link. It does not provide me any value at all, I know how to write a question to an AI, just as I know how to use Google.
I'm starting to realise I might have completely misunderstood the whole lmgtfy thing. I thought it was a semi-rude way to call someone out for asking lazy questions instead of trying to find the answer themselves.
No, you completely had it correct. And sending an AI response to a question is the same semi-rude way to respond.
The context here is that the person logging the ticket (or asking the original question by using AI to do it) is the one who is ALSO being a lazy piece of shit, and deserves and equally lazy useless response in the form of a LMGTFY or AI response, because they were too lazy to actually think about their original query and spend time to craft a succinct but useful ticket/query.
As far as I remember the original plan was to only maintain both in a transitional phase, with the aim of fully replacing the Java edition. A simple plan: bring Bedrock to feature parity with Java, add a modding API that satisfies 95% of use cases, then force everyone onto Bedrock. The feature parity is mostly there, but modding in Bedrock seems to have become a non-goal, and Bedrock has so many bugs that if your platform offers the choice between both Java is still preferred even if you don't care about modding.
> As far as I remember the original plan was to only maintain both in a transitional phase
Is there a source for this? I don't remember any language to suggest Java Edition would eventually be replaced when they announced Windows 10 Edition. They've always indicated that they intend to keep maintaining the Java Edition, with parity in the core game. The messaging here has never changed, as far as I'm aware.
I'm not sure there are any direct quotes to that effect. But for four years the name of Bedrock Edition was simply "Minecraft" or "Minecraft for Windows", with the previous Minecraft becoming "Minecraft: Java Edition".
That's still the official name of bedrock, but it was never meant to establish a hierarchy or a plan for ending Java, they always seemed very careful in their words to avoid making it sound like it does.
If anything, they might have just done the rename simply for standardization over 9 different app stores with different requirements, branding requirements, and length limits before truncation occurs.
Ironically, it was originally built to support Android phones.
Pocket Edition was a stripped down version of the game to support the xperia play, so it was built for optimization from the start. Later it got support for broader Android devices and iOS, while Mojang outsourced console development to 4J studios. Eventually, they decided to beef up Pocket Edition to be mostly feature complete with Java, renamed it Bedrock, and made it the de facto standard for all devices, sunsetting 4J's port.
Java is for the modding user-base. If they would kill that, there is a good chance that the whole Youtube/Twitch creator ecosystem around the game dies, and with that it's popularity.
Bedrock is more performant and more portable across platforms (e.g. on consoles where you couldn't mod anyways).
It won't die. Its not a problem to skip auth checking if at some point MS tries to use kill switch (hopefully EU would make that fully legal in EU if that's not provided by the company).
As for feature parity, there are mods backporting modern features back to 1.7.10.
Java is also portable to all the consoles, its just Microsoft did use that as an argument to try to kill the Java Edition. Nobody prevented Microsoft from adding bedrock like modding to Java Edition.
The only thing that needs to happen is the one single stable mod API for Minecraft Java Edition. The incompatibility between Forge, NeoForge, Fabric, etc. is terrible, but from what I know about some of the folks involved this won't happen as they cannot constructively discuss the matters.
Wrong kind of death. Taking mods away after a decade and a half of the game being modded inside out would massively reduce the creative scope of the game for players. It would become "boring" and die out
They wanted everything on bedrock but they can’t do it, and losing the Java modding ecosystem would literally kill the game, which remains popular because of all the YouTube content, 90% of which is Java (even unmodded).
Much of the cashflow is from kids watching a YouTuber doing something in Java Minecraft and attempting it themselves in bedrock, which is why feature parity is the only thing they’re really working on anymore.
(Not saying you are but) I think people here are overstating modding and understating Bedrock's inferiority for content creation. The bugs, the differing technical surface and redstone logic, the basic missing key technical features from Java, like the F3 menu. Yes modding is a huge factor, but even if they released an amazing Bedrock modding API 3 years ago, Java would still be dominant in the content creation community and therefore still be the lifeblood of the game.
Bedrock is aimed at kids and they've never made any real effort to supplant Java with it. It's just a very effective way of hitting different target markets
