• 0 Posts
  • 34 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 17th, 2023

help-circle

  • So I have some experience with this and have a few things I want to tell you:

    Consider a dedicated sleep study. If you have sleep apnea, medication will not fix your problem and some medications may actually make it worse.

    Xanax (an anxiety medication) and Ambien (a sleep medication) are very similar drugs with respect to their mechanism of action. Xanax binds to a specific group of receptors to cause anxiolytic effects and happens to also make you sleepy. Ambien binds to a subset of those same receptors to make you sleepy, but don’t have the strong anxiety reducing effect. If Xanax works for you, Ambien should theoretically have a similar effect. In practice, it doesn’t tend to work as well because anxiety can keep you awake. If that has been your experience with Ambien, think about taking some steps to address anxiety even if you don’t think it’s that bad. Yoga, counseling, meditation, whatever. There are also guided breathing audio sessions designed to put you to sleep in apps like Fitbit and calm that may be helpful.

    You can also supplement a prescription sleep aid with something non prescription, which is what I do. I take Ambien, and to keep my dose low I supplement with melatonin, tryptophan, and valerian root when I need an extra kick into sleepiness. I’ve heard CBD is also quite effective for this. Magnesium reportedly also helps with restful sleep, but get a sleep formulation because magnesium in the wrong form causes diarrhea.

    Don’t underestimate sleep hygiene. For a long time I had the attitude of “I have real sleep problems, basic stuff like cutting back caffeine is not going to help.” The thing is, when taken together, that kind of stuff actually can help tremendously. I scheduled a month where I went hardcore on sleep hygiene. Strict caffeine limits, no late caffeine or exercise, don’t do anything on your bed but sleep and sex, wake up at the same early time every day even when you don’t have to, limit screens before, bed… I mean ALL of it. I found that it actually really helped. In combination with medication it might be a life saver. Might be worth doing your own experiment with it.

    Good luck!















  • I think you’re farther down that slippery slope than you think you are. We have more access to foreign voices from outside the country than we’ve ever had in history. A lot of that is through social media owned by US companies who are not the target of this legislation.

    Twitter has been pretty instrumental in swaying public favor to the Palestinians in Gaza despite Israel (a US ally) trying to paint a different narrative. Now imagine if Twitter was owned by an Israeli company. Would we see all those horrific pictures and videos in Gaza? Would we even know if we weren’t seeing them? Would we have any legal or legislative options if we did uncover feed manipulation?

    I think maybe the reason you aren’t fully on board with this is that you seem to have a strong distrust of the US government. More than our foreign adversaries. That’s fair and you are entitled to that. The people on the other side of the issue trust the US government more than foreign adversaries and that changes the calculation.


  • Because China has interests that are in opposition to US interests, and they can sway US opinion any way they want by covertly manipulating the feed. They absolutely can do significant harm with this, including but not limited to selecting politicians, inciting chaos and political unrest, and even economic destabilization. I’m not sure that the US government actually has a much higher potential to do you harm than a foreign enemy of the US with a weapon like social media as you stated. You could make a strong argument that the political shitshow we are currently in is partially due to foreign interference through social media, and that is before they owned the actual platforms. The US government is not incentivized to destabilize itself at least.




  • The screen technology is the biggest differentiator. Cheap sets use LCD. Some will have local dimming zones where parts of the backlight dim in order to increase contrast a bit, but there is light bleed which I find distracting

    There’s a newer tech called mini LED which is basically an LCD with an array of much smaller led backlights behind it than a cheaper set. This allows for much more precise local dimming of pixels, creating a picture with a better contrast ratio and much less light bleed.

    The more expensive stuff is OLED which is a different technology entirely. Its main benefit is that each pixel is lit independently without the need for backlighting which provides VERY deep blacks (the pixels are off), often described as a near infinite contrast ratio, with no light bleed. The main drawbacks are low peak brightness and the possibility of burn in, though both are getting better with time.

    The newest and priciest is micro LED, which uses self illuminating LEDs as pixels so it has the same contrast advantages as OLED but it has much higher peak brightness and no burn in. This is extremely expensive and not widely available yet, but is being pitched as replacing OLED eventually.