Newtra

I honestly don't know what that silence would be like. I've spent my programming career jumping between domains, becoming an expert then moving on to find a new challenge. Now I'm building AI stuff for medicine.

In my down time I learn languages, watch videos about physics and math, and play puzzle games.

My brain actually won't let me stop. Boredom = pain.

I've had those "some little wrinkle and the whole thing falls apart" moments. The worst thing is googling them and finding huge threads of complaints from years ago. Apple is a powerhouse at building high quality new software, but they never listen to user feedback and fix the old stuff. Sometimes things even gets worse! e.g. the AirPods Gen 1 let you change the double-tap action between Next Track, Previous Track, Play/Pause and Siri. Obviously people have asked for more customization options like Rewind 5s. Of course, AirPods Pro Gen 2 removed options and now you can only choose between Noise Cancellation and Siri. At this rate the next gen will remove touch controls completely and force me to talk Siri 😱.

The TV might be the problem if Samsung cheaped out on the CPU, or has too much bloatware running in the background. It's infeasible for app makers to test on every TV model and every OS update. It's easy to see how an update could cause a new type of system lag that hadn't appeared during testing... That said, I remember Apple TV also didn't have good options for selecting quality. It's also pretty plausible that Apple didn't code it to fall back to a lower quality if the CPU couldn't keep up.

It's not you. The experience on computer also sucks. I haven't had those video playback & CC issues, but the interface is awful:

• There are so many ads for other shows it's infuriating. I don't care they're on the same service. They're ads on a premium product and should be optional.
• On one of the shows I was watching the time code for automatically skipping the credits were out of sync, causing the episodes to cut out while there was still more than a minute left if I didn't intervene in time. If I did intervene in time, it was unreasonably hard to get to the next episode, having to go back to the front page, select the show again and scroll along the episode list. There's no prev/next episode buttons, no way to return directly to the episode list.
• Entering the site from the wrong language URL puts you in a broken login state where you can get to a show but it will error before playing. This happens all the time if I enter the US site recommended by Google instead of the German site (I'm in Germany but my browser is in English). I lost about an hour of my life trying to figure it out.
• The vignette effect when you pause/move the mouse is so strong it's hard to see the content/subtitles behind it. Annoying if you like to gawk at background detail.
• On PC it also forgets where you are all the time. The URL doesn't change for the show you're watching, so if you close and reopen a browser with a paused video it boots you back to the front page.

Also, the desktop app on macOS is unusable for me without playback speed controls. At least I can hack them in with userscripts on browser.

It hurts me, but I gave up and went back to piracy. I really like Foundation and want to financially support it, but I was taking psychic damage every time I tried to watch it through Apple TV. If I kept paying Apple TV without watching it there, they wouldn't know I was subscribing for Foundation so my money wouldn't be going to the right place.

I'm impatient. I usually eat it still half frozen. The outside gets warm enough for the cheese to melt, but the core is still usually frozen and covered in ice.

For context, due to histamine intolerance severely limiting my food choices, I've given up and just eat the same frozen meal prepped lunch every day. It'd have lost its flavor by now due to repetition, even if I hadn't gotten bored of waiting for it to fully cook.

That's some awful gaslighting.

I have no idea how these people make it through 8-12 years of college without even getting their understanding of common diseases up to a wikipedia level.

I've had psychiatrists push this crap.

One even refused to write me a prescription and insisted I just needed to get outside more after listening to an hour-long recounting of how my ADHD makes self-care difficult to impossible.

I'm glad to hear I'm not missing out on anything. (It's still not out in Europe.)

Since it's a natural hormone the body already has ways to get rid of it. It has a half-life of less than an hour. The lethal dose is so high we haven't been able to intentionally kill animals with it: "Melatonin is not fatal even at a dose of 800 mg/kg in animal studies".

The big risk of ongoing high doses is becoming so dependent on it that you wake up as soon as it wears off (e.g. after only 4 hours of sleep). At this level you basically can't sleep without it and have to slowly wean yourself off to get back to normality.

I think the big difference between people benefiting at small doses (~0.3mg) and large doses (2+mg) is that the 0.3mg group use it for sleep quality through the night, whereas the 3+mg people just need the sudden shock to get to sleep in the first place.

The drawback with big doses is that your brain becomes less sensitive so your naturally-produced melatonin might not be enough to keep you asleep for the whole night after the pill wears off. It has a very short half-life in the body (under 1 hour), so there's no way for a single dose before sleeping to last 8 hours. We naturally produce only 0.06-0.08mg per night, so it's easy to see how supplementing melatonin could desensitize someone and cause them to wake up after just 4-6 hours of sleep.

I have ADHD and am in the large-dose category and use 2-3mg of melatonin to help me fall asleep. Without it, I can't sleep reliably because my brain often won't shut up. Sleep reliably is so much more important to me than sleep quality.

Using it only 5 nights a week, I'm not significantly dependent. I can still sleep without melatonin, just less reliably. I've tried 0.3mg, but it felt the same as taking nothing.

For me, 10mg would be excessive and probably harmful in a desensitizing way. The most I've taken is 6mg, but it only helped in 2 out of 6 times. The other 4 times my brain just wouldn't stop. If doubling my usual dose didn't help, I don't think doubling it again would be any different.

There are however studies with higher doses, e.g. this one about kids with ADHD that says:

two-third of the patients responded to relatively medium doses (2.5–6 mg/d), whereas doses above 6 mg added further benefit only in a small percentage of children.

so I guess it's different for everyone.

I tried Bard again today, hoping it had been updated to Gemini. Not yet, but it was a strong reminder that Bard is appallingly bad.

It hallucinated entire Google products and thought Q** was an upcoming Google AGI. I asked it to use its YouTube extension to find me some videos and the extension failed so the model just made up a list of nonexistent videos by real channels.

Yes! Scientific trials have shown that for most people, 0.3mg of melatonin gives better quality of sleep than 3mg.

I've seen pills as high as 10mg on the shelf and have to wonder wtf they're for. If you take too much your body becomes less sensitive to it and you become dependent on supplementation. 10mg is definitely too much.

That was directly in response to:

those are helpful altho the name of the game is also brightness

Every night I lie in bed, lights off, using my phone for about 20 minutes while waiting for the melatonin to kick in and my brain to calm down. In a dark room I have to keep my phone on quite high brightness (about 1/3rd of maximum).

Lamps aren't an option at that stage as usually my husband is in the room also trying to sleep. I also find that "warm" light still has too much blue