It’s advertised as a healthier alternative to screen time

vaping and e-cigarettes were initially advertised as a way for cigarette smokers to quit.

“In other words, these conversations with a social robot gave caregivers something that they sorely lack – a space to talk about themselves”

so they’re doing a job that’s demanding, thankless, often unpaid (in the case of this study, entirely unpaid, because they exclusively recruited “informal” caregivers)

and…it turns out talking about it improves their mood?

yeah, that’s groundbreaking. no one could have foreseen it.

if you did this with actual humans it’d be “lol yeah that’s just therapy and/or having friends” and you wouldn’t get it published in a scientific paper.

it’s written up as a “robotics” story but I’m not sure how it being a “robot” changes anything compared to a chatbot. it seems like this is yet another “discovery” of “hey you can talk to an LLM chatbot and it kinda sorta looks like therapy, if you squint at it”.

(tapping the sign about why “AI therapy” is stupid and trying to address the wrong problem)

You need better mental health care.

you start off by saying you’ve always thought you’re on the left

but the moment you disagree with someone, you start shit like this, which is a very common pattern of argument from right-wingers.

“I think your opinion is so wrong that it’s a symptom of mental illness” is just fucking stupid. do better. or, if you refuse to do better, stop attempting the “I’ve always been on the left but…” shtick. it is absolutely see-through and does not fool anyone.

I haven’t. It was omitted from the article in question. I stand corrected.

keep standing…because here’s the 5th paragraph of the article:

Political analyst Matthew Dowd was fired from MSNBC on Wednesday after speaking about Kirk’s death on air. During a broadcast on Wednesday following the shooting, anchor Katy Tur asked Dowd about “the environment in which a shooting like this happens,” according to Variety. Dowd answered: “He’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. And I think that is the environment we are in. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in.”

a contributor who made an unacceptable and insensitive comment about this horrific event

have you read the actual statement that got him fired?

from wikipedia:

On September 10, 2025, commenting on the killing of Charlie Kirk, Dowd said on-air, “He’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. And I think that is the environment we are in. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in.” Dowd also speculated that the shooter may have been a supporter.

you can agree or disagree with the decision to fire him (I’m not shedding any tears, Dowd was the chief strategist for the 2004 Bush re-election campaign, it’s ludicrous that he was working for a supposedly “progressive” network like MSNBC in the first place)

but characterizing that statement as “celebrating murder” is just bullshit.

How the fuck does the government have this much control over the media?

wealthy oligarchs purchased the media, and purchased the government. so it’s not the government controlling the media directly, it’s just that they report to the same boss.

would you like to know more?

My best guess is that you were going for “hypothetical.”

no, if I meant hypothetical I would have said hypothetical. notice that I gave two hypotheticals - Brinnon-Redmond and Tacoma-Redmond. only the Brinnon one was pathological.

let’s go back to 9th grade Advanced English and diagram out my comment. that sentence is in a paragraph, the topic of which is “some shit about Seattle’s geography that people who’ve never lived here probably don’t know”. notice I’m talking about geography. I wasn’t saying anything about Brinnon’s population, or the likelihood of its residents working at Microsoft. that was entirely words you put into my mouth and then decided you disagreed with.

if you think pathological is the wrong word choice there, then no I don’t think you actually understand what it means, at least not in the context I was using it. from wikipedia:

In computer science, pathological has a slightly different sense with regard to the study of algorithms. Here, an input (or set of inputs) is said to be pathological if it causes atypical behavior from the algorithm, such as a violation of its average case complexity, or even its correctness.

there’s crow-flies distance and there’s driving distance, and obviously driving distance is always longer, but usually not that much longer. playing around with Google Maps again, Seattle-Tacoma is 25 miles crow-flies but 37 miles driving, for a ratio of 1.5. that seems likely to be about average. the Brinnon-Redmond distance, without the ferry, gives you a ~3.7 ratio. that’s an input that causes significantly worse performance than the average case. it’s pathological.

the closest synonym to pathological in this context would be “worst-case”, but that would be subtly incorrect, because then I would be claiming that Brinnon is the longest driving distance out of all possible commutes to Redmond within a 50 miles crow-flies bubble. you’d need some fancy GIS software to find that, not just me poking around for a few minutes in Google Maps.

(and this is the technology sub-lemmy, in a thread about something that will mostly affect software engineers, and planning out a driving commute is a classic example of a pathfinding algorithm…using “pathological” from the computer science context here is actually an extremely cromulent word choice)

there seems to be a recurring pattern of you responding to me, making up shit I didn’t actually say, and then nitpicking about it. recently you accused me of “trying to both-sides Nazis”. please stop doing that.

We’re seriously citing a population of 900 people on the Olympic Peninsula as somehow central to the RTO order?

I said “for a pathological example”

if you don’t know what that term means, you can look it up.

But I’m still able to use it, so.

yeah. except when you’re not.

because this “I can do whatever I want” Ron-Swanson-wannabe brand of libertarianism is very predictable.

if you go to a dinner party and the host notices your Spyware Amulet and says “turn that off or leave my house” would you respect their property rights? without pissing and moaning about it?

if a bar or restaurant banned them (like happened with Google Glass) would you respect that rule as well?

if you were on a date, and your date noticed and said “that’s kinda creepy, would you mind turning it off?” would you do it? or would you start ranting about how it’s not infringing on your date’s rights?

yeah, no, we still disagree. I think you are missing the point completely, and continually.

general protip: if the conversation is about some behavior being creepy or weird or against social mores, and you jump in talking about the legality of it, you are missing the point, and also contributing to the creepiness.

for another example, upskirt photography was legal in the US until 2004 (at least at the federal level, state laws seem to have trickled in around the same timeframe)

hop in a time machine back to 2000, and imagine there’s a digital camera that’s marketing itself as being very easy to attach to your shoe in order to take surreptitious upskirt photos.

people say “wow that’s a fucking creepy product” and you jump in to say that technically it’s not illegal, and people have the right to attach cameras to their shoes. and if a woman is wearing a skirt in a crowd of people, and sees a guy with a camera on his shoe, she has the right to walk away from him. that is technically true, and also completely misses the actual point.

if you think upskirt photos are a bad analogy, here’s a reddit thread from 2 weeks ago about a gynecologist wearing the “Meta Ray-Ban” sunglasses that have a built-in camera.

“data is the new oil”

most people keep their phones in their pockets, which would ruin audio quality for 24/7 listening, and Apple and Android are able to restrict app permissions as well to prevent it.

VC money doesn’t care about whether normal people actually want a device like this. what they’re really after is “we’re collecting a bunch of user-specific data that no one else has, that we can sell to people who think it’ll help them do better ad targeting (among other things)”

people have the right to do things you personally disapprove of

meanwhile, literally in the headline:

Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy.

no one is saying you don’t have “the right” to wear this Spyware Pendant in your one-party consent state.

people are saying it’s creepy and you’re jumping in defending it with “well, technically, it’s not illegal, depending on state law”. you’re just completely missing the point entirely.

this is like, if someone wrote an article about how people are annoyed by someone microwaving fish in the office cafeteria, you chimed in with “well they can simply quit and find a different job where people don’t microwave fish at the office”.

Puget Sound-area employees: If you live within 50 miles of a Microsoft office, you’ll be expected to work onsite three days a week by the end of February 2026.

“return to office” mandates are always, always, always a form of stealth layoff.

people structure their lives around their commute (or lack thereof). if you can work from home and don’t have to go to the office like it’s 2019, it opens up a bunch of places to live that wouldn’t be feasible otherwise.

this will force a bunch of employees into godawful commutes, or require them to move to be closer to the office. that’ll be relatively easy for younger employees who most likely rent an apartment and don’t have kids, but much harder for older / more experienced people who own houses, have kids, a partner with their own job, etc. lots of people will just quit instead - constructive dismissal.

also, I suspect many people who aren’t familiar with the Seattle area will read “50 miles” and think “about an hour’s drive”…lmao. 50 miles as the crow flies, in Seattle’s geography, can be a multi-hour drive, possibly including a ferry ride, before considering traffic delays. for a pathological example, Brinnon to Redmond is 35 miles in a straight line, but 130 miles driving distance, or 75 miles driving distance if you take a ferry. (and there can be a multi-hour wait just to drive on to the ferry during peak times)

even if you constrain it to 50 miles driving distance - Tacoma to Redmond is 43 miles driving distance according to Google. if you ask it for driving directions and specify “arrive at 9:30am” you get an estimate of “typically 1 hr to 2 hr 30 min”. public transit takes 2 hours, and that’s assuming you’re leaving directly from downtown Tacoma.

from The Needling, Seattle’s local Onion-esque satire site:

Bill Gates Compliments Trump on Wife Who Didn’t Ditch Him Just Because He’s in the Epstein Files

Research has shown that practicing social interactions with professionals in a clinical face-to-face intervention can improve outcomes for individuals, but these solutions are often costly or not widely available.

the common theme every single time I read about LLM chatbots being used for mental health - having human therapy is great but it’s just too expensive for regular people. and that’s treated as an immutable fact about society that can’t be changed. (“it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism”)

human therapy is too costly? OK, make it cheaper, or free, for the patients. it’s not widely available? OK, pay the therapists more, and give them better working conditions.

but where will the money to do that come from?

Silicon Valley is spending billions of dollars building AI datacenters. so I dunno, where is that money coming from?

resource allocation is a choice that we as a society, and a species, make. we can make different choices. we don’t need to confine ourselves to “well human therapy is expensive, so only rich people can access it, and poor people have to settle for AI slop, but they should be grateful because without the AI slop they’d have nothing at all”.

a cheap docking station with two SATA slots (currently housing hard disks) and putting them together on a RAID0 almost doubles a single one’s performance.

you can buy a 50cc moped and attach a NOS cylinder to it. that might be a fun hobby project, if you’re into it.

but in a drag race, you’re going to get beat by a 10 year old Toyota Prius. because there’s only so much you can eke out of a 50cc engine.

“RAID0 using a cheap 2-slot external enclosure” is one of the more cursed things I’ve ever contemplated. firmly in “just because you can doesn’t mean you should” territory.

the remaining 5 percent are totally awesome and doing great and hey check out these jangling keys aren’t they shiny and interesting

short answer: buy NVMe. plug it directly into your motherboard, don’t use an enclosure. forget about wonky RAID0 crap.

longer answer:

SATA SSDs (which you say in the comments below are all you’ve got) are an evolutionary dead-end. they’re SSDs pretending to be very fast hard drives. they end up being bottlenecked by the assumptions that the SATA protocol makes about how fast a hard drive can be.

look at this chart for example. SATA (AHCI) limits a device to having 32 commands queued up at once, which means the operating system needs to jump through hoops in terms of maintaining its own queue of pending reads & writes and issuing them to the device as queue space becomes available.

NVMe raises that limit to 64k, which for any non-server workload is effectively unlimited. the NVMe drive can respond to IO requests pretty much as quickly as the OS can dispatch them.

if you want to know more nitty-gritty details, Scaling ZFS for NVMe is an interesting talk, much of it isn’t specific to ZFS, but instead is about how NVMe devices are so fast that they’re forcing filesystem developers to rethink long-standing assumptions about drives being slow.

I’ve always called it “getting mail-blasted on the information superhighway” but not many dictionaries include this alternative usage, and Merriam-Webster filed for a restraining order against me.

yeah, the scalability of this seems like a pretty big challenge

annoyingly, they talk about the amount of water they pumped only in terms of energy (35MWh) and not in terms of water volume.

I think they do that because, if you estimate the water volume…it’s pretty unimpressive.

going off the numbers for Bath County Pumped Storage Station, the largest in the US, and until 2021 the largest in the world:

total storage capacity of 24,000 MWh - meaning that this power station built in the late 70s / early 80s has almost 700 times the storage capacity of this 35MWh demo

between their upper reservoir and lower reservoir, their water capacity is 78.4 million cubic meters. so as a crude estimate, Quidnet’s demo project used ~115,000 cubic meters.

Olympic swimming pool contains 2.500 cubic meters. so, again with the caveat that this is a rough estimate because Quidnet didn’t publish the actual numbers…this demo they’re bragging about involved 45 Olympic swimming pools worth of water.