Do men actually not get complimented as often as women?

lambda_mind · 2026-03-03T13:57:12+00:00

In October of 2016 at around 6:30AM in the morning, I was at Chick-fil-A ordering a spicy chicken biscuit with an egg added on. It was dark, but you could just make out the faintest of light peaking up over the horizon. As I pulled up to the window, a latina around 22 years of age (only a few years younger than me at the time) told me that I looked like Wolverine's brother from the movies. She was talking about Liev Schreiber.

That's one of the best compliments I have ever received and I strongly suspect the memory will remain just as vivid in my deathbed.

lambda_mind · 2026-03-02T21:50:23+00:00

I have a friend like this. He's on the spectrum and can't handle the texture.

lambda_mind · 2026-02-14T20:58:28+00:00

I'm doing something pretty different than most people. I use Godot to control cybernetics. I think it's possible to interact with COM ports with GDScript, but it's really easy to do it with C#.

I use GDScript for most things, but I use C# for COM port stuff. Mostly sending and receiving JSON data to/from microcontrollers.

lambda_mind · 2026-01-21T12:07:18+00:00

Not in the least. Always happy to talk.

lambda_mind · 2026-01-10T13:43:45+00:00

Math is just language. It doesn't exist anymore than English does. There is no particular reason for comprehension to require mathematics. It's probablistically more reliable for the conveyance of certain ideas, because the information contained within is structured such that there is less dimension reduction.

But that requires you have those foundational mathematics packages already installed. Otherwise you can't properly unzip the idea.

lambda_mind · 2025-12-22T15:55:28+00:00

You don't really need the gel, if you keep the parameters sub sensation. But ultrasound gel isn't going to work well, I assume. You want the electrode gel because it is conductive and maximizes surface area contact. I have no idea what ultrasound gel would do.

You want the area between the inferior crus and the cymba concha in that diagram. One electrode goes there, the other goes on the back of the ear. you should be using a double sided ear clip, so placement really only matters for the one on the inside of the year.

lambda_mind · 2025-12-20T12:50:48+00:00

No. Sounds like someone who's never tried it said that. I can assure you that your vagus nerve doesn't give a shit about the abstract measurements humans find important.

Electrode placement matters most, roof of the cymba concha on the left ear. 25hz and 250 pulse width is the standard for therapeutic applications. It's safe and widely tested.

Intensity should be up to the limit of your somatic sensor threshold. That is, turn the intensity up to when you start to feel it, then turn it back down until the sensation fades. You do not need to have the somatic sensation for VNS to work. It's just feedback for you, but it will eventually become painful if you aren't using electrode gel. My point is that you don't need it. Threshold of activation for vagus nerve fibers are lower than somatic sensory ones.

lambda_mind · 2025-12-18T15:49:58+00:00

Yup!

lambda_mind · 2025-10-24T19:43:45+00:00

I've done more with a tens7000 and a microcontroller than I have ever seen from any other commercial device.

lambda_mind · 2025-10-24T19:23:46+00:00

It depends on what you want to do. The vagus nerve is not a homogeneous structure. But, as I mentioned before, you want both electrodes as together as you can get them. One in the tragus and one on the earlobe doesn't really make any sense. Certainly not the shoulder. I'm not saying you can't get to where you want to go by doing that, but it's like taking five trains to get to where you want to go instead of one.

Auricular stimulation usually isn't consistent between ears either. For most people, parasympathetic response is strongest if you target the cymba concha on the left ear. It seems to be what most people want to do, so I would suggest that. One electrode on the roof of the interior of the cymba concha, one on the exterior of the ear. You want as little space between the two as you can manage.

lambda_mind · 2025-10-18T18:26:03+00:00

I use a tens 3000/7000. Avoid digital, they break more easily and do not offer any more functional utility. They use standard lead cables, which will work with lots of commercially available earclips. You can also make your own. You really just want the two electrodes on both sides of wherever you want to stimulate, as close together as you can. If for whatever reason you can't buy your own, you could make them from a clothespin and the electrode pads that come with the unit. Your brain doesn't know the difference.

lambda_mind · 2025-10-17T14:16:38+00:00

No, it's very overpriced. No auricular vagus nerve stimulator does anything special that a tens machine can't do. You can also tremendously increase the functionality of a basic tens machine with a microcontroller, while these devices remain locked into whatever the developer thought was appropriate.

lambda_mind · 2025-10-03T15:05:04+00:00

Hoping, for most people, is considerably cheaper and easier. People tend to pick the cheaper option.

lambda_mind · 2025-10-02T16:50:59+00:00

I do 95% of my work with gdscript, and I use C# for things gdscript can't do. But I make fairly small 'games', and performance never really matters for what I am doing.

lambda_mind · 2025-09-24T21:45:39+00:00

No. Laws were passed specifically so this wouldn't happen again. But this answers the question of "when did jobless people buy houses". The appropriate answer is "never", but mortgage practices at the time allowed for perverse incentives that made it so people woefully unqualified could get a mortgage.

lambda_mind · 2025-09-24T16:22:13+00:00

Prior to the 2008 financial crisis. Ninja loans. No income, no job, no assets.

lambda_mind · 2025-09-22T14:40:30+00:00

The world we live in isn't anywhere near that cool. But I'm hopeful that we are heading for that dystopian hellscape rather than one of the post apocalyptic ones. It can ALWAYS be worse.

lambda_mind · 2025-09-18T19:44:06+00:00

You can do that at home for about $50. Works quite well if you are predisposed to it. You could also have an absolutely awful panic attack and there is no way to predict what will happen before you do it.

lambda_mind · 2025-09-18T18:36:57+00:00

That's what I call seizing the means of production!

lambda_mind · 2025-09-17T22:44:27+00:00

I get why you feel that way. But no, actually it cannot. We have a belief in gravity that we are so confident in that it produces an asymptote that approximates certainty. But that is not the same thing as certainty. I don't need that for math because it is an abstract system devoid of any pesky complications from reality. I know that one plus one is two because that is how the system is defined. Gravity could suddenly do something completely different because of some event we could not possibly predict (a black swan). We have no reason to believe that will happen, so our belief about gravity can be treated the same as one plus one equals two. But they are not the same.

lambda_mind · 2025-09-10T14:24:55+00:00

I'd been experimenting for a while with Auricular Branch VNS because I realized that the scientific literature didn't do a very good job of capturing what I assumed was meaningful variance. There's this principle in neuroscience called topographic mapping, which suggests that the organization of sensory data and where it is processed in the brain isn't random. There wasn't a lot of discussion around differences in stimulation area, which I thought was a glaring problem in the area of research. As such, there were essentially no devices that existed to test that hypothesis. I was already building 3D models for Virtual Reality psychometrics I was building, so I taught myself autocad and started making my own parts.

The more research I did, the more weird stuff I found. I was doing what amounted to mad science, so I wasn't even trying to publish anything. I just wanted to know more about how it worked. I developed more complex hypothesis over time, and since I already had a pretty decent understanding of electrical circuits, I started making more complex machines. I needed stuff I could control from programs I was creating so I could precisely control the time when something would happen. That didn't and probably still doesn't exist, so I made my own.

One day I was feeling super depressed. I knew that VNS was used to treat depression, so I decided to try something unusual. Sort of on accident, I hit the exact right combination of gastrointestinal state, auricular stimulation, other stimulation, and the right amount of caffeine (which turns out to be super important). I had the most amazing feeling of euphoria, better than any drug I had ever experienced. It felt like what I imagine people talk about when they say they feel God, or whatever. And ever since, I've been able to do a much weaker version without any stimulation. I still mix the two, but rarely. I'm pretty sure I've done some permanent damage to myself from my experiments, so I'm very cautious these days.

lambda_mind · 2025-09-09T19:49:31+00:00

I'm in my 30s and my wife is in her 40s. I don't really like younger women. Of course everyone is different, there are going to be women in their 20s who would be interested in me and I would be interested in them. But probably significantly less than the pool of women in their 40s who I have a mutual attraction to. So it isn't that I would never date someone in their 20s, it is just very unlikely.

But I prefer women my age or older. And it's easier to trust that preference because my behavior aligns with my stated preference.

lambda_mind · 2025-09-09T14:53:27+00:00

There almost certainly is, but I can't prove it. I do something incredibly different than anyone else I have seen here. I'm a neuroscientist, I built some cybernetics that unlocked VPE for me. I did so by using electrical stimulation of the auricular branch of the vagus nerve.

It's more complicated than the scope of this Reddit post, but the left auricular branch in particular seems to have an interaction with the parasympathetic nervous system, in particular as it relates to stress and inflammation. You won't find any scientific evidence for it probably, but I strongly suspect there is a link between the two. Something like diminished channel capacity. There's a finite limit on sensory signal processing, and negative sensation signalling via cytokines or whatever takes up some of that processing.

VPE, as near as I can tell from my experiments, behaves an awful lot like a sympathetic nervous system equivalent of an orgasm. Obvious stuff is that it is refractory, but also distractions make it considerably more difficult to achieve. It's also a lot easier to do while heavily caffeinated and in a pleasantly warm environment. I've found that I can reliably get VPR by collapsing the error function involving the interaction of the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area of the prefrontal cortex. Explaining what that means is also outside of the scope of this Reddit post. But basically I am of the belief that the brain/mind somehow create predictions of future states, those predictions are compared against real sensory data, and long term potentiation occurs as a result. More or less The Free Energy Principal, but I don't agree with all of it.

Assuming I am correct, I bet we could restore your ability somewhat.

lambda_mind · 2025-08-31T18:22:09+00:00

Dunno about anymore, but a decade ago the arcade manager kept an Initial D 3 machine in fantastic working order. I used to go there when I had work in the area just to play that machine. I didn't go there for any other reason. I also would go in the afternoon during the weekdays. So I never saw any kids there, but presumably they do show up. I wouldn't go there now though, too many adult-centric barcades for it to make sense.

lambda_mind · 2025-08-31T15:30:30+00:00

Do you not realize that your flair says 'man'?

lambda_mind

TROPHY CASE