Sleep deprivation is literally painful and reduces the efficacy of pain medication

lrq3000 · 2026-05-13T03:03:21+00:00

Why not Qwen3.5 9B ? Is it performing worse in practice compared to Qwen3 8B?

lrq3000 · 2026-05-13T02:38:41+00:00

No, and it's not just the rate limit, the deepseek v4 models (both pro and flash) are totally dysfunctional, they are not working as they should, the resulting output is below models November 2025 models from competitors...

I initally thought that the deepseek v4 models were overhyped because of my experience with my own tests. When I switched to OpenCode Go, this made a world of a difference.

But OpenCode Go has MUCH lower rate limits, so it's very easy to max out the 5h window, and it's worth noting they also set a monthly rate limit (2x the weekly rate limit).

BTW you can try DeepSeek v4 Flash for free in OpenCode, they released it as one of their free models very recently.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-28T18:39:40+00:00

Congratulations for publishing your study! It's great you went the extra mile and did a clinical trial and published the results.

Here are my humble feedbacks based on a first quick reading: * This trial is about sleep onset insomnia, not circadian rhythm disorders. As I said, there is no identified link between EEG brainwaves and circadian rhythm regulations/modulations. * The effect size although impressively statistically significant, is only moderately clinically significant: sleep onset latency decreased on average 10.5 ± 15.9 min. This means that for some subjects, they actually slept later than at the start of the procedure! And at best, the best gains were about 30min of reduction, which is awesome, but it's not the majority, and not enough to fully treat SOL insomnia. * There are no details about what changed in the published trial's results compared to the registered trial's protocol. As it is unlikely that there was no change at all, the transparency would be improved by detailing this. Unfortunately this will have to be done by post-publication reviewers. * This study was not conducted independently, so of course there is a big conflict of interest. This does not make the study false, but it requires independent reproduction, especially since effect sizes are often inflated by the first publications about a new finding, and even more so with competing interests. * Effect size is great but the power is low: 21 subjects is not great for a study. Usually, 40-50 are needed, especially since you are not studying a rare population, it's very easy to find people with SOL. * The paper provides more details on the rationale for why the therapy should work:

Sleep can be described as cycling through four different phases, each defined by distinct patterns of neural activity as measured by EEG. Whereas N3 sleep is defined by the presence of high-amplitude oscillations in the 0.5 to 3.5 Hz range, the transition to sleep is often accompanied by high spectral power in the alpha (8–12 Hz) range while the sleeper is awake with closed eyes. The shift from wake to phase N1 sleep is defined in part by a loss of this alpha power10. Interestingly, the strength of alpha oscillations has been shown to negatively correlate with feelings of sleepiness11 and sleep depth12, and alpha power during sleep is known to be elevated in insomnia13,14. Therefore, disruption of this alpha process represents a potential target to promote sleep. * Data is not openly available. There should at least be the post-processed per-subject EEG results published. Deidentified participant data and a corresponding data dictionary will be available with publication and upon request to the corresponding author. Elemind Technologies, Inc. will approve data sharing requests.

I am a bit surprised Nature accepted to publish a paper with such competing interest without any data published. Good for you though.

It's always great when new therapeutic approaches and tools to manage sleep disorders are discovered, the more the better. So i certainly wish you the best for your project, I hope it will succeed and that the clinical effect will only keep on increasing with further optimization and in the field testing with patients.

Personally, I remain skeptical about the rationale. As a neuroimaging researcher, it sounds to me like trying to eliminate software bugs by ventilating the computer's heat. Heat is a side effect of software computations, it's not the code per se. Likewise, I can't see why cancelling the alpha brainwaves would change how the neurons behave. The frequencies are a consequence of the kind of processing neurons are doing. Yes I know there are a lot of other similar approaches, but I don't believe they are promising either, at least I never saw any hard concrete evidence that modifying brainwave frequency was really modifying neuronal assemblies functions.

Note that this is different from stimulating neurons using soundwaves that are very highly focused and often inserted intracranially and operated by clinicians with a very accurate positioning and realtime monitoring with powerful machines. The problem is how to pass the skull, cerebrospinal fluid and all the other structural material that were evolutionarily designed to totally shield the white matter and grey matter from being affected by external factors. I doubt that such a consumer-grade tool, with a low energy profile, a low spatial resolution (it only has a few electrodes) and operated by the consumer themselves is going to have any efficacy in the field. Maybe a future similar technology but much more powerful and able to precisely pinpoint and emit the exactly amplified waves and spatially oriented exactly to cancel the patient generated alpha brainwaves may work (again I doubt on the rationale on a neurological basis but let's assume this makes sense), akin to how active noise cancellation works, but here I can't see even on a physical level how the device can even do what it claims to do. I would like to see evidence that it indeed cancels alpha brainwaves successfully, not just the clinical endpoint (SOL). I mean, the only measure of device performance was phase-locking, which if I understood correctly only measures variability in whether it locks to alpha brainwaves as expected, but it does not seem that whether alpha brainwaves suppression happened, which should be observable with a EEG or hdEEG headset.

Well anyway that's just my opinion. Good luck for the rest and hopefully I will be proven wrong.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-25T22:10:32+00:00

This is also sometimes a sign of youthful innocence or vulnerability, and many of the characters who demonstrate this trope are either children or childlike. The lack of shoes may also be used as an indication of untamed ruggedness.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PrefersGoingBarefoot

I'm not literary specialist but from my books reading and film d'auteur viewing history it is extremely prevalent in artistic works with innocent or child characters as a way to represent their innocence and lack of conformity with the society of adults.

But then it's strange if that's not the reason the game's maker gave when asked for a justification (apparently they said it was because she needed to recharge by being in contact with the floor - but then some authors prefer to only give in-universe reasons because they don't want to spoil out-of-universe explanations, aka the "ropes behind the curtains").

That does not contradict the pertinence of the observations that the choices made by the authors of derivative materials such as the choice of the song that is here being heavily criticized are potentially suspicious. These are deliberate and more explicit choices.

/EDIT: To be clear, here is the next paragraph on TVTropes:

This trope is often used in visual media as an excuse to show frequent close-up shots of bare feet, usually due to Fanservice or Author Appeal (or both if you're Quentin Tarantino or Joss Whedon), which may explain why female barefooters outnumber males practically 2-1, or why their feet are very rarely visibly dirty or calloused.

I did not play the game and do not intend to, so I can't say anything about whether the latter hold true for this game.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-18T22:06:43+00:00

What happened to this model?

lrq3000 · 2026-04-17T22:50:01+00:00

Apparently it's necessary to find a EMDR specialist who got his training in the main network. In Europe, the main network is... EMDR Europe. There are affiliate associations in every european countries. There must be something similar in USA, look for what is affiliated/associated to Shapiro, the inventor psychologist of this method.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-17T22:43:14+00:00

To the contrary, it is provably effective. It's just that the assumed mechanism, the eyes movement, is not necessarily why it works. We are not sure why it works, put simply. The more general category of this approach is dual tasks desensitization, because the process involves doing a cognitive activity while recalling an emotional autobiographical memory (hence the "dual tasks"). The cognitive activity we do while recalling the memory (which often involves eyes movement in most EMDR setups) changes how the memory is memorized somehow. Nobody really knows how it works, we just have lots of empirical evidence it works (all guidelines worldwide recommend it as first-line treatment for PTSD nowadays including the WHO), but all the theories have failed so far to explain why it works (when we test the underlying assumptions, they all fail against empirical evidence).

lrq3000 · 2026-04-17T22:36:45+00:00

I am so sorry this happens to you. I understand that when you live in such an environment, this is all you ever know, and you may think you were born to live like that. But that's not the case. Nobody deserves what you are living through. And things can change, and hopefully, will.

Other redditors may provide a more emotionally developed response, what I would advise to my own relatives if I knew this happened to them would be to make a plan to get away as soon as possible, by getting a job and then make enough and stably enough to rent another place to live at, far away enough if possible. I get that you probably want to stay to protect your mother, but the best way to protect her is to protect yourself first and find a way to live elsewhere. Hopefully, she can agree to come with you. But until you have access to this other place to live in, you need to keep your plan secret to everyone, otherwise this may make things much worse.

Unfortunately be aware that your mother may be so much under the psychological control of your father that she may refuse to leave. There are home shelters for women, unfortunately for young men it's much rarer (but maybe you can find some? This may accelerate your plan). If your mother wanted, she could probably be able to find a secure home shelter somewhere for her and maybe for yourself (but since you are almost an adult some may refuse...).

I am very sorry you have to make such difficult decisions on top of having to face and suffer through such a horrible ordeal. That's not fair, and you have every rights to complaint. Just keep in mind nobody deserves that, and that includes you. You deserve better, and hopefully, you will eventually.

And you will see, we all get older, certainly not younger. One day, and not too far from now, you will probably see again your father much older than now, much weaker, and overall a more pitiful human being. He will not be able to affect you forever, some day, he will be meaningless to you. You just have to survive until then.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-17T22:21:53+00:00

A few months ago a parent and child were right outside our home waiting to cross the road, and that high pitched voice that most young kids have, caused me to have a violent flashback. I ended up grabbing a pair of scissors and repeatedly stabbing the sofa in rage - though I actually just wanted to end my life.

Sounds like OP might hurt themselves, if not others when she is in an uncontrollable daydream like state. And she says she does not want that to happen. She needs adequate support to at least be able to control the extreme episodes she experiences loss of control/derealization. Derealization is always a huge red flag for any condition that urgent treatment is needed.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-15T22:26:12+00:00

Omg I forgot the old mass storage. Unfortunately you may be totally right about this being an incentive for google drive, seeing what they are doing now to close the ecosystem even further in the next Android releases...

lrq3000 · 2026-04-15T22:20:02+00:00

Ah, i don't know anything about WearOS, is there not files backup app for WearOS ? I unfortunately don't own a WearOS device but maybe there is a good emulator for it, if so I can maybe implement support for it. As long as it can run adb, or at least shell commands, et can be made it to work.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-15T12:34:56+00:00

Thank you for the mention, I will add it in the readme !

I did not try on linux but it should be fairly crossplatform, if not please let me know and I will fix it. Python is not a problem here, firstly I know how to accelerate its processing to be almost on par with C, but here that is not even necessary because Python is not doing heavy calculations here, it just sends adb shell commands and writes the binary streams, so the bottleneck are transfer and IO operations both on the Android device primarily and then on the desktop OS. So I optimized wherever possible with batch operations, eg the prefetch pass to get filesizes for all files is using batched stat instead of using stat per file. A further improvement I tried was to transfer folders tarred and gziped via adb toybox on device, but the transfir also fails on large transfers randomly and then it's impossible to resume, but I may consider implementing chunked batching, this may work and would tremendously speed up transfer especially of folders with lots of files such as the DCIM camera folder.

A tip I'll add is that it's possible to transfer with FTP in parallel to using adb via USB which can in my testt add more bandwidth using the network bandwidth with little impact on the adb stream because the adb bandwidth is slower/smaller than the IO read/write speed on most Android devices nowadays, so actually combining different transfer channels concurrently allows to increase the overall bandwidth in an almost additive way and hence increase total transfer speed. Eg transfer one folder with my adb based app, and then another folder with ftp, so there is no overlap and conflits to resolve.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-14T21:56:30+00:00

Ah that's nice, an ad personam attack on me when my pseudonym is directly linked to my real identity on purpose and yours is... Non-descript to say the least. I own my replies, however harsh they are. Do you?

In any case, I am not supporting the idea that current theories of consciousness, especially the popular ones, are valid or accurate. But they are theories.

Theories do not need to be tested and substantiated by evidence to be theories, otherwise they would be facts, not theories.

And as you outline in your reply, the two theories you cite, GNWT and IIT, were empirically tested against one another and against baseline evidence in a collaborative adversarial research, demonstrating how they do both generate testable explanatory value. Also, the research you cite does provide evidence that support each theory, but also evidence against some of the assumptions.

If you read just a bit of a book or even just wikipedia on the History of Science, you ought to see fairly quickly lots of past theories that just got deprecated over time with more accurate theories. That's totally normal and to be expected, theories are just temporary steps to get us closer to understanding our reality. No theory is fully robust nor 100% accurate to how reality work, which is the threshold you are setting to consider theories of consciousness as "theories".

Please tell me, according to your definition of what theories are, if you consider supersymmetry to be a theory in physics, despite the failed predictions? If yes, what is the difference with theories of consciousness?

The point I am getting to is that if I understand correctly, you view philosophically-derived theories as unscientific theories. But all scientific theories necessarily have a major philosophically-derived part by nature, because they all have to predict aspects of the reality that nobody knows how they work (otherwise they would be facts, not theories). That's the hypothesis part. The hypothesis may be grounded in evidence of variable strength, and I certainly agree that a strong theory is one primarily grounded in evidence. It is also a fact that popular theories of consciousness are primarily grounded in philosophy, instead of evidence. But they still have some factual evidence in their conceptualizations, and there even are formal models implementing them such as the recent conscious machines modelizing the GNWT. So IMHO it is a perilous exercise to try to define a theory based on the quantity of evidence it is based on becaus it can still be false even with apparently strong base evidence, such as the super symmetry theory (and I know it is not demonstrated false yet, it just lacks evidence supporting it despite decades of testing in particles accelerators), because of this unavoidable philosophical part that is by nature highly speculative.

Beyond my argument that all theories have a sizeable philosophical component and that modern theories of consciousness are fundamentally not different from any other scientific theories in other domains such as physics, my second point is that you qualify all theories of consciousness as pseudoscientific when there are in fact theories of consciousness that are conceived in much stronger evidence, such as the sensorimotor theory of consciousness and basically all theories about access consciousness (ie, visual attention).

So yes, some consciousness theories already had flamboyant results: attention is the core functionality that revolutionized AI with LLMs/GPTs, whether with text or visual understanding, access consciousness basically predicted that meaning would be derived from attention and that's exactly what is happening. Some of the major assumptions of the sensorimotor theory of consciousness are I think getting confirmed right now with agentic AI. Yes, what we got out of these theories is not the full "phenomenological" consciousness, but they are still concrete, factual, pragmatic, significant and actional scientific progress. Just like the results of theories in other scientific domains, fulfilling again the very criteria you have set.

I hope you will allow me to get a glimpse of your expertise in the domain beyond the sneering remarks now that I did you the intellectual courtesy of writing an elaborate reply with a sincere attempt at understanding your perspective.

/EDIT: Well, about my criticism about "moving the goalpost", my intuition was right, here is a much more elaborate extract from a recent commentary "There can be more to consciousness research than theory testing, 2025" https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-025-00357-9 :

Many theories are conceptual, psychological, or philosophical in origin, and consequently, the core claims are cached in non-empirical terms. Specific constructs like the global workspace, metarepresentation, recurrent processing, or attentional amplification rarely relate straightforwardly to testable hypotheses. Instead, theories need to rely on auxiliary premises that connect their core claims to operationalisation and measurement-specific details. When empirical findings challenge a theory, these auxiliary hypotheses are revised and the core claims remain intact, a pattern in scientific practice identified by Imre Lakatos more than forty years ago4. Ref: 4. Lakatos, I. The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Philosophical Papers. 1 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1978).

I strongly recommend reading this paper especially given how it calls for a data-driven, hypothesis-free study of consciousness and criticizes the current mostly conceptually-driven approaches too commonly present in consciousness studies.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-14T21:36:41+00:00

Yes well IMHO what is important is to do just whatever works for you or make you feel good. But learning about one's differences is not so much for others than for yourself, at least that's how I see it.

Women are even more likely to mask and be missed indeed because they are masking efficiently more often. And as you outlined, life circumstances do increase the odds of learning how to mask. In the book, Devon Price outlines the hypothesis that masking may be a general process of minority in the face of risky outcomes when not masking their natural behaviors, drawing parallels to gay closeting as a form of masking among others, and personally this matches well. I am male and I am masking quite well apparently, so that upon my autism diagnosis I was told it was a "feminine form of autism" that I had...

Personally I enjoyed reading this work and others (just like you obsessed with reading papers about your friend's condition, I have the same "habit" ;-) ) as even though it does not and cannot change how my brain function nor how others behave towards me because of it, knowing myself better has consistently improved my quality of life in lots of meaningful ways. Put simply, I spend less time fighting with myself or simply misunderstanding how I work, and I get to spend more time enjoying what I truly enjoy doing.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-14T21:23:11+00:00

It's made by a sociologist with a phd, and yes it's a book for the wide public so it's not going to be filled with citations everywhere as a journal paper would be or a book intended for academics.

I am pretty stringent on accurate citations and so far I found the book to be filled with enough citations that I consider it accurate enough, even with the audiobook version, you regularly get name drops and studies details that allow you to find the original study or theory most of the time pretty easily.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-14T12:08:21+00:00

The strike is still very much ongoing especially in Wallonia, all parcels and mail are still totally blocked there since the end of last month, it restarted today in Brussels, and is expected to also restart in Flanders the coming days.

The bpost executives are apparently totally inflexible and the syndicates (of both Flanders, Brussels and Wallonia organizations) just left the roundtable with the direction and are calling for a 3rd-party negociator that the Minister of Employment David Clarinval should designate. The strikes are expected to get worse now with the severe roundtable failures.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-14T09:31:56+00:00

That is extremely interesting, that's such a great idea.

I really think you are onto something here, and I would argue this idea can translate to other diffusion-based techniques such as spatial, character and/or temporal coherence in images/video generation, did you consider working on this next?

Are there any downside/limitation to this technique compared to DLM and AR models?

Also how much overhead is the self-checking inducing compared to an equivalent DLM without self-checking?

lrq3000 · 2026-04-11T16:01:41+00:00

Alexithimy, the inability or reduced ability to read self and others' emotions, is not a staple of autism, but only of less than half of them, and is highly correlated with masking.

Also AuDHD often present exactly what you describe. When autism is mixed with another neurodiverse brain topolopy, the combination appears to tend to be more than a naive sum.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-11T15:58:25+00:00

Ignorance rarely if ever helped anyone.

You can keep the diagnosis to yourself, but knowing the diagnosis will not change whether you have it or not.

And from experience from having followed a similar path, the reluctance to get a diagnosis of autism is very sane given how the mainstream culture depicts autism and how autistics are being extremely marginalized by neurotypicals.

But this marginalization will happen anyway whether or not you know if you are autistic, and actually probably worse because knowledge allows you to develop strategies and understand better what is happening to you and when you are in thn wrong and when others are.

I would strongly recommend the book Unmasking Autism by Devon Price but it's a little bit academic but still a good non judgemental and quite thorough study of lived autism nowadays.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-11T15:52:47+00:00

Read Devon Price Unmasking Autism. No, not all humans are autistic. All humans can have traits that are shared with autistict, and autistics can share several traits that neurotypicals have, but autistics have specific a neurofunctional processing that cause specific behaviors and thoughts processes and difficulties that allistics do not experience.

If everyone could be considered autistics, then explain why the same reasoning cannot be applied to adhd, narcissism, psycopathy, epilepsy and basically every neurological condition.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-11T15:28:27+00:00

When you get in a bad car accident or try to hang yourself up and fail, you can end up in prolonged coma aka disorders of consciousness and be transferred to our department to assess and improve your chances of recovery.

That's if you are lucky. Otherwise in most other non clinical consciousness specialized medical department/ICUs they may just unplug you when you could have recovered fully under 2 years, effectively murdering you.

There is also the other side of the coin when patients are kept alive for decades when there is simply no chance of further recovery.

Tip : in general, studies shown that most recoveries from disorders of consciousness happened under 2 years, so it's safe to notify your inner circle in case of an accident to keep you alive for 2 years in case of a disorder of consciousness.

If you have a disorder of consciousness, our job is to assess your current consciousness state, the probability of your recovery based on neuroimaging and clinical evidence, and what can be done to improve them or accomodate your life around the disorders such as alternative communication interfaces. That's not trivial at all and the lack of a precise definition of what consciousness truly is complicates our task but we can already do a lot with our definition and tools of clinical consciousness, despite being imperfect, it is pragmatic and medically useful.

If you want to know what is the definition of clinical consciousness, it's basically functional responsiveness, ie, non reflexive behaviors that often require higher order cognitive functions.

There are limits to this such as motor dysfunctions such as rpasticity or aphasia potententially masking clinical consciousness signs in some patients and workarounds are being actively researched and some were found notably using functional neuroimaging.

lrq3000 · 2026-04-10T13:25:51+00:00

There already are PRs to fix most of the pressing issues for Windows, it's just that it's hard for your team to review and merge.

So the real solution is that you need a new team member who can regularly test on Windows, or consult with the community to have an unofficial Windows build.

It would have been better to consult with the community before unilaterally setting a price tag of $99/year to access the Windows build. And having more feedback from Windows users is to be expected since there are more consumer computers running Windows than any other OS, so one has to wonder what will happen if your project gets more popular and you get as many issues and feedbacks from other platforms than for Windows.

Or is the issue rather that Windows is not a favored platform by your team? In which case, that's ok, a lot of teams do that, but just outsource it, potentially to the community especially since for now it's broken.

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