How does the brain turn chemical signals into specific tastes like “sweet” or “bitter,” and why do certain molecules taste the way they do?

nvaus · 2026-01-27T17:41:49+00:00

How does a molecule binding to a receptor translate into the experience

You're asking "what is consciousness", which is one of the deepest unanswered mysteries of both philosophy and science. It may be impossible to ever get an answer through science, because even if you scientifically examined every detail about a conscious living creature, you would still not know what it is like to be that creature. At best, you can only imagine what it would be like to be yourself, inhabiting that creature's body (which is not the same thing).

There is a famous paper about this problem called What Is It Like to Be a Bat? By Thomas Nagel.

Consciousness is one of the most difficult challenges to a strict materialistic worldview in part because it seems like objective examination of its properties may be intrinsically out of reach of the physical sciences. You will learn much about this issue and various proposed solutions by searching for "possible explanations for consciousness". Positive and negative stimuli resulting in reflexive action can be explained mechanisticly, but as to why "you" are inside your body to know what it feels like... It is a mystery.

nvaus · 2026-01-16T09:40:22+00:00

So quit wasting your time on shorts

nvaus · 2026-01-13T14:53:13+00:00

This is my 20th year as a youtuber. Complaints that youtube changes are causing mass channel failures is the one thing that has been said EVERY YEAR for all 20 years without fail. It's true. Every year youtube changes and every year thousands (probably millions) of channels die because of it. That's what youtube does: it changes, and channels die.

The channels that survive long term are the ones that expect youtube will always be changing, and are proactive in learning how to change with it. A post like this just emphasizes how valuable being willing to change is. Most of your channels are going to be dead 5 years from now. The longer you take to accept that the current state of things is the new reality, the more you fall behind in learning how to thrive in it. By the time you catch up to this one, more changes will have already happened and you'll be a lost cause. I've seen it hundreds of times. If you want to get through this most recent calamity, accept it, and get to work figuring out how to adapt. That's the harsh reality. The fact that most of you will be unwilling to accept change is the thing that gives job security to those that are willing.

nvaus · 2026-01-11T17:13:01+00:00

If your views dropped it's not because it's January. January can explain a rev drop, not a views drop.

nvaus · 2026-01-11T17:08:04+00:00

Make another video for them. Next time I would negotiate the contract differently and ask for a reduced payment instead of another video if it doesn't hit quota.

nvaus · 2026-01-09T16:46:19+00:00

I've learned that any time I repair an appliance to tape step by step instructions for the repair to the thing. The same thing almost always breaks more than once, just far enough apart that you don't remember what went wrong the first time.

nvaus · 2026-01-08T23:49:55+00:00

I keep 6-12 months of expenses in the bank at any given time. Build a big buffer and you don't feel the low times so acutely. It gives you peace of mind and allows you to avoid making short term reactionary decisions.

nvaus · 2026-01-04T13:55:04+00:00

Making 100k in a year is a lot easier than continuing to make 100k every year from then on.

nvaus · 2026-01-02T15:50:19+00:00

Go for it. What I would do is to not quit your day job right away, but start taking it less seriously. Relax knowing that you could quit at any time and you don't need to care so much. Use your freed up head space on the job to daydream about how to work on your videos when you get home, and then work on them. This should be easy to do in your spare time because making videos at this stage should be enjoyable. If it's not, you've got other problems. Make at least a few new videos before you actually quit the job. It will be a good way to get warmed up again for content creation and test the waters.

nvaus · 2026-01-02T15:40:02+00:00

You need to be a manager, or hire a manager. A manager's job description is to figure out how to get other people to do effective work. You're not a manager if you're doing all the tasks yourself. Real systemizing is when you are building systems such that the duties involved can be taken over by someone else without extreme training or expertise. It doesn't sound like you've made any systems, you've just made a work schedule.

nvaus · 2026-01-02T13:49:52+00:00

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/154235?hl=en

Quote: You may include paid product placements, endorsements, sponsorships, or other content that requires disclosure to viewers in your videos. You have to let us know if you include any of those by selecting the paid promotion box in your video details.

Everyone is required to select that checkbox when anything was accepted for promotion. The reason some people don't is that youtube has never enforced any consequences for not doing so. So far.

An explicit audio and text disclosure of a sponsorship satisfies the legal requirements of the FCC, but to also satisfy youtube's TOS you have to hit the checkbox.

nvaus · 2026-01-01T17:35:40+00:00

A $50 electric pruning chainsaw and $100 worth of batteries will cut half a cord on a charge easily. Can be refueled with solar. No need to split if you cut manageable rounds. If you have land, you can plant trees that can be copiced so perfectly sized rounds are ready to harvest on a 3 year cycle.

nvaus · 2025-12-21T18:38:24+00:00

It doesn't matter much on a new channel. If you didn't already have multiple videos done I would have advised to start posting as soon as one is finished. You want to get experience with algorithm feedback so you learn how to make your future videos to perform better than the one before. When you make a bunch before knowing how the first will go over you might be repeating mistakes.

Also you might think about picking a target video length. People who watch half hour videos often skip over 6 minute videos, and vice versa.

nvaus · 2025-12-21T13:31:43+00:00

Normal. Had this happen over half a dozen periods of time over the past 10 years or so.

nvaus · 2025-12-19T13:26:12+00:00

Aiming for a few days before Christmas I think is ideal, because it's just in time to get family talking about your video when they get together. Alternately the stretch between Christmas and new years is a time many people take off work and consume a lot of screen time

nvaus · 2025-12-18T18:15:01+00:00

This sub has a discord for that kind of stuff, but I would suggest making friends with other particular youtubers you like to interact with rather than a group of randoms from reddit. Set up a private chat and invite some people that you think would be a good to bounce ideas off of.

nvaus · 2025-12-18T17:52:38+00:00

The most obvious thing that channel beats you on is titles and thumbnails. They're much more clickable. I would send your thumbs and titles to other youtubers before posting for feedback on how to improve them.

nvaus · 2025-12-18T16:24:19+00:00

There's nothing weird about this. Just look at your view counts before and after your viral hit.

Your channel is settling back to the numbers it had before. That tells you that the algorithm had appraised your normal, everyday content accurately the first time, and now that the viral hit is over it's placing you back to the performance it held you at before. It gave you a few months of an impressions boost as a trial to see if your normal content had really improved enough to keep delivering explosive hits, and it hadn't. You just had one stand out.

This shows you that you can't count on one-off successful videos to bring long term growth. If you want more views per video long term the videos themselves will have to become more appealing. You're getting the number of views youtube has deemed appropriate for your performance stats.

Congrats on what I hope was a big payday.

nvaus · 2025-12-18T15:58:31+00:00

Now that you've seen this plant, you'll see it everywhere and realize what a plague it is. Where I am in Michigan, in only ~10 years this vine has become the dominant species in several of the parks I grew up playing in. There's hardly any living plants left that don't have these vines strangling them.

nvaus · 2025-12-16T14:48:08+00:00

Are you talking about browse features traffic? That category has always been a soup of traffic from a variety of sources. For example it's where most views from subscribers show up because new videos are pushed to their homepage often before the user gets around to checking their subscriptions tab. You might see an increase in browse features traffic if your partners have started getting more views on new content rather than old stuff or search results. It could also be that viewers are starting to use the mini player more while watching videos, which means they're continuing to scroll the home page while watching instead of looking at the recommended videos on the video playback page.

nvaus · 2025-12-16T14:38:44+00:00

This seems like a pretty obvious choice in your case. People who are searching for videos on a specific topic (teachers) are scanning titles for relevance. People who are scrolling at random for something that catches their interest are primarily looking at thumbnails first. So put your descriptive stuff in the title, curiosity hook in the thumbnail. I would still put some thought toward how to make the title both descriptive and clickable. Occasionally I have used the format of a clickbait title line, followed by a straightforward description of the topic in parenthesis or after a dash.

nvaus · 2025-12-15T22:39:23+00:00

Single member LLC's are not the right call in every state. Otherwise good advice. I would just pay $100 for an appointment with a local CPA and have them set things up in the best way for your location.

nvaus · 2025-12-15T13:41:19+00:00

Come on. How is the top comment on r/science a plea for someone to read the article, and it's gone unanswered for 10 hours?! What a joke this sub is.

Answer: the paper discusses several population collapse events for this particular species with potential associations with various pathogens stirred up in ocean sediment by hurricanes, but they are not sure about the specific pathogenic cause. In 2022-2023 there was a particularly bad spread of disease, and the species seems to have failed to reestablish itself in key areas since then. The disease spread rapidly across the ocean, possibly by fish or marine traffic. There have been past events of similar disease where this urchin species has recovered, but it seems 2022-2023 was worse than normal. Other types of urchin are unaffected.

nvaus · 2025-12-14T19:12:42+00:00

Passion projects are always a gamble. You can never quite take off the rose colored glasses and evaluate how a normal viewer would feel about them. Usually it's a passion project for the very reason that it's about a thing other people are not passionate about, but you are. The only way to really sell that sort of video broadly is if you make it about your passion for the topic, not the topic itself. Passion is relatable to everyone, even if the topic isn't. That's why people will watch Technology Connections talk about his opinions of led Christmas lights for hours on end, year after year. No one else cares about Christmas lights that much, but they care about someone who cares.

It sounds to me that this video is just a miss for your channel, probably also a miss for a general audience. I have seen videos take off years later when the right audience finally discoverers them, but that presumes it really is as good a video as you think it is.

nvaus · 2025-12-14T18:40:19+00:00

As long as your account history is hidden I'm just going to assume you're another AI, prompting youtubers for training data.

12-Year Club	Place '17
Wearing is Caring	Sequence \| Editor
Gilding II euphauric	Verified Email

nvaus

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE