Pro tip: don’t. It’ll make you feel worse than if you just isolated yourself.

The incentive structure of dating apps is completely twisted and makes you feel like every part of yourself is getting commodified and ranked.

Find some social groups or clubs and go hang out there. You’ll have a much better time. Many people don’t mind if you aren’t comfortable with communicating, just being present is a positive in their book.

A broad statement like “trees consume carbon dioxide” would actually be an incredible paper to publish because it means that there is 1. a lot of interesting data that could back up a statement so broad and 2. extremely applicable to a wide variety of fields. When I say “uninteresting,” I really mean a very specific type of uninteresting, like "sunlight does not affect the growth of the fungus Neurospora crassa. " It’s uninteresting because it doesn’t really tell us what affects the growth of the fungus, only that sunlight does not. If you got this result, you likely wouldn’t even feel like it’s information that’s worth making public, hence the lack of papers that have these sorts of results. But, if it weren’t published, then grad students across the globe would keep testing sunlight and keep finding the same thing again and again, wasting time and money. Hence the argument that all data should be published, regardless of how useless the results are

That makes sense, but unfortunately in a frustratingly unhelpful way. NF-kB is the central mediator of cellular immunity. What that means is that everything that needs an immune response triggers NF-kB and everything immunity-related gets activated due to NF-kB. Likewise, TNFa is the prototypical pro-inflammatory cytokine. It’s remarkably good at triggering immune responses in a wide variety of cells, and every immune response that I know involves TNFa in some way.

In other words, having inflammatory symptoms be caused by NF-kB>TNFa is less of a “that’s an interesting pathway” and more of a “yeah, of course NF-kB and TNFa would be involved, what’s new?”

The concern is that we don’t really know what’s activating NF-kB in the first place, and so as a result you can’t really fix the core problem. And because NF-kB and TNFa are involved in basically every immune process, it’s hard to tell if these proteins are the ones actually responsible for causing your symptoms. You’d be operating on a hunch, essentially. Though I will say that your unusually nondescript and broad symptoms do seem roughly in line with what I would expect from TNFa signaling.

All that to say, I’m not a doctor and I have no experience with translating knowledge into practicable therapies, so definitely talk to a doctor about it. But TNFa is very easy to detect in your blood, and if TNFa is causing your symptoms, then it’s really easy to just check to see if you’ve got high TNFa in your blood when you’re taking the antibiotics vs. when you’re not. If you had the money, you could even buy a test kit yourself and get an answer in a single day, assuming you know how to use the kit

I’m not familiar with COVID, but it does sound to me like you’ve got long COVID. I’ve got no advice on that front - frankly, I don’t think anybody really knows what’s up with that. I get the impression that that’s why the advice that you’ve received so far are primarily focused on treating symptoms.

If your hypothesis is correct that your antibiotic is helping through its immunomodulatory effects, then it looks like it’s acting primarily through inhibiting cytokine production. Messing with cytokines will certainly affect your ability to fight off infections, since that’s how your body signals to immune cells that there’s something wrong. Of course, immunity is all about balance, and you don’t need to block cytokine signaling completely in order to decrease it to manageable levels… A brief search shows that there are inhibitors for TNFa, which based on your links seem to be what you’re leaning towards as the molecular mediator.

Have you considered bringing this up to your doctor? I’m not sure how feasible it would be to do a “trial run” with one of these inhibitors to see if it helps your symptoms. However, it may be simple enough to ask for a blood test to measure the amounts of different cytokines in your blood. My understanding (don’t trust me on this - I’m not a clinician) is that standard blood tests don’t typically measure cytokines, which is potentially why your blood tests so far haven’t been able to pick anything up out of the ordinary. That would at least help rule in/out any possible causes.

I will also point out an alternative hypothesis that might be worth considering - it could be that the antibiotic is depleting your microbiome, which would reduce the same cellular pathways that your antibiotic is said to inhibit due to your cells being in less contact with bacteria. Have you tried other antibiotics, and did they have a similar effect?

No reason, I suppose. In my opinion it seems to just be a holdover from the previous systems of publishing. The prestige of a journal is ranked based on how often it gets cited (or in other words, how influential the papers are within the journal). Publishing insignificant/uninteresting data would lower a journal’s average citation count, which would make it seem less prestigious than other journals. Hence journals are incentivized to only publish interesting data. It’s a shitty system that everyone knows is shitty but nobody has a good solution for how to fix it

Immunologist here: what you’re describing seems vague. Inflammation is honestly just an umbrella term that generally refers to any time when the immune system is doing something (hence the seemingly conflicting advice). As a result, it’s not entirely clear to me what specifically you’re referring to.

Remember that no pathogen will just sit there and let themselves be destroyed. Many will actively exploit the immune system to cause disease, and in those cases, having a stronger immune response is actually bad for you. As well, I’m not sure what you mean by having higher “baseline inflammation,” because again, inflammation isn’t a singular thing

Survivorship bias is the idea that there might be an unknown filter that’s filtering the data before you even get to see it. In the case of the plane, that’s referring to a story from WW2, where planes returning from combat were recorded for where they were shot. Famously, the recommendation was to thicken the armor on places where the planes weren’t hit, because the “unknown filter” in this case is that if the plane were shot down, then you would never be able to record where bullets hit on that plane. Hence, the most important areas of the plane are actually the places that weren’t shot in the surviving planes.

In the case of the graph, this is a graph compiled from looking through a lot of papers and recording how significant a result is. Essentially a measure of how “interesting” the data is. Here, the unknown filter is that if a result weren’t interesting, then it wouldn’t get published. As a result, there’s a gap right in the middle of the graph, which is where the data is least interesting. In recent times, there’s been a philosophical argument that even uninteresting data should be published, so that at least it would prevent wasted time from multiple people attempting to do the same thing, each unaware that it’s already been done before. Hence the reason why people made the graph in the first place

I was taught in my Micro course that lichen is actually a symbiosis between 3 organisms: fungi, algae, and cyanobacteria. The cyanobacteria produces energy, but more importantly fixes nitrogen into a more biologically available form, which would not be otherwise accessible in the environments that lichen grows in

Scientists don’t wait for mice to get cancer, then cure the cancer. That would be inefficient. They just force the mouse to get cancer instead. And cures are tested based on how quickly the mice die to the cancer with or without the drug

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While that is true, I think those same selection biases also make the sub quite a poor source of actual advice.

1. The posts obviously only talk from the perspective of one party. This makes it very easy for responders to think that the other party is unequivocally bad. I remember several times where the OP seemed in the right, until the other party reveals that the OP was lying and manipulative.

2. Building on point 1, the type of people who would be willing to post their problems on social media tend to also be the type of people who would be unwilling or unable to consider the other party’s perspective.

3. People who browse r/relationshipadvice tend not to be the types of people who appreciate nuance, nor do they tend to notice discrepancies or omissions in the story. Where a normal person might ask for more details, a responder on this sub is more likely to “trust their gut” and fill in the gaps with what they assume has happened.

There are multiple times in which a post asks for advice about what appears to be a minor problem but then gets overwhelmed with “just break up” responses

I like making costumes! If anything, it’s a good way of making clothes that you would never make otherwise, and there isn’t anywhere near an expectation of quality. Making a costume yourself basically automatically ensures that people would be impressed, no matter how shitty the costume is.

Regarding perfectionism, it’s something that I’ve had to learn throughout my various forays into arts - there’s going to be mistakes. There’s always going to be mistakes. You can’t avoid it, no matter how skilled you are. The skilled artists know how to avoid drawing attention to their mistakes, and that generally means that they just let it happen without caring about it. But also, it’s just a costume, and as mentioned above, people will be impressed regardless of how shitty it is.

Regarding effort, it requires a lot of effort. Because you’re making unusual clothes, you need to spend a lot of time to design it and make sure it fits properly. I designed costumes this year for me and my partner, and in total that took maybe 2 months. It’s also more expensive than costumes you buy online. The raw material (cloth, thread) was maybe around 200 USD total, roughly 4-5x the cost of a regular costume you can buy online, or 2x the cost of a niche costume that you can buy online. It’s definitely not a good use of money and time, but it’s a good hobby project.

Regardless of if you buy a costume or if you make one, here’s the trick: don’t skimp out on the wig. Most people don’t wear a wig, and the people who do tend to use cheap wigs. Cheap wigs have a plastic-y texture and are difficult to style. I get wigs from Epic Cosplay, which have a lot of different colors to choose from and tend to look fairly realistic.

Also, wigs never come with hair already at the right length! Make sure to give the wig a haircut, it’ll look way better if you remember

Gives a strangely similar vibe to seeing the slide reels. Pretty cool!

I am so poisoned by Linux that I automatically read it as guh-nome. Thanks, Lemmy

This trick also works for a lot of other non-steam games - always good to keep this trick in your hat

How does that work? Selective breeding? Fertilizer? Growth hormones? New growing techniques? What is it that’s allowing these pumpkins to get bigger and bigger?

Like Wii Tanks, but with pee. Fun to play with your friends!

Custom, but I understand the appeal of sticking with the default.

I think the issue with wallpapers is that there’s a very fine balance that it needs to strike: not too simple that it’s monotonous, but not too fancy that it’s distracting and hides icons. Too many wallpapers swing too significantly in either extreme that I simply don’t like the vast majority of wallpapers that I find.

Interestingly, KDE seems to strike this balance relatively consistently - they must be aware and are actively attempting to strike that balance. I don’t know how else to explain it.

This is a pretty nuanced problem, in my opinion. Here are my thoughts:

1. You’re definitely judging them
2. I don’t necessarily think it’s wrong to judge them, but it would have to be for different reasons than you state. I would judge them for being personally incompatible with the fundamental tenets of society (ie that you contribute to it and act as a good citizen)
3. You can’t change the mind of someone who isn’t open to change. One of the things you’ll need to accept is that most people are only willing to learn from their own mistakes, and a good portion of those aren’t even willing to learn from their own mistakes consistently. You will need to wait until they regret their decisions before change can even be possible. And even then be aware that there’s a solid chance that they’ll still keep doing whatever they’ve been doing
4. It’s good that you’re thinking about this, but on the other hand, it’s not your responsibility to ensure that your friends have good lives. Your responsibility is to yourself, and if you act as though you have responsibility over other people, you come off as nosy, pushy, bossy. Be careful that you don’t confuse advising someone with assuming responsibility over that person.

I liked Control but Alan Wake was a sludge. Its age really shows. That being said, it wasn’t necessarily bad enough that I couldn’t tank through the game, but if Control were in lower A tier, Alan Wake would be upper C tier