The “drug” appears to have been injecting a “viral vector” (whatever that is) into the monkeys’ ventral striatum. Do you really want to fix your procrastination by injecting viruses into your brain? I wonder if there is a behavioural or biofeedback way to get a similar effect.

The research article (open access) is here: https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.cub.2025.12.035

I’d DIY it (maybe with FreeNAS, about which I know nothing) instead of buying a proprietary NAS in a box. What’s the point of self-hosting if you’re going to be at the mercy of someone else’s software anyway? If you’re DIY’ing, there are 3.5" drive enclosures with soundproofing stuff in them that should keep the drive pretty quiet. Or if you can afford enough SSD’s for your storage requirements, then use those.

Headline sounds another Bell experiment. Is there more?

Tbh I generally prefer that robot voices actually sound like robots. I don’t want human sounding TTS since I don’t like anthropomorphized machines. So I’d stay with something low tech.

I’ve bought most of mine on craiglist but either way you sort of have to know what you’re doing. I’d say just sort by price and scroll through the results in the range you want to pay. You might also filter on “within 25 miles” or whatever, and get a unit that you can pick up in person. Or at least, try to talk to the person on the phone to get a sense that they know what it is that they are selling.

Thinkpads forum is still around and has a forsale section. It has slowed down but is still active:

https://forum.thinkpads.com/viewforum.php?f=11

I’ve bought stuff from there in the distant past.

My sister has a 13 inch ipad and it’s a nice size, 14" should be fine. I have some doubts about the big Lenovo though. My main interest is reading full page PDFs so anything less than 14" will be annoying. Ok I’ll give it more thought. Laptop prices are going to go up because of the dram shortage too. Sigh.

Thanks, it is kind of intriguing though I keep telling myself to just use normal Linux stuff instead of Android. I’d want the 14 inch one which is around $300. Is there any trouble installing F-droid and apps from there?

Alternatives I’m thinking of include Lenovo Yoga laptop (16 inch) and a Raspberry Pi thing with an HDMI monitor (that would be plug-in only but I mostly read at home).

$25 is too much for a used 1gb pi 3. A new pi 5 with 1gb is $45 and way better. But, most ppl start with a vps.

I see, yeah there is something about it in the blurb. How do you like the tablet? Is it responsive? Is it full of Android bloatware? Do you know if it is rootable?

I see there is a 14 inch version that’s about $300 and that starts to get interesting. It’s not “2nd gen” though. And, I had thought of TCL as a lower tier manufacturer with quality issues, but I hadn’t looked into it much.

I like that the tablet has an SD (probably microSD) slot. Don’t like that there’s no headphone jack. There’s plenty of space in those things compared to a phone.

If anyone was wondering: https://www.tcl.com/us/en/products/mobile/tcl-tab/nxtpaper-11-gen2

11 inch display with 60 hz refresh, but it sounds like regular lcd rather than e-ink? It has an 8000mah battery that it says can run the tablet through a full day, so that’s nothing like an epaper tablet. It sounds more like a drawing tablet, as it has a pressure sensitive pen.

Anyway, I’ve been using Librera FD for reading epubs on Android. Its blurb mentions annotations but I’ve never tried that feature.

I have an Inkplate 10 e-paper tablet but haven’t been using it.

I didn’t realize Hetzner had referral codes. I see https://www.hetzner.com/legal/referrals and think I qualify but am not sure. I’ll see what I can do.

Yes Hetzner has virtual networks. I don’t know how similar they are to AWS or GCP. You should probably check the docs before signing up

Also for cheap processing power, you’re better off with an auction dedi than with their cloud stuff. See hetzner.com/sb . But, I think the referral codes don’t work for that. Also, all the dedi hardware is in EU. US stuff is cloud only.

Added: ok, I have a referral link and will PM it to you.

Abstract

Sleep is a fundamental part of our lives; yet, how our brain falls asleep remains one of the most enduring mysteries of neuroscience. Here we report a new conceptual framework to analyze and model this phenomenon. The framework represents the changes in brain electroencephalogram activity during the transition into sleep as a trajectory in a normalized feature space. We use the framework to show that the brain’s wake-to-sleep transition follows bifurcation dynamics with a distinct tipping point preceded by a critical slowing down. We validate the bifurcation dynamics in two independent datasets, which include more than 1,000 human participants. Finally, we demonstrate the framework’s utility by predicting a person’s progression into sleep in real time with seconds temporal resolution and over 0.95 average accuracy.

Aren’t there already tons of these already? Piwik has been around for a quite a while, plus there are others mentioned in the comments.

Fastmail for 5 users will be on the expensive side. Further downscale: mxroute, cranemail, and migadi should all be ok.

Omg their version of whaling shanties are going to be dank. Like “Sink the Bismarck” except called “Sink the Pequod”.

I don’t really have any of those. My stuff goes down and I later get around to restarting it. I’m a wimp in not self hosting more important stuff like email. But my media files are on a local disk rather than a server.

Depends on the specs. If it’s really old the power consumption will cost more than you’d spend on newer hardware. I have such a box sitting at home doing nothing. It’s cheaper to rent a hetzner dedi.

That leaves you with 17 more of them though.

These are mini PCs right? So you want something with a room full of humans or some type of local online service. Anyway, not a purely computer project.

Library terminals and game room come to mind, but neither are for installing at home.

Some people use TPM hardware for this. Others (big cloud operators) have a ton of complicated infrastructure involving among other things special key servers on a walled off LAN. I don’t know a really satisfying answer, so will keep watching the thread.