Star codec

I love all of you so much. I realize I am making your lives harder by taking the blog down. There is no comments section for this post. The appropriate comments section is the feedback page of the New York Times.

Remember that you are representing me and the SSC community, and I will be very sad if you are a jerk to anybody. Please just explain the situation and ask them to stop doxxing random bloggers for clicks. If you are some sort of important tech person who the New York Times technology section might want to maintain good relations with, mention that.

My email is scott slatestarcodex. The problem with democracy is that elections happen before the winning candidate takes office. When the outgoing President left office, the country would hold an election.

It was run by approval voting: you could either approve or disapprove of the candidate who had just held power. The results were tabulated, announced, and then nobody ever thought about them again. Clamzoria chose its officials through a prediction market. Traders could provisionally buy and sell these bonds.

The President would spend a term in office, the election would be held, and the bondholders would be reimbursed the appropriate amount. The Clamzorians argued this protected against demagoguery. He ran for President on an unconventional platform: if elected, he would declare himself Dictator-For-Life, replace democracy with sham elections, and kill all who opposed him. Based on his personality, all the bond traders found this completely believable. It used to be a regular mobocracy.

Then people on the other side would protest, and that would also shut down major cities, and the government would backtrack. Eventually they realized they needed a better way, made a virtue out of necessity, and wrote the whole system into their constitution.

The Executive Branch is a president elected by some voting system that basically ensures a bland moderate. They have limited power to make decrees that enforce the will of the legislature. The legislature is the mob. One proposes a bill by having a protest in favor of it. If the protest attracts enough people — the most recent number is 43,, but it changes every year based on the population and a few other factors — then the bill is considered up for review.

Anyone can propose amendments by having a protest demanding amendments or vote against it — by having a protest larger than the original protest demanding that the bill not be passed. After everyone has had a fair chance to protest, the text of the bill supported by the largest protest becomes law unless the largest protest was against any change, in which case there is no change.

The Cognitans appreciate their system because protests are peaceful and nondisruptive. The government has a specific Protesting Square in every city with a nice grid that lets them count how many protesters there are, and all protests involve going into the Protesting Square, standing still for a few minutes to let neutral observers count people up, and then going home. Several consumer watchdog organizations are trying to organize mobs in favor of a bill to stop this.

Every form of government has its own advantages and disadvantages, and the goal is to create a system of checks and balances where each can watch over the others.

The Yyphrostikoth Governing Council has twelve members:. The Representative For Meritocracy is whoever gets the highest score on a standardized test of general knowledge and reasoning ability. The Representative For Futarchy is whoever has the best record on the local version of Metaculus. The Representative For Minarchy is an honorary position usually bestowed upon a respected libertarian philosopher or activist. If a Representative For Minarchy wants to vote their conscience, they may break this rule once, after which they must resign and be replaced by a new Representative.

The Representative For Theocracy is the leader of the Governing Council, and gets not only her own vote but a special vote to break any ties. She is chosen at random from a lottery of all adult citizens, on the grounds that God may pick whoever He pleases to represent Himself. Long ago, the twelfth Councilor was the Representative For Kratocracy rule by the strongest.

This usually involved a lot of firefights and hostage situations, which was fine in principle — that was the whole point — except that the rest of the Governing Council kept getting caught in the crossfire.

Finally, a petition was sent to the Oracle of Yaanek, asking what to do. The God recommended that the position be eliminated, and offered to decide who filled the newly vacated seat Himself; thus the beginning of the Representative For Theocracy. The Constitution was never fully amended, so technically the position is still the Representative For Kratocracy, and technically anyone who kills the Representative For Theocracy can still take his seat and gain immense power.

But for some reason everyone who tries this dies of completely natural causes just before their plan comes to fruition. Must be one of those coincidences. He still encourages interested people to sign the petition as a general gesture of support. Normally this would be a hidden thread, but I wanted to signal boost this request for help by Professor Steve Hsu, vice president of research at Michigan State University.

Hsu is a friend of the blog and was a guest speaker at one of our recent online meetups — some of you might also have gotten a chance to meet him at a Berkeley meetup last year. He and his blog Information Processing have also been instrumental in helping me and thousands of other people better understand genetics and neuroscience.

He started as a theoretical physicist publishing work on black holes and quantum information. Then he transitioned into genetics, spent a while as scientific advisor to the Beijing Genomics Institute, and helped discover genetic prediction algorithms for gallstones, melanoma, heart attacks, and other conditions. Along with his academic work, he also sounded the alarm about the coronavirus early and has been helping shape the response.

This week, some students at Michigan State are trying to cancel him. You can read the case being made against him here , although keep in mind a lot of it is distorted and taken out of context, and you can read his response here. Professor Hsu will probably land on his feet whatever happens, but it would be a great loss for Michigan and its scientific community if he could no longer work with them; it would also have a chilling effect on other scientists who want to discuss controversial topics or engage with the public.

If you support him, you can sign the petition to keep him on here. If you are a professor or other notable person, your voice could be especially helpful, but anyone is welcome to sign regardless of credentials or academic status. See here for more information. He says that time is of the essence since activists are pressuring the college to make a decision right away while everyone is still angry.

They come from random plants or shiny rocks or stuff Alexander Shulgin invented to get high. But every so often, somebody tries to do things the proper way.

Go over decades of research into what makes psychiatric drugs work and how they could work better. Figure out the hypothetical properties of the ideal psych drug. Figure out a molecule that matches those properties. Synthesize it and see what happens. This was the vision of vortioxetine and vilazodone, two antidepressants from the early s. They were approved by the FDA, sent to market, and prescribed to millions of people. Enough data has come in to be pretty sure that vortioxetine and vilazodone, while effective antidepressants, are no better than the earlier medications they sought to replace.

SSRIs take about a month to work. This is surprising, because they start increasing serotonin immediately. If higher serotonin is associated with improved mood, why the delay? Most research focuses on presynaptic 5-HT1A autoreceptors, which detect and adjust the amount of serotonin being released in order to maintain homeostasis. If that sounds clear as mud to you, well, it did to me too the first twenty times I heard it.

Your boss tells you the right voice level for sales is 60 decibels. So you put an audiometer on your desk that measures how many decibels your voice is. Suppose you take a medication that stimulates your larynx and makes your voice naturally louder. No change. This is what happens with antidepressants. The antidepressant increases serotonin levels ie sends a louder signal. But if the presynaptic 5-HT1A autoreceptors are intact, they tell the cells that the signal is too loud and they should release less serotonin.

Not sure. Maybe depression affects whatever sets the autoreceptors, and causes them to be set too low? Maybe the problem is with reception, not transmission? Maybe you have the right amount of serotonin, but you want excessive amounts of serotonin because that would fix a problem somewhere else?

How do I get the Star Code? CherryAhrizona — CherryBaby. Thanks once again! Updated, thanks! Thanks again! Devoun — Mango. Awesome, thank you! Post updated. All added. And great catch on the name! Reddzzyx — Red Elite — E. Captainly — Cap LavenderBlossom — Lav.

Added, thanks! DigitizedPixels — Digi. Added, thanks. Added all, thank you! By joining Download. StarCodec is a free pack of media codecs optimized for a wide range of media players and formats, packaged together with a single installer. It offers stable, high-quality video and audio playback from a variety of sources, including files, disks, and Web sites, and numerous configuration settings to optimize media compatibility and playback.

Installing the StarCodec pack involves choices like post-processing and file associations; we chose the defaults, but they're easy to change later. There are also icons to quickly access the StarCodec Web site as well as remove the codec pack and associated software.

The Config folder contains the settings for configurable filters, encoders, and decoders, including the aforementioned ones as well as Xvid and ffdshow; there's an SPDIF Test tool, too. None of the various settings seemed likely to challenge users who have configured media playback options before; there's assistance available online but no actual Help file.

With codecs, the proof is in the playback, and we played a wide variety of video and audio files through three common media players: Windows Media Player, Zoom Player Pro, and the free, open-source VLC Player, which packs its own set of codecs.

Clicking Remove quickly uninstalled all the codecs and associated software, requiring a reboot to finish and reassociate file types with their previous defaults. If you're having trouble playing certain files in certain media players, you should definitely check out StarCodec.

There are lots of free codec packs out there, but few we've seen are as complete as StarCodec's, and none we've come across are bundled together in such an easy-to-use package. StarCodec is a codec pack, an installer of codecs for playing media files. StarCodec provide a convenient and stable media environment with audio environment option, video quality option and including stable and excellent codecs.

StarCodec is optimized for various media players. Free YouTube Downloader. Biden to send military medical teams to help hospitals. GameStop PS5 in-store restock. N95, KN95, KF94 masks. Microsoft is done with Xbox One. Windows Windows. Most Popular.

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