This is an incorrect summary of the placebo effect. The placebo effect does require the patient to either believe it is effective, or at least not knowing clearly it is ineffective.
This is why clinical studies don't tell neither group (neither the treated group nor the control group) who is in which group, to not spoil the results.
And also, this is why homeopathy puts so much effort into spreading the belief they are effective despite all odds, up to the point of trying to convince people to abandon basic scientific principles.
GP is actually correct according to Wikipedia[0] (for what that's worth): There seems to be evidence that "open-label placebos"—i.e. "where the patient is fully aware that the treatment is inert"—still have positive effects.
Contrast this with advertisement, which actually does work even when people know that it is ads, and which still does work on people how know how ads work.
Also, contrast this with psychotherapy, which usually does work even better if the patient understands how it works, because it enables them to become an active and more effective part of the therapy.
While I hear this argumentation a lot, I still struggle with this:
If you have "mild problems, which would normally heal on their own", buying no medication at all would be even cheaper.
And from an ethical point of view, the idea of financing a whole (homeopathic) industry that uses your money to produce fake science, even with a single cent, should make one shudder, shouldn't it?
But then, why prescribe the most expensive placebos where you co-finance societal harmful behavior, rather than just prescribing the "harmless" placebos that are not homeopathy, which are usually even cheaper and don't have any ideological overhead?
I think it comes from our animistic roots. Magic that calls for the sacrifice of a goat is stronger than magic that calls for the sacrifice of a flower because the former requires more dedication from the caster. It would be the same with money.
There is a lot of over-the-counter and even some prescription medicine that don't do much at all for what people take them for, and homeopathy is cheaper and less harmful for the same placebo effect. Cold medicine in particular is known for its dubious efficiency.
No medication is even cheaper, but the placebo effect works, so if people were to take something, might as well have them take something cheap and harmless. In my opinion, it doesn't justify supporting homeopathy, but health insurances may see it differently.
Placebos are an interesting ethical issue. Doctors are not supposed to deceive you, they are people you trust with your life and very personal issues and they are therefore held to very high standards. But even if it is for your own good, the placebo effect is based on deception, so is it ethical for a doctor to give you a placebo? And is fake science that still help people ethical? The consensus seems to be "no" for both and I tend to agree, but I still think it is worth debating.
> If you have "mild problems, which would normally heal on their own", buying no medication at all would be even cheaper.
American culture loathes the idea of not treating a disease. Problems are expected to be dealt with, even if it harms society (see overprescribing antibiotics or opioids).
When confronted with people that don't understand the impacts of medicine, it's easier for an insurance company to give them fake medication than nothing at all.
You'll quickly find which parts of the manual are interesting to you and which ones just repeat what you already know (or could have guessed on your own). Since the manual is very well structured, skipping those parts is very easy.
Look at that, there's an entire section on internals. Honestly, I didn't even consider looking there, I just assumed it would be all about syntax and never bothered to check. Thanks!
The Postgres docs are great because of that. They are kept on top of pretty regularly compared to most open source projects, and document things in an understandable way.
> "We will continue to improve this new solution and are already working on an IPv6 only solution for cloud servers, too."
I'm eagerly waiting especially for this! The cloud servers are pretty cheap, but costs for IPv4 addresses make a significant part of the monthly cost. The Hetzner cloud server would be much more interesting if they weren't each tied to a public IPv4 address.
It took a while for me to fully appreciate the OpenSSH approach to portability:
They primarily develop OpenSSH purely for OpenBSD, using all (including non-portable) facilities of OpenBSD, including crypto and whatnot.
Then, a separate team manages the "portable" version of OpenSSH, which add stubs and does everything else needed to make OpenSSH compile on as many operating systems as possible.
I'm aware that OpenSSH is not the only project using that approach to portability. Nevertheless, I think it is fair to say this is an unusual approach used only on a minority of projects.
I was always puzzled on why they are doing this. This always struck me to be "just" a side effect of project politics and historically grown project structures.
But over the years I started to see some interesting benefits of that approach as well. I'm still not convinced by this model, but I have to admit that, more generally speaking, the OpenBSD project does many things against the mainstream, but quite often they turn to be right.
Can you name one? OpenBSD-affiliated projects like OpenSSH are the only ones I know of that do fully separate releases where one is just for one OS, and the other is the “portable” one
Not really, that is how the games industry has worked since forever and one of the reasons why AAA game studios couldn't care less about 3D APIs portability.
The game idea is developed with one specific platform in mind, and if the game actually gets a publishing deal, the publisher onboards studios whose main skill is to port games into platform XYZ.
To me the "natural way" has always been to write portable code in the first place. From time to time, you'll find that parts of it are not portable, so you fix it, and along that way to learned something new about portability and apply it to future improvements on your code as well. Over time, you'll find fewer and fewer portability issue as you get better and better at writing portable code in the first place.
I'm not saying that this is the best way to do this, but to me this was always the obvious thing to do. As a somewhat extreme example, I'd never write a graphical user interface in pure Win32 API and expect it to be even remotely portable by some additional layer. I'd rather use Qt (or GTK, or Dear ImGui, or whatever) for native UIs even for programs that are (for now) meant to be only run on Windows.
To me personally, this has the additional benefit that I can do most of the development and testing in a non-hostile environment (e.g. Debian), then running a cross compiler (e.g. via MXE) and only do the final testing on Windows (well, usually first Wine, then some Windows VM), but at that last stage surprises are extremely seldom.
Be aware - that is an extreme minority of projects in the real world.
Historically, most of the time the development team only knows a specific platform specific language or way of doing things, and doesn’t have the background or experience to even know that what they would be doing in a specific place isn’t portable.
Languages and cross platform toolkits have developed a lot, but I still would question if most development folks would even recognize something like an endianness issue was a potential problem on some random project.
If someone is doing HTML/js/web dev, they’d never need to worry though I guess (barring something really weird).
If you haven't been aware of the great work of the European NGO "noyb", this should grab your attention.
Facebook's GDPR violations are not just tolerated by the Irish DPC, they are outright protecting Facebook. Until recently, nobody was able to prove that. But noyb finally managed to annoyi the Irish DPC so much that the Irish DPC finally showed they true face by trying to force noyb into signing an NDA for documents that have clearly, and legally proven, a public interest.
These "Advent Reading" sessions are noyb's way to kick back the blanket so everyone can see what the Irish DPC is actually doing here.
If you haven't been aware of the great work of the European NGO "noyb", this should grab your attention.
Facebook's GDPR violations are not just tolerated by the Irish DPC, they are outright protecting Facebook. Until recently, nobody was able to prove that. But noyb finally managed to annoyi the Irish DPC so much that the Irish DPC finally showed they true face by trying to force noyb into signing an NDA for documents that have clearly, and legally proven, a public interest.
These "Advent Reading" sessions are noyb's way to kick back the blanket so everyone can see what the Irish DPC is actually doing here.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9562
(which wasn't yet finished at the time of the article)