So essentially the same business plan as 95% of all tech startups of the past quarter-century.

I want to move to a timeline where this is part of a bad movie plot, not part of the news.

I would say that all issues can be traced back to letting people sell stuff on what was designed as a government/educational communications system. We keep on adding patches trying to smother commercially-motivated bad actors who were not an expected part of the original design, but it’s not really much different from playing whack-a-mole.

(I didn’t read the article, but I imagine it’s Yet Another Idea for some kind of patch, and probably not a very good one, because most of them aren’t.)

A snake doing the limbo could not go lower than these people at this point.

The problem is not the hypothesis, the problem is that it isn’t really presented as a hypothesis. Reporting on the results before doing the experiment isn’t the way to go.

Our theories of how the world works are necessarily incomplete, and experiments turn up things that overturn scientific understanding often enough. The way this is set up matches a common pattern of vilifying tech without seeing whether it’s deserved or not. Maybe not wearing a noise cancellation headset would, in fact, help this patient, but until that’s tested and found out to be true, reporting on it is just spreading FUD.

If it’s a high-pitched hum, they may genuinely be unable to hear it. It’s common for people to lose their hearing in very high registers quickly as they age (like, most teens still hear them, but thirty-somethings mostly don’t). Without noticing, since it doesn’t impede day-to-day communication.

The cause of Sophie’s APD diagnosis is unknown, but her audiologist believes the overuse of noise-cancelling headphones, which Sophie wears for up to five hours a day, could have a part to play.

Other audiologists agree, saying more research is needed into the potential effects of their prolonged use.

That looks to me like, “audiologists have no bloody clue where this issue is coming from, and are therefore throwing shit at the wall in the hope that something will stick.”

The article isn’t entirely clear. I get the impression that the person in question may have been the sole maintainer for some hardware-agnostic parts of the wireless stack (which I’d expect to only need active development when a new standard gets greenlighted; should be bugfixes the rest of the time), co-maintainer of the drivers for some atheros chipsets, and the general oversight/coordination guy, but there are other developers working on specific drivers.

Did they compete on providing actual therapy? No? Then this is meaningless.

It’s an obsolete usage of “beg” that’s now preserved only in that particular set phrase. One of English’s many linguistic fossils, which you should learn more about before trying to critique anyone’s language use.

The newsworthy parts of this:

1. It was a monkey and not a squirrel.
2. It took down the entire grid and not just a section of it, because poorly-designed and -maintained grid.

It’s useful because it’s ubiquitous. Everything that can take in music files supports it.

Is MP3-encoded audio of the best possible quality? No, of course not. But for most people it’s Good Enough, especially if you do most of your listening in a noisy environment. MP3s are to lossless formats what CD was to vinyl for so many years.

They might end up having to pay more money than exists on the planet at that rate.

My bet would be, convenient and intrusive. The two are not mutually exclusive—in fact, they very frequently go together.

One of two things is the case:

1. The numbers are in the paper, and the person who wrote the article could have transcribed them but is too lazy.

2. The numbers are not in the paper, in which case I would class the article as inflammatory and irresponsible.

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Do I trust the journalist? Not in the sense you mean, but I expect them to act responsibly and make a minimum effort.

Missing from the article: actual amounts of PFAS found in the bands, what percentage of it can be absorbed through skin contact, how that compares to other sources the average person might run into, and how much you have to absorb before biological damage emerges out of the statistical noise. The information may be in the original paper, but I’m disinclined to search for it there. Without those numbers, this is meaningless.