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.

Y’know what’s worse? When there’s no dot. Worse than that, it’s an undotted directory used to store a single config file. Ugh, unpleasant memories. 😒