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Painkillers are essential. (There are indicators that Neanderthals already used them.) However, many people don’t know about aspects of them, that could be relevant for them in practice. Since I learned some new things recently, here a condensed info dump about painkillers.

Many aspects here are oversimplified in the hope to raise some initial awareness. Please consult your doctor or pharmacist about your personal situation, if that’s possible. I will not talk about opioids. Their addiction potential should never be underestimated.

Here is the short summary:

• Find out which substance and dose works for you.
• With most painkillers, check if you need to take Pantoprazole to protect your stomach.
• Never overdose paracetamol, never take it with alcohol.
• If possible, take pain medication early and directly in the dose you need.
• Don’t take pain medication for more than 15 days a month against headaches. Some mediaction even fewer days.
• If you have any preexisting conditions, health risks, or take additional medication, check very carefully if any of these things could interacts with your pain medication.

Not all substances will work for you

The likelihood of some substances not working for some sort of pain for you is pretty high. If something doesn’t seem to work for you, consider trying a different substance. I have seen many doctors being very confident that a substance must work. The statistics often contradict them.

Common over the counter options are:

• • Ibuprofen
  • Paracetamol
  • Naproxen
  • Acetylsalicylic Acid (ASS)
  • Diclofenac

All of them also reduce fever. All of them, except Paracetamol, are anti-inflammatory. The anti-inflammatory effect is highest in Diclofenac and Naproxen, still significant in Ibuprofen.

It might very well be that none of them work for you. In that case, there might still be other options to prevent or treat your pain.

Gastrointestinal (GI) side effects

All nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), that is, Ibuprofen, Naproxen, ASS, and, Diclofenac can be hard on your stomach. This can be somewhat mitigated by taking them after a meal and with a lot of water.

Among the risk factors you should be aware of are Age above 60, history of GI issues, intake of an SSRI, SNRI, or Steroids, consumption of alcohol, or smoking. The risk is lower with Ibuprofen, but higher for ASS, Naproxen, and, especially, Diclofenac.

It is common to mitigate the GI risks by taking a Proton Pump Inhibitor (PPI) like Pantoprazole 20 mg. Usually, if any of the risk factors apply to you. You can limit the intake to the days where you use painkillers. You only need one dose per day, 30–60 minutes before a meal. Then you can take the first painkiller for the day after the meal. Taking Pantoprazole for a few days a month is usually fine. If you need to take it continuously or very often, you have to very carefully weigh all the side effects of PPIs.

Paracetamol doesn’t have the same GI risks. If it is effective for you, it can be an option to use it instead. It is also an option to take a lower dose NSAIDs and a lower dose of paracetamol to minimize the risks of both.

Metamizole is also a potential alternative. It might, however, not be available in your country, due to a rare severe side effect. If available, it is still a potential option in cases where other side effects can also become very dangerous. It is usually prescription-only.

For headaches, you might want to look into Triptans. They are also usually prescription-only.

Liver related side effects

Paracetamol can negatively affect the liver. It is therefore very important to honor its maximum dosage of 4000 mg per day, or lower for people with risk factors. Taking paracetamol more than 10 days per month can be a risk for the liver. Monitoring liver values can help, but conclusive changes in your blood work might be delayed until initial damage has happened.

A risk factor is alcohol consumption. It increases if the intake overlaps. To be safe, avoid taking paracetamol for 24 hours after alcohol consumption.

NSAIDs have a much lower risk of affecting the liver negatively.

Cardiovascular risks

ASS is also prescribed as a blood thinner. All NSAIDs have this effect to some extent. However, for ASS, the blood thinning effect extends to more than a week after it has been discontinued. Surgeries should be avoided until that effect has subsided. It also increases the risk for hemorrhagic stroke. If you have migraine with aura, you might want to avoid ASS and Diclofenac.

NSAIDs also have the risk to increase thrombosis. If you are in as risk group for that, you should consider avoiding Diclofenac.

Paracetamol increases blood pressure which can be relevant if there are preexisting risks like already increased blood pressure.

If you take ASS as a blood thinner. Take Aspirin at least 60 minutes before Metamizole. Otherwise, the blood thinning effect of the ASS might be suppressed.

Effective application

NSAIDs have a therapeutic ceiling for pain relief. You might not see an increased benefit beyond a dose of 200 mg or 400 mg for Ibuprofen. However, this ceiling does not apply for their anti-inflammatory effect, which might increase until 600 mg or 800 mg. Also, a higher dose than 400 mg can often be more effective to treat period pain. Higher doses can reduce the non-pain symptoms of migraine. Diclofenac is commonly used beyond its pain relief ceiling for rheumatoid arthritis.

Take pain medication early and in a high enough dose. Several mechanisms can increase the benefit of pain medication. Knowing your effective dose and the early signs to take it is important. If you have early signs of a migraine attack, or you know that you are getting your period, it often makes sense to start the medication before the pain onset. Pain can have cascading effects in the body, and often there is a minimum amount of medication that you need to get a good effect, while a lower dose is almost ineffective.

As mentioned before, you can combine an NSAIDs and Paracetamol. The effects of NSAIDs and Paracetamol can enhance each other, potentially reducing your required dose. In an emergency, it can be safe to combine both of their maximum dosage for a short time. With Ibuprofen and Paracetamol, you can alternate between them every three hours to soften the respective lows in the 6-hour cycle of each of them.

Caffeine can support the pain relief. A cup of coffee or a double-espresso might be enough.

Medication overuse headache

Don’t use pain medication against headaches for more than 15 days a month. If you are using pain medication too often for headaches, you might develop a medication overuse headache (German: Medikamentenübergebrauchskopfschmerz). They can be reversed by taking a break from any pain medication. If you are using triptans (not further discussed here), the limit is 10 days instead of 15 days.

While less likely, a medication overuse headache can also appear when treating a different pain than headaches.

If you have more headache days than your painkillers allow treating, there are a lot of medications for migraine prophylaxis. Some, like Amitriptyline, can also be effective for a variety of other kinds headaches.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: TikTok will not introduce end-to-end encryption (E2EE) -- the controversial privacy feature used by nearly all its rivals -- arguing it makes users less safe. E2EE means only the sender and recipient of a direct message can view its contents, making it the most secure form of communication available to the general public. Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and X have embraced it because they say their priority is maximizing user privacy. But critics have said E2EE makes it harder to stop harmful content spreading online, because it means tech firms and law enforcement have no way of viewing any material sent in direct messages. The situation is made more complex because TikTok has long faced accusations that ties to the Chinese state may put users' data at risk. TikTok has consistently denied this, but earlier this year the social media firm's US operations were separated from its global business on the orders of US lawmakers. TikTok told the BBC it believed end-to-end encryption prevented police and safety teams from being able to read direct messages if they needed to. It confirmed its approach to the BBC in a briefing about security at its London office, saying it wanted to protect users, especially young people from harm. It described this stance as a deliberate decision to set itself apart from rivals. "Grooming and harassment risks are very real in DMs [direct messages] so TikTok now can credibly argue that it's prioritizing 'proactive safety' over 'privacy absolutism' which is a pretty powerful soundbite," said social media industry analyst Matt Navarra. But Navarra said the move also "puts TikTok out of step with global privacy expectations" and might reinforce wariness for some about its ownership.

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Continuing its product launches this week, Apple today announced the "MacBook Neo," an all-new, low-cost Mac featuring the A18 Pro chip. It starts at $599 and begins shipping on Wednesday, March 11. MacRumors reports: The MacBook Neo is the first Mac to be powered by an iPhone chip; the A18 Pro debuted in 2024's iPhone 16 Pro models. Apple says it is up to 50% faster for everyday tasks than the bestselling PC with the latest shipping Intel Core Ultra 5, up to 3x faster for on-device AI workloads, and up to 2x faster for tasks like photo editing. The MacBook Neo features a 13-inch Liquid Retina display with a 2408-by-1506 resolution, 500 nits of brightness, and an anti-reflective coating. The display does not have a notch, instead featuring uniform, iPad-style bezels. It is available in Silver, Indigo, Blush, and Citrus color options. The colored finishes extend to the Magic Keyboard in lighter shades and come with matching wallpapers. It weighs 2.7 pounds. There are two USB-C ports. One is a USB-C 2 port with support for speeds up to 480 Mb/s and one is a USB-C 3 port with support for speeds up to 10 Gb/s. There is also a headphone jack. The MacBook Neo also offers a 16-hour battery life, 8GB of unified memory, Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 6 connectivity, a 1080p front-facing camera, dual mics with directional beamforming, and dual side-firing speakers with Spatial Audio.

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Intel has formally unveiled its Xeon 6+ "Clearwater Forest" data-center processor with up to 288 cores, built on the company's new Intel 18A process and using Foveros Direct packaging. The chip targets telecom, cloud, and edge-AI workloads with massive parallelism, large caches, and high-bandwidth DDR5-8000 memory. Tom's Hardware reports: Intel's Xeon 6+ processors with up to 288 cores combine 12 compute chiplets containing 24 energy-efficient Darkmont cores per tile that are produced using 18A manufacturing technology, two I/O tiles made on Intel 7 production node, as well as three active base tiles made on Intel 3 fabrication process. The compute tiles are stacked on top of the base dies using Intel's Foveros Direct 3D technology, whereas lateral connections are enabled by Intel's EMIB bridges. Intel's 'Darkmont' efficiency cores have received rather meaningful microarchitectural upgrades. Each core integrates a 64 KB L1 instruction cache, a broader fetch and decode pipeline, and a deeper out-of-order engine capable of tracking more in-flight operations. The number of execution ports has also been increased in a bid to improve both scalar and vector throughput under heavily threaded server workloads. From a cache hierarchy standpoint, the design groups cores into four-core blocks that share approximately 4 MB of L2 cache per block. As a result, the aggregate last-level cache across the full package surpasses 1 GB, roughly 1,152 MB in total. This unusually large pool is intended to keep data close to hundreds of active cores and reduce dependence on external memory bandwidth, which in turn is meant to both increase performance and lower power consumption. Platform-wise, the processor remains drop-in compatible with the current Xeon server socket, so the CPU has 12 memory channels that support DDR5-8000, 96 PCIe 5.0 lanes with 64 lanes supporting CXL 2.0.

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A new Android app called Nearby Glasses alerts users when Bluetooth signals from smart glasses are detected nearby. The Android app, called Nearby Glasses, "launches at a time as there is an increasing resistance against always-recording or listening devices, which critics say process information about nearby people who do not give their consent," reports TechCrunch. From the report: Yves Jeanrenaud, who made the app, first spoke to 404 Media about the project and said he was in part inspired to make Nearby Glasses after reading the independent publication's reporting into wearable surveillance devices, including how Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses have been used in immigration raids and to film and harass sex workers. On the app's project page, Jeanrenaud described smart glasses as an "intolerable intrusion, consent neglecting, horrible piece of tech." Jeanrenaud told TechCrunch in an email that his motivation came from "witnessing the sheer scale and inhumane nature of the abuse these smart glasses are involved in." Jeanrenaud also cited Meta's decision to implement face recognition as a default feature in its smart glasses, "which I consider to be a huge floodgate pushed open for all kinds of privacy-invasive behavior." The app works by listening for nearby Bluetooth signals that contain a publicly assigned identifier unique to the Bluetooth device's manufacturer. If the app detects a Bluetooth signal from a nearby hardware device made by Meta or Snap, the app will send the user an alert. (The app also allows users to add their own specific Bluetooth identifiers, allowing the user to detect a broader range of wearable surveillance gadgetry.) Further reading: Meta's AI Display Glasses Reportedly Share Intimate Videos With Human Moderators

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At Mobile World Congress, Cristiano Amon of Qualcomm argued that the coming 6G networks will power an AI-driven "agent economy," where devices and AI assistants constantly communicate across the network. "AI will fundamentally change our mobile experiences," Qualcomm chief executive, Cristiano Amon says. "It's going to change how we think about our smartphones. Think about our personal computing. Think about and interact with a car. The car is now a computing surface. If you actually believe in the AI revolution, 6G will be required. Resistance is futile." The company says early consumer testing could begin around the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, with broader rollouts expected by 2029. Fortune's Kamal Ahmed reports: Akash Palkhiwala is Qualcomm's chief financial officer and chief operating officer. I spent some time with him at the company's stand, as his leading engineers took me through a 6G future where individuals will have real-time information delivered to them via their glasses. Palkhiwala compliments me on my watch, which only does one thing. It tells me the time. "6G is going to be the first time that connectivity and AI come together in the network. What we're building is the first AI-native wireless network that's ever been built," he explains. "The traffic that we expect on 6G is way different than what we had before," says Palkhiwala. "Before, it was all about consumer traffic. We expect 6G to be driven by [AI] agent traffic. Think about all these use cases where there are AI agents sitting on various devices -- your glasses, your watch, your phone, your PC. These agents are going to be talking back and forth across the network to other agents and services. "The traffic completely changes. 6G is being built with this idea that the traffic that goes on the network is not just going to be consumer voice calls or downloading videos, we're going to have agents talking to each other, so the reliability of the network becomes very important." On-device capabilities (the ability of your phone to process far more data); edge computing (locally sourced IT technology rather than distant data centers); more efficient use of available bandwidth (AI-enabled load control); and greater cloud access will all come together to produce a new wireless network. [...] "Today we are in the application economy," he notes. "On the phone, you want to make a travel reservation, you go to one application. You want to order an Uber, you go to a second application. You want to order food, you go to a third application, movie tickets, etc. The user has to go through that effort. In the future, you think of the app economy moving over to an agent economy, where there's one agent I'm interacting with, and I can ask that agent to book me a movie ticket or a plane ticket, to order food for me, get an Uber for me. It knows everything about me."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: OpenAI today updated its most popular ChatGPT model, debuting GPT-5.3 Instant. GPT-5.3 Instant is supposed to provide more accurate answers and better contextualized results when searching the web. The update also cuts down on unnecessary dead ends, caveats, and overly declarative phrasing, plus it has fewer hallucinations. According to OpenAI, it tweaked the Instant model to address complaints about tone, relevance, and conversational flow, which are issues that don't show up in benchmarks. GPT-5.2 Instant had a "cringe" tone that could be overbearing or make unsubstantiated assumptions about user intent or emotions. The new model will have a more natural conversational style and will cut back on dramatic phrases like "Stop. Take a breath." Users found that GPT-5.2 Instant would refuse questions it should have been able to answer, or respond in ways that felt overly cautious around sensitive topics. GPT-5.3 Instant cuts down on refusals and tones down overly defensive or moralizing preambles when answering a question. The model will no longer "over-caveat" after assuming bad intent from the user. GPT-5.3 Instant also provides higher-quality answers based on information from the web. OpenAI says that it is able to better balance what it finds online with its own knowledge, so it is less likely to overindex on web results.

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For years, Linux security has triggered two very different arguments. One side sees the problem as largely solved. The operating system has a strong permissions model, and open source transparency allows vulnerabilities to be inspected and fixed quickly. The other side sees a growing crisis, pointing to the constant stream of CVEs and the increasing sophistication of modern attacks. In reality, the situation falls somewhere between those views. The more useful question is: who targets Linux systems, and why?

Warner Bros. is developing a feature film set in the world of Game of Thrones with writer Beau Willimon of Andor and House of Cards. "That's about all we know right now, and as with everything 'Thrones' things could change, but the film is firmly in development," reports TheWrap. Page Six Hollywood was first to break the news and speculated that the story could revolve around Aegon I, the legendary Targaryen king who spawned a dynasty. From the report: The Targaryens have been at the center of all things "Thrones" on HBO, with "Game of Thrones" following Daenerys Targaryen's (Emilia Clarke) quest to usurp the throne, spinoff "House of the Dragon" set in the midst of the Targaryens' reign and recent spinoff "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" following the squire-ship of Aegon "Egg" Targaryen towards the end of the family's run atop the Iron Throne. All, of course, based on George R.R. Martin's expansive book universe.

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NASA is eyeing an April launch window for the upcoming Artemis II mission after it repaired a helium-flow issue on the Space Launch System upper stage rocket. "Work on the rocket and spacecraft will continue in the coming weeks as NASA prepares for rolling the rocket out to the launch pad again later this month ahead of a potential launch in April," NASA wrote in an update on Tuesday. Space.com reports: The repair work occurred inside the huge Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. Artemis 2's SLS and Orion crew capsule have been in the VAB since Feb. 25, when they rolled back to the hangar from KSC's Launch Pad 39B. Just a few days earlier, the Artemis 2 stack successfully completed a wet dress rehearsal, a two-day-long practice run of the procedures leading up to launch. In the wake of that test, however, NASA noticed an interruption in helium flow in the SLS' upper stage. That was a significant issue, because helium pressurizes the rocket's propellant tanks. Rollback was the only option, as the affected area in the upper stage was not accessible at the pad. The problem took a potential March launch out of play for Artemis 2, which will send four astronauts on a roughly 10-day flight around the moon. It will be the first crewed flight to the lunar neighborhood since Apollo 17 in 1972. The next Artemis 2 launch window opens in April, with liftoff opportunities on April 1, April 3-6 and April 30. And those options apparently remain in play, thanks to recent work in the VAB. That work centered on a seal in an interface through which helium flows from ground equipment into the SLS upper stage. That seal was obstructing the interface, which is known as a quick disconnect.

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Security researchers say a highly sophisticated iPhone exploitation toolkit dubbed "Coruna," which possibly originated from a U.S. government contractor, has spread from suspected Russian espionage operations to crypto-stealing criminal campaigns. Apple has patched the exploited vulnerabilities in newer iOS versions, but tens of thousands of devices may have already been compromised. An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from Wired's report: Security researchers at Google on Tuesday released a report describing what they're calling "Coruna," a highly sophisticated iPhone hacking toolkit that includes five complete hacking techniques capable of bypassing all the defenses of an iPhone to silently install malware on a device when it visits a website containing the exploitation code. In total, Coruna takes advantage of 23 distinct vulnerabilities in iOS, a rare collection of hacking components that suggests it was created by a well-resourced, likely state-sponsored group of hackers. In fact, Google traces components of Coruna to hacking techniques it spotted in use in February of last year and attributed to what it describes only as a "customer of a surveillance company." Then, five months later, Google says a more complete version of Coruna reappeared in what appears to have been an espionage campaign carried out by a suspected Russian spy group, which hid the hacking code in a common visitor-counting component of Ukrainian websites. Finally, Google spotted Coruna in use yet again in what seems to have been a purely profit-focused hacking campaign, infecting Chinese-language crypto and gambling sites to deliver malware that steals victims cryptocurrency. Conspicuously absent from Google's report is any mention of who the original surveillance company "customer" that deployed Coruna may have been. But the mobile security company iVerify, which also analyzed a version of Coruna it obtained from one of the infected Chinese sites, suggests the code may well have started life as a hacking kit built for or purchased by the US government. Google and iVerify both note that Coruna contains multiple components previously used in a hacking operation known as "Triangulation" that was discovered targeting Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky in 2023, which the Russian government claimed was the work of the NSA. (The US government didn't respond to Russia's claim.) Coruna's code also appears to have been originally written by English-speaking coders, notes iVerify's cofounder Rocky Cole. "It's highly sophisticated, took millions of dollars to develop, and it bears the hallmarks of other modules that have been publicly attributed to the US government," Cole tells WIRED. "This is the first example we've seen of very likely US government tools -- based on what the code is telling us -- spinning out of control and being used by both our adversaries and cybercriminal groups." Regardless of Coruna's origin, Google warns that a highly valuable and rare hacking toolkit appears to have traveled through a series of unlikely hands, and now exists in the wild where it could still be adopted -- or adapted -- by any hacker group seeking to target iPhone users. "How this proliferation occurred is unclear, but suggests an active market for 'second hand' zero-day exploits," Google's report reads. "Beyond these identified exploits, multiple threat actors have now acquired advanced exploitation techniques that can be re-used and modified with newly identified vulnerabilities."

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OpenAI is reportedly developing a code-hosting platform that could compete with GitHub, The Information reported on Tuesday. "If OpenAI does sell the product, it would mark a bold move by the creator of ChatGPT to compete directly against Microsoft, which holds a significant stake in the firm," notes Reuters. From the report: Engineers from OpenAI encountered a rise in service disruptions that rendered GitHub unavailable in recent months, which ultimately prompted the decision to develop the new product, the report said. The OpenAI project is in its early stages and likely will not be completed for months, according to The Information. Employees working on it have considered making the code repository available for purchase to OpenAI's customer base.

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