tremere

I dissent. I see it as wholly harmful for the human body. You can argue marijuana and LSD are also good for surrendering the ego and forming closer human connections, yet neither marijuana nor LSD has received anywhere close to equivalent social approval.

I see the consumption of alcohol as weak, immature, and reckless. I view people who drink alcohol regularly as lucky people who work bullshit jobs and do not notice the buffer protecting them from harm. Anyone entrusted with secrets or whose job function is essential to national security should not ever drink alcohol in my view.

Interpersonal issues, as well as deep-seated personal ones, can be resolved without the use of alcohol. If you ask yourself in a Socratic fashion where the happiness from alcohol comes from, and recursively proceed, you will find it always comes from within and that alcohol is merely a crutch. You can ask yourself hard questions and adjust your mindset accordingly without ever touching a drop of alcohol.

There is tremendous upside. You can look like a rockstar at the new company and propel yourself upwards with that momentum.

Wasn't trying anything, I was legit curious about places where intellectual conversation happens. I suppose you are right that exposing such places to air will risk their integrity, then you'll be left in the same situation as me. Forget I ever asked.

I share this sentiment. Whenever I see his name I end up reading his article and whether I agree with him or not, the quality of content he puts out sets a very high bar. Whenever he writes a comment on HN it's one of those rare instances where I'll stop and read it carefully rather than blaze through it. Jeff is truly a gem in the community.

FWIW I did not expect bad news since I didn't see a date range after the name in parens.

Humor me. Recommend a filter for me to get me started. It doesn't even have to be that good and if I'm disappointed I won't be able to reply anyway.

I have taken out the word "outside" from my post, because you seem to be addressing a very minor component of my overall message. Please note: My main point is that pure, intellectual connection is almost nowhere to be found. It is drowned out in a sea of shit.

While I did criticize HN in my post, I will note that it is sort of a last bastion of intellectual conversation. I believe the motives are not as pure as before, and I lament that. There simply is not a space for intellectual conversation for intellectual conversation's sake on the internet anymore. It is all twisted.

The site was rife with perverts, Neo-Nazi propaganda, CSAM distribution, and honeypot operations. I think people are idealizing what it was in recent years, believing it was the same fun as in the early 2010s. It was an absolute shitshow.

The owner acts like Omegle was about innocent curious internet explorers asking cute questions and spreading knowledge. Bull shit. I never met a professor on Omegle. The most common encounter is a pervert who quickly ends the chat. I probably would have needed to sink 300+ hours on the platform in order to meet one. And by the time I would have met this professor, I would most likely have gained nothing from the exchange. Therefore, in my experience, I have found such innocent encounters to be the exception. By far. There is no corner on the internet where that happens organically. Even on HN, where comments are verbose and technical, it's only because of the perceived clout and proximity to VC money. The open connectedness of the internet has little to do with it.

If you access Tor, which is considered the peak of anonymous interconnectedness, you will also find a draught of intellectual activity. I would love to find intellectual discussions occurring on Tor, if anyone knows one please let me know the onion address. (Pro-tip: it's an impossible quest.) Instead all you will find are CSAM, scams, and honeypots.

I have found that my life has gotten immeasurably better since I generally stopped using the internet. The reddit API lockdown woke me up and I realized pretty much everything on the internet is garbage. Even HN is of lower quality than before, with the average post being a flex of one's social status rather than a helpful tip from one hacker to another.

Fuck all this noise. The internet is so full of low quality social content that it is overall not worth using for social connection.

Call me naive, but I don't see why we need Kant's ideas of noumena and phenomena when we have Plato's Allegory of the Cave and Analogy of the Divided Line. In my limited experience, Plato's philosophical primitives prove more useful for thinking about whether LLMs possess intelligence and what reality really is. In my opinion the most groundbreaking contribution of Kant is adding in the a priori and a posteriori distinctions to how belief is constructed. Even so, nothing of Kant's work impresses me more than Plato's allegory.

>adorable, tiny

Or maybe, just maybe, realize your consumer preferences are not universal and are in fact the minority view

Agreed entirely. Even more glycemic foods than sugar (which is only half glucose), are not a metabolic problem. I started eating pasta, white bread, and white rice and have been able to lose weight. People on this very forum will tell me that what I do is impossible, but I'm done taking the advice of bots and people who aren't fit. I am downright skinny now. Go ahead and downvote my post, after all HN is an echo chamber full of IYIs and shills, is it not?

No, I think it's fine and honestly I can understand the need to compulsively use AirPods especially among the anxiety prone. Forcing people to endure the noise of the world, which is increasingly inorganic and terrifying, just because you insist on them listening to you in a subservient manner, is very strange and the sort of insistence I would expect only from narcissists. I personally wear my AirPods Pro at all times when in public because it makes it that much easier to tolerate it. I have transparency mode on so I can still listen to you, probably better than without AirPods.

If the person is listening to you and responding just fine, then the AirPods are not a problem. If the person is obviously distracted then you have cause to ask them to take them off. Simple as.

From a decision-making standpoint it seems difficult to argue that you made the wrong choice. At the time when the $99 kits were ubiquitous, 23andme seemed like a solid, reputable company.

Back then, few people had the mindset of, "if they own my data, they own me." But we're starting to see it take hold.

reddit is a funnel away from establishment media toward sites like bitchute and obscure conspiracy groups. Every shadowban is a new alt-right acolyte.

You're a fool if you think that the way reddit handles content moderation does not create angry people.

I don't know if I necessarily agree, especially with D = decoupling. However I do like the idea of dead simple code. Often I'll find code written by self styled haxors who omit curly braces and nest ternary operators because they can. That's great but it ends up biting you in the ass.

The code itself should be treated internally like part of the product and it should be easily extensible, of uniform style, and written so safely that if a child added a line to the code it wouldn't break it entirely.

This is especially true of languages that support macros. If inclusion or modification of macros in your code cannot be done, it is probably a bad sign. When writing code to be resistant to hardware attacks for instance there is a different style that must be adopted entirely, if everyone is writing the fanciest for-loops fathomable then it becomes inefficient and a risk to code correctness to mutate the code to resist classes of attacks. This is terrible and not worth it just because an elite haxor wanted to write a for loop in a single line.

In my view, we need to stop putting all notions of intelligence on a pedestal. In my opinion, it interferes with productive science. It's useful to know that mentally rotating an object is a task that allows you to sort people by IQ, roughly. It's less useful to have studies that say "aww it's okay if you take long to solve hard problems, it's actually a sign of intelligence." It just creates cope.

Reddit is past its expiration date anyway and I'm surprised no one has created a challenger site. Perhaps this was due to Reddit's friendliness toward programmatic access but it seems they are taking that away.

This is a good opportunity to create a new community, and essentially take back messaging from the corporations (let's be real about what reddit is) and put it back into the hands of the people.

Because Android is a far more secure platform and Google is a far more trustworthy custodian of your data?

Or are you recommending that one opt out of a good portion of society by not using a smartphone? For most people that is not really a convenient option.

If they do this, then

- Make alignment of front facing cameras free (for newer automobiles not retrofits), not a $500 service option. The front facing camera is bound to fall all out of alignment, which makes the system begin to see ghosts. This then causes drivers to simply disable the automatic emergency braking, after 1 or 2 scares. Therefore the system is broken.

- Fine car companies that cause accidents due to emergency braking randomly braking due to ghosts or other spectra, if due to flawed mechanics. There should not be corner cutting in a safety feature. Such fines already exist for airbag regulations.

If we were to mandate automatic emergency braking today with the state of the current technology, it would be a disaster.

Energy expenditure isn't constant but it can be easily predicted based on body mass and body temperature versus environment. You made a strawman out of the person you replied to, clearly they meant 500-1000 below maintenance (a variable), not 500-1000 below a constant. The severe logical mistake was made by you.

I'm happy you've quit your former habits and I celebrate you.

Just so you know, the point of my post isn't to rip on people with low willpower or to brag about mine (which would be false valor anyway--there are reasons I had issues with alcohol and drugs to begin with). The thesis of my post is that the narrative is that you need a drug to get better.

Ozempic is supposed to be a treatment applied to people who are not yet overweight enough for bariatric surgery, yet it is being used ubiquitously. What does that tell you about the mind share differences between "you need a drug to get better" versus "you can just stop"?

The idea that another drug is your only way out is but a shadow on the wall of a cave, puppeteered by Big Pharma, people need to free themselves, escape outside and see the sun.

Additionally, my post was "flagged" which is a bit hilarious. I wonder what part of my post was hateful or otherwise below the standards of this forum. Unless you define hate as being critical of big pharma.

> I stopped using cocaine and for some reason gained weight, the post

I can stop putting food in my mouth for free, just by deciding to. By doing exactly this, I have lost considerable weight, 10 BMI points worth. I will continue doing this because it's working for me.

I can stop smoking and using any nicotine product. I have done exactly that after deciding to.

I can stop drinking and using any sort of depressant to relax my mood. I have also done exactly that.

It is all mindset. Ozempic doesn't erase the food you eat, it just makes you eat less of it.

So to me, it is strange to me that this is no longer seen as the straightforward choice. We are told ever more frequently that we are slaves to our impulses and that we need help, often of the pharmaceutical variety, every step of the way. It sounds like learned helplessness though psychology is not my area of expertise.

Maybe I am an old man yelling at clouds, but I don't like this change in the narrative.

I don't know if this is the right call, since it opens up a can of worms. Since it might affect free speech as a constitutional right it might make it to the Supreme Court, which might be interesting.

I fast, not intermittent fasting but real fasting, 48 hours or 72 hours or longer depending on social obligations, during parts of the year. I might be the only one who does this so I hope my testimony helps you out.

During these fasts I have water and nothing else. If I feel inclined to exercise or if I'm peeing excessively I will take electrolytes in the form of powder in water, but that's it. In the morning I'll have black coffee. So technically this is called a "dirty fast".

Initially it sucks. The first day in particular can be a bit hazy. Tip of tongue syndrome, tendency to hyper focus on a single thing, etc. It is objectively terrible.

After about 24 hours it becomes a very smooth feeling and you feel mentally agile. It might be placebo but it feels like more mental agility than when not fasting.

After about 48 hours it becomes peaceful on top of all that. Forgiveness comes easier, anger comes slower, you will feel like you should do less harm, things like that. It's a bit of a trip. Hunger is still there, might even be roaring with hunger at this point. Sense of smell is greatly sharpened.

After 72 hours you no linger are hungry. It's scary. There is just no desire to eat other than a psychological worry that you're missing whatever vitamin you're recently obsessed with. You might ask yourself "what's happening to my nicotinamide riboside reserves" and other such questions. However, physiologically there is not much hunger at all, and it is a bit scary because you know that you need food so it's strange and makes you mistrustful of your impulses to experience a disconnect between instinct and need.

Beyond 72 hours it stays the same, you've evolved beyond needing food and bowel movements and are closer to machine, you can get a lot done and you will have more time than you know what to do with. If you're someone who enjoys indulging in earthly pleasures you might be extremely bored.

Disclaimer the following contains information about fasting, it is not qualified medical advice as I am not a doctor nor am I claiming that it is safe:

My "advice" to someone who has just started is to take it slow, primarily for medical reasons. Electrolytes aren't exactly safe to tinker with. If you have a heart condition I would say straight up don't do any extended fasting. However if you want to know how it feels like to fast then work your way up to an extended fast, try an all day fast then resume regular eating for 3 days then try again. Then work up from there. Don't become obsessive about whether one calorie from sugarless gum breaks a fast, focus on the discipline required to fast through meals and let that discipline strengthen other aspects of your life. Also, take a very thorough accounting of your own health. If fasting causes you to lose minerals, you should be able to notice it right away. Take careful care of your teeth and nails so you can see any potential warning signs before they become issues. If anything goes wrong just resume eating, there is always tomorrow. And remember that water is your friend but if it is absorbing too much electrolyte out of your body then use powdered electrolytes to stay balanced.

Lastly, in general, and in stark contrast to the above, I do NOT recommend fasting to most people unless they hunger for a challenge that requires immense self-discipline. You can get plenty of metabolic health benefits from IF or OMAD without nearly as much discomfort. You can say "I'm fasting" and simply skip breakfast or dinner. It's almost a no-brainer especially if your only goal is weight management.

Source: me about to be 72 hours fasted

> It is so sad that so many people won't experience late 1980s and early 1990s era of the internet, which was devoid of extensive surveillance and censorship.

Was it though?

Lol. To fix them? They are not errors as much as warnings that are still helpful and I would like to keep. I just don't want the ugly box and underline which makes text unreadable.

Even when the error involves balancing parentheses the ugly box gets in the way. VScode has a neat trick of color coding parens so that balancing them is a bit more efficient, but with a tight box around your text and a squiggly underline it's just an unreadable mess.

Honestly turning off the linter has been the most helpful. Now I avoid forgetting semicolons and not balancing parens simply because of how painful using the linter is, that I would rather avoid it altogether. But it didn't have to be this way. They could have just not made error highlighting so terrible. It's garbage and everyone knows it is, anyone who tells me errors don't look absurd on VSCode is someone I stop taking seriously. It would be as if your teacher used a thick sharpie to black out what she thought were your mistakes in your essay, rendering you unable to even figure out what mistake you made in the first place.

What bothers me most about VScode is that linters and other annotating plugins will underline and box text and make it really hard to read. It's not graceful the way error highlighting was in Eclipse and Visual Studio and it makes me miss the old tools. It's really really ugly, especially the box. Everyone says "just get a plug-in like ErrorLens" but I would rather just have a de-lint button. I honestly turn off the linter nowadays and run it manually in the shell (fortunately VSCode has a shell built in).

I'm starting to become fatigued by all this TikTok news. Either ban the app or don't. Causing anxiety over TikTok without any action is the worst of both worlds.

The uncommented upon angle here is that it works because it's content derived from an already established influencer. It is not wholly synthetic but rather an ersatz good that almost seems like the real thing. The unspoken offering is "you can make it seem like this influencer is your girlfriend." It is like a deepfake photo but of the personality.

If this becomes turnkey I can see many Twitch streamers offer such AI services.

When I work with a computer I really don't want to think too much about POST or how the power on button sounds. I simply want it to turn on and work. The functioning of my computer system is mostly orthogonal to my work. I don't distract myself by obsessing over POST messages when I have a backlog to work through.

For your other points, my visits to the Apple Store do not result from learned helplessness. Most problems with Apple products can be resolved using their knowledge base, or if you must, a couple minutes of chat. Apple even has free technical support reachable by phone if you have a real technical issue (like mail issues with your Mac.com address, which came to me as a surprise that they would even do this).

When I do go to the Apple Store the few times that I do, quite frankly it feels like I'm going there to rip them off. Their prices are fair and when you have Apple Care+ they bend backwards to get you up and running. I almost want to apologize to the poor overworked genius after an Apple Store visit.

This is an experience completely different from that from a more conventional PC manufacturer. With a home built PC or one from a gaming vendor like iBuypower, you're pretty much left with the manuals for your components, which are sparse and hardly updated. Even if you get pretty POST beeps it's not reassuring that these problems have little recourse other than "buy more crap to fix your problem" or "flash this shady bin." There is no Apple Store equivalent for regular PC either, if you need help with a regular PC the geek squad is no better at Googling your issue than you are, and very few insurance plans will rebuild your computer for you without a huge copay. "Big" vendors like Dell are even worse, whose support can be summarized as "fuck you pay me" even when the problem is entirely their fault.

To summarize, getting help with a regular PC is a game of passing the buck around by vendors. With Apple there is no one to pass the buck to, so you have them pinned.

All that stuff is worth way more to me than some clunks and beeps.