> you are going to get well under a 50% success rate here. Accept that most people flake
This is true, but as long as the success rate is >= 1 other person, it's okay.
I started a running club for my apartment block (about 200 flats with maybe 300 residents). I posted flyers out once advertising it as a friendly social running club. Of the 300, the group has about 15 people, of which 5 are regulars (every other week at least), and just 2 of us are super regulars (multiple times per week). It's a terrible success rate, but those are 4/5 good friends.
At first it bothered me how flaky people were. Some people joined the group but have yet to show up in person. And some joined the group and are yet to even converse in the group chat, but hey, they'll come along when they're ready.
Does anybody get the looming impression that the probability they'll die in war is approaching 1? I don't know which country / group of countries it'll be against, but I get the impression that a lot of our fates are being written out right now.
Advertisements around where I live are gradually all becoming about joining the military. My country is sending troops to territories as if they are tripwires.
> Does anybody get the looming impression that the probability they'll die in war is approaching 1?
No. If I had this level of anxiety, I would disconnect from news and online media for a little while to take a walk in the forest to clear my mind and calm down.
As things get worse, this advice gets less relevant. You no longer have to be addicted to social media or 24-hour news to be worried about what's happening. You don't even really need to be paying explicit attention at all.
To call the headline "US threatens to invade Greenland" unprecedented would be an understatement. You only need to see it once to be justifiably anxious.
I'm already there. I never use social media and I limit news consumption to once per week for catching up.
I'm seeing these messages in the real world. Adverts on the side of buses are telling me to enlist in greater frequency, and job sites have positions in the Royal Army pinned above everything else.
Not by colloquial usage of the term, which is often (and in this case) limited to the subset of larger global human-content firehoses where the problems inherent to that dynamic become more dramatic, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, shorts feeds, things like Instagram and Reddit maybe, etc.
HN is just as much an echo chamber as any facebook group or subreddit. You are making a mistake if you think you are immune from groupthink and herd mentality by limiting your online discourse to this platform only.
Unfortunately access to the forest is blocked by ongoing "immigration" enforcement action by masked secret police in the area. Stepping out of the front door under these circumstances may be treated as a crime, punishable by death.
Between war, climate change effects, antibiotic resistant bacteria and Alzheimer's, for myself I think I'd pick war. Hard to know what to wish for my children.
I'm too old for this: not only am I not going to get called up, I also remember the Cold War, where everyone really did think there was a significant risk of a nuclear exchange at any time.
Mind you, the logic of MAD was a lot more .. logical? The canonical example of a cold game theoretic perspective leading combined with enough irrational paranoia to make an unstable situation.
We're more likely to have a war over a dumb tweet.
> Does anybody get the looming impression that the probability they'll die in war is approaching 1?
Not that high, but I know what you mean. I think there's a reasonable chance that the US system successfully redirects Trump away from actually ordering an attack on Greenland, and a reasonable chance the US military has an actual coup if that order comes through.
But if he gets to take it… the consequences need to be extraordinary, and misjudgement will have already been a precondition and therefore more misjudgement is likely, therefore escalation can be almost arbitrary.
You probably should revisit your opinion about what wars would look like today.
- WW1 was a competition of troops: how many soldiers each country was willing to sacrifice for victory. Something like 50M soldiers participated.
- WW2 was a competition of hardware, less troops - how much industrial output could each country pour into the battle. Aprox. 300 000 tanks, 200 000 airplanes , 9000 warships (according to chatgpt), 2750 Liberty cargo ships (wikipedia).
- WW3 can't be a competition of troops (where would they get 50 million people, how would they train them, how would they feed them?), and it can't be a competition of hardware (who could make 300 000 tanks, 200 000 airplanes and 9 000 ships today?, where would they even get that much steel?).
World war today could be 1) nuclear and we're doomed, or 2) kids playing with toy drones breaking windows at each other's factories - you're mostly safe, unless you work there.
> World war today could be 1) nuclear and we're doomed, or 2) kids playing with toy drones breaking windows at each other's factories - you're mostly safe, unless you work there.
Cyber war, especially insufficiently defended industrial equipment control systems.
And about those drones: the category scales up and down, all the way from toys to things that rip apart apartment blocks.
And about quantity, Ukraine is estimated to be at the scale of millions of units last year, expended like munitions rather than like vehicles.
Interesting. What hardware do you use to measure this?
I have a Netatmo home device that measures PPM and have been observing the trend lines throughout the day. At some points my flat gets up to about 1400, which the device says is bad, and sometimes it goes down as low as 500. I've noticed a pattern but can't quite connect that pattern to my activity or the surroundings. It starts going up around 4pm, which could be homewards-bound vehicles, but it seems to trend even on weekends when there is lower traffic. Maybe I start breathing differently at these times. I'm quite interested in getting to the bottom of it. Unfortunately I'm west facing so plant use is quite limited.
What is the atmospheric ambient CO2 level? Is that variable based on location?
I've learnt a few things:
- I had my sensor on my work desk which meant the CO2 pooled, and was increased dramatically by my breathing almost directly onto it. Moved the sensor at least 1.5m
- I had the sensor quite low down, where CO2 pools (being heavier), so moved the sensor to eye level
- CO2 seemed to increase when cooking (same room), so while cooking I open the windows and let the warmth flow out of the building
Atmospheric CO2 is currently around 430 ppm. It's minimally variable based on seasonality, think a 15 ppm difference between the lowest and highest points.
It's been a long time since University for me but the standard measurement location is the Mauna (sp?) Loa Observatory in Hawaii, if I recall correctly due to it being the longest-running continuous measurement site.
By far the largest impact I’ve observed on my CO2 levels are from the hvac. When the fan is on the levels go down and tend to stay down, so I usually leave it on circulate which runs every ~15 mins (based on the graph structure). I use an SCD30 in the corner opposite to where I sit.
Also important is using a direct CO2 sensor (NDIR or photo acoustic) and not eco2 which can give false positives from other things in the air.
I've been exploring kefir. I'm looking at finding some live grains to boost the store bought variety here (10-20 varieties) up to 50-60 varieties or so, like the kefir in Eastern Europe / Russia. The store bought stuff in my country (UK) is more like a diluted, gimmicky thing. However, I believe the strains of bacteria they do include are some of the more influential ones. I think it would just be interesting to expand the scope a bit.
This came from reading about the gut microbiome, which was spun off from reading a book about Ultra Processed Foods (Ultra-Processed People). I've been trying to remove UPF foods from my daily consumption, trying to lower the ratio of them I eat (the average is supposedly 60% for adults in my country), since the academic link between UPF and dementia is quite strong now. It's quite shocking to see just how much of a typical supermarket/food store is UPF, and where many of the emulsifiers and preservatives come from.
I went down a similar path, sans book. I opted to remove processed foods from my diet in its entirety - to be clear, I consider neither oil, nor vinegar to be processed. This has resulted in basically the only processed food in my life now being soy sauce.
The hard reality is that food, which I already enjoyed, tastes significantly better. Similarly, when I fall off the wagon and have some UPF (crips).. it just tastes flat. Highly recommended, even without the health benefits, frankly.
I've noticed the same flatness you're describing with a similar product. The other week I had two items spaced across different meals. I'm still permitting bread as long as it's real or homemade (4 ingredients max, hard after 2/3 days), which was the first, and then later I had "made-in-store" chips with the a bunch of UPF and spices (preserved).
After about 2 weeks of minimising UPF, the bread tasted much better than it usually would, even on its own. Then not only did the chips taste flat like you've experienced, but they didn't taste good, and I felt I could almost tell what they'd added to try and get you to finish them.
I find it quite insidious how much food is falsely branded as healthy ("Just Natural" snack bars) or fresh. Not just items that are dressed up as if they are made fresh in-store, but foods proudly showcasing claims about things added, or nothing bad being added, only to be invalidated by checking the ingredients on the back.
The extra difficulty to eat was a pretty big takeaway for me from that book. Imagining most processed food as having been broken down and reformed, the breaking of the food matrix, the sort of pre-digestion that stops my body doing that instead, the hurrying of the eating process to get more in before the body works out its full, have all been useful for me to slow down my eating and avoid this stuff in general.
I have noticed that my scattergun approach of avoiding stuff that's been transported long distance and overly branded (judged by packaging in both cases), has made supermarket trips very quick and simple. 80% + of the big stores must just be rubbish.
It's led to me doing most of my shopping at local markets, where things are loosely packaged in paper. The book > avoiding branded packaging got me down the road of avoiding plastic wrapped consumables wherever possible, because plastic leeching is also a concern.
The only disadvantage is that my food environment has shrunk a lot, and as an endurance runner it's made it quite hard sometimes to get enough energy in. For that reason I don't think I can drop pasta and bread entirely.
"I have built more in the past 10 months than I ever have."
Correction. The genAI has built it.
I haven't got any skin on either side here, but doesn't the fact the genAI can build it imply that what you are doing is heavily trodden ground, that there will be less and less need for developers like you, and will gradually lead to many developers (like you) being cut out of the market entirely.
For personal stuff it's wonderful. For work, it seems like a double edged sword that will eventually cut the devs that use it (and those that don't). Even if the business owners aren't completely daft and keep a (vastly diminished) workforce of dev/AI consultants on board, that could easily exclude you or me.
It's going well if all the jobs it eradicates can be replaced with just as many jobs (they can't), or the powers that be catch on and realise there isn't that many jobs left for humans to do and institute some form of basic income system (they won't).
"The genAI has built it" -- this is the core point. If I did nothing except complain about AI for the past 10 months, would these projects exist? No they would not. So. I. Built. It.
If you actually use these tools, really use them. You realize that it's an augmentation not a replacement. Simply because the training data is what has already come before (for now!). The LLMs need help, direction, focus...and those are learned skills dependent on the tooling. Not to mention ideas.
And sure, I imagine the software development workforce will change quite a bit, probably this year, no doubt about that.
But the need for builders will not change. I imagine that the 'builder' role will change to be traditional software developers, designers, sales people, writers, c-suite...whatever.
So I think you are right. "That could easily exclude you or me". 100% correct. The required skill set to be a builder is changing on a weekly basis. The only way to keep up is to keep building with these tools. Trying things. Experimenting. Otherwise, yes, you will probably be replaced. By a builder.
I don't think this is based around GLP drugs. I've noticed the gym, swimming pools, running and cycling routes I usually frequent have been lower every year for the past 5 years or so (the spike in January is smaller every year).
I think new years resolutions are dying out, or people are doing non-fitness based resolutions (eg. Dry January) more often now.
“users who stop taking it gain the weight back” is not a baseless claim.
Most of the people on GLP will come off the drugs and regain the weight back to their original weight, if not heavier, just like people who temporarily restrict eating in any other way (discipline). You need real lifestyle change. Even the people shilling the drugs tell people that.
Personally, I hope all of these business fail. Screw the fast food industry, dieting companies (they don't want customers to actually succeed), and the pharma companies that are restricting access to people who actually need GLP drugs.
This is the most sensible attitude I've seen people express that has led to meaningful weight loss, maintenance and as far as we can see across large timespans, lifestyle change.
It's incredibly hard to gain weight by eating whole or minimally processed foods. The destruction and recombination of foods (and their food matrix) into ultra processed foods is one of the driving causes behind people eating more because the artificial textures and softness is one of the main drivers of over-eating, especially of high calorie foods.
I'd wager that people could replicate the same satiety induced weight loss (to a slower, but safer extent) through minimising ultra processed foods than GLP drugs.
It reduces your supermarket shop to about 10% of the store. Almost anything packed and transported is out of the question, as are entire rows of capitalism-driven junk food.
It is very hard to gain weight when paired with some daily cardio and/or weights, even when you are eating to build up more muscle mass.
Eating healthy snacks through the day: handfuls of oily nuts (peanuts, cashews, macadamias), full fat smoothies and a lot of protein doesn't shift the scales.
We still end up buying some packed and transported food: Frozen blueberries from Chile, Spanish olive oil, dried herbs like tumeric, paprika etc but most meat/fruit/vegetables is sourced locally.
It's entirely discipline and motivation. Just because only a select few people carry it through and maintain it doesn't change that. Just very few people in this world are truly disciplined and self-motivated.
You can see it all around you in one form or another:- overweight/obesity, alcohol consumption, smoking/vaping, people spending 5+ hours staring at glowing rectangles.
This is true, but as long as the success rate is >= 1 other person, it's okay.
I started a running club for my apartment block (about 200 flats with maybe 300 residents). I posted flyers out once advertising it as a friendly social running club. Of the 300, the group has about 15 people, of which 5 are regulars (every other week at least), and just 2 of us are super regulars (multiple times per week). It's a terrible success rate, but those are 4/5 good friends.
At first it bothered me how flaky people were. Some people joined the group but have yet to show up in person. And some joined the group and are yet to even converse in the group chat, but hey, they'll come along when they're ready.
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