firmretention

>That got me paying attention to how hunger effects food enjoyment.

I cured my lifelong pickiness thanks to an excessively long diet. The pickiness had tempered itself somewhat over the years, but my food choices were still quite limited compared to your average person.

On that diet, I lost about 50 pounds over 8 months and got to the leanest I've ever been, probably under 15% bodyfat. I knew better than to diet that long and the negative effects of diet fatigue, but dammit, I was determined and had to keep going!

The last few months I was constantly ravenous, tired, having trouble sleeping and absolutely obsessed with food. A few weeks later was Xmas dinner with the family, and when I arrived, I was shocked to discover that EVERYTHING on the table looked absolutely delicious to me. Foods I wouldn't have even imagined trying before. My pickiness was so severe, even attempting a bite would have previously caused a vomit response. I ate everything on that table that year and enjoyed nearly all of it. My family was stunned! It was like a dam broke, and now I am willing to try just about anything. It's been a great increase to my quality of life.

As an aside, I always hated hearing "What would you do if you were starving?" growing up. My contention was that if I were truly starving, any pickiness would disappear quite quickly. I mean people have resorted to cannibalism during times of famine! This experience completely validated my theory.

Is this really problem solving? I thought this stuff was done by basically just memorizing patterns. Not saying it's easy, but seems like more a combination of memorization + muscle memory.

IMO, FOV is the biggest immersion killer in VR today, and doesn't get nearly enough attention. It's not so bad when you're relatively new to it as the illusion is convincing enough that you don't notice, but once the magic wears off a bit, it's hard to escape that binocular effect. I wish one of the bigger players would tackle that. I'm not willing to take a chance on Pimax.

There's no labor shortage there either. Go look at the Canada trades/jobs subreddits. Go look at the experiences of new grads who can't find an entry level job that pays a decent wage. Go look at how many kids want to enter the trades but can't get anyone to take them on as an apprentice. Software developers, engineers, etc. Even people with experience are out of work for months. Skilled laborers are sitting around with nothing to do because nobody is building houses.

Why do you think any Canadian grad who is able moves to the States? If we truly had such a dire labor shortage, surely they'd be able to work here and be paid well for it?

I can't take RMS seriously any more after he supported Covid vaccine mandates. A closed source printer driver is evil, but forcing people to get a proprietary novel medical treatment from a giant corporation that stands to profit immensely from it is A-OK? His conception of freedom only extends to what HE wishes to be able to do, and whenever there's a conflict with that, he wins. Typical behavior from an extremist.

Source: https://www.stallman.org/notes/2021-jul-oct.html

"Meanwhile, I think that the proposed vaccine mandates for federal workers, military personnel, medical personnel and the work force of some businesses will help. They are a small fraction of the population, but in the delusional states they will help break through the anti-vax pressure."

"Addressing those who call [vaccine mandates] attacks on personal freedom, one doctor said that "people also have a right to be able to go to work and not get infected and not get sick and not die."

Hear, hear. We all have a duty to get vaccinated, except for the small fraction that medically can't do it."

We don't need more workers. This is a corporate lie to suppress wages. It's clear some of you haven't spoken to a new grad looking for a job in ages.

Isn't that expected since LLMs are inherently non-deterministic?

I think War and Peace is the longest book I've ever read. Most editions have 1300-1400 pages.

I've always liked the analogy that talking to an LLM is like talking to a really, really smart person with a head injury.

No, it's in the increasingly growing tent cities in my town, and among the junkies that have taken over downtown Ottawa. Glad to hear you're doing well, though.

Good point. We should abolish any party that can't win an election.

This is such a cool idea and I want to build one. I wish I had this kind of creativity. I can do the hardware/software side, but great ideas elude me.

The capacitive multitouch screen and the software/gestures to go with it was what made the iPhone a success. All the other feature phones of the time were so much less pleasant to use - I had one, the Nokia N95. On paper it destroyed an iPhone. In practice, it was clunky and annoying to use.

IMO, price is the problem. I can afford a folding phone, but I can't justify the cost for a tertiary computing device. Whenever possible I'd rather use a desktop, followed by a laptop. If I was more dependent on my phone it might be different.

SERIOUSLY?! You'd be surprised how few people know you can easily spot planets with the naked eye, in addition to many other little interesting things in life. You react as if he didn't know how to his shoes.

It reminds me of how the first Terminator moved because of the stop motion effects.

Sloppity slop.

WFH was a great example of this. Everyone seemed to be on board, this was the way of the future, etc. Yet it seems nobody in charge thought about downtown economies or commercial real estate, and it turns out having a bunch of empty office buildings is really bad for banks and pension plans that invest in them. Somehow the experts or economists didn't see this coming, and since the system in question is too big to fail, and they tried nothing and were all out of ideas, the only remaining solution was a whiplash back to the status quo, employee happiness and productivity be damned.

I'm tired of being told what things aren't or what they don't do.

I suspect he was not nearly as lean as he suspected. Everyone over estimates how much fat they have to lose until they actually try to get shredded. My own efforts let me to discover that despite lifting weights in a dedicated fashion for years, BMI is still relatively accurate for me. Might be off by 15-20 lbs at the most, but still somewhat useful as a diagnostic tool since it if it says I'm obese, I am at the very least pretty overweight. It's only at the margin of overweight/healthy where it becomes only a tiny bit problematic.

The vast majority of natural lifters will never get enough muscle to really seriously throw it off.

My alma mater took an interesting approach in that they dived right into vector spaces right away. At the time we used Elementary Linear Algebra by Nicholson in the prof's custom order, but it seems they've since written an open textbook based on that approach:

https://ruor.uottawa.ca/items/f66a4ede-e276-486c-9067-9621d5...

Really felt like being thrown in the deep end at the time, especially since it was my first exposure to proofs. Very rewarding when it finally started coming together, though.

I can relate to all of these. One way to get rid of them is to put them on a "special project". Something low stakes and inconsequential to keep them busy.

It's a big club - and you ain't in it.

>Again, I think this is a programmer centric way of looking at things: “how do I know it’s right if I can’t compile it”.

I would argue this would only be true for those without formal education. Writing your code on paper is very common in CS courses. You get used to not being able to compile it.

Just don't eat too much and you will be just fine.

Just don't use screens so much and you will be just fine.

Once a something becomes a seamlessly integrated and essential part of daily life, "just don't do the bad thing" can become very, very difficult. There was a time where spending all day on the internet was considered maladaptive, and online dating? That's for losers who can't find a match in the real world! Just don't go online so much, and you will be just fine.

Imagine how much it must have cost to have him read your comment! I hope he sends you an invoice.

Dang it, sold out :(

Not really. The exercise needed is minimal and the rest is just calorie management. Now having said that it's not easy - simple, and not particularly time consuming yes, but psychologically very difficult unless you naturally tend towards leanness.

I still enjoy some of his later works. James Cameron on the other hand - boggles my mind that he wants to waste his remaining years on that Avatar dreck.

This is definitely a thing. I remember buying the Metallica black album tab book and there was one section in there with a chord that was literally impossible to play as written. I can't remember exactly where it was, but it was a two note chord on adjacent strings with an impossible to cover distance between them.