throwforfeds

It's definitely cheap and delicious, but I found that it actually started giving me breakouts on my forehead, especially around my brow line, when I started putting it in smoothies after training 4-5x per week. Switching over to using almond butter (or really just cheaper raw almonds since I'm blending anyways) made it go away.

Gentoo forced me to switch to Apple.

jk, I wanted to install Ableton and now it's been 15 years.

Both.

I'm not sure why the meme on the right is that the left wants to protect Biden or anyone else. Who cares, they all can come crashing down.

I'm surprised and also not. We're a long ways away from 90s hacker culture, and even then there were plenty of upper class kids that were just in it for good pay working for the giant tech corps. We like to romanticize everyone dropping acid and being part of the counter culture, myself included, but reality is different.

The saddest part to me is that the aesthetic of street art has been totally consumed by major corporations and spit back out on to the streets here in Brooklyn. I laugh to myself whenever I walk by a tourist taking a selfie in front of some mural that is really just some brand advertisement.

Yeah I agree. I'm very pro public transit -- I live in NYC and didn't get my license until my 40s -- but there is absolutely a need for last mile connections once you leave transit dense parts of a city. Or the occasional errand that requires hauling some stuff around. Or a number of other reasons you'd need a car a couple times a month.

The reality is we decided to invest mainly in car infrastructure for the past 100 years and it's going to take a long time to fix that. In the meantime, I'll be happy with an automated car and diminishing car ownership.

I'm in the middle of watching this happen. The business owner chose a "low code" platform due to cost and "speed", against my team's recommendations, and now they're needing to do all sorts of customizations which are essentially massive hacks. My team is sitting in our corner writing typescript deploying a dozen or so times per day, and this other team of "low coders" is sitting there trying to figure out how to make curl do things it shouldn't be doing with prod deployments like once per month.

The same reason why people take month long road trips anywhere, it's to see everything on the way. I'd guess their clients were 20 year olds wanting to go on an adventure. Honestly, if this had been a thing when I was 21 and out of college and a friend asked me to go I probably would have.

I never said they're in opposition to each other. I'm an advocate of science and I think we should absolutely be studying what's going on with the body as we undertake these practices. If anything I find the Buddha's teachings on self-investigation and not taking any of his words at face value to be very compatible with scientific curiosity [1]. There is no "because I said so" on this path.

As I said elsewhere in the thread, what I take issue with is that many westerners try to ignore thousands of years of investigation and practice, to only waste a lot of time trying to come up with things on their own. And not even by following a map already laid out while collecting data or whatever, they're trying to discover the map on their own.

The author was contemplating an idea that is a pretty basic, known concept. Like absolutely, let's collect a bunch of data with some meditators doing various practices and see what's going on with transformations of smooth muscle over time. But let's not push away the millions of people that have done these practices just because they're Asian or wearing robes or talk about Nirvana/Samsara and that makes you feel uncomfortable.

I'm grateful to modern scientific discovery and I'm also grateful to all the teachers on this path that have helped liberate my mind. Both can be true at the same time. We shouldn't get caught up in thinking of things in binaries.

[1] https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an03/an03.065.th...

> You’re unlikely to see a buddhist missionary asking if you’ve heard to truth about emptiness on a street corner ;)

That made me lol, because yes I've never experienced that. But then I remembered that SGI had a lot of controversy due to their aggressive proselytizing in Japan in the 20th century. [1]

Also, we do have to bear witness to Theravadin monks in Myanmar advocating for (and participating in) genocide against the Rohingya due to their religious beliefs. Similarly in Sri Lanka against Tamils and Muslim populations there.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dsei_Toda#Aggressive_pro...

> What are the objective benefits of meditation - what is the exact/specific process and what specifically does it accomplish?

There is no one form of meditation, and each practice has different results, but the majority of them share proven reductions in anxiety, stress, depression, and improvements in all sorts of gauges of mental well being.

One of the fundamental teachings of Buddhism is the interdependence of all phenomena [1], and when you begin your practice you'll start seeing that when you sit, you might notice less daily anxiety, which might translate into better physical health. Or you might notice that being slightly less depressed makes you engage in your relationships with friends and family better. You might notice that your hips open up, which might mean less lower back pain.

The point being there are tons of positive benefits from a meditation practice that don't include some metaphysical nonsense that might be hard to take at face value. As my meditation teacher often emphasizes, if the practice doesn't deal with your day to day, quotidian problems of being alive, then it's just nice philosophy and nothing else. The Buddha taught that we should put first things first, and that's dealing with the suffering and stress of our lives. [2]

Also, "zoning out" is pretty much the opposite of meditation. Meditation is to be fully without distraction, whereas "zoning out" is giving in completely to the distraction.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Poisoned_Arrow

Of course, and I wasn't arguing that we shouldn't have contemporary scientific inquiry into what's going on. The Buddha said that we should do the practice for ourselves and not follow it just because someone else said so, or because it's tradition. [1] It's great to get some fMRI imagery of what's going on in the brain with advanced meditators. We should study what's going on because we should be curious!

But what I do find to be a little misguided is what I pointed out from the author's statement. There is a tendency in western circles to push away everything and not only just try to recreate based on first principles, but push those first principles away as well. The author was pondering a question that millions before her have done the practice of, without looking to any of those millions for a guide. Instead, I'd say listen to them, practice it, and if it doesn't work, discard it.

[1] https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an03/an03.065.th...

> If this works, there must be some way to tune our meditation methods specifically for relaxing smooth muscle.... using awareness to track exactly how and where the body grips and lets go.

It's great that westerners are exploring these things, but I can't help but think the strong aversion people have for things not being "proven" by western science is holding everyone back. This is literally yoga and meditation practice and has been studied for at least a couple thousand years.

Even if we exclude the modern invention of yoga as exercise in the 20th century, there are seated practices of releasing these tensions in the body. It's not even framed in mystical terms, it's literally just opening the body and getting rid of discomfort, pain, and stress in the body so that you can sit and focus for longer periods of time in your formal meditation practice.

Even in the author's teacher's capital V Vipassana tradition, invented in the 20th century, it is known that the piti that arises even in the first stages of meditation can be directed. That weak piti is just the piloerection response, which is an autonomic response, and if you can control it it would seem to imply we of course have facility over things science assumes we have no control over.

I'm the same, I haven't lived in a house with a TV since I left my parent's house at 18 (I'm in my 40s now) and whenever I'm in someones house with one on I'm just flabbergasted that people watch things that look like they do on their TVs.

I was at my parent's house the other day for Christmas and tried to start watching Wong Kar-wai's Blossoms Shanghai, but the TV made everything look so terrible that I couldn't continue with it. I was having a hard time figuring out what was just from his style and what was whatever crap the TV was trying to do to it on it's own. I'm amazed people don't realize things just look like shit on their TVs now?

Yes, but it does happen a lot. The case of Kalief Browder was one of the reasons for all the reforms around bail. [1][2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalief_Browder

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/nyregion/kalief-browder-c...

Yeah, I haven't used it to write Terraform yet and am not surprised that it would trip on itself with it. However, I did do a major refactor to AWS CDK using TypeScript and Claude worked really well. I treat it as a pair programmer, have it work really atomically, and always question it's work. I find scoping things down really helps with the quality of it's output.

Well, people who aren't citizens still use the healthcare system, regardless if they have insurance or not. All those undocumented kids aren't just not getting sick -- they'll end up using the ER as primary care, clogging up the system, just like everyone else that doesn't have insurance.

I find it's really nice to just have Claude run the compilers and linters when it's done making a change, as it often has some mistakes and will catch them at this step. It lets me step in for review after some trivially stupid thing is fixed up, rather than wasting my own time.

Yeah, I think "vanity" is not totally the right term here, but I do think they have a point that there are diminishing returns with staying up on the news cycle.

For instance, I think there is a difference between reading some news daily and consuming only news. My father was in the latter category growing up -- I never really saw him read a book, but he was always reading a paper or listening to/watching a news program. Personally I find that I get more from reading books as they're afforded the space to go into depth on a topic. I think the author is trying to point out that that surface level news consumption is fine but probably not as beneficial as we might want to tell ourselves.

The one thing I've found most helpful news-wise, though, is that I find that it's one of the better ways to learn a foreign language to an upper-intermediate or advanced level. I relied heavily on RFI and other news outlets when learning French, with the added benefit that you're often getting international news the media doesn't report on here in the US.

> Tourists that drive to the crater, take pictures, and drive down have no idea what they're missing.

And for some reason blather on and on loudly up there when the most mind blowing sunsets are happening. Can we not be silent for 15 minutes and look at the universe doing it's thing?

I mean you could buy books your first semester of your $75k/year freshman year of college though! Think of all the new Calculus that'll be in the 23rd edition of the standard textbook that costs $150. /s

Blood Meridian is one of the few books where I reached the end and then just started again right from the beginning. It's probably the book I've read the most amount of times and each re-read still manages to amaze me.

For sure, I admit I'm an outsider in most of my life choices, including retail decisions. But for about 13 years there I was able to purchase phones that worked one handed before the market completely shifted away from that.

I purchased the phone that was the lightest, thinking that maybe it's thinness would make it nice to hold in one hand (it does), but it's still too big. And so back it goes for my 13 mini until that thing can't hold on any longer.

I was still using my iPhone 13 mini until last week when I bought an Air. As a city dweller without a car, I'm constantly in situations where I'm carrying something in one hand and need to pull out my phone for something. Now with this huge form factor I can't comfortably do that. For example, I was traveling internationally and was carrying my duffel bag in one hand and needed to get information out of the Airbnb app on my phone, and I almost dropped it. The mini would have been (and was always) fine in these circumstances.

The Air doesn't even fit in my jeans comfortably, I have to carry it in my jacket now (what do I do in summer?). I'm considering returning it and switching back to my mini until it just can't run anymore.

Apple needs to realize the user base that wants a portable, one handed phone isn't the same market that wants a cheap phone. I paid more for a worse spec'd phone (Air vs 17), solely hoping it would be easier to use as a mobile, out in the world device. It's not. If they launched the same exact mini with a processor bump at $1k or more I'd be fine paying it.

I bought an Air, coming from a 13 mini, and I largely agree with you on all those points except the battery life. I'm not sure why everyone keeps saying the Air has bad battery life, which maybe it does compared to the 17 or 17 Pro etc, but the past week I've been test driving it it has more than all day battery life for me. My 13 mini needed a recharge in the middle of the day (battery was worn down to about 83%).

Otherwise, yeah, you're right. I'm pretty sure I'm going to return it this week before my 14 days are up.

Absolutely, and the lack of decent pockets on women's clothing is probably a large reason I can no longer buy a computer I can fit in my jeans.

For sure, I had that thought as well, that clothing is evolving alongside the things people are needing to carry.

But, for me, it does seem like we're going in a functionally poorer direction. Just a few years ago I could have a computer I could fit in my pocket. I can't buy that anymore. The fact that people are selling modifications to these devices (cross body slings, cases with those weird pop up things on the back so you can hold it one handed) to me means we've missed the mark on design. For more than a decade we had a great one handed computer that'd disappear into my pocket. No longer.

I was just talking to my wife about this, literally 5 minutes ago. I just moved from the 13 mini to the Air and am hating that it doesn't comfortably fit in my jeans, to the point where I might go return it today. My young cousin was wearing her iPhone on a cross body sling, and I was commenting that we've gotten to the point where the phones are so big that you need bags or extra things to carry it comfortably.

Yeah, you're right in that it is highly dependent on the person and the set and setting. For me, I went into that first experience seeking a catalyst for insight into the things that were holding me back in my life, and got it. Intention setting is super important, which is why in formal meditation practice and in yoga they teach you to set a samkalpa for your practice session [1].

I've certainly taken LSD and gone to a rave with 6k people before, but I usually end up wanting to go home to meditate after a while. Insight into that existential void (sunyata) is exactly what I'm seeking out. But there's of course nothing wrong with wanting to stay at the party and dance all night! They're both manifestations of the same thing if you can see it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path#Right_res...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81

Absolutely. I've heard some Tibetan Buddhist teachers say you have to taste the chocolate for yourself, which is exactly the same sentiment.

The visuals are like a fraction of the experience. Personally, I get very little in terms of visuals. It’s insight, wisdom, love, and the releasing of emotional holding patterns that is the most prominent thing for me. You can read about ego death all you want, but until you actually experience that sort of thing it’s just nice words on a page. It’s why Buddha would say don’t take my word for it, do the practice and have the experience yourself.

My first LSD trip is probably the most important experience of my life, and sure I saw some fractals in the clouds, but that’s close to zero percent of what was important during it.