100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10hr ago
Most successful entrepreneurship is unproductive
This one was hilariously ignorant. Literally 9th grade "intro to econ" levels of "akshually, I'm pretty sure Adam Smith was wrong."
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11hr ago
Your response is incoherent throughout.
Right from the jump;
And yet... a tiger being made out of atoms doesn't make it any less capable of killing you.
As opposed to what? A tiger not made out of atoms? This isn't even strawman, it's just a weird thing to say presented as an argument.
You complete lost me here;
All models are false, some models are useful. That's a rationalist saw, but for good reason. What actually matters is whether a model constraints expectations, in other words, is it useful?
Regarding;
They process language, they exhibit something that looks like reasoning, they have distinctive response patterns that persist across contexts.
That something looks like, sounds like, and walks like a duck doesn't always make it a duck. For example, is Donald Duck a duck?. Well, we can yes and know that he's a representation of a conception of a duck with human like personality mapped onto him (see where I'm going ...) but it doesn't make him a duck made out of atoms - which seems to be, like, important or something.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11hr ago
There's a 30+ year-old AS/400 working alongside thousands of Access databases, hundreds of SQL Servers
Please provide a trigger warning before typing this out so that SysAdmins can make sure they have their therapy anime body pillow with them.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
16hr ago
Yeah, it is funny to see that underneath all that socialism and all that postmodern philosophical masturbation, Europe really still believes in feudalism and is furious that us new world peasants won't pay the King's Tax! Don't we know that they are our betters!
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
16hr ago
If these aren't character flaws, I don't know what is.
They're model weights. <-- This is a link.
That's literally, exactly, precisely what they are.
You can map your own preferred anthropomorphized traits to them all you want, but that's, at best, a metaphor or something. This is the same as when people say their car has a "personality." It's kind of fun, I'll grant you, but it's also plainly inaccurate.
They're good at different things
This is correct. But it is correct because of training data, superparameters, and a whole host of very well defined ML concepts. It's not because of ... personalities.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
18hr ago
If we didn't break tasks down to an absurd level of guardrails and hand-holding, it would try to make enormous, system wide changes without any kind of midpoint validation.
Yep, I've seen this too. I have to ask, where you using any of the terminal based tools for code development (i.e. Claude Code). I know you said you were using Gemini, so I am doubting it was actually Claude Code (although you can run Gemini within CC).
There is a lot of guardrailing and handholding built into to these tools. If I pass a full system design doc to Claude Code and explicitly instruct it to do TDD with unit tests etc., it will.
It wasn't that we were surfacing implicit context, so much as writing it for a very enthusiastic intern developer with absolutely no sense of self preservation.
LLMs aren't beings, people, or minds. If you think of it as having intention and character flaws, you're going to get frustrated quickly. If you think of it is a very imperfect and probabilistic tool that outputs into non-deterministic solution spaces, you'll get less frustrated and probably think differently on how you prompt it.
I am an unrepentant AI bull. I'll admit that and let people judge whatever I write with that bias in mind. I only request the same from the bears. When I see sentiment like this, which literally chastises a matrix of numbers, I have to assume a non-neutral bias.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19hr ago
This is a continuation of a topic brought up in one of the AAQCs for January. Hat tip to @birb_cromble
I value and believe what @birb_cromble wrote. I think AI is both over and under hyped (more on that below). I believe birb's report that a team of good devs are looking at it and saying "wtf ... this is ... ok ... maybe?" I think @RandomRanger had a similar comment that I am struggling to find (although, to be fair, it was pointed out that Ranger was using copilot which is a known dumpster fire).
On the other hand, I have direct, personal experience with AI (to be specific, as I kind of hate the blanket term, "AI", coding oriented LLMs) writing good code quickly and accurately. I've had past colleagues far more gifted than myself send 11pm "holy shit" texts based on their own projects. The head of Anthropic, has publicly stated that LLMs write 100% of the code at Antrhopic now. And the guy behind ClawdBot / MoltBook (or whatever its called now) has openly discussed how his own deployment of ClawdBot was thinking and executing ahead of him.
If it's all hype, it is the mother of all hype cycles and something that approaches a mass movement of hysteria. This would be outright falsehoods and lying on a level usually reserved for North Korean heads of state and Subsaharan cult leaders.
I don't think it's that. I am, however, developing the idea that both sides are actually right at the same time in different directions. To explain that, we're going to have to talk about software and software companies a little bit.
1. CRUD
Create, read, update, and delete or "CRUD" is what is at the core of almost every piece of software that is above the operating system level. CRUD is definitely at the core of almost every piece of software that is sold from one company to another (business-to-business or b2b) and most software sold to customers (business-to-customers or b2c). There are exceptions, of course, some of them quite large. But the fact remains that most software is about having data somewhere, storing it, asking it questions, modifying it (and unmodifying it), and, perhaps, deleting it (note, however, that with storage being fundamentally cheap now, deletion is a kind of philosophical state. Your e-mails for instance, are often not deleted until you double-for-serious-delete-them and then wait 30+ days).
A junior developer can build a CRUD app on their computer at home in less than a week. By hand, from scratch, zero LLM involved. Building a CRUD app is often a final assignment for mid-level undergraduate CompSci work. You, yes you, can build a CRUD app today with one good, long prompt to any of the big LLMs. It will be complete, with minimal to zero bugs.
Salesforce, at its core, is a CRUD app. Salesforce is worth almost $200 bn while the CRUD app you build is worth exactly nothing. Why is this?
2. Enterprise
The holy grail of all b2b software is their first enterprise customer. What defines "enterprise?" It's a bit of squishy term, but it means a big company. 1,000+ employees is more or less agreed upon as the minimum, though this may vary depending on the market niche you're in. Why are enterprises so prized? Because you're selling your product at scale (usually in terms of individual user licenses or "seats") to a customer who can pay a six, seven, or even eight figure annual bill without worrying about it and will not switch to one of your competitors quickly (....usually). This is where b2b software companies get their explosive valuations from and where founders get capital-F Fuck you money. Salesforce, our CRUD app supreme, has enterprise deals, probably, with every F500 company and thousands more very large companies. They recently announced a deal with the U.S. Army (lol, ELLE-OH-FUCKING-ELLE to that one). Salesforce has more enterprise than a Star Trek reboot.
But isn't an enterprise CRUD app still a CRUD app?
Yes, yes it is. But it's a CRUD app that;
- Can handle thousands of concurrent users
- Can manage all of the different levels of access control granted to each user by other users (admins etc.)
- Handles IAM - Identity and Access Management. Basically all of the security stuff like two factor authentication, password resets etc.
- Has, built into it, all of the necessary record and data retention requirements that many of these big F500s are legally required to have. (Note: GDPR requirements in Europe are close to impossible to actually meet, so many b2b companies either don't sell to Europe or will only sell them access to their software hosted on U.S. servers. It is impossible to overstate how much of an own goal GDPR was for Europe's tech sector).
- And this is maybe the biggest one, it can integrate with a bunch of other apps - CRUD or otherwise
To return to the CRUD app you just built at home, it works just fine on your laptop! Can it export seamlessly to Excel or Word? No. Can I log into it remotely from my laptop while I am in the Delta lounge at O'Hare? No. What if four people want to work on it together at the same time. Uh, no - you don't even have a login into it! You just start it and boom, you're CRUD-ing around.
So much of the value of "big" software is all of the non-core functionality that is bolted on top of it in overlapping layers. This is also the dirty secret of what a lot of FAANG engineers do - write integrations between one product or service and another. They are not thinking up the next killer app, but essentially acting as digital plumbers in the world's largest city.
In the startup world, core functionality is often complete within the first year or two. It kind of has to be to gain your first customers. Then, so much of "product development" is figuring out where you're going to spend your time building integrations and then balancing that against actual new feature requests. The smart product managers realize that they can unite those two things and integrate a new feature from a different product. Two birds, one stone, zero actual innovation. Give that man a promotion.
There was a unicorn that literally was an integration hub for different products and services.
3. New vs legacy software
This is where we start to get into "both sides may be right" territory. From my experience, it seems AI is now quite good at writing new software, even fairly complex systems. It can do this because it doesn't have to make any assumptions about how anything already works. If it makes assumptions based on the user's intent, it is usually decent at carrying those assumptions through development to the finished product. In cases where it is not, you, the human, have to debug. Debugging, in this case, however, is often no harder than saying "Hey, this part doesn't work, and I think it might be because of xyz..."
This is not the case when you deploy AI against a legacy codebase, which is exactly what @birb_cromble mentioned. This is because legacy codebases are evolutionary products of a system changing over time. Ideally, each major upgrade - and even the minor ones too - to a system are documented. What "documented" means, however, varies wildly across developer teams. For sometimes, it's nothing more than a quick changelog of bullet points. For other teams, they write about the decision making process that led to changes. Most documentation is incomplete or somewhat ambiguous. I would argue that, right now, almost all legacy documentation is in no way written for LLMs to use well in their context windows.
4. Documentation
Unless it is. That link is to a good blog post on the recent fracas at Tailwind labs. Tailwind labs makes software and gives its core functionality away for free. This is the same model as Red Hat linux. They make money by having developers realize that they, Tailwind, have already built premium features on top of the core and will sell those features and hosting to companies that want it. I actually really like this so called "open core" business model because I think it's philosophically more in line with OG software ideals. Linux and its various derivatives have been free - in some form - since the 1970s, and the world's infrastructure runs on it. If Linux had been locked down from the start, I am convinced computers would still be weirdo specialty scientific equipment.
Anyways, back to Tailwind. Tailwind had to lay off about 75% of its staff because AIs read their whole documentation - which was very, very good - and can, now, build all of the premium services on their own. This fucking sucks, it's bad, nobody likes it. OpenSource is a necessary part of the software ecosystem. Even the most evilest of the FAANGS pour millions of dollars into sponsoring open source projects every year - because they rely on lots of those projects in their own code bases. Now, however, LLMs that scrape the internet, potentially, pose an existential threat to opening up your documentation plus codebase. It's as if you've just created one million free forever expert devs. Furthermore, this also exposes a dark pattern. If you want to retain your IP, lock down your documentation, intentionally obfuscate it, or just don't post it and only support your product with bill-per-hour in-house tech support teams.
The good news, however, is that most documentation is such shit that this will not happen.
But let's return to the main thread: AI under and overhyped at the same time.
My suspicion with @birb_crombles code base is that it isn't completely documented. This is absolutely NOT a shot at birb. I say this because, for any legacy code base, it is essentially impossible to build and maintain complete documentation that describes not only how the system operations, but how it evolved over time. This is valuable and necessary context for an LLM. All of the assumptions it makes about various libraries and modules can be very, very wrong because it doesn't have the legacy "evolutionary" documentation to inform it of various design choices and modifications. Birb and his team have that context as tacit knowledge in their brains and shared collective intelligence. "Hey why does thing x do action y?" , "Oh, team A needed that special feature so they could do necessary report z" , "cool, got it." That 10 second exchange across the the aisle with another dev is worth approximately 1 million lines of well written context to an LLM (1 million may or may not be an exaggeration.)
Birb said as much in his post. He wrote:
After that the wisdom was that we needed to carefully structure our tickets and our problems so that the tool could one-shot the problem, because no Reasonable Person could possibly expect a coding agent to iterate on a solution in one session. The problem with that solution is that by the time we've broken the problem down that much, any of us could have done it ourselves.
Bravo, Birb! I mean this sincerely. Phrased differently, Birb is saying that once his team provided extra-context documentation, the LLM was performant. However, by doing so, his team pretty much arrived at a state where the fix was obvious and easy.
Very well done documentation does lead to this. However, documentation is literally endless if you want to cover not only the system now but how it evolved over time. Good technical writers at easily $100k+ and they are necessarily slower than writing new code. Most companies will not invest in this because, economically, they can't.
4. Ships and Planes
Existing legacy software is like a ship. It's big and slow, sure, but it's moving a lot of mass and is more or less steady and stable. One-shotted LLM applications - like Clawdbot - are like planes - fast, soaring, sexy, and, sometimes, they crash spectacularly. The thing to point out, however, is that planes cannot move, economically, the bulk that a ship can. What I mean here is that all of the evolutionary design choices, system revisions, and tacit knowledge that a legacy codebase reflects is a very bad payload to deploy an LLM against. There are too many unknown unknowns and relationships that are hidden so as to be very improbable. An LLM is a probabilistic machine, so it relies on what makes sense on average - not what is real in a specific circumstance.
But deploying an AI against the clear blue sky (like a plane) is its most advantageous arena because it can just assume the average and build the thing from scratch.
Big, legacy CRUD apps - and, absolutely, more specialized apps - aren't really in danger of being disrupted by AI in the immediate future. 5 to 7 years from now, ehhhh, I am not so sure. The folks who are absolutely totally fucked as in right now, today are any startups that have launched a CRUD app with the idea that they'll do all the dirty work of building it into an enterprise offering. The market for that is quickly evaporating. Instead, internal tool teams will just use LLMs to make their own CRUD app, wrap it in their existing security etc. stack and use it internally. This may equate out to as much as $250k of combined labor hours and API credits but, 1) that would be at the high end and 2) that would be a one time cost (besides internal maintenance) instead of the the recurring six, seven, eight figures of spend to a third party.
5. Conclusion
I hope I've done a reasonable job in showing how both sides are right. I believe @birb_cromble. I believe, because I see, that pretty big names in software, who were even AI skeptics (roon on twitter, for instance) are now admitting to 100% agentic coding. The difference is in the starting point and the legacy debt or bulk that a given party engages with.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
One of the many reasons I have pretty much totally discounted Scott's takes on AI is that he is incredibly technically illiterate. You'd think that living in the bay area are moving in the circles he does that he'd have a better grasp of some of the basics, but he doesn't. AI (LLMs) are literal magic to him and the fact that they - in chat bot applications - "talk like humans" baffles him.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
Sure, fine. Whatever.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
It's intimidation, harassment, or something similar. And it has (or should have) a high probability of triggering a Civil Rights investigation as the 1st Amendment begins with the religious freedom clause.
It's not civil disobedience because no church represents the local/state/federal government. This is also why it isn't terrorism per se.
To the specific Don Lemon case, this just shows how profoundly dumb that man is. America is a very secular nation. Especially in regards to Christians, "The Culture" is openly antagonistic unless you're one of those "christian" groups with LGBTQ flags and female pastors.
But actually running in to disrupt a service is still faux pas. People are still woo-woo enough that they aren't okay with this. It would've been fine if Lemon and his weirdo friends picketed outside the church. It would've been more than okay for him to make up just-so false equivalents to random Bible excerpts. Since at least the early 1990s, it's been totally okay to parody solemn Christian institutions to the point of profanity.
But don't go into the Church, dude.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
Speculating is always dumb - and so am I.
After discovery Pretti had his past violent altercations with ICE today, I am now capital-w Just Wondering if the bodycam will show him;
a) clearly reach for the gun in the scuffle b) say something similar to "Fucking shoot me, bitch" or "I'll fucking kill you" etc.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
Believe it or not, I was never in uniform. Did contractor stuff for a looooong time and was in the same age range as junior officers, so often got a glimpse into Real Life (TM) that the "adults" didn't.
Top (Bottom?) 10 moment of life was being in the backseat of exactly one of these kind of muscle cars while the driver - definitely not over the legal limit - was doing 110 mph on hwy 62 back to Twentynine Palms after having, in fact, visited a strip club near Palm Springs.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
@Sloot has his schtick, sure, but his posts are mostly well written, often humorous, and, IMHO, do bring up excellent points even if I disagree with them and if they're sometimes too "on the nose."
But in this specific instance, I actually want to double down on my support for @Sloot.
Dispersed, grassroots social phenomena tend to have (at least) two levels of causality. There's something proximate, obvious, and discrete at the surface. That's usually where they get their name. George Floyd protests were about, ostensibly, George Floyd. Occupy Wall Street was about the feeling of financial industry excess post 2008 recession. The OG Civil Rights marches in the 60's were about ending what was then codified and explicit racial discrimination.
The second level is a broader and more amorphous manifestation of long building social change that has now reached a critical mass. George Floyd was about COVID, Trump Bad!, and the 2020 election. This actually made it kind of unique as it was not the culmination of a multi-year development (or, to be generous, only about a 4 year development during the first Trump admin). I believe it is safe to say the extraordinary circumstances of COVID are what created it.
Occupy Wall Street is a better example; this was a movement born of the slow motion economic displacement following trade liberalization in the 1980-1990s (NAFTA, China / Korea / Japan). It wasn't all about 2008. OWS even shifted and changed into the Tea Party and is now still the spiritual ancestor of MAGA style economic populism.
The 1960s Civil Rights movement is the poster child. After decades of Jim Crow, the socio-economic reality in the majority of the US made the codified racism of the South no longer tenable. This wasn't all about Rosa Parks trying to improve her commute or a couple of kids in Kansas wanting to enter the transfer portal switch schools. The Civil Rights movement's success and enduring place in the American consciousness as The Right and True Righteous Cause is evidence of its long developing scale - and, perhaps, its lack of actual success six decades after the fact (that's for a different post).
So what does this have to do with @Sloot hating women?
The subtext of the Minneapolis ICE protests is feminist LARPing finally smashing into the wall of hard reality.
We're in anywhere between decade 4 to 6 of this. This being modern American / Western feminism as a loosely defined social phenomenon. Colleges are now significantly majority female. Women have occupied every major leadership position (political, corporate, and beyond) with the exception of President (which would've been claimed as well if Hillary Clinton hadn't been the worst candidate in history). Millenial women out earn millenial men at the median. All of this female success has been great! Except for TFR, family formation, and general happiness. But, like, whatever. The Future is Female and all that.
What's happening in Minneapolis, now, is evidence that the nth-wave feminism of today has out kicked its coverage. Smashing glass ceilings and hanging tough with the boys is all well and good, but literally conspiring to disobey laws and obstruct law enforcement has real and immediate consequences. Maybe Wonderwoman didn't get that promotion at work because of actual sexism - she can keep the struggle going however she likes because she's alive, healthy, and, gosh darn it, ready to kick some patriarchal ass!
But when Wonderwoman decides that the best way to deal with a toxically masculine man in her way is to hit him with her car she can't keep the struggle going because he might respond with his own lethal force. When Wonderwoman decides to clap back at a flashbang, she might never be able to clap at all after that.
I'm being a little flippant here as an ode-to-@Sloot, but my point is real; the feminist "movement" as far as it a cohesive one and not just a vibes based mentality, has broken containment and exited reality. It is now responsible for women putting themselves into highly dangerous physical situations with potentially lethal immediate impact but under the guise of fun-and-safe "girl power" vibes. That's an irresponsible ideology. They're choosing the bear to signal how much of a girlboss they are and then are shocked, shocked, when the bear rips off their face.
@Sloot's injection of female revealed preferences in relation to military / police sartorial choices isn't him contorting his "womenz bad" theme into the conversation. This topic actually demands that we look beneath the surface level "ICE vs commies" narrative to figure out the much larger scale social phenomena at work. I believe that the phenomena is a long running social change - feminism - metastasizing into a view of the world that is divorced from reality. Human brains don't do well with cognitive dissonance. And the data shows this.
Liberal women are fighting a battle between their identity-ideology and reality. In continuing to lost that battle, it's not just a matter of ill-advised hair colors, tattoos, and a surfeit of feline companies. It is now immediate death or maiming because of an injection of self into horribly dangerous and easily avoidable situations.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
If ICE agents cannot act competently in high stress split second situations
Define it.
Define "competently"
I need your full rubric, please.
Otherwise, this is just a weasel way of saying "ICE agents should only every make perfection decisions in all circumstances"
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
US police already looks spectacularly unprofessional compared to other first-world countries;
Lol what.
Here's the Mannheim police stabbing. This particular video does the shitty editing thing where they long pause during the gory bits and then zoom forward, but you can dig up the unedited footage if you like.
Notice how the police mostly stand back and shout instead of getting involved. Except for the biggest male police officer. Who then gets stabbed in the head. Because his colleagues aren't swarming the attacker. It was nice, and professional, though, of the police woman to put her hand on his shoulder at the end - "You alright, hon? Yeah, looks like you got stabbed in the head there."
Most other "first world" police are basically crossing guards. This is because most other "first world" countries are a) surveillance states that can prevent crime by violating civil liberties in ways that are cut-and-dry-illegal in the USA and b) either ethnically homogenous (Japan) or ethnically / socially caste like societies where the lowerclasses are allowed to murder each other so long as all that riff-raff stays out of the Nice Parts of Town.
American police actually, you know, police the worst areas of society instead of flatly ignorning them. Which means their job is fundamentally very difficult.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
But, I mean, if you want to match the metaphors, the woman in your scenario would've also literally been yelling "rape me! rape me!" at the man she met at the bar...
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
that the US military runs a human experimentation program that’s already developed gene editing technology,
This one is actually true, but in a stupid and dumb way.
The amount of Monster Energy drinks and dip than an average Marine Infantryman consumes on a weekly basis does alter their genetic profile. That's sound as stone. This then lets them become super soliders in combat while weighing 165 lbs, failing to ever surpass a 3rd class PFT score, and paying 28% APR on their Dodge Hellcat, which they wrecked - twice - on a 72 hour libo.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
Yep, this is all true.
Still, the sections of Metabolical where he actually walks through The Science the science of, say, ATP production helped me "get" nutrition - and especially insulin - in a way I hadn't before.
Your point is well taken, nonetheless. I try to diligence any pop science books I read and everything you said about Lustig popped up on my radar. That's why I kept reading and kept an interest in nutrition.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
- Re: Protein. Genuinely curious about what a good range is. I've always seen .5 g / lb as the benchmark for "minimum" for a semi-active person.
- Re: Sleep timing. I hear you. I would be in bed at 9pm everynight if this wasn't the equivalent of social suicide. Artifical light literally changed the species and I think the consequence is that early oriented cronotypes are slowly dying out over generations. Sorry, dude.
- Re: Religion. I'll plug the Catholic Land Movement. I don't have a ton of experience with it but it seems to be split between TradCaths (my strain) and very woke Liberal Catholics (who .... aren't catholics). So, YMMV, but at least something to consider.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
Relationships are all about compromise, and give and take.
This is one of those generic pieces of casual advice that literally leads people into hell.
I'm not writing this to attack you, @FtttG, but to attack that idea.
Relationships are not about compromise unless there is a greater goal to compromise for. Otherwise, this is a circular argument that is also negatively compounding. Think about this rephrase;
"Relationships are all about compromise. When I want to do something that my wife doesn't want to do, she compromises her own happiness (just a little!) to make me happy. Likewise, when she wants to do something that I don't, I do it, and compromise my own happiness (just a little!), to make her happy. The relationship net happiness is totally the same, right? Not at all slowly degraded."
The intent, genuine as it is, is to maintain system stability in the relationship. But if the "goal" is the current state of affairs, then every possible choice becomes overweight in risk because every possible choice represents a potential change to the system. Soon enough you get into defection problems. Think of this scene; Guy wants to go our for guys night, has already informed his girlfriend / wife of his intention days before, she has agreed, but, then, at the moment he is pocketing his keys to leave, she hits him with the puppy dog eyes and asks if, maybe, just this one time he can stay home and watch Netflix with her. Why? Because there is no direct relationship upside to him hanging out with the guys. Sure, sure, he needs time with his friends and all, but there's the much higher risk that some bar slut will make a move (or is that just a perceived risk?). The point stands.
My counter is that relationships are about two people working towards a defined mission. Usually, thats the having and rearing of children. When it isn't, there has to be something beyond mutual emotional support (which is stasis). Perhaps that something is being the DINK couple that travels a bunch. "Babe, we're going to hit 50 countries this year if we save and budget!" maybe it's the fitness couple - they run marathons together. It doesn't matter what the particular goal is just that The Goal is there and third party to mutual emotional support. Then, you can "compromise" because both parties can see it as a positive sum sacrifice for that external goal. The guy stays home from boys night because the drinking will impair his training. The girl doesn't nest up the couch and binge watch netflix because that means missing a training session.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
Thank you for the write-up.
Longevity / health has been an interest since I read Lustig's Metabolical. FWIW, Lustig does a good job of getting into the details of how the macros (fat, protein, and carbohydrates) interact to fuel you - or to cause metabolic syndrome, "leak gut", and all sorts of insulin issues. The transfats section was particularly scary.
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On the Zone 2 exercise claims. I've seen these floating around health twitter for sometime. I cannot at all claim to be an expert, but I think some of the confusion may come down to the fact that the difference between Z2 for multi-year trained folks and those just coming off the couch can be massive. The reality is that most people, even those who go to the gym regularly, are actually very undertrained in a whole-of-athlete sense. Gym Bros can move big weight, but they have the cardio of smokers. Treadmill bunnies can stomp out 7 min miles for ever, but have heart palpitations after doing a few box jumps or kettlebell swings. Casual gym goers train themselves into hyperspecialization which leads to overall system brittleness. I think that's hard for people to deal with because it means treating your fitness as a dynamic system that changes meaningfully every six or so months. The only people who are going to be able to keep up with that are already in the top 20% of executive function / discipline / planning capability - which means they likely are already doing it! It's such a hard problem for that 50% - 80%. It's an impossibility for < 50%.
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Agree broadly on nutrition. There's no special diet. You eat whole, minimally processed foods, with roughly balanced fat-protein-carbs. I think anything from 40-30-30 (fat protein carbs) to 20-50-30 (fat protein carbs) is probably fine and mostly rests on an individuals particular sensitivities and situation. Any diet where a macro is less than 15% if total calories seems suspicious to me. The protein cult is real. You cite 1g / lb of bodyweight as a max. I've seen references to 0.8 g / lb as where diminishing returns start. If you're really getting after it in the gym or elsewhere (marathon runner etc.) then going above 0.8 can have benefit.
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Sleep is king. Got disciplined with it about 18 months ago. Perhaps as much of an impact on mental and physical health as a good gym routine. After a while, I started to really enjoy the end of day pattern I had constructed for myself to signal sleep to my brain and body.
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Emotional. Again, person to person. There are recluses out there who do perfectly fine on their own, but they are an exception. Definitely against the "everyone should go to therapy" line. Pretty good way to develop neuroticism. I think the gold standard is a religious community. You get a deeply committed community aligned to a transcendental or metaphysical "goal." That's self-sustaining in a permanent way that a softball beer league or trivia night group is not.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
New Jersey State Troopers.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
Kidd killed Kilcullen
Just had to point that out.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
Next week, on This American Life, we take a look at the quiet life of Cell Block D in Rikers Island. Enjoy this early preview:
_Tuesday is canteen day. Always a bustle of activity then. My cellie (for the week I am visiting) is named Bullwhip. He's a white supremacist who murdered a latino woman and her child. He's got a rugged complexion and a strong gaze that reminds me of my grandfather. I'd spend summers on grandpa's farm as a child, working on spiceracks in his woodshop that never turned out quite level.
Bullwhip leads me out of our cell with a friendly, "get your shit, faggot" to urge me on to the day. "Lead on", I think. Maybe this will be like one of my childhood summer adventures. When we get in line for canteen, a member of the Piru Crips steps on Bullwhips foot. I can't quite make out if its accidental, intentional as to make a point, or the kind of juvenile horseplay that is common in locker rooms. As I puzzle over this, Bullwhip gouges out the man's eyes. His shrieks of pain bounce of the concrete walls as the Correctional Officers - "screws" my fellow inmates call them - charge the scene. Bullwhip, covered in the other man's blood, keeps shouting "That's what you get, frog! That's what you fucking get!" while I lie prone and try to keep from tearing up due to the pepperspray that's been deployed.
Or ... am I misty eyed because maybe, just maybe, I can hear the bullfrogs from Grandpa's farm once again."_
This reminds me of one of my favorite personal anecdotes ever.
In 2022, I was, for about six months, living in a big city on the east coast. I had previously worked in this city, hated it, and moved away. When I came back, I contact some friends and colleagues with the standard, "TollBooth is back in town, who want's to party."
One guy invites me to meet him, his girlfriend, and one of her friend's at a bar. I text him asking if he's trying to slyly set me up on a blind date. He responds cheekily, but the intent is clear (yes). L-to-the-O-L. I get ready and meet them.
Old buddy is outgoing and affable. Somewhat like a human golden retriever. Girlfriend is a great complement. A little more dryly humorous. The straight man to his goofball. Blind date girl is ..... swing and a miss. Although quite pretty, the personality type was immediately offputting - liberal but brittle. Not a loud and proud wearer of pussy hats, but an anxious NPR type who sometimes has a meltdown loading and running the dishwasher. If You've seen School of Rock, think of the female principal (before she turns cool. Whatever. I'm not going to ruin the vibe.
Conversation is happening. Lots of references to memes and The Office. It's not like
mentally jerking offdiscussing topics of high importance on The Motte, but it's not a bad way to spend a Friday evening. I've also been drinking, which helps.Old Buddy brings up space. I think he'd been watching a document. Starts to really geek out over all the cool stuff SpaceX may be able to do. Nods from TollBooth, girlfriend seems pleased her man has a non videogame passion.
Blind date hits the table with your "Whitey on The Moon" vibe; _"I just think it's kind of insane, actually, that we're spending, what, tens of billions of dollars on these hobby projects while people are LitErallY StARVing out there."
I'm no veteran, but I know a landmine when I see one. Not stepping into this one. Just give a sincere seeming nod...and maybe flag down the waitress for another drink or four.
Old Buddy can't help himself. In the most gentle way, he asks Blind Date if, perhaps, maybe, just maybe, poverty and space exploration aren't zero sum tradeoffs? And that, perhaps, advancing the species' exploration of the cosmos may deliver some auxiliary benefits to the economy as a whole?
Nope. She holds the line. Moderate escalation. Girlfriend finds a way to change the subject. Rest of the evening is pretty much fine. I got pretty nicely drunk without getting sloppy. Old Buddy and girlfriend get their uber quickly after we all pile out of the restaurant. I'm ready to give an awkaward ass-out hug to Blind Date and then stumble to an Irish Bar to finish off the night solo.
"Want to come over to my place?" She asks. I'm stunned, and not only because I'm drunk. I haven't ... talked to her for the past 2 hours. But, years, later, I learn tall, plain guy is a fantastic pickup routine. All of that non-committal non-communication, paired with disinterested heavy drinking was irresistible!
Or not, who knows. I declined the offer, honestly informing her I was pretty wasted. I think I registered a mix of confusion and revulsion on her face.
The kicker to the story is that Old Buddy texts me the next day; "Great seeing you! Sorry Blind Date was such a weirdo"
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