charlesf
3mo ago
Instead that particular problem returns on schedule, almost but not quite clockwork, to make an outrageous post and get banned again.
Things like this will always remind me of the Something Awful poster who was banned for posting solicitations for one of his personal businesses in a subforum where that isn't allowed for 11 years. Then, 11 years to the day he broke the exact same rule in the exact same subforum. He caught another 11 year vacation and everyone fully expects to see him in 2035 when this one expires, assuming the forum still exists.
I've lost about 160 lbs on semaglutide and have been able to mostly maintain the lower weight for a number of reasons, but I can speak to the difficulty of "not doing something" and the different experience of the sensation hunger that I have now vs in the past.
Before describing my experiences with the sensation of hunger, I think its worth noting that I was relatively healthy and active as a child through my 20s and early 30s, so I always remembered what it felt like to not be fat and I think actually being healthy before I started gaining weight made it somewhat easier to ignore at first. I think people that are fat their entire lives have it harder. I began overeating after surviving cancer and the depression I experienced from the lifelong nerve damage I have now.
On the sensation of hunger and the specific wording I'm using "the sensation of hunger" and not simply the term hunger, this is part of the meditative practice that I think has allowed me to maintain the weight loss. In Buddhism we talk about dependent phenomena and conditional arising, and the fundamental emptiness of all such things. In this understanding, hunger is not an indication of needing to eat, or at all even related to the nutritional state of my organism, its a sensation like the temperature of the air, or ambient sounds. It never, ever, ever goes away. If I am awake, I am hungry. Starving. Even now that I'm "better", I'm hungry from the moment I awake until I return to sleep. No amount of eating of any type of food has any effect whatsoever on my sensation of hunger. In fact, eating generally makes me even hungrier, as well as exhausted. I could eat so much food that I had trouble walking, I would feel like I was on the verge of vomiting from how stuffed I was, and I was still starving. I think something like this drives the behaviors of many, if not all, obese people to some extent. I am fortunate that the same techniques I use to manage chronic pain work pretty well with chronic, inescapable hunger.
Until semaglutide. I knew once it started to work that there was probably always going to be an end date. The normal American medical system was a failure from the very beginning for me here, I've always had to obtain it on the 'gray' market so to speak. (Its actually much cheaper too, about 20% what my clinic's pharmacy would charge w/o insurance, which always refused to pay for it) So, while I still am able to maintain access to a "maintenance dose" now, I knew from the outset that I needed to use the possibly very limited time I had access to retrain my body and my mind to a new relationship with eating. I spend about 30-45 minutes per day meditating, and have for over 20 years now. One of these daily sessions is focused entirely on internalizing the fundamental emptiness of all phenomena, but specifically the sensation of hunger, to mentally sever the relationship between feeling the sensation of hunger and the arising desire to eat. Its now simply another flavor of physical pain. Its been largely successful; I've been able to sign a peace treaty, so to speak, with hunger. I do not attempt to fight it, or suppress it, but simply experience and observe the sensation without it conditioning my behavior. Without the previous experience with meditation for coping with chronic pain I don't think I could have done this. Using meditation to "short circuit" the connection between physical pain and mental suffering was much more difficult than addressing hunger, though the two are similar in many ways, the primary similarity for me being the absolute unavoidability of both. The pain my body produces is just as omnipresent as the hunger, and is likewise a false signal. The depression that I used to feel from chronic pain contributed to my overeating. In a way both of these issues had to be processed together to address either of them individually.
The second set of changes: I had to train my body to accept, and then expect, a completely different relationship with eating. I had to build enduring lifestyle habits that were unique to my situation. I mentioned earlier that actually eating offers no relief to the sensation of hunger and usually just makes it more severe. For me what worked is not eating at all, most of the time. Three meals a day, or even two, is entirely unworkable. Given the very low number of calories I can consume before I start to gain weight again, three meals would all have to be the size of snacks for most people. As I was able to cope with the hunger with the medication, I began to reduce my calorie intake, settling at what my doctor said it appropriate for a 6'3'' man, about 2400cal per day. This is way too much. I'm not sure exactly how people's metabolisms differ, and how much being sedentary due to my disability contributes, but at 2400 calories a day my weight will stabilize at about 330lbs. Even 2000 only gets me to about 290-300lbs. So I stopped counting daily calories for the most part and now account per weekly intake: 8000-9000 calories per week stabilizes my weight at about 235lbs. This generally takes the form of one 1000-1500 calorie meal per day in the evening with one 0 calorie day per week. I buy food once per week based on these limits. If I somehow eat everything before its time to shop again I'm looking at more than one 0 calorie day. I have to eat in the evening as it exhausts me and causes varying levels of brain fog eventually driving me to bed. After about 2 years of this my body is acclimated and I will actually become nauseous if I eat more, though I'm still starving the entire time I'm nauseous. It never goes away.
I think the people that gain the weight right back are largely letting the medication "do all the work" as it were. So, at least while they are on it they have the metabolism and habits of a normal person. Sort of. I suppose its possible to stay on it for life if the supply and price gouging issues can be resolved, but right now most people can't or don't. If you don't use the opportunity provided by the medication to reestablish a new relationship with eating and retrain your body and mind then its likely to only be temporary. In a way I'm fortunate to have already had the toolbox for dealing with chronic pain.
charlesf
3mo ago
The anti-cheat services compile quite a bit of data but its generally not released to the public beyond limited disclosures to try to sell their services to game studios. Valve anti cheat is one of the bigger ones. Its expensive, but customers will get access to the "rap sheets" as it were for various online credentials. IPs, UBID, steam installs, accounts related by payment method, hardware IDs etc. You don't get large data sets to just browse, but you can see the history or reports and flags for clients that connect to your game, substantiated or otherwise. You can set up auto-bans for known cheat engines or bad actors.
charlesf
3mo ago
I can't speak to academic cheating with confidence, but I can about videogames. First, there are more opportunities as time passes as more and more players get into online games so the whole number is going to go up. This matters b/c these are all potential customers of the next part of the problem. Its never been easier to cheat at online games. Used to be, back on the 00s, it was much harder. You either needed to be a programmer yourself with knowledge of the game engine and build your own hacks, or you needed to know the right people or be part of fairly insular online communities, the Warez scene probably being the most prolific. There was a lot of overlap between the game cracking/piracy scene and the online game cheats scene, both of which were almost never just stumbled upon by normies. Now that much larger numbers of people play these very competitive games, they are large enough to constitute a customer base worth trying to get the attention of. People are also much more comfortable with paying over various apps now, so its much easier to sell to them. Prices are wildly variable with the specific game, but for anywhere from $10 to $200 you can get a download link to a fully contained .exe that you run with the game, there is a relatively user friendly interface, and you money buys not just the download of the exe, but also updates as the sellers of the cheat engines try to stay one step ahead of the game devs and other anti-cheat service providers like VAC. In addition, the people using the engines are much, much sloppier with using them, not even bothering to try to hide it most of the time. To accommodate this the same groups that sell the cheats also sell various ban-evasion packages, helping you make new accounts, teaching you how to use a VPN etc, or in many cases just selling you a pre-made, clean account to get right back at it. A few more infamous ones over the years have also had inside people at the game studio who would just remove the bans for money. Money changed everything with videogame cheating. I don't think any of this applies to online chess, which is its own strange world.
charlesf
3mo ago
I've taken hallucinogens many, many times in my life. Mostly LSD when younger, shifting more toward mushrooms as I've gotten older, to entirely mushrooms now in my late 40s. Its the only 'hard' drug I use any more, usually 1-2 times a month on the weekend. Your report sounds like a small amount tbh, mostly based on your ability to actually record the experience. Higher doses absolutely shoot your attention span. The inconsistency of natural mushrooms is a real thing. I'm lucky to have had the same source for a long time now, but even then the same weight batch to batch has noticeable variations in strength. Taking it in a clinical setting sounds frankly horrific. I'm accustomed enough to using psilocybin that I can perform a wide range of tasks while tripping and have never had anything close to a bad trip, and I wouldn't do it in that setting ever. I live on a farm in the country. My primary activity on mushrooms is playing in the fields with my dogs. I think people refer to spiritual or mystical experiences on hallucinogens because we lack other language to describe the experience. I find trying to describe it in words very difficult, like its a category of experience that can't effectively be spoken or written about. I feel this exact same way about the effects of meditation over the long term. We just don't have vocabulary for it in English. As far as enlightenment/ego death/loss of the self experiences, most of the people I've know that have these, and I've also had many personally, are already engaged in this pursuit outside of their psilocybin use. Generally through various forms of meditation practice. Hallucinogens alone generally don't trigger these in my experience, with the massive exception of DMT, which I don't really recommend for beginners. DMT will absolutely slam into the user with ego-death/loss of the illusory self, and though temporary, you don't know that at the time. Its a class apart from other hallucinogens massively altering your thought processes and sensory perceptions.
charlesf
3mo ago
Kratom provides a kinda-sorta opiate-like buzz the very first few times its used that taper off pretty fast and generally stop around the 3rd-4th use. It is a fantastic pain reliever though, and a godsend for people with chronic pain who cant get medical pain management from a doctor. The pain relief doesn't go away with repeated use like the buzz does.
There is a predictable profile for the people we see who have problems with kratom (I volunteer at a local rehab). They are opiate addicts, usually heroin, pretty deep into it. They get off dope but are struggling with terrible withdrawal. They learn that in the cultures that kratom is native too people use it to get off dope, that it blunts the withdrawal symptoms. This is true, its great for this. Then, the first time they use it they get sorta opiate-like buzz and a lightbulb goes off in their heads: "I've found a loophole! I can keep getting high! I'll still pass my drug tests!" But as mentioned the psychoactive effects fade very fast. This can temporarily be countered by taking more, so they move from the capsules to the liquid extracts then the more concentrated extracts. Still by the end of the first week the buzz is entirely gone. It still offers relief from withdrawal but thats not why they're using it now. This stuff got them high once, why isn't it working anymore? This is where the huge amounts of money kick in. The individual bottles of the concentrated extract cost $20 each or so and they're taking 5-10 a day chasing that buzz that isn't coming back. Way more than they ever spent on heroin (which has been dirt cheap for a while now) Many go back to dope at this point. We see a lot of ODs at this point; having been clean for a while, even just 1 month sometimes, is enough to reset their opiate tolerance but they still dose based on their previous habit, which is now too much.
Kratom is a very effective treatment for pain. Its also very good as alleviating withdrawal, but those first few doses that provide a ersatz high for recovering addicts ruins this use case for some people leading to the observations in the above post.
charlesf
3mo ago
Oh I know. My father ultimately lost his license after his 9th DUI. He started racking them up in the 60s, before they put increasing penalties on subsequent violations. He drove everywhere with a tallboy in the console. After he finally lost license around '94 he transitioned to drinking and biking. He'd be 2-3 cans into the case before he even arrived home. He had a sleave that he put around his beer can that made it look like a Pepsi. He could have gotten his license back with a hefty fine after 5 years but he knew he'd just lose it again. He had to choose between drinking and driving, and chose drinking. Some people will never stop. It ultimately killed him early, along with the smoking, at 62 via colon cancer. He actually started drinking more when he was diagnosed.
charlesf
3mo ago
I'm some places it already is illegal to sell cold beer for carry out. Indiana I believe, and maybe Oklahoma. Actually it looks like OK repealed it a few years ago. Some beer is also meant to be consumed at room temp, but the people that are into this type of beer are probably not drinking it in the car. Most of the degenerate alcoholics I've known, people who literally can't wait to get home and have to drink in the car, do not care in the least what the temperature is and have often also bought a half-pint which they downed in the parking lot before even getting back in the car.
I'm on the boarder of the midwest/upper south, so there are some hispanics here but not a large fraction of the population. Pickup trucks, however, are extremely common and popular. Some of them are work trucks, though vans are more common as actual work vehicles. The overwhelming majority of pickup trucks on the road here (I'd estimate 80%+) are single passenger commuter vehicles. 99% of their drive time is to carry their driver to and from their job that doesn't require a truck at all, or running errands. Nothing has ever been, nor will ever be, transported in the (tiny) beds, which generally have a hard cover of some type so they don't need cleaned. Many of them boast considerable off-road capabilities yet will never have a single tire touch dirt, short of occasionally hopping a curb to get out of a small driveway or parking lot. All of my neighbors, the men anyway, drive one of these as their primary vehicle. If they do find themselves actually needing to haul something, the more well off actually buy a second, usually older, truck to use for that, or they have a trailer. Trailers are very common and popular; nothing really fits in the beds of these trucks anyway. They are essentially lifted SUVs with enormous engines with the rear storage area converted into a semblance of a truck bed that is never used. Decades ago this same demo (their parents and grandparents) would have driven Lincolns and Cadillac sedans. The interiors of these trucks often have the same luxury options as the current Lincoln/Caddy offerings. More offroad vehicles like jeeps and hummers are also popular with the younger men. These are slightly more likely to be used for their ostensible purpose, especially if they've aftermarket alterations, but I'd guess at least 50% of these vehicles are also single passenger commuter vehicles. The locals who are fans of offroading/mudding disparagingly refer to both types of vehicles as pavement princesses or mall prowlers. As mentioned down thread, all of these commuter trucks are in impeccable condition, regularly washed and kept away from any scenarios that might scratch or ding them in any way.
As to the question why? They are men, and men drive trucks. There isn't much more introspection than that. A non-trivial amount of women use pickups as their primary commuter vehicle too, but they also tend to prefer jeeps, or the jeep pickup, which I'm seeing more of, or just regular giant SUVs. Many of the wives of the men who own the giant commuter trucks near by me have nearly identical black Cadillac Escalades with the silver trim. I have a Lincoln Navigator personally, I think Ford makes better vehicles, at least right now. I also have a Nissan pick up that is used as a farm truck mostly, and looks like it.
charlesf
3mo ago
Yes, I have memorized several poems. I'm gifted with an extremely good memory. I'm a formally trained musician and have, over the last 35 or so years, memorized hundreds of songs as well. I can't always immediately recall all of them 100%, but I can brush up 15-20 or so of them in a week to performance level by reviewing the sheets and playing them a couple times. I also enjoy memorizing quotes, passages from books, religious verses etc. I can do pi out to 72 digits w/o brushing up, 144 if I refresh (this is as a song btw, each number is a distinct note). I find the memorization of all these superficially different things to be very similar in practice. In my case I can't really help it. Even brief contact with writing or music can trigger fairly solid, if partial, memories which compel me to put in the work of fully memorizing whatever it was. Its like an itch. I feel like the main sources of this skill are both the naturally very good memory and the formal music training since childhood. Memorizing musical notation feels like memorizing words. I can also "replay" songs in my head with all the instruments differentiated, accurately, beginning to end.
I don't think photographic or eidetic memory are real. Or, at least my own internal experience feels nothing like the descriptions from people that claim to have photographic/eidetic memory. To me it feels like the inability to forget, and I'm pretty sure its a form of, or related to, mental illness, like a weak form of hyperthymesia, but it doesn't really feel like the descriptions of that either. It's not an entirely positive ability. I remember every humiliating thing I've ever done, or awful thing that has been done to me, in vivid detail. I can tell, at the moment I hear or read something, that I'm going to remember it forever. I can also tell when I'm going to struggle to ever remember it; some things just slip right off my brain. Sometimes those things are important. Most stuff falls somewhere in the middle and I can memorize it with a small amount of effort and practice. The worst aspect is if I learn something incorrectly and have the "remember it forever" reaction. When my brain locks onto something inaccurately I will struggle with that for the rest of my life. As a toddler I got east and west reversed in my head. I now have to remember an additional memory that my first recall of these concepts are flipped, like a brain patch. This has caused me to read/study new things very carefully.
I'm completely hopeless with the people's names. There is nothing to grab ahold of, mentally. The sounds that represent that person feel entirely arbitrary. My work requires me to meet and remember a lot of different points of contact for different issues, as well as a rotating roster of my own team of employees. I have to make flashcards and devote time to using them. I also find most people, especially women, largely uninteresting and interchangeable. Unless they aren't, but rare people are rare. The exception to this is if the person's name is in a song. I can reliably make the song start playing in my head when I see them. This was very helpful with my wife when we met 30 years ago; her name is Amy. The song by Pure Prairie League still plays to this day when I look at her.
can't really detect any reasoning at all in decisions like this? How could the law possibly fail under heightened scrutiny[?]
Because falling under heightened scrutiny would produce the desired result. That's it.
Jackson can play the game. I find her unimpressive as well but she seems at least aware that her arguments should have, well, arguments. She knows the law ok and will go through with the ritual of tortured interpretations and equivocations to forward the Cause. The conservatives do this too; don't be blinded by agreeing with them. Although I would argue the current group are much better at it. Sotomayor doesn't care at all, nor does she put more than a token effort to try to hide it. Her writings look superficially like a considered legal decision, but even to a non-lawyer if you apply any scrutiny at all many of them completely fall apart into the absurd.
charlesf
3mo ago
As much as I support the norms here about charity and civility in communication, I have to agree as well. Just read some of Sotomayor's writing. I wasn't really following the issue at the time when the opening was being debated in the first Obama admin. Everyone knew that he was going to appoint a woman, and probably a minority, and I assumed that all the eligible judges were interchangeable. Then some time later I found myself reading one of her dissents entirely unprepared for the experience. I was appalled. This was obviously someone who had gone though life without ever having anyone correct her or challenge her on anything serious. She has a reputation as a bully which I 1000% believe. I wouldn't call her stupid in absolute terms; she's probably a bit above average for the nation as a whole. She was certainly very good at school and skilled at navigating bureaucracies. She probably would make an ok, or at least not totally disappointing local politician. A lot of people have accused a lot of justices of being concerned primarily with the results of their decisions, cleverly twisting the laws to produce the desired political victory for their side. She doesn't even both with the pretense of respect for the law.
By the standards of supreme court justices, she is stupid.
charlesf
3mo ago
Try Yandex, I use it more and more lately. It has a different set of problems than Google et al, Russian language results and worse at removing scam/fraud links, but it great at image/video search. Their political censors are entirely uninterested in the sorts of US culture war and IP issues that Google heavily restricts, and they don't have the main focus of the results on selling things.
charlesf
4mo ago
Its our in-house AI tool. I understand that microsoft has build something similar into Outlook, but our IT sec teams have blocked it on our work accounts.
charlesf
4mo ago
I've never used it for anything personal, so I've never made accounts like described above. I do work for a large corporate tech company though who has its own AI offerings. I use this one for work a modest amount and its been helpful but not game changing. I review a number of very large speadsheets on a regular basis. 95%+ of the data in these sheets doesn't really concern my immediate duties. AI has been great in digesting these and presenting me with just the information I need to see. Its also good at reading my many, many emails and flagging ones where people are asking me to do something specific, or touch on a number of topics I've flagged at important. Its also really good at reviewing the recordings of long meetings, converting them into text transcripts, and extracting the valuable information (if there is any), finally turning the meeting into the email it should have always been.
charlesf
4mo ago
This happens to me sometimes too. I've taken to reading a bit about the local history of an area before the trips and use my free time to visit historically interesting, but tourist uninteresting, locations. Some great experiences in the past include visiting very old churches/shrines, the oldest restaurants/bars in the area, harbors/docks and other industrial areas, train and bus stations. There are often very small specialist museums that have been pretty good too. I visited a devastated Rust Belt town that in 2020 was at something like 15% of its all time high population from 1950. The town had converted an old train station into a local history museum full of photos and artifacts related to what people used to do there when it was an economically viable, vibrant location, a whole post mortem shrine of remembrance to a place that doesn't really exist anymore. There are a lot of little spots like this around the US, but they take a bit of digging to find them. I often just use Google maps to virtually explore, then visit spots that look interesting.
charlesf
4mo ago
I live in a community like this in the rural midwest. The volunteer FD is pretty popular and they have no trouble getting people to sign up. That being said, there is a...certain type of person very attracted to the VFD that make up a good % of the volunteers. They are people that are really, really into first-responders and the military but couldn't actually make it in the professional PD/FD/Military for various reasons, either washed out of the academy/training/boot camp, can't meet the physical requirements, or have medical issues. The VFD gives these, often very patriotic and civic minded, people an outlet for their desire to serve the community. They get really into it with a CB radio in their personal vehicle and often a little red hazard light too. They wear their VFD clothing/uniform all the time too.
Maybe, but I've never really used books very much as part of my practice. I find books about Buddhism and meditation interesting intellectually but not always useful for progressing actual practice. The ones I enjoyed the best are probably the more semi-biographical ones were other people share their experiences and details of their practice. There are certain predictable milestones as well as potential stumbling blocks that almost all life-long meditators eventually encounter. Some of these I would also categorize as real dangers. An experienced teacher is indispensable for navigating this and I don't find books or writing to be a functional ersatz. I imagine you could probably do ok with instruction over the internet though. Still, there a few books I've enjoyed that stick out. Anything by DT Suzuki is pretty good, though he is a major figure in modern pop-Buddhism that's not really his fault; the hippies became somewhat obsessed with him in the 60s. Alan Watts is also quite good, though I prefer his more academic audio lectures where he explains the basics of Indian philosophy. His other stuff in general is quite syncretic and personally idiosyncratic to his own practice and not really what I'd call standard or traditional, and the hippies got ahold of him too. Another author I enjoy is Taitetsu Unno who writes in English about, and is a minister in, Jodo Shinshu Pure Land Buddhism. There is much less interest in the west for Pure Land, despite it being the overwhelming majority of Buddhists in China and Japan. I learned to meditate at a Jodo Shinshu temple when I was young. Meditation is actually not a core practice of Shin Buddhists at all, most never do it at all, though it does exist in the tradition and is more common in the clergy. The underlying philosophy of Pure Land doesn't really require it as part of the practice, they are mostly chanters; their path to liberation is entirely different from the more well known types like Zen or Tibetan traditions. However this temple shared a facility with a Rinzai Zen sensei who held twice weekly sessions. Shin and Zen have a good and fairly long relationship in Japan so this wasn't that strange to the natives at the temple. I feel like speaking or writing about the experience of meditation is always something of a farce. Its a category of experience I find often beyond my ability to communicate about. At its core is meditation practice. I do a mixture of sitting and walking/working meditation as well as chanting, mostly the nembutsu. I think I understand the aversion to pop-Buddhism though. I learned at a temple of Japanese immigrants and their decedents. They were extremely sensitive to the idea of their religion being a caricature and their non-Japanese visitors being any sort of cultural/religious "tourists". Many of them were quite militant about resisting anything that felt like being exoticized and were very clear that they'd prefer that no non-Japanese were allowed in the services at all, ever. One thing the Shinshu in the USA does that I really like is translate the majority of their teachings into plain English, borrowing many terms from Christianity. Their organization is even called the Buddhist Churches of America. Many of these changes were made post WWII in an effort to integrate more fully into American culture. The temple I attended was founded by former internment camp prisoners who left their old communities en masse after the war and founded entirely new communities in American cities that had little or no Japanese presence before the war. I think that my introduction to the practice coming from this group was very helpful for avoiding a common trend I often see in western Buddhists of what I can only really describe unkindly as LARPing. I have over the years learned a great deal of Japanese and Sanskrit/Pali terminology out of academic interest and as part of deepening the practice. Some of these terms are very useful for describing concepts that sometimes require an entire sentence in English to convey, but I don't think a successful meditation practice requires learning any foreign languages at all, nor adopting the cultural practices of a different people.
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