cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
7d ago
I don't like trading citations, we both have access to search engines.
The simple problems with calorie counting:
- Effort and thinking. Counting up calories consumed and burned is tedious and annoying. This results in people dropping the diet. Dropping the diet tends to reverse all weight losses.
- Not all calories are equal. 500 calories of soda vs meat vs vegetables all have very different effects on hunger levels, digestion, and nutrients. Other diets have more success in reducing calories consumed through simple rules like "no sugar".
- Metabolic adjustment. Even if someone does everything right, keeps balanced meals, and puts in the effort their body may adjust and render the efforts useless. Caloric expenditure comes in lots of forms, exercise is known, but your brain is an energy hog and so is just being awake vs being asleep. You have strict control of your intake but you absolutely do not have strict control of your expenditures. You can end up just being far less alert, sleeping more, and having less energy overall.
Your body is not a simple calorie machine. It has a complex digestive system that has evolved over the entirety of our evolutionary history. It's designed to work whether or not an animal can count. Fat in the body does not just serve a single purpose, it's not just energy storage. It's a form of protection and heat retention as well. The body works to maintain a certain level of fat, because having having too little in bad weather is just as much of a death sentence as being too hungry.
cjet79
7d ago
I think Steam has a way to indicate that you own a game from another platform or source, and still just use the steam launcher for that program (but not acquire achievements).
cjet79
8d ago
The Chinese and Mongols were in a semi eternal conflict. Every few hundred years the Mongols would ride in and conquer China. They'd then grow fat and content in China and then get conquered by the next set of mongol invaders.
An adviser proposes that the Mongols go back to living in the harsh Mongolian steps after conquering China. That way they will stay a hardy people and not be conquered by the next set of mongol invaders.
Everyone recognizes this is a good idea, but the whole reason the Mongols conquered China was for the loot and the prospect of not living in Mongolia.
The adviser dies in China reading reports of the next Mongolian horde gathering on the border.
cjet79
8d ago
What I said above, and elsewhere:
A thing can be true and also bad advice.
Good advice in my opinion helps you achieve a desirable outcome.
CICO often manifests as calorie counting. It's the most straightforward interpretation of CICO. Calorie counting has historically and scientifically been shown to have just about zero impact on dieting and positive health decisions. It works for a tiny minority of people. I called it the diet for people that love accounting.
I don't dispute the physics, I never did. Just like I wouldn't dispute the physics of motion and free energy with a car mechanic. A car mechanic that started lecturing me about physics and the need for fuel would be an asshole and I'd never go to him again. Telling a fat person about CICO is the equivalent of that mechanic.
cjet79
8d ago
$1 million donation is chump change at those levels. Possibly the donation was to secure the sit down dinner where they talked, not actually a promise for any kind of outcome. That seems way more in line with that amount of money.
cjet79
8d ago
I have this weird belief that advice should be helpful. That if you want outcome X then good advice will improve your chances of achieving outcome X. Bad advice is something that just restates outcome X or has no impact or a negative impact on achieving outcome X. Do you have a different word for helpful advice as I've defined it?
Apparently you believe differently, and think that advice does not have to assist towards achieving a desired outcome. That simply haranguing someone for not doing the thing counts as advice. Thats fine. I'm not gonna convince you otherwise, I'd just ask that if you ever see me asking for advice is a wellness thread, know that I'm asking for helpful advice, and whatever it is you are offering can be better left unsaid.
cjet79
9d ago
No it's not. And if it was I have a series of the best advice for various topics:
On sports: you should win
On war: kill anyone that opposes you
On politics: convince everyone you are correct and wield all the power.
That "advice" is basically saying what the end state is without good help on how to get there.
cjet79
9d ago
CICO is fine as a physics explanation. I disagree with OP that it can be "debunked".
As dieting advice it is crap. The main failure point of diets is compliance. CICO has terrible compliance rates.
cjet79
9d ago
Ya I forgot how much I hated the union rep lady. For a while I just pretended the story ended with me ratting her out to the boss and her being fired.
I've met real people like her and they drive me absolutely insane. A self righteousness mixed with a self centeredness that turns every interaction with them into a lecture where you can't get a single word in.
cjet79
9d ago
A thing can be true and be mostly bad advice. CICO is like that. If you get your gas car towed to a mechanic and the mechanic asks "have you tried filling it up with gas? You know you can't just get free energy from nothing. To change an object from at rest to in motion requires a force acting up on that object." You'd probably get a little annoyed. Cars cannot run without some form of energy this is true from a physics perspective, but as a way of diagnosing all car problems it's dog shit. You don't need the physics lesson, you need the engine checked by an expert.
But sometimes there is actually no gas in the car and that mechanic would be right that one time. Sometimes calorie counting works for some people. It just seems to fail for most people as a dieting measure. I tend to think of it as a diet for people who think accounting is fun.
cjet79
10d ago
My mother has actually been doing a text version of this with her ancestors that lived in the 1800s.
She fed hundreds of pages of translated letters into the prompt, and can have the AI sort of respond to fake written letters with real sounding stuff.
I expect text based AIs are probably already possible for anyone that spends enough time online, and especially if the training data is comprehensive enough.
cjet79
10d ago
I've got something that might fit.
Hardspace: shipbreaker
Mechanically an amazing game and very fun.
Story wise atrocious, and heavily panned in many reviews.
It's a story of workers doing a miserable and dangerous job for shit pay, so they rise up to fight their bosses by destroying a bunch of property as a form of strike. It would probably be a fine story as a movie.
The problem is it creates a total mood disconnect with the player. Not only do I enjoy the main characters' supposedly "miserable" job, I actually payed money to the developers to do this "miserable" job.
I think other games solve this sometimes mood disconnect by just having dishonest characters tell the player that what they are doing is fun and good. Like Glados in portal.
I ended up trying to make as little progress as possible in the Hardspace campaign, until I was done with the game and wanted to see for myself just how bad the story was. It's just cringe. And one of those things that you don't realize is an unwritten rule of video games storytelling: never directly trash your own video game within the video game. If you need to do so for storytelling reasons, get an obviously dishonest character to say nice things.
cjet79
10d ago
There are programming RTSes out there. I found them unfun. Probably because I've been programming for a living for a long time, so it doesn't feel like a game, it feels like work to me. Your mileage may vary, thats just like my opinion man.
cjet79
10d ago
I occasionally get recommended the Gothic games when I'm looking for a game that allows for overpowered and unlimited levelling. How is Drova in that regard?
cjet79
10d ago
In the abstract, sort of.
But in practice I've seen what those games look like, and no it was not fun.
I think pillars of eternity had a super in depth programming system, just about any input could be a trigger for just about any action.
The reward for all your hard work is that you get to not play the game. or if you are like me and don't enjoy that combat part you can much more easily just turn down the difficulty.
cjet79
11d ago
Usually leave the genre and try turn based strategy, or grand strategy.
I think you'll probably still generally enjoy Dune Spice Wars. I run the game at double speed and then just constantly pause and unpause it. Some micro is necessary at the early parts of the game. Like when you want to save one of your 5 soldier units, and you have just that unit do a tactical retreat while everyone else stays. By the end of the game its more of the reverse where I'll might leave one guy behind to die while everyone else retreats, or more commonly everyone retreats at the same time if the combat doesn't look like it will go in my favor.
There is a bit of tactics changes for small units. They have an "armory" that provides different unit bonuses, or sometimes tradeoffs. The tactics and tradeoffs are pretty limited though.
Most important skill is planning out your territory expansion, and adapting those plans as needed when temporary status effects come into play.
cjet79
12d ago
Ya I enjoyed Northgard as well. The games are sort of mechanically similar, but it feels more like "influenced by Northgard" than "Northgard with different paint".
The main similarity is the territory and unit mechanic. But that's obvious from any videos.
What's not as obvious is that there are other areas where factions compete:
- The Landsaraad which is a political forum, where various random gameplay effects can be voted on. The gameplay effects can be large, and the politically powerful factions can basically operate at a permanent advantage.
- Espionage. There are agents than can be assigned to give resource bonuses, or sent as spies to other factions. At the highest levels you can assassinate enemy leaders to eliminate a faction.
- The spice market. This mechanic is a little straightforward "buy your way to victory".
I've also really enjoyed the campaign gameplay. Which consists of a string of skirmish missions, or sometimes special victory condition missions (like conduct an assassination, or befriend the fremen). Victory at the main objective and secondary objectives grants resource bonuses for future skirmish maps. By the end of the campaign I'm usually acquiring enough bonuses to make me almost unbeatable, and missions become more of time attack challenges. But I enjoy being the overpowered unstoppable team in RTSs and I've only been playing on medium difficulty.
cjet79
12d ago
Video games
I've been playing Dune Spice Wars on PC. Its an enjoyable RTS. I initially passed on the game, because while RTSs were some of my first games (age of empires) they have evolved in ways that I'm not always a fan of (relying on micro and speed).
Dune has been a good "dad game" as I like to think of it. I can sit down and play a session for thirty minutes to an hour and not feel blueballed or teased. Pausing is fine in single player, and coming back to a saved game is not hard.
The factions have good flavor. The mechanics are straightforward.
cjet79
13d ago
It's not an either or thing. It's a gradient.
Some things increase skin in the game.
I think tying names and reputation to weapons systems is one way to have skin in the game, but it's obviously not very much skin if it's only a small part of their reputation.
cjet79
14d ago
This seems like a solved and understood problem. And Cowen himself is aware of the solution and has had interviews with the people that proposed it.
The solution is skin in the game. The person making the decisions needs to be personally impacted by outcomes.
That impact doesn't have to always be punishment, as @faul_sname points out below.
There is probably some low hanging fruit for accountability. Military projects should be tied to specific generals that care about a good legacy. And possibly a politician as well. Let those names become a curse or a word that means reliability to the grunts.
School boards should require that they have kids at the school. And possibly they should only be elected by those who have kids in school. It's possible that mixing in traditional politician accountability systems has made these positions worse. They should maybe be anonymous, or at least part of the board should be.
We require that politicians live in the areas or districts they represent. That is a decent start. Economic tie ins or closer representational tie ins should also exist. Lords of an area used to share their name with the area.
It mostly just feels that accountability is an afterthought. Something added in as a shitty ineffective process, because no one really cares about the hard work of real accountability systems. This feels backwards. The power shouldn't be allowed to exist in the first place without accountability. The Constitution was written partly as a way to say "this is how we won't make the same screwups as the last government".
Let the people in power figure out their own accountability systems, or just don't let them have power.
What's the best blue collar job for me?
Current/former programmer. Dad is a carpenter.
Things I don't mind:
Things I do mind:
More options
Context Copy link