If anyone is interested in keeping up with current events in a manner closer to "reading the history" rather than reading the news, check out Wikipedia's Current Events portal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
I read a few days down and stopped once I realized that absolute zero percent of any of it was useful information for me as a Northern European and all of it was terrible news. I don't think it's helpful for anybody that I know these things, while it is actually detrimental for my ability to be of service to other because of how it drains me.
> If one of those 30 is related to politics I don't see the problem. Just don't click on it.
I think it's a fair issue for people trying to avoid triggering news topics. Sometimes the headlines can be really inflammatory. Avoiding them might be feasible for you and me but may be tougher for others. For example, the top post right now is titled, "ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants", which is tricky because it is tech related and straddles the line of politics and tech. But I can see how someone might get triggered by reading that. Telling someone, "Just don't click on it", may be akin to telling an alcoholic, "Just don't drink that poured beer" in this case.
It would be nice if you could unsubscribe from certain tags like you can on Tildes. That way, you would have slight control over what you see while allowing others to keep what they want to see.
> I'd consider 5'8 and 210lbs morbidly obese. An average male at 5'8 should generally weigh about 150lbs and no more than 164lbs
You would consider incorrectly then.
This person has ~155 pounds of lean body mass. 164 would put him at roughly a body builder level of fat, which basically requires a part time job in cooking and nutrition to maintain.
For reference, I’m in a similar situation to this person. I’m 5’11” (180cm) and about 200 lbs (91kg) with about 170 lbs of lean body mass. My dexa scan says that I’m 15% body fat, but I get the same lectures from doctors about being obese and needing a lifestyle change, all based on BMI and (I assume) my size (I’m barrel chested). It’s completely absurd.
Dexas are notoriously inaccurate. Your dexa scan is probably wrong, and you are fatter than you think. I've been lifting over a decade, so I have far more muscle mass than the average person, and I am 6'1", yet am still easily over 20% BF if I'm 200 lbs or more. Don't believe me? Try to get truly shredded. You'll see for yourself that you will have to lose far more weight than you think. Everyone is fatter and less muscular than they think they are, even if they're active. Unless of course you are a heavy steroid user, in which case you may actually be muscular enough for that to be valid. But for the average natural trainee? Nobody who's truly lean is getting an obese or morbidly obese BMI. Overweight at worst, maybe.
BMI is definitely inaccurate for those with greater amounts of muscle mass, but not as inaccurate as many would like to believe.
I didn’t want to belabor the point in my original post, but since you went there…
The next steps at the doctor is that I show them my MyFitnessPal nutrition tracking, my dexascan, and (at some point) take off my shirt. I ask them what exactly it is I should change. 100% of the time the answer has been something like “Oh, sorry. Please continue as you are doing.”
They just aren’t used to seeing muscular 200 pound dudes at my height in my area at my age (btw, I’m in my 50s).
Also, someone can workout in the gym all they want, but I think most people will struggle with lowering their body fat percentage if they don’t focus on their nutrition.
I realize that my lean body mass (both bones and muscle) are decreasing, and that rate of decrease be higher each year. That said, I’m doing what I can to maintain whatever muscle and bone mass I have.
Or that guy could be a burly bricklacker / concerete worker who can casually carry hundreds of pounds of weight all day every day in brutal conditions.
burly - maybe, but I haven't done any hard labor most of my life. I ran track as a kid, and kept my high metabolism - (RMR: 2460kcal, TDEE: 3380kcal); well lost it when my thyroid failed, but medicated myself back to it. I eat what I want, but its a very high lean-meat diet (lots of chicken breast and turkey because my wife likes them), but I don't limit my carb intake either, as I mostly burn sugar for energy (according to my Respiratory Exchange Ratio).
Somehow my body is just amazing at working without any help from me. I don't even exercise much. Maybe a few pushups a day, up and down my stairs at my house a couple dozen times a day, and probably 5-10k steps a day max.
No quite. On iOS, I cannot place the cursor in the middle of a word by putting my finger there. It goes to the beginning or end of the word, and then I have to drag it like an ice cube to the precise spot. On Android you can tap exactly where you want the cursor to go, and it does with perfect precision.
> The productivity gains I'm seeing right now are unprecedented.
My company just released a year-long productivity chart covering our shift to Claude Code, and overall, developer productivity has plummeted despite the self-reported productivity survey conveying developers felt it had shot through the roof.
I'd like to see a neutral productivity measure? Whether you tell me it went way up or way down I tend to be suspicious of productivity measures being neutral to perception changes that effect expectation, non paradoxical, etc.
It makes a lot of intuitive sense: people feel more productive because they're twiddling switches but they're spending so much time on tooling it doesn't actually increase output (this is more or less what the MIT study found: 20% perception of productivity, 20% lower actual output).
Sure but increased output would mean code. I don't think generating a lot of code is itself developer productivity. Some people could be using it to stop themselves from creating bad code which is developer productivity. While I find it a bit unlikely people are using it in this way (in terms of the average) I would most certainly have made this argument if code quantity was up from LLMs so I can't claim to know a quantitative measure.
My hypothesis for why our developers have reduced productivity is that LLM assisted coding has made reviews much more difficult. The words that are written are subtly more complex for a human to understand compared to what our engineers would have previously written themselves. Sort of an uncanny valley effect.
Couple that with engineers across the board mentioning that they feel like they're losing proficiency in an understanding of the codebase and where things are.
The model that does make sense to me is (and the only actual success stories I've seen) is people saying "it let me quickly produce a piece of software that otherwise wouldn't have been worth the time to create". That is definitely an increase in productivity, but "software people aren't actually willing to pay for can now be made much more cheaply" is a much different claim than the marketing is making (which I read to be TFA's point).
I don't really see the influence of things like LLMs (or StackOverflow or improved search engines) as simple productivity. People do what they can with very complex value estimates and comfort levels. If they are less productive in a careful measure it may mean they are doing a lot of high value low hanging fruit across areas they were afraid to touch.
The trouble with highly productive specialists is that they produce a ton of high quality results where the demand is not really there and has to be artificially made. Even if you find enough work for them it often means the incremental cases are things you wouldn't have bothered with. A specialist branching to work slowly in related yet further related areas is a lot more value and can work with an oracle so flawed that it barely beats chance..
With juniors it is much more complex, but they have always been a useless consideration in productivity. Not having them has always been highly productive in the short term but has long term consequences.
My cousin just finished years of medical school, residency, and his first job as a psychiatrist. He opened up a private practice a year ago and has been working hard to acquire a client base. I fear this will destroy his livelihood. He can't compete on the convenience. To see him, a person has to reach him via phone or email, process their healthcare information, and then physically visit him. All while this tool has been designed to process health information, which can also speak out loud with the patient instantly. Sure he can prescribe medications, but many people he sees do not need medication. Even if the doctor is better, the convenience of this tool will likely win out.
If America wants to take care of its people, it needs to tear down the bureaucracy that is our healthcare system and streamline a single payer system. Otherwise, doctors will be unable to compete with tools like this because our healthcare system is so inconvenient.
That sounds like a one-off anecdote. For my anecdote, when the government was shutdown and people on food stamps needed help, I counted 8 churches in my neighborhood serving meals to an influx of people, which aligns with my experience throughout my entire life. Maybe some churches don't help people as much as they should, but that seems to go against a core philosophy of the church and my experience with dozens of churches across America.
> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help.
By the time my generation was ready to start using SO, the gatekeeping was so severe that we never began asking questions. Look at the graph. The number of questions was in decline before 2020. It was already doomed because it lost the plot and killed any valuable culture. LLMs were a welcome replacement for something that was not fun to use. LLMs are an unwelcome replacement for many other things that are a joy to engage with.
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