• 6 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Broadly speaking laws should centre around enabling people to make choices in an informed and safe manner.

    If a product is not what it says it is then people can’t mame that choice properly, so laws around quality control and labeling are a must.

    Advertising often clouds decisions and frequently reaches audiences outside the target market, driving consumption by kids etc, so none of that please.

    Tax should be significant on these items, but not high enough to leave illegal supply competitive or even cheap by comparison. Otherwise you get an increase in gang activity like we have had from raising our tobacco prices over the last 20 years.



  • Yes, Asahi is for Apple silicon, not Intel, I wasn’t sure when they changed over from Intel to Arm.

    That said, if you have a fully spare computer which is not something you rely on for anything then installing the OS directly can give you better performance. I don’t know how powerful your main machine is but if it is significantly more powerful than the old machine a VM may be faster on that, it just depends on the performance of each machine.


  • A lot of people talk about Asahi Linux as a good distro for Apple hardware, I wouldn’t know given I haven’t tried Apple hardware for decades. That said, installing on the bare metal is great, but first I would recommend a virtual machine.

    Using a VM you can try different distros, test different desktop environments, and generally mess around without risk to your data or the usability of your machine in the early stages of figuring Linux out. Once you have tried a few and found a workflow that works for you you can install as a dual boot or even ditch Mac OS entirely. I would personally try a few different desktop environments including KDE, Gnome, and XFCE, along with some of the more obscure ones like in ElementaryOS and so on. Linux is all about options and choice so try some things and learn what works for you.

    Ultimately, don’t take it too seriously. You don’t need the right answer, there isn’t one, just try some things and find what works for you. If it stops working you can always try something else later.




  • I hate to use the example, but one of the worst places on the internet actually found a solution for this a long time ago. $10. By having a small, but meaningful, fee for the account people couldn’t have unlimited accounts and there was a cost to getting banned. If you are posting bot slop you will be banned quickly and lose your $10. If you are not being bot like and also not breaking tonnes of other rules many times then you will not be banned and can keep your account.

    This works well enough most of the time. Getting a new account after your previous one has been banned can be done fairly quickly but that $10 adds up quickly and can fund the cost of reviewing and potentially banning bad actors. It doesn’t solve the problem in full, but another thing you can add is region gating. In your profile you set where you are going to be dialling in from, including which VPN providers and so on. This means you have a fairly specific pattern of behaviour that is white listed in advance. Now if your account is compromised and starts logging in from other places it can be blocked quickly, and also potentially the login attempts can be blocked and a password reset process initiated.

    Another option would be to require a invite only process and have those you invite reflect on you. For example, if someone invites a friend and that friend invites not accounts then both people are impacted. If someone invites 9 good people and 1 abused account their ratio is 0.9, if they drop below some value then they lose invite privileges. If you consistently invite crappy people or abusive bots you get banned, but if it happens only occasionally then you lose your invite rights for a while. Those parameters are all tunable but should help to get things operating more smoothly.

    Also, having invite periods but closing invites most of the time can also kill off many bots. People using bots are lazy, they don’t want to wait for months posting stuff and pretending to be a person to then use the accounts to post 3 junk things and then have the whole set banned. They want a large network of accounts they can throw away as needed. Make it slow, expensive, and consequential. Make botting 50 accounts cost $500 and also be a waste of time and the bots will stop coming.


  • It looks like a cool project. I wonder if anyone is working on higher PWM frequency for people who are PWM sensitive. Most ereaders with front lights use PWM at a fairly low frequency to control brightness and it can be very taxing on the eyes. Dimming using DC regulation is slightly more expensive but it should be fairly manageable with this kind of open hardware project.


  • Just to start, it was definitely not meant as any sort of “fuck you”. Genuinely. Please reread with the opposite emotional valence as that was definitely not what I wanted to achieve at all. I honestly did want to say good luck and have fun, but not like some sort of sassy sign off, I will work on that for the future.

    In my opinion, which you are free to dismiss, your previous language was somewhat aggressive and dismissive. Your conversational partner seemed to find it to be so and reacted to that, so I don’t think it is just my bad reading of your statements. It is entirely possible that you meant no harm, had no aggression at all, and your personal expressive language was just not a great fit for either myself or the other conversational partner.

    When I said “Something you may find helpful” I meant those words, not something else. You may find a 10mm socket wrench useful, you may not, it depends on your current needs which I don’t have access to, but hey, if you need a 10mm socket wrench I have one, along with my opinion above. It is offered in the spirit of kindness and also a lack of obligation, you don’t have to take my opinion on or show why it is wrong, you are free to just ignore it and mark it as read.

    I don’t have an investment in you beyond hoping things go well for any other person. I do have an investment in the communities I participate in, so when I see something like your previous conversation and think I can make things a little better, a touch nicer, I feel motivated to do so. Feel free to look through my history, I really do try to consistently explain things, make things clearer, and resolve conflicts with discussion. I try not to dismiss the concerns of other people and in this case I have failed to note and respond to your concerns effectively.

    I do not consider what I was doing as mediating, but I can see how you would read it that way and I perhaps should have used a direct message to prevent that interpretation. Do you think that would have been better? A less public forum? Please do answer this, I actually do care about your thoughts here.

    I don’t have any ego invested in this. I hope things go well for you, I have some tools it has taken a long time to acquire, they seemed possibly useful for you in this situation, so I tried to offer them.

    Suppressing conflict is not the goal. The goal is resolving conflict, or at least for me. Agreeing to disagree is a perfectly good resolution. Finding a common ground and having someone expand or change their mind is a good resolution. Having someone change my mind is just as good as someone else changing their mind, and both are a little better than just agreeing to disagree. I am not trying to preserve peace at the cost of resolution, I believe that the level of conflict present was not conducive to a resolution and pulling back a tiny bit would make a resolution more achievable.

    Anyway, I really truly hope things go well for you, no hard feelings if not, and feel free to ignore, reply, reply with a DM, or whatever else floats your boat, I genuinely hope you have a good day from here.


  • Just a quick clarification. This is a mouse study. This is not a study in humans.

    What do mice eat? What do humans eat? Are we closely related to mice? Do we occupy the same niche? No. This tells us about mice eating a ketogenic diet, not about humans doing so.

    Monkeys exaggerate, mice lie. Something shown in primates is likely, though not guaranteed, to be similar in humans, though the degree may be very different. Something shown in mice may or may not replicate in humans at all, and the degree is often very different even if it does.

    Mouse studies are great in some ways. They are cheap, fast, and very well understood. You can copy the study design from someone else and save a lot of effort designing your study. You can control for really specific factors by choosing what specific mice you use. You can control their diet perfectly, use large numbers at low cost, and see their full life cycle in just a couple of years.

    Mouse studies also suck in a bunch of ways. Humans are not mice, so translating the research is not easy or reliable. Something that causes an issue in mice may or may not translate to humans for a bunch of reasons. They make their own vitamin C for example, so you may have to knock out their genes for making vitamin C if you want to make them get scurvy. You have to humanise them and these changes are always approximations.

    So this study does show that a high fat diet that causes obesity IN MICE does increase tumorgenesis in the small intestine. In mice. Not in humans. Every claim here needs that caveat to be made clearly and directly. If they do a translational study in humans I will happily read it, but this study? To me it is worse than useless. It is irrelevant at best and misleading at worst.


  • It is a little more than cutting sugar. If you replace all your simple sugar with complex sugar you will have an improvement in blood sugar control, that is true. You won’t reverse insulin resistance with that change because you will still have elevated insulin levels all the time.

    What ketosis allows is a period of time where you are not using large amounts of insulin to push your blood sugar down to safe levels. Instead you use gluconeogenesis (making sugar in the liver from fat) to push blood sugar up. This means you don’t overshoot and have to push it back down.

    If you stop using insulin all the time your body becomes less resistant and it becomes more effective, allowing you to actually push your blood sugar down when you need to. This is one of the core issues with diabetes and can actually be solved.

    As for your wife’s mum, what she is eating is up to her. She is an adult and has to make her own decisions. If she chooses something you wouldn’t choose it isn’t an indictment of your and your choices. She can do what she wants and so can you. It isn’t a personal insult. If she chooses to take keto very seriously and won’t eat beans then treat it like you would vegetarianism, don’t be dismissive or rude, just be a supportive person and don’t make bean (or other high carb) dishes when she is around for dinner. Or make the high carb dish as well as something for her. Or just make parts of the meal keto and others high carb and mix and match on your plate. Or don’t have her over for dinner. Lots of options that don’t require you matching her diet or pushing back on what she eats.

    Diet is personal. It is personal for her, and yours is for you. Her diet is not personal for you. You don’t need to concern yourself with her choice of food just like you don’t need to be concerned with her choice of underwear.


  • If you eat sufficient carbs yes, you will be knocked out of ketosis, but beans are not too high carb to have in moderation. You can’t maintain ketosis if you are having hundreds of grams of beans but if you have a small amount to make a dish more enjoyable you can get by and make food much more manageable if that I’d important for you.

    Personally I have had a small amount of refried beans in my Mexican beef dishes because of the flavour and especially the texture. They do add carbs but they add something important in the texture and I find then worthwhile. I actually also add some black beans, but only a small number, and capsicum (bell peppers) as well.


  • Hey, just as an outsider to your conversation above, I don’t think the overall attitude here is super helpful or positive. That person read your post in a way you didn’t mean it, you bounced back a couple of times, and it ended in telling someone to take their attitude and shove it. That is a fairly aggressive response and probably not great for them or for you. Living with that kind of outward aggression is painful and not actually helpful for defending yourself.

    Something you may find helpful is restructuring with the assumption that they have misunderstood in good faith, without malice or accusation. For example,

    “Ah, yes, they did list psyllium husk as working, it is one of the raw fibres, but the refined and processed ones don’t work, they fail to gel. As for invalidating your symptoms, that wasn’t my intention, I was trying to provide useful information of what not to do. If I were doing the wrong thing to manage a health condition I would want to know. Good to know psyllium husk is working for you.”

    It is much better for you and them, and honestly I have had a large number of interactions like this where the other person comes back and apologises for any confusion, seeing my tone and changing from defensive to conciliatory. It feels nicer than “winning”. Anyway, good luck, have fun.


  • The sourdough was unscathed, which was the problem, it deflected the knife better than my weak human flesh. Attempt 2 was successful, the sourdough was great, and it is a standard loaf which replaces all other bread so it became Vegemite toast, tuna salad sandwiches, boiled egg mashed with butter toast, and a vessel for butter with sausages. It is also gluten free, made with brown and white rice, buckwheat, and tapioca starch. Finally got sourdough working with gluten free flour, no xantham gum needed, just a touch of psylium husk (2g/500g).





  • Conversation have a flow, and sequence of performances from each participant. Saying “I’m tired of classic rock” is a stop point for the conversation. If you use this wording you are not making a space for their next response.

    Instead you could consider saying something more like “I’m not really into classic rock, do you have anything else?” Or even more directly just add “Do you have anything else?” to the end of your original statement. If you close the conversation around classic rock but open a new one about another genre or a request for their other preferences the conversation can go forward.

    That said, this is all masking. If you are not interested in maintaining that relationship it may be more trouble than it is worth then ending things there may work for you. If someone required that level of emotional work from my end but did not reciprocate by adopting strategies that worked with me I would feel it was pretty unfair and not really worth my time. Being flexible and kind is something that should be reciprocal, not one sided. Masking costs you something and you not masking costs them something. Meeting them half way may make sense, but it may also be pointless if they won’t actually meet you there.


  • Hey man, that sucks. I won’t claim that things will be better because I can’t know that for sure, but it does seem times are changing. When I was a kid a trans person was a punchline. When my parents were kids a trans person was a pedophile and worthy of death. The kids I work with now are aware of trans people and just accept it as part of human diversity, like hair or skin colour.

    If you can’t be out now then don’t be, you are the judge of that and nobody should be telling you what to do. That doesn’t mean the future will be like today. There may be a day where it seems more possible or you find a new friend group. You may find that you can be more flexible in that group and take the risk, making yourself more comfortable. I would recommend not closing yourself to the idea, just accepting that right now it isn’t working for you and you are putting on hold for a while. We all wait for things, that doesn’t mean giving them up or never trying again, it just means waiting and making the best of your time now.