> Why did it take until the late 20th century for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu to develop [...] every major country has long lineages of specialized competitive martial arts and tremendous incentive to find martial arts which worked and quick feedback loops?
Well, do societies have a tremendous incentive to find unarmed martial arts which work?
If my tribe faces an existential threat from the next tribe over, wouldn't I pick up a stick?
Martial arts in Brazil have had to have a notion of "cover", the other big one pretends to be a dance, because it was outlawed to practice martial arts.
It is really a combination of factors. No holds barred fighting in Brazil was very important. Not emphasizing standup wrestling / grappling and focusing on finishing a fight as part of a sport was not common. Judo/jujitsu had all the components of BJJ and even practitioners focusing on ground (ie Judoka that taught the Gracies). However, the agreed on rules of Judo focused more and more on standing techniques with rules ending a fight on throw to back, resulting in leaving behind many aspects of the ground game in Japan from years past.
Having trained BJJ and some Judo, I have come to appreciate the idea that if you land a proper judo throw on someone in a street fight, i.e. on concrete, and you put someone down hard on concrete, the fight is almost certainly over.
The same applies for wrestling high-crotch or blast double. If you put someone down hard on the nearest solid object or concrete, there's a good chance the fight is immediately over.
That said, in a real scrappy fight, landing a proper judo through is a tall order. I've seen high level black belts fail to land clean throws on spazzy white belts. They get them down and technically win, but not cleanly, and not with the force needed to end the fight. Newaza (ground techniques, i.e. BJJ) comes in there to help finish.
Pure BJJ is great if you are fighting on dirt, and great to know defensively if you do find yourself ambushed or otherwise on the ground in an altercation. But in a real fight you should do your best to put the other guy down hard, get on top, and stay on top. Modern BJJ in particular is far too willing to concede top position, though modern MMA is thankfully pushing back on this some.
For the record, BJJ doesn’t “work” in a context of general fighting. BJJ has a strong focus on going to the ground and fighting within the rules of BJJ/MMA competitions. You do that in real life or death environment and you’re dead.
BJJ didn’t develop until the 20th century because the competitive rules in which that style of mock fighting is most effective didn’t solidify until the 20th century.
1:1 fighting is extremely exceptional from a real world perspective. All real world fighting will be either many:many, or 1:many, or you should assume so as you never know that your assailant doesn’t have a friend somewhere nearby.
If you engages in BJJ like ground fighting techniques, it’d be like that scene in Indiana Jones where the crazy swordsman final boss shows up, and Indy just shoots the guy. Some other guy would come over and step on your neck, stab you, or just shoot you while you’re down, or your opponent will gouge your eyes out, because that’s the real world response. Historical fighting manuals are pretty explicit: never, ever get caught on the ground or you’re dead.
It’s just that most of the ways in which a standing person would attack a nearby person on the ground are so dangerous that they are outlawed from sport competition, and so ironically even the notoriously “everything goes” MMA ends up favoring ground game and devolve into wrestling matches.
MMA fighters are often asked in interviews about techniques for real street fights. The answer is always to sucker puck then gouge the eyes and throat.
BJJ is well suited for the octagon. Allow small joint manipulation and most of the technique goes out the window.
Yes, sport fighting is not like survival fighting because anything that would cause permanent damage is against the rules. Against the rules doesn't get trained or practiced.
Many organizations need to train people for real-world fights. Think police departments, militaries, prison guards and the like.
By far the most popular thing to teach is some variant on Krav Maga. Which focuses heavily on rapid incapacitation while maintaining your ability to move. Going to the ground wrestling is an excellent way to be taken out by your enemy's ally, or finding out the hard way that your enemy had a hidden knife you didn't know about.
The success of BJJ in MMA has not changed what gets taught to people who actually are at risk of winding up in a street fight with lives on the line.
BJJ worked in the early UFCs because the Gracies were among the very few competitors who had participated in MMA matches previously (having trained for Vale Tudo matches). A pure BJJ fighter today would get demolished by anyone training for MMA, but arguably Royce wasn't a pure BJJ fighter at the beginning of the UFC.
On top of that Severn, Frye, and Coleman all came from western wrestling backgrounds and they did pretty well in UFC...
Gwern is wrong about this. Around 1900 catch wrestling was well established in Europe, and had many similar techniques to BJJ. I consider this an existence proof for him being wrong; it seems unlikely that these were the only two points where it developed.
Catch wrestling split in two ways. On one side, it had submissions banned and became Olympic freestyle wrestling. On the other, they played up the drama and it became modern professional wrestling.
1. Many martial arts consider armed/unarmed just variations of a theme, and practicing unarmed is often safer, and used as "phase 1".
2. A lot of the modern day stuff can be traced back to Japan at a time when the government funded "civilized sports that help you grow", and then the Olympics got involved... we're pretty far distanced from "defend the village" at that point.
> Why does writing in the morning (anecdotally so far) seem to be so effective for writers, even ones who are not morning persons? While programmers, which seems like a similar occupation, are invariably owls?
Also anecdotal, but I've met my share of early bird programmers. I often wonder how much of these habits are driven by ~~stereotypes~~ culture, since theoretically your energy level depends mostly on your lifestyle.
Interruptions are costly to both programmers and writers. But I don't think writers get interrupted as much, so they can work during normal waking hours. Programmers get interrupted a lot if they work during business hours because their projects usually interconnect with other people's projects.
Yeah, I think it's stereotypes + reinforcement of peer groups that follow similar schedules as you.
I am a pretty ok writer & programmer in the morning; my productivity & quality of work falls off after 2pm. Under pressure, I'd much rather go to bed early and wake up very early to work on a next-day project.
A hunch: paper vs. screens or, going fully digital, paper-like software vs. terminal-like software. Microsoft Word, MacOS Pages, WordPress WYSIWYG, etc. come with the default background bright and was/is a pain to change; terminals, IDEs, code editors, etc. come with the default background dark and is a pain to read lots of code on a bright background and interface with other tools, mostly dark backgrounds.
Maybe others can sympathize with my personal experience. I'm a morning person. But mentally, I can't completely focus when there's things that I have to do later. I'm always worried about those upcoming things (responsibilities, meetings, kids, etc). By programming at night, after everything else is done, I can truly focus. Getting in the flow, I'm not tired and I'm completely absorbed by the current task. No future distractions.
No one is up or going to be up, likely. People aren't outside making noise. No inbound calls, less inbound emails or chats. Less notifications across social media.
I think this is why I was most productive at anything in the morning. I would get up at 5 or 6, because I just can't sleep past six hours, and have a good two hours to myself before my wife was up or I needed to head to work.
But now I have a kid, so either he wakes up soon after I do, or I don't dive into anything but because I need to drop it when he's up.
Another consideration is that people write differently depending on their state of mind/body.
I effectively can't do "work" writing at night. But I've found that fiction, humor, and other creative writing can benefit from being in a different headspace. Being tired to the point of feeling a bit punch-drunk can take you to interesting places. The few times I've truly surprised myself, I was writing in a somewhat (not drug-induced) altered state.
Perhaps the boring explanation is, if you don't start writing in the morning, you're already doing something else when you think you should start writing.
I program equally well early in the morning or late at night, basically the two times in the day when my daily tasks are mostly settled. If I advertise early morning programming, it doesn't feed into the mantra of "hard working" in corporate USA as well as the "burning the midnight oil" tropes.
So, I come into the office two hours early and get my programming done before the meetings start and get little to no recognition, or I stay three hours late doing the same and get lots of recognition. Savvy people will soon learn to feed the trope of working hard, working late, especially when it can excuse a late entry to work (but arriving early never permits a late exit).
I'd say the late night hacker is more a stereotype driven by culture.
I am a night owl, but most productive in the morning (if not exhausted). I dont think the two are as connected as people think. You need to be not tired to be productive, but there is more than that to it.
From a history point of view, early mainframe programmers were required to be night owls. Mainframes were expected to be running all day doing the calculations they were purchased to do - the only time they were allowed to be idle for development and maintenance was after the close of business. This is also the source, to a certain extent, of the unusual freedoms programmers often enjoy within organizations. They needed to have unusually free access to the most expensive equipment (and the building in general) and weren't supervised in person by the usual hierarchy of bosses.[1]
I'm not a morning person, and when I try to write a blog post or something late at night, right before bed, I'm already kind of spent and my mind is full of things.
On the few times I've woken up both early and well-rested, I have both the quiet and a clear head, although I almost always have something that'd be better tackled in the morning than cranking out a blog post or an e-mail to a friend.
Schizophrenia occurrence may be somewhat related to the inverse of Dunbar's number, this is only partially about biology / genetics, just as computers are also about software and not only about hardware.
> Obesity Epidemic: Why do humans, pets, and even lab animals of many species kept in controlled lab conditions on standardized diets appear to be increasingly obese over the 20th century? What could explain all of them simultaneously becoming obese? (Is it literally something in the water?)
I think it would help us if we understood why this problem is so hard to understand and what our blind spots are.
---
It is easy to see the problems that an obese person has. It is easy to feel like they should know better and make changes for their health. It looks like a big problem that should be taken seriously.
But that's not how that person got there. 1-5 pounds of excess fat does not feel like a big problem. Fat gain is usually quite slow and steady, and the body has time to get used to it. In other words, it's not a problem that suddenly shows up in a person's life, and it doesn't physically feel like a problem (until it's too late).
---
Hunger doesn't have a number. Scientists have an aversion to studying things that don't have numbers. It doesn't feel like serious science.
Hunger isn't weakness or failure, it's a whole body response to lack of nutrients.
Hunger isn't one thing, it's a bunch of body sensations and psychological triggers and conditioning.
Hunger acts like a one-way valve - there is a strong negative feeling for a moderate lack of nutrients, there is no equivalent feeling for a moderate excess of nutrients. People can often lose fat while dieting, but then gain it back. That has been described as the hunger set-point. Winter is coming and losing your energy supply may kill you (says evolution).
Hunger is not comparable between people. I don't know how bad you feel when you miss a meal, and you don't know how bad I feel.
---
I can eat like a king at every meal, every day. I can eat like a king of a different country every single day. I'm never limited to boring food.
Corporations make money from "adding value" to food, advertising it and selling it. The value add is to make food very tasty - sugar, salt, fat, flavor. There's no pressure at the corporate level to market food in accordance with health goals. The "sugar tax" has been thoroughly demonized.
The problem with gravy and sauces is not just the caloric content. It is the inducement to eat more. An experiment: buy unsalted and salted nuts of your choice (or unflavored and flavored rice cakes, etc). Eat as many of the unflavored item as you care to. Now think about eating the flavored version. Did you suddenly feel like you could eat more? Your gut and your mind talk to each other. If you taste something good or even imagine tasting something good, and it is different enough from something you just ate, your body will tell you that you are still hungry.
---
On the calories out side, studies show that exercise has little effect on fat by itself. Exercise is good for health, but remember that your body will tell you to eat more to make up for it.
---
Advice time: Learn to control hunger. This may take quite a lot of effort and learning. I recommend the books "The Hungry Brain" and "Burn".
Eat boring food high in protein and fiber.
Find exercise that you enjoy.
Control your food environment. If you have snacks around, your brain will remember them. If you have snacks within reach, your body may start eating them without conscious command.
> It is easy to see the problems that an obese person has. It is easy to feel like they should know better and make changes for their health. It looks like a big problem that should be taken seriously.
If the article is correct (haven't verified myself), that lab animals on a controlled diet are more obesse now than in the past, that contradicts basically everything you wrote.
You will have a hard time finding controlled animal diets from long ago that were actually controlled. At the 80's and 90's there was a wave of scientific articles about how diet impacts lab animals, all new because most labs never bothered to look before.
I love the design aesthetics of this wiki. It also makes me happy that someone bothered with a custom tool stack and hosting solution to get something near to exactly what they wanted. Here's a page describing this:
With tools like GPT4 around, this kind of labor of love becomes much less laborious. What gwern has done is absolutely insane for the era it was made, but I find myself becoming so much more ambitious with taking on stuff like this with GPT4 assistance. In the last couple months I've coded my first browser plugins, custom HTML5 renderers, physics simulators, etc. Never would have done it without the AI boost.
There will be a whole lot more "custom stack to get exactly what you want" going around in the near future, pretty exciting.
I appreciate your comment, its not a bad comment, but I must say that I am SO exhausted with GPT getting brought up on EVERY post on HN regardless of what the post is about. It feels like I am being advertised to and it makes me doubt the authenticity of the comments.
I hear you. I actually thought about this when making the comment, but decided to make it because the website at hand, gwern, is also deeply interested in AI and GPT and has a lot of posts about it.
It does feel a bit like the mid 2010s when everyone was talking about applying blockchain to everything. The difference, I think, is that the proof is in the pudding. I have browser plugins and HTML5 physics simulators now that I didn't have just months ago.
Re: your particular issue, I am not joking, you should use ChatGPT to help you write a browser plugin that simply blocks those comments. The browser plugin I mentioned that I used GPT to create is actually for blocking low-effort HN comments. My HN browsing experience is much better because of it.
Your suggestion cracked me up. That's absolutely hilarious, also practical.
And agreed - the hype feels like blockchain on steroids, but unlike blockchain, it is truly a transformative technology that is breaking open the floodgates to many new avenues of technological development, so the hype is certainly warranted.
It's so very hard to not do that when the tool has become so transformational in your life, not just in one area, but across the board. I am in the same boat of being so ambitious with my personal projects these days, now that the drudgery is gone, that it's hard to communicate to people who haven't tried it how it changes your experience of "almost everything making it on HN."
gwern's page having so much about GPT makes it a prime candidate, and I think there is a link between LLM fascination and wanting to build your own stack and pursuing your own intellectual path. It is a fascinating tool for personal growth, much more so than at a team or industry level.
"Gwern.net is implemented as a static website compiled via Hakyll from Pandoc Markdown and hosted on a dedicated server (due to expensive cloud bandwidth)."
I would say that the distinguishing characteristics of a wiki are:
- it is intended as a general repository of human-readable articles [x]
- it is designed so that authorized users can edit articles easily [x]
- it has affordances for lots of linking, internally and externally [x]
So, from the viewpoint of Gwern Branwen and only Gwern, it's wiki-like.
Nobody else has authorization or easy article editing, as far as I know. So for everyone else, it's just a really interesting site.
It seems that paper authors themselves replaced whole paper with a Dracula story in the latest revision. You can download previous versions [0], they contain fewer Draculas.
One of the laziest submissions of open questions. Most have completely uninteresting well known answers:
* Obesity: We are eating more. We are eating higher calorie foods. We are also eating more sugar. The days of cooking raw foods in the home are few, and when we do, we do so by cooking with pre-prepared items that tend to have high caloric intake without many of the previous dietary benefits.
Most families are down to one non-starchy vegetable a day, arguing that the tiny amount of pasta sauce counts as a vegetable as it contains tomatoes, ignoring the added sugar. To fix this, people are willing to sell us a never ending stream of services and advice, where the most effective advice is deemed uninteresting compared to the attention grabbing advice.
Our health industry has spawned a wellness industry, where we are being told that blending our fruits and vegetables (releasing more sugar) need to be sweetened with honey (more sugar) as it is more healthy than table sugar. Here is a clue, just don't blend the stuff and eat it; but, that would hardly spawn an industry.
- Alcohol: Yes, there have been numerous studies that moderate wine drinking can have health benefits. The main issue is that drinking in the USA probably involves at a minimum more alcohol than would qualify as healthy, and it is a relative health benefit that can easily be cancelled by too much ethanol.
Here's a hint, food is a mixture. Drinking gin-and-tonics might also prevent malaria, a health benefit, but give you cirrhosis of the liver, a health hazard. Mixtures do that.
- Boogers: Any biology student knows that they are primarily comprised of sugars, and are a mixture of sugar, whatever else is in the nose, and water. Why do they come in so many varieties? Sugar is flexible, making up trees, sugar glass, sugar for your coffee, and much, much more. No news here.
- Jeanne Calment: Most people believe she took over the identity of a relative to avoid inheritance tax. The French government refuses to entertain this idea, as they prefer to have a national icon. This is well covered in the article, but in a fit of "let's disregard the contradicting ideas" is summarily dismissed with "the fraud theory seems highly unlikely to explain the Calment anomaly" because, they're already believing Clament is an anomaly and thus cannot believe she isn't.
Oddly enough the Clament story is just like the other items in the list. If you start from a position of believing something is unusual, you have to assume that any bland explanation must fail because it wouldn't make it an unusual item.
> Does listening to music while working serve as a distraction, or motivation?
Both. It depends on what I am doing.
If programming with completely new stuff, I need silence (but can't stand it). If programming stuff that is familiar, but still new, music is perfect, as long as it's not slow.
If writing, I do best when listening to music that corresponds with the mood of the current scene.
> Why does writing in the morning (anecdotally so far) seem to be so effective for writers, even ones who are not morning persons? While programmers, which seems like a similar occupation, are invariably owls?
Funnily enough, I write best at night when I'm slightly sleep deprived.
I've had more people praise my writing for a technical document [1] written during late nights than for anything else. They specifically praised the snark, which was just the result of a sleep-deprived brain.
I'm not sure why, but I have a hunch: I'm a little autistic and can be quite stilted; however, a sleep-deprived brain can go a little haywire. Going a little haywire seems to make me more human.
This is like the Ballmer Peak [2], except that this doesn't work for me when programming.
I'm currently working on code and a novel. I'm trying to get into the habit of programming when I'm fresh and writing the novel or technical documentation when I'm tired.
> Alcohol Hormesis: Does moderate alcohol or wine consumption have any health benefits, or not?
Am I mis-remembering recent studies showing that alcohol does no good whatsoever for health (in contrast to earlier studies to the contrary)? Or is this just one of those that stays an open question in the hope that someone proves it true?
There have been recent studies that said that, just like at one time there were recent studies that said the opposite. Neither is sufficiently strong evidence to be dispositive, though I'd probably lean towards the more recent ones.
No, it's one of those that comes up with unconvincing results in alternating directions every six months, and whose press releases everyone in "light" news reports on.
IIRC, that last negative one (of course I might be a year out of phase with you) proved that alcohol consumption doesn't do anyone any good at any amount by redefining "anyone" and "good" and telling us what we already knew about esophageal cancers and alcoholism.
This podcast episode by Andrew Huberman does a good job explaining why it's not really an open question at all.
I think it remains open because people really want to drink, and people really want to sell alcohol. There are many things like this in our diets, and the evidence is fairly conclusive. We just struggle to accept it.
Old-school furry, from the early 90s. I won't try to speak to the history - it predates me by a few years - but the comment "furries run the Internet" was true for decades. In the 90s and 00's the level of overrepresentation was off the charts, to such a degree that for awhile one large and successful contracting company (Taos Mountain) would actively recruit from the fandom.
Many, many successful early startups had multiple furries working there in key technical positions, including some who's earliest and most influential employees were furries (not naming names because those folks may not want to be 'outed' as furry). I worked for one pretty successful startup that, with I think maybe <100 employees, at least 10 of us were furries. For awhile if a company was an ISP or other service provider, data center operator, had an IT staff of at least 3, or just were a tech company chances are there were multiple furries working there. Some companies still have pretty large fractions of certain departments absent on weekends when large furry cons are being held.
I'd say we're still overrepresented in tech but the industry has gotten so much larger that the raw absolute numbers aren't as surprising as they once were.
61 comments
[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadWell, do societies have a tremendous incentive to find unarmed martial arts which work?
If my tribe faces an existential threat from the next tribe over, wouldn't I pick up a stick?
https://www.abada.org/capoeira-history/
I think rather than look at the results, it is interesting to look at the forcing functions the results operated under.
The same applies for wrestling high-crotch or blast double. If you put someone down hard on the nearest solid object or concrete, there's a good chance the fight is immediately over.
That said, in a real scrappy fight, landing a proper judo through is a tall order. I've seen high level black belts fail to land clean throws on spazzy white belts. They get them down and technically win, but not cleanly, and not with the force needed to end the fight. Newaza (ground techniques, i.e. BJJ) comes in there to help finish.
Pure BJJ is great if you are fighting on dirt, and great to know defensively if you do find yourself ambushed or otherwise on the ground in an altercation. But in a real fight you should do your best to put the other guy down hard, get on top, and stay on top. Modern BJJ in particular is far too willing to concede top position, though modern MMA is thankfully pushing back on this some.
BJJ didn’t develop until the 20th century because the competitive rules in which that style of mock fighting is most effective didn’t solidify until the 20th century.
If you engages in BJJ like ground fighting techniques, it’d be like that scene in Indiana Jones where the crazy swordsman final boss shows up, and Indy just shoots the guy. Some other guy would come over and step on your neck, stab you, or just shoot you while you’re down, or your opponent will gouge your eyes out, because that’s the real world response. Historical fighting manuals are pretty explicit: never, ever get caught on the ground or you’re dead.
It’s just that most of the ways in which a standing person would attack a nearby person on the ground are so dangerous that they are outlawed from sport competition, and so ironically even the notoriously “everything goes” MMA ends up favoring ground game and devolve into wrestling matches.
BJJ is well suited for the octagon. Allow small joint manipulation and most of the technique goes out the window.
By far the most popular thing to teach is some variant on Krav Maga. Which focuses heavily on rapid incapacitation while maintaining your ability to move. Going to the ground wrestling is an excellent way to be taken out by your enemy's ally, or finding out the hard way that your enemy had a hidden knife you didn't know about.
The success of BJJ in MMA has not changed what gets taught to people who actually are at risk of winding up in a street fight with lives on the line.
On top of that Severn, Frye, and Coleman all came from western wrestling backgrounds and they did pretty well in UFC...
Catch wrestling split in two ways. On one side, it had submissions banned and became Olympic freestyle wrestling. On the other, they played up the drama and it became modern professional wrestling.
1. Many martial arts consider armed/unarmed just variations of a theme, and practicing unarmed is often safer, and used as "phase 1".
2. A lot of the modern day stuff can be traced back to Japan at a time when the government funded "civilized sports that help you grow", and then the Olympics got involved... we're pretty far distanced from "defend the village" at that point.
Also anecdotal, but I've met my share of early bird programmers. I often wonder how much of these habits are driven by ~~stereotypes~~ culture, since theoretically your energy level depends mostly on your lifestyle.
I am a pretty ok writer & programmer in the morning; my productivity & quality of work falls off after 2pm. Under pressure, I'd much rather go to bed early and wake up very early to work on a next-day project.
No one is up or going to be up, likely. People aren't outside making noise. No inbound calls, less inbound emails or chats. Less notifications across social media.
But now I have a kid, so either he wakes up soon after I do, or I don't dive into anything but because I need to drop it when he's up.
For instance, if she went to sleep at 7.30 she'd wake up at 7.30 and so on. Might be helpful if you're looking for more time in the morning.
Or it might not be, because kids are high variance and what works for one is useless for another.
I effectively can't do "work" writing at night. But I've found that fiction, humor, and other creative writing can benefit from being in a different headspace. Being tired to the point of feeling a bit punch-drunk can take you to interesting places. The few times I've truly surprised myself, I was writing in a somewhat (not drug-induced) altered state.
I program equally well early in the morning or late at night, basically the two times in the day when my daily tasks are mostly settled. If I advertise early morning programming, it doesn't feed into the mantra of "hard working" in corporate USA as well as the "burning the midnight oil" tropes.
So, I come into the office two hours early and get my programming done before the meetings start and get little to no recognition, or I stay three hours late doing the same and get lots of recognition. Savvy people will soon learn to feed the trope of working hard, working late, especially when it can excuse a late entry to work (but arriving early never permits a late exit).
I'd say the late night hacker is more a stereotype driven by culture.
[1] From The Computer Boys Take Over, a very good basic history of the professsion: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9247209-the-computer-boy...
On the few times I've woken up both early and well-rested, I have both the quiet and a clear head, although I almost always have something that'd be better tackled in the morning than cranking out a blog post or an e-mail to a friend.
I think it would help us if we understood why this problem is so hard to understand and what our blind spots are.
---
It is easy to see the problems that an obese person has. It is easy to feel like they should know better and make changes for their health. It looks like a big problem that should be taken seriously.
But that's not how that person got there. 1-5 pounds of excess fat does not feel like a big problem. Fat gain is usually quite slow and steady, and the body has time to get used to it. In other words, it's not a problem that suddenly shows up in a person's life, and it doesn't physically feel like a problem (until it's too late).
---
Hunger doesn't have a number. Scientists have an aversion to studying things that don't have numbers. It doesn't feel like serious science.
Hunger isn't weakness or failure, it's a whole body response to lack of nutrients.
Hunger isn't one thing, it's a bunch of body sensations and psychological triggers and conditioning.
Hunger acts like a one-way valve - there is a strong negative feeling for a moderate lack of nutrients, there is no equivalent feeling for a moderate excess of nutrients. People can often lose fat while dieting, but then gain it back. That has been described as the hunger set-point. Winter is coming and losing your energy supply may kill you (says evolution).
Hunger is not comparable between people. I don't know how bad you feel when you miss a meal, and you don't know how bad I feel.
---
I can eat like a king at every meal, every day. I can eat like a king of a different country every single day. I'm never limited to boring food.
Corporations make money from "adding value" to food, advertising it and selling it. The value add is to make food very tasty - sugar, salt, fat, flavor. There's no pressure at the corporate level to market food in accordance with health goals. The "sugar tax" has been thoroughly demonized.
The problem with gravy and sauces is not just the caloric content. It is the inducement to eat more. An experiment: buy unsalted and salted nuts of your choice (or unflavored and flavored rice cakes, etc). Eat as many of the unflavored item as you care to. Now think about eating the flavored version. Did you suddenly feel like you could eat more? Your gut and your mind talk to each other. If you taste something good or even imagine tasting something good, and it is different enough from something you just ate, your body will tell you that you are still hungry.
---
On the calories out side, studies show that exercise has little effect on fat by itself. Exercise is good for health, but remember that your body will tell you to eat more to make up for it.
---
Advice time: Learn to control hunger. This may take quite a lot of effort and learning. I recommend the books "The Hungry Brain" and "Burn".
Eat boring food high in protein and fiber.
Find exercise that you enjoy.
Control your food environment. If you have snacks around, your brain will remember them. If you have snacks within reach, your body may start eating them without conscious command.
That said, you offered some of the best advice I've seen:
| Eat boring food high in protein and fiber.
Which is effectively the opposite of nearly every kind of snack food that is currently popular.
If the article is correct (haven't verified myself), that lab animals on a controlled diet are more obesse now than in the past, that contradicts basically everything you wrote.
- Burn: https://www.amazon.com/Burn-Research-Really-Calories-Healthy...
https://gwern.net/design
There will be a whole lot more "custom stack to get exactly what you want" going around in the near future, pretty exciting.
It does feel a bit like the mid 2010s when everyone was talking about applying blockchain to everything. The difference, I think, is that the proof is in the pudding. I have browser plugins and HTML5 physics simulators now that I didn't have just months ago.
Re: your particular issue, I am not joking, you should use ChatGPT to help you write a browser plugin that simply blocks those comments. The browser plugin I mentioned that I used GPT to create is actually for blocking low-effort HN comments. My HN browsing experience is much better because of it.
And agreed - the hype feels like blockchain on steroids, but unlike blockchain, it is truly a transformative technology that is breaking open the floodgates to many new avenues of technological development, so the hype is certainly warranted.
gwern's page having so much about GPT makes it a prime candidate, and I think there is a link between LLM fascination and wanting to build your own stack and pursuing your own intellectual path. It is a fascinating tool for personal growth, much more so than at a team or industry level.
I would say that the distinguishing characteristics of a wiki are:
- it is intended as a general repository of human-readable articles [x]
- it is designed so that authorized users can edit articles easily [x]
- it has affordances for lots of linking, internally and externally [x]
So, from the viewpoint of Gwern Branwen and only Gwern, it's wiki-like.
Nobody else has authorization or easy article editing, as far as I know. So for everyone else, it's just a really interesting site.
[0] https://osf.io/download/5fa6d1f29c7a4e006ca006be/?version=4
* Obesity: We are eating more. We are eating higher calorie foods. We are also eating more sugar. The days of cooking raw foods in the home are few, and when we do, we do so by cooking with pre-prepared items that tend to have high caloric intake without many of the previous dietary benefits.
Most families are down to one non-starchy vegetable a day, arguing that the tiny amount of pasta sauce counts as a vegetable as it contains tomatoes, ignoring the added sugar. To fix this, people are willing to sell us a never ending stream of services and advice, where the most effective advice is deemed uninteresting compared to the attention grabbing advice.
Our health industry has spawned a wellness industry, where we are being told that blending our fruits and vegetables (releasing more sugar) need to be sweetened with honey (more sugar) as it is more healthy than table sugar. Here is a clue, just don't blend the stuff and eat it; but, that would hardly spawn an industry.
- Alcohol: Yes, there have been numerous studies that moderate wine drinking can have health benefits. The main issue is that drinking in the USA probably involves at a minimum more alcohol than would qualify as healthy, and it is a relative health benefit that can easily be cancelled by too much ethanol.
Here's a hint, food is a mixture. Drinking gin-and-tonics might also prevent malaria, a health benefit, but give you cirrhosis of the liver, a health hazard. Mixtures do that.
- Boogers: Any biology student knows that they are primarily comprised of sugars, and are a mixture of sugar, whatever else is in the nose, and water. Why do they come in so many varieties? Sugar is flexible, making up trees, sugar glass, sugar for your coffee, and much, much more. No news here.
- Jeanne Calment: Most people believe she took over the identity of a relative to avoid inheritance tax. The French government refuses to entertain this idea, as they prefer to have a national icon. This is well covered in the article, but in a fit of "let's disregard the contradicting ideas" is summarily dismissed with "the fraud theory seems highly unlikely to explain the Calment anomaly" because, they're already believing Clament is an anomaly and thus cannot believe she isn't.
Oddly enough the Clament story is just like the other items in the list. If you start from a position of believing something is unusual, you have to assume that any bland explanation must fail because it wouldn't make it an unusual item.
So lab animals on controlled diets are sneaking out to the grocery store?
Both. It depends on what I am doing.
If programming with completely new stuff, I need silence (but can't stand it). If programming stuff that is familiar, but still new, music is perfect, as long as it's not slow.
If writing, I do best when listening to music that corresponds with the mood of the current scene.
> Why does writing in the morning (anecdotally so far) seem to be so effective for writers, even ones who are not morning persons? While programmers, which seems like a similar occupation, are invariably owls?
Funnily enough, I write best at night when I'm slightly sleep deprived.
I've had more people praise my writing for a technical document [1] written during late nights than for anything else. They specifically praised the snark, which was just the result of a sleep-deprived brain.
I'm not sure why, but I have a hunch: I'm a little autistic and can be quite stilted; however, a sleep-deprived brain can go a little haywire. Going a little haywire seems to make me more human.
This is like the Ballmer Peak [2], except that this doesn't work for me when programming.
I'm currently working on code and a novel. I'm trying to get into the habit of programming when I'm fresh and writing the novel or technical documentation when I'm tired.
[1]: https://git.gavinhoward.com/gavin/bc/src/branch/master/manua...
[2]: https://xkcd.com/323/
Am I mis-remembering recent studies showing that alcohol does no good whatsoever for health (in contrast to earlier studies to the contrary)? Or is this just one of those that stays an open question in the hope that someone proves it true?
IIRC, that last negative one (of course I might be a year out of phase with you) proved that alcohol consumption doesn't do anyone any good at any amount by redefining "anyone" and "good" and telling us what we already knew about esophageal cancers and alcoholism.
I think it remains open because people really want to drink, and people really want to sell alcohol. There are many things like this in our diets, and the evidence is fairly conclusive. We just struggle to accept it.
https://hubermanlab.com/what-alcohol-does-to-your-body-brain...
Throwaway.
Old-school furry, from the early 90s. I won't try to speak to the history - it predates me by a few years - but the comment "furries run the Internet" was true for decades. In the 90s and 00's the level of overrepresentation was off the charts, to such a degree that for awhile one large and successful contracting company (Taos Mountain) would actively recruit from the fandom.
Many, many successful early startups had multiple furries working there in key technical positions, including some who's earliest and most influential employees were furries (not naming names because those folks may not want to be 'outed' as furry). I worked for one pretty successful startup that, with I think maybe <100 employees, at least 10 of us were furries. For awhile if a company was an ISP or other service provider, data center operator, had an IT staff of at least 3, or just were a tech company chances are there were multiple furries working there. Some companies still have pretty large fractions of certain departments absent on weekends when large furry cons are being held.
I'd say we're still overrepresented in tech but the industry has gotten so much larger that the raw absolute numbers aren't as surprising as they once were.