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I have heard this too, and that cholesterol measurements are flawed because they don't account for particle size. That you can actually have better 'numbers' but worse results, if you reduce particulate size but also overall volume. It's frustrating that the science behind cholesterol is constantly in wild flux, but at any discrete moment you're expected to accept whatever the momentary consensus is.

Interestingly, my dentist, who also has a bit of a fixation on cholesterol on a personal level and is educated on the matter, has said that a heart calcium scan is the best way to determine what someone's target cholesterol number should actually be, and that it should not be the same from person to person.

This was after I voiced my frustration to him at having made lifestyle changes to get my cholesterol down in order to avoid getting put on statins (not wanting yet another daily drug if I can avoid it), getting the my number below the target of 110, only to shortly after that find out that they'd lowered it to 70. I talked to my endocrinologist about it, and she basically said "yeah, those numbers are more-or-less unachievable. But we want to be extra careful for type 1 diabetics, so we hold them to a higher standard. Either way, everyone gets put on statins at some point anyway, so who cares?"

I'm absolutely allergic to "everyone goes on x medication, so stop whining and go on x medication" as a medical argument, and will probably just deal with being labelled non-compliant over this one unless my cholesterol reaches a level I actually personally find to be too high at this point. Which sucks to have to do, but hey, it's my body after all, and so far doctors have failed to make a convincing case for me personally here.

Last time I looked into anki was years ago, and I ended up giving up after researching it and finding a billion videos all claiming the default settings are terrible and you have to set up an elaborate bunch of settings nobody could agree on to actually get effective SRS spacing. Are the defaults better now? I never really got into anki because I couldn't get a good handle on how to set it up effectively

Idk, I've been meaning to get around to music flash cards because quick recall has honestly become a bottleneck for me in musical situations. I think it's pretty huge even for learning scales, which you should be able to derive from facts which I should but don't have memorized. Some of examples of cards that would be of high utility to me:

- What are the sharps in the key of E? (can be derived using the circle of fifths, but is better to do that with random practice until it's deeply internalized and eventually memorized, helps memorize info on the circle of fifths as well) - What is the 5 chord in the key of G? (can be generalized to all chords in all keys) - What is the relative minor of A? - What scale is A dorian (or any mode) the ionian (or any other mode) of? - What scale degrees are raised in mixolydian (or any other) mode? - What chords are 2 5 1 in (key)? - What are the chord degree numbers for an F-turn in c? - What are the chords for an f-turn in c? - What are the numerals for the andalusian (or any other) cadence?

The more I think about it, the more I think analyzing common progressions and how they often fit together via flashcards would be huge for actual in-practice musicianship as well, but I on't belabor that by adding more here. Most of these can be derived from the circle of fifths, but building the connections from repeatedly doing that over and over again is invaluable and there's so so much more you could make just reviewing the relationships there than what I have listed here.

It would also be interesting to make flashcards for practicing audiation, I can pretty easily imagine how a major, aolean, mixolydian, or harmonic minor scale sounds but am not nearly as clear on all the other ones should sound and couldn't hum them on demand.

If they just had a back option that was a foot higher, I'd seriously consider buying one of these to use as a mini camper. I feel like they were so close!

Edit: damn, bed length: 5 feet. Wonder if they could get an extra foot in the other direction as well, although I'm guessing all that would eat into range.

You missed the K2 part of his comment though. Both my mother and I have chronically tested incredibly low for vitmain D, both always taken supplements, both never had improvement. A couple years ago, my mom texted me saying she tried a D3+K2 supplement and for the first time in her life tested in range for vitamin D on her panel. I was skeptical but tried it, and have tested in normal range since.

I am curious about these 'smell' comments, or at least how you're supposed to react to it. The last time I got pulled over, the cop commented multiple times that something smelled like marijuana, and he asked if I had been smoking or had friends that smoked.

I said I hadn't and didn't know anybody who did. It's true that I don't and had not been around any and there's no way my car smelled like drugs. I think I was on the verge of heat stroke and basically didn't respond with any level of stress to anything he said. I was being pulled over for driving without a seatbelt, which I almost never do, but it was 95 degrees and my AC was broken and I couldn't bring myself to put my back against the chair (plus I was in the middle of nowhere).

Another cop also showed up reasonlessly to hang around behind the other one with his lights on after awhile (I'd pulled into a gas station), which I think was also supposed to freak me out. I ended up excusing myself to go stand in the gas station to cool down and when I came back they were gone

I have a framework 13. It looks like eventually you'll be able to upgrade the chassis to the pro one, including the battery, for under 200? Am I reading this right? That's borderline unbelievable to me

I've always thought I'd like to visit Japan someday, but have always been worried about the cultural significance and omnipresence of white rice. Like, I can see how not eating rice would seem boorish (like you only want to eat the more expensive proteins, don't understand the purpose of a palate cleanser, etc), but living with type 1 diabetes I have not eaten white rice in literal years. Every single time I do, I regret it -- it's a complete nightmare to control your blood sugar after, sometimes for the entire rest of the day. I've even wondered if I could find a way to avoid being impolite by deliberately under eating the whole time if I were to visit, to make it clear I'm not just taking the good stuff and leaving the rice out of greed.

But producing that digital good costs time and money (anyone on HN care to disagree?)

Not disagree, but it is more nuanced than this I think. I spend a fair amount of money going to movie theaters, usually independent movie theaters but sometimes big ones, to see new releases. As I understand it, the production and funding model relies almost entirely on the box office numbers. I think when dealing with older releases, the waters are much murkier.

I end up seeing new things in person and paying a huge premium to do so. I won't pretend I do it for moral reasons or even strictly to support the creators (although I do it in part to support the independent theater itself). It does keep me from feeling bad for also running a media server, on which maybe 1% of the content is newer than 5 years old, though.

I have almost never bought a physical copy of a movie -- and in my mind the IP holders are usually terrible curators of their own content. Physical media is provided in a horribly limited and anti-consumer format, tied to ephemeral standards and technology and often embedded with advertisements and few subtitle options. Digital products are, somehow, worse. Tied to a walled garden, with no true 'ownership', sometimes platforms like Amazon video will even make their own edits to movies, removing crucial parts for no apparent reason (the wicker man, avatar) and without marking it as abridged. They often make decisions that scream 'cash grab' (i.e. years ago when TNG came on netflix, I went to stream it and was shocked at the potato quality. Later re-releases were released in an un-cropped widescreen that included things like boom mikes because of the original intended aspect ratio of the show.) DRM is a nightmare. The product I want -- a file containing the media and only the media, which I can view however I want without logging into anybody's servers -- does not exist. And if it did exist, well, I do also take issue with paying full price for a file of a 40 year old movie, for example. I know there are costs associated with remasters, etc, but most of these are not remasters (and those costs are also much much lower than outright movie production).

A notable exception is outfits like Vinagar Syndrome, who as a labor of love dig up lost media and often re-cut or remaster / distribute it, and due to the low scale and lack of demand likely do not make much if any profit off it. I often do see showings of Vinegar Syndrome releases at my indie theater though or rent them from the one remaining video rental place (I'm unsure whether or not that benefits the production company).

It probably gets more hairy for people who watch a lot of new serialized media, which I do not.

I kind of wish people would think critically about the gradient of potential consumption habits when making their media choices rather than separating into pro / anti piracy stances, because it's an interesting and multi-faceted topic with a lot of considerations to be made.

I was going to use bitlbee, but it looks like matrix-purple lost e2ee support a couple years ago. That's really frustrating. I wonder how hard it would be to get it working again

Yeah I'm planning to send both matrix and xmpp through bitlbee so I can use a terminal client as well (I know matrix has one technically but it is reeeeally crufty). I don't understand why every modern chat client has to be 99% empty whitespace separated by squircles.

N=1, but last yearly physical my primary care doctor asked me if I ever had anxiety. I said yes, but that I wasn't really interested in treating it outside of lifestyle change. They asked if I wanted a prescription for prozac, without explaining anything about how to does it or titrate up or down or a time frame. I said I wasn't interested again, and that I particularly didn't want to take any medications that you can't just stop taking one day on a whim (a statement she didn't respond to).

She then proceeded to say "well I'll just write you the prescription anyway and you can do your research later and decide to fill it or not".

I was actually shocked by this interaction, and think about it often. She's a regular family doctor with the local hospital system, and this was just a regular checkup. I answered one question with a "yes, but it's manageable and I think I can handle it with lifestyle change" and then said no twice to medication and ended up with a prescription, which I ignored but don't appreciate having on my record, since it's a false indicator for future prescribing physicians.

I have a 2020 Forester and I've come to describing it as "I no-longer drive on the highway, I manage the car." Sometimes I'll get nervous and take over. But even in stop-and-go traffic, it has behaved perfectly.

I drive an old beater from 2001, but... I really don't think I understand why people want these in-between not-quite-autopilot features? To me it's like, it would be one thing if you could completely turn your brain off, or look at your phone, or rest. But since you can't, it seems like this stuff makes it more difficult to pay the appropriate amount of attention? For me, if I'm already driving somewhere, and have to pay enough attention to know if an emergency is about to happen, I might as well just do the driving.

I already have a similar setup for developing on remote servers I've been using with tmux + goose-cli + claude via openrouter. I've found that anything claude 4.x and above becomes very expensive very quickly, with 3.7 being almost negligibly inexpensive. I'd find myself using $30 dollars of credits in a few hours of development on a small scope project. I might give the claude CLI a look specifically, but I don't expect great savings and I will miss my AI-provider-agnostic setup. Is everyone using this technology just programming as they go about their day and burning like fifty to a hundred bucks while doing so?

I've spent a lot of the last four years accumulating tools and building out infra in my home for my hobbies, to an extent that it's blocked me from actually doing things due to being bogged down from meta-work, learning, and research. This year I'm going to put a hard stop on spending and building up new things so that I can:

- Continue to take old-time music classes at the folk school, play more music with people that way

- Finally run some water through my hydroponic setup

- Finish electrifying part of the basement

- Play some noise shows with my friend and the synths I've built over the years (and make some recordings)

- Make a dating profile, setup instagram (which seems necessary for a successful dating profile these days)

- Actually catalogue, export, and post the extensive photography I've done of the last years and continue my black and white development processes

- Get back in the swing of eating from-scratch bread, fermented sauces, mayo, saurkraut, ginger ale, and home-cooked food in general

- Actually make blog posts, improve my web presence

- Finish my woodworking bench, tackle some of the woodworking projects I've had backed up

That's a lot of things, but I already have every piece of the puzzle to tackle all of them stored neatly in my house and the experience to do it all, which cuts down on a lot of it. I also really need to save money, so all that should dovetail nicely. I'm at a point where tech projects crop up and sort themselves out on their own regularly in my life so I'm not mentioning that here. Really, the 'skill' I need to learn is having the mental energy and drive to get things done as I go about my work week, or maybe to realize that I don't need perfect energy / motivation / clarity / whatever to work on something in the afternoon.

- Working on a time tracker frontend to watson-cli that meets my specific needs

- Setting up importers in beancount for a retrospective on my last 3 years of spending and investment

- Getting ready to start a slow migration of some services from unraid to an argo/k8s cluster (starting with some services I don't use yet which are hard to keepup in clickops, immich,peertube, etc)

I'd like at some point to try to make an android app for personal use, but my strong preference for lean toolchains and non-ide-based development are hindering me there. It doesn't help that I'm using nixos, and the toolchain for developing even with gradle and kotlin is a nightmare. I'm not sure when I'll have the patience to approach that issue again

That sounds neat! I have an old kobo clara HD. I run koreader through nickelmenu, and I have to let it load its native software before selecting and switching into koreader. I'm also under the impression that if I connect it to the internet I'm at risk of losing my setup via wireless update. I think I had to delete a config file by mounting the device to linux to be able to even use it without a walmart / ratuken / whatever idp account in the first place.

Everyone here is lauding kobo for being so 'open' and 'hackable', but when I set mine up in 2022 it kind of just felt like they just weren't as good at fucking me over and subverting my intentions as Amazon. Kind of like being an intruder in your own home. Have things changed? Should I update my setup?

Interesting, I have never been diagnosed with anxiety beyond 'well ADHD and anxiety go together, ADHD medication should help' and then a kind of shrug when it made things worse. All these things are possible and are food for thought (I am not saying it definitely is that either). This is kind of US-medicine specific, but everyone I know who is being treated for anxiety is being treated via methods I'm not interested in unfortunately.

For these people, it’s almost more physiological than psychological.

This stands out to me. I have lifted weights in the past, have not been well physically conditioned in cardio activity since I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at 22. Cardio tends to cause my blood sugar to become unpredictable (or at least you have to actually be really rigid in maintaining your exercise patterns to keep things predictable). Maybe a bit of biking or running would do me some good. What would you do?

Hmm, have you checked out Ox-Hugo? It's a pretty great system for exporting to a hugo blog from a single org file. But then I guess your blog would have to be hugo-based

If a candidate has a blog with just two articles on it that hasn't been updated in five years

Oh hey, that's me! This post might actually encourage me to get back on top of things. Not only do I have two articles (more recent than 5 years though), one of them has a glaring error that is somewhat foundational to what it's supposed to be about. I have to fix that, as well as my broken RSS feed, and get my git link re-directed to my self-hosted forge, and update all my remotes, remove some defunct links and menu options, and then decide which of my 68 (yes, 68!) blog drafts I want to focus on publishing next. Now that I've listed it out, I bet I can get all that done over the break.

I was diagnosed with ADHD at several different points and saw different professionals about it at different times, most notably in kindergarden, first grade, fifth grade, the beginning and end of high school, and college. (not all were re-diagnoses but for some reason took place at different locations) I don't really know why treatment was so off and on or varied, but I suspect it is because I don't respond well to stimulants. They make me feel extremely 'up' and anxious in very, very small doses. Everything from the amphetamines they prescribe to coffee.

When I was in college, I was prescribed them again just by my primary care physician. I didn't say I was having trouble focusing, I said I was having trouble with wakefulness. I still do sometimes. It was hard to stay awake in a lecture setting for some reason, borderline impossible on days when I had several in a row. Medication definitely helped me get through college but it was a rough time.

As an adult I don't take them, but it is hard to really work the full work day. I have always performed well enough that nobody questions it (and in some cases have brought so much value to a company that nobody cares), but it is a constant source of stress. I resonate with the top commenter in that I also have hundreds of unfinished personal projects across all domains. At this time in my life (33 y/o) I am more concerned about mitigating the constant stress I feel than I am about the actual ADHD symptoms. I am ok with my many personal projects clashing with each other.

At one point a few years ago I was stressed enough about my job to seek medication. For some reason I was not able to get the information about my diagnosis from my old primary care (from 8 years ago) and the one before that was pediatric and didn't seem to count. I talked to a therapist for a bit (which was not useful), got a diagnosis, and then talked to a psych briefly via zoom, and went on medication for a month before deciding (again) that it wasn't worth it. The whole thing was kind of disheartening.

Things are very weird when it comes to ADHD treatment and diagnosis. There seems to be a tendency towards the same 'easy button' when it comes to ADHD. I also don't think it's exaggerating to say that just about every single person I know well enough to have spoken to about these things says that they have been diagnosed with ADHD, often medicated. I don't think very many of them actually do have it. Sometimes I'm not even sure if I do, or there is something else going on.

I'm not sure what to conclude after all this except that maybe there are no answers for me in this space. It's frustrating, but I've never opened up to exploring this problem without the same exact solution being thrown at me, a solution I know is not sustainable for me. I've never spoken to a doctor who's ever suggested it could be anything else. Should I just find my own way, since I seem to be able to function well enough?

Given the choice of increasing the number of high paying, high skills jobs or the number of relatively low skill, dangerous manufacturing jobs, why wouldn't we choose the former?

Idk, the trend in manufacturing seems to be towards more and more high skilled work and less dangerous or low-skill work as time marches on. Your post also positions it as a binary choice, where we must either increase IT service jobs / web services or manufacturing, which doesn't seem to be true given the landscape of the job market these days.

Personally I would like it if there were a more diverse array of job opportunities in general for people looking to gain and employ skills in machining, fabrication, factory automation, production, etc. "Just learn to code, bro" has been a meme since I was in college, but at this point at 33 every single person I know who is doing even 'kinda ok' has either gotten a tech job or gone into nursing. Exactly 0 of these people actually care about technology or are interested in computers at all, but it feels like the only avenue available anymore for Americans. That doesn't seem good or sustainable.

No matter how much of a cash cow the tech industry has been, is it really a virtue to be totally anemic in such a basic function as ability to produce actual, physical goods?

Hmm, I downloaded and installed Atuin a few years ago as a solution mainly for syncing shell history across machines or on the same machine across terminal instances (e.g. in tmux). I thought that was its main use case. How did we get to runbooks? I'm kinda having trouble figuring out what it does based on the linked page, but I think that's mostly because I'm trying to tie it back to my understanding of atuin as a shell history database

I might have to give it a try. There's a lot I like about the idea of latex but I've never been able to successfully internalize how to use it in a non-painful way either. I've pretty much given up on the whole idea of making a PDF do what I want at this point.

I've looked into typst before and am always turned off hugely by the website's attempt to make it look like some sort of purchased product with a freemium option. I don't really ever like to commit to anything I can't use with a basic commandline / plain text pipeline or that I don't expect to be available in a long-term way without enshittifying. Looking closer at the actual repo for the first time, it seems like I can use it that way, so it warrants investigation, but I'm still leery of the project because of its presentation

The thing that gives me pause is the correlation that all the girls I dated or was interested in college either didn't have a facebook or deleted theirs at some point while I knew them, and I'm worried that the most interesting people will be filtered out

Then again, I didn't online date at all in college and am only just considering it now that it's been so long and I just never seem to meet single people anymore. Maybe it's worth a shot, setting up some kind of OLD profile was one of my resolutions for this year