HN user

icebergonfire

130 karma
Posts0
Comments43
View on HN
No posts found.

Anecdotally speaking I can confirm this… it gets easy to just skip a meal, and you may end up skipping the entire day because the usual hunger signals are just not there.

For anyone tempted by that concept, please don’t and remember to try to eat your 1000-1500 calories every day.

Quick weight loss won’t do you any good if you lose all your muscle mass, or if you carve a deeper groove into body image issues.

It’s cliche but it’s true, slow and steady is the way to go.

More anecdata, my spouse and I have been on Mounjaro since Jan 2025 guided by private health insurance.

I have suffered almost the entire gamut of side effects from the beginning until I tried split dosing twice a week, and even then there’s still the occasional instance of me learning that I should not have eaten that and the following 9 hours are going to revolve around stomach pain.

My partner’s journey on the other hand has been smooth sailing the entire time.

YMMV, do your own research but definitely double check any search results with your doctor first… lots of urban myths going around.

I do recommend it though, I am the healthiest I’ve been in literally 10 years.

How Not to Buy a SSD 11 months ago

Their no-bullshit returns policy.

Caveat emptor though, I trusted this policy as well and got my account closed for unclear reasons. They hinted at returns fraud (not the case) and a high return rate (not the case either).

I provided detailed records of everything and even escalated this to jeff@amazon.com, no luck.

Still have a few hundred euros in Amazon Echos in storage that I cannot use anymore.

Their support department must be quite understaffed too and heavily amplified by AI. I've had multiple lengthy interactions with them since Sunday due to a bug that has lost me money (yes literally, see [1]) and I am saddened by the low quality of their responses.

First time I run into an AI-replaced-humans wall, and it gives me a very uneasy feeling for the future.

[1]: Sent 0.05 BTC from personal wallet, Coinbase acknowledges transaction, blockchain confirms transaction, two days later transaction disappears from the Coinbase UI, I now have no money and no coins.

I wish shibboleths were real (https://xkcd.com/806) so that I could stop wasting time with chatbots and would instead be able to file a bug on Coinbase and get to someone who would read logs.

simply read your emails from them if you do

Certainly. Except their mistake had beyond-reasonable consequences, since account termination would result them losing access to: their phone, their laptops, their TV smart pucks, their tablets, their smart speakers, their photos, any accounts on websites if they logged in using Sign in with Apple, any accounts on websites if they were using Hide My Mail...

Once you are in Apple jail, it's on Apple to have a good process to follow to try to go back to good standing. OP was met with a black box that may or may not read their internal Apple mail. They may or may not reply either.

The moral to draw from this blogpost is to be careful of putting too many eggs on the same corporate basket. Though in theory you are good as long as you pay your bills, there is no banhammer with an accuracy stat of 100%!

I've been on the receiving end of a false-positive fraud flag on my Amazon account (literally undeserved), it ended with my account being terminated and me being banned from the store. The blast radius was bigger than expected:

- It forced a factory reset on all my Amazon Echos at 03:00AM (fun to be woken up to a house-wide symphony of smart speakers OOBE-ing at the same time).

- It immediately negated my ability to exercise warranty consumer rights on most of my tech devices, as they were purchased on Amazon.

- It also blocked from cancelling my Amazon recurring subscriptions, so I spent two more weeks receiving things like soap and cat food despite the account termination supposedly cancelling all outstanding orders. Support was unresponsive the whole time.

- It immediately terminated my (luckily personal!) AWS resources, as these are also umbrella'd under the same account.

No amount of email reading could have saved me since I did nothing wrong (still have all the receipts, but I'm a stranger on the Internet so caveat emptor). All I ever got back from the different tiers of customer support were different ways of saying you are bad and we don't need to listen nor explain, we are done bye bye.

Anecdotally speaking, the 80% limit seems to be key to better battery aging long term.Anecdotally speaking, the 80% limit seems to be key to better battery aging long-term.

My launch-day iPhone 15 Pro Max is at 95% battery health. That phone has had the 80% limit enabled since day one, and I very rarely have had to increase it for specific busy days.

My previous iPhone 12 Pro Max very quickly descended to 88% battery health after a year.

My charging habits remain the same: fast and furious Magsafe/Qi/Qi2 charging every time there is a charger nearby (remote worker, so that’s almost all the time).

I do have unpleasant thoughts about the 80% battery charge limit not being available on anything older than the 15, since it turns out it can be sideloaded via Nugget and MobileGestalt manipulation.

Not enough to push me away from the walled garden (these phones are aging better than my previous flagships from other ecosystems), but a reminder of the rough edges in it.

I know that Game Porting Toolkit exists

There's a wrapper over this called Whisky (https://getwhisky.app) that makes it really straightforward to install and run Steam or other Windows binaries.

I use it on an M1 Air and an M1 Pro. Less demanding titles run very well, heavier games like Cyberpunk 2077 don't really reach a stable 30fps even with Steam Deck-like settings so keep your expectations in check.

Compared to actual medication, no. It can help though… and that’s how you may unintentionally develop a pretty high tolerance for caffeine (200mg caffeine pills and energy drinks every day at sunrise).

Turns out I had ADHD and I had been using caffeine my entire life as a crutch.

Diagnosed in my late thirties, and although finding the correct medication and dosage that works is an ordeal… once you are there you realize you’ve been swimming with a hand tied behind your back this entire time.

It’s not a magical cure motivation-in-a-pill though, it requires you to do the work. It simply enables you to try instead of completely failing to attempt anything.

I love videogames, understanding how a speedrun is made is technically fascinating for me and I am also known to love some other things under the appropiate set and setting[1]... but I'll defend the OP because certainly don't think it follows that someone is a bad human that needs to do drugs just because they don't see the allure of Super Mario 64 and the people who are knowledge-hungry and obsess in understanding its guts.

[1]: Readers please do the research before experimenting, you are tweaking your brain's running config with extremely opaque tooling that is not fully understood. Most of the time the calamity-event chance is low, it's a high impact event if it happens. Plural of anecdotes is not data, and oh do people confuse these.

Whether you consider videogames worthy of extended time and attention or not, that's entirely subjective and you are correct (for yourself) whatever your take is.

Even in the case of assuming that you consider videogames completely worthless and a blight on humanity, surely you can appreciate that the person in this video has demonstrated an ability to reverse-engineer and understand extremely complex systems that were designed and shipped under very tight deadlines and not-very-good tooling... plus they have the ability to teach this knowledge in ways that non-experts can easily follow and understand.

I would not say loving videogames makes for a good engineer, but I will say that my engineering growth was boosted by the opportunities granted to those videogames I loved when I was younger and how easy it was to inspect and disassemble them.

For some The Cutting Room Floor is a website about unused content, but for other people that website is a gateway drug to needing to peel behind the curtain and understand how the sausage is made.

Not in your situation at this point, but as a photo nerd I will eventually be so I took to Google.

Any method that I've found to clean them up (exporting the originals, deleting them from the library, and then re-importing the JPEGs only seems easiest) will lose all of the years of metadata that I've built up in the library.

Apparently when you File/Export Unmodified Originals it will export the RAW+HEIC and a separate sidecar file containing the metadata. You can then move the RAW file away and import the HEIC file, which will autoimport the sidecar metadata file too.

You lose edits though, although it seems you can "copy edits" somehow. Surely a technically inclined person can AppleScript their way through this...

Yet it seems needlessly cumbersome and should be a built-in function in Photos.app, it's clearly not prioritized because it helps funnel people into higher iCloud tiers.

My daily driver is a Macbook Air M1 with 16GB of RAM, and my backup is a Mac Mini 8GB; both hooked up to 5K displays.

I live in vscode, a plethora of browser addons and tabs (with auto-suspend extensions after 30min of idle), some Teams and Google Meet sessions (video piped through OBS) and some terraform every once in a while; no discernible performance difference between the two machines 99% of the time, although the remaining 1% is a swapping-party on my Mac Mini because 8GB of RAM is certainly not enough.

I'm going to tell you what worked for me, with the explicit caveat that it may not work for you and/or you may not find it palatable.

I use browser extensions to timegate the time spent in websites that I know hit me in my weak spots and tend to send me into time-wasting sessions that I have nothing to show for. There's Stayfocusd and Leechblock, and probably other alternatives.

This worked for a few years, but it stopped. I tried rectifying that with no consistent success, there's no amount of calendar reminders / pomodoros or external triggers that helped beyond the initial novelty.

I tried medication, currently on Concerta XR 36mg, and it has made a world of difference. It's not a superpower but it does enable me to notice the distraction spirals I can get myself into and I can now break them.

I still have to use the same support systems I used before though. It's not a miracle cure, it just "adds" willpower to my toolbox.

Adding to the polite pile of plus ones, I wasted my 20s in directionless ways. I spent 28-30 ramping up into tech and managed to kickstart my career began two months before I turned 30.

I still feel like I wasted the years from age 16 to age 25, but I no longer feel like I've wasted my entire life

I shall steal this turn of phrase, can relate so much.

To the fine OP: success is not guaranteed but I've met so many people that have pivoted their entire careers and lives later than you'd think. If you have the drive and privilege to give it a real try, you have a chance to join the ranks.

If you don't... you won't.

Not sure if a literal Spotify could have been built on the web, but I recall using Grooveshark roughly around that timeframe (may have been 2009, 2010 at the latest).

Grooveshark did work for me as fully-featured streaming music player, so I find it reasonable to infer that a Spotify-like service could have worked from a purely technical point of view... though maybe there is a year of two of leeway that makes all the difference.

And I kept putting it off due to poor mental health and travel.

I've been you, quite literally. And with an extremely similar age timeline even.

I won't tell you _you will make it_ because we are not owed a specific outcome in exchange for our efforts, but I can tell you it can be done. Channel that regret into creating the proper scaffolding to propel yourself into trying to make it work.

If you don't end up _making it_ at least you will be able to say you did indeed try your best until you couldn't.

The ideal best time to do it was ten years ago. Next best time is today.

As someone who went through the same process, including using a Huawei watch previously, I encourage you to try Autosleep. It has much better sleep detection magic and exposes a few knobs that enable you to fine-tune the autodetection and also manually correct the sleep records in sensible ways.

It integrates with Health, so it has the bonus of tidying up the sleep data all across the board.

Not related to the developer in any way, just a very happy user.

Spot on, I’m so different now than I was then I disregard anything anyone without kids says.

I would posit this is universally correct. Us not-parents can "believe" we can accurately imagine what you go through or what we would do in your place. Theoretically speaking, the theory matches reality :)

Yet imagining is literally not enough! People without children do not viscerally know what it is to parent, 24/7 for the rest of your days for the foreseeable future. How the accumulated indescribable-joy and the mounting exhaustion that you simultaneously carry influences slash impacts your decision-making and relentlessly molds the options you'll choose to make for the rest of your life.

Good luck explaining how different this parenting experience can be for every person and child, even within the same family in the same environment two children can be polar opposites with no obvious reason other than "life finds a way".

I feel like they’re not real adults too.

I say this with all my empathy: the fact that for you parenting is such a core part of the adult experience is not only correct but beautiful, and anybody who tries to invalidate that is extremely wrong.

That said, there is another layer of unkindness in your position that you must unpack yourself, if you wish to have adult-level relationships with people with a different set of adult-core concepts.

I don't want to invalidate your experience, but allow me to offer an anecdata counterpoint: Wifi works perfectly on my M1 Mac Mini and has since day 1 (to the point I never bothered to wire it up), and I have location services enabled.

I wonder what other variables are in play here that make it not work for you.

Without taking away from your point, deep in the Reddit comments the OP states Stripe put a hold on the account after billing the sale of a literal company truck through Stripe and not via selling their normal store merchandise.

https://reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/wa1zob/_/ihyq7tl...

As usual, there’s always an undisclosed fact that changes the narrative and explains the ban. Whether this should trigger Stripe’s scorched earth mechanisms is another matter.

I don't know your friend nor you, so I can only speculate.

I can tell you that during my own journey trying to Be A Better Me it took time to internalize this kind of communication framework, to stop feeling like I was putting on a front and instead make it flow naturally as if this is just a part of my personality... because it did become just a part of me.

I have acquaintances from "the before times" that feel slightly put off by this aspect of present me, because they expect me to react more impulsively (or more "real") like I used to do. Nobody's wrong here, just mismatched expectations. Now that they see this is "really" me and not a mask I'm putting on, it leads to some gentle ribbing and that's it.

So putting myself in both your shoes: maybe your friend needs time to translate the core concepts of this into his own grammar and vocabulary, and it takes to acclimate to that from the outside too.

A full restart of the devices helps, but usually only for 15-30 mins.

This rings a bell. Do you have an Orbi mesh by any chance? I used to experience this with specific cheap IoT devices that were constantly hopping to different Orbi satellites.

There is an option somewhere in the UI to bind a device to one specific access point, and you can tag a device as IoT or smart speakers which (based on feeling) seems to change the steering heuristics to something that stops this from happening.

out of the 22 dollars the customer paid for the delivery, I received 5.61 before tip

I am completely ignorant on how this works on the driver’s side, so I could be missing something here:

Those 22 dollars the customer paid include whatever food you were delivering, right?

Now, I’m sure the Food cost/Service cost split changes from country to country (I’m somewhere in the Euro zone)… but interpolating from those numbers, I get the feeling that Uber must be subsidizing the service very heavily.

They don’t charge that much extra money to the customer, so I wonder where the profit is coming from.

I’m having trouble conceptualizing how they are making any actual profit after expenses, and in the meantime they (and their ilk) are pushing the traditional restaurant delivery network away since they cannot compete or price nor convenience.

I don’t have a conclusion for this train of thought, just a bit of shock here in the early morning.

As someone who as been on both ends of that spectrum at different points of my life, I’ll attempt to explain: your core concept is completely legitimate and understood, at least here in HN.

Presenting it as a clear-cut _you are a queue of work and paychecks_ is where it breeds conflict. For the royal you that description is merely a description and expresses no judgement, it is simply the _why_ of your intentional lack of interaction with your coworkers.

To the people on the other side, that description brings back the negative feelings they felt when a coworker that held that same opinion (not you) was unnecesarily rude at work and shielded his failings behind the _I don’t do people_ cover.

I realize that asking you to use the human touch (for lack of a better term) is asking you to have to “work” to cater to the social aspects that you are trying to not get involved with…

So instead I’ll posit that your last paragraph is a perfectly acceptable response to the eternal “want to join and be social” question. It’s innofensive yet firm, and it conveys your position in a concise way that nobody can really pick apart unless they want to make an scene and look bad.