throwforfeds

Water that's coming out of your tap is generally aiming for neutral (~7 ph). The alkaline waters in the store are using minerals to elevate it into probably the 9s.

Like many hippie health trends that then go mainstream, a lot of it seems to filter in from Rastafarian traditions, where in the Ital diet they believe that alkaline water coming from the Blue Mountains in Jamaica (and other natural springs there which are naturally alkaline) help detoxify the acids in the body.

I also drink a lot of water (always have). I also train Muay Thai and am in my 40s, which means an hour of 1:1 with my trainer would just leave me ridiculously tired. I started supplementing with creatine and immediately it was evident that it was working -- after 8-10 rounds on pads and the heavy bag I was fine. To the point where my trainer would often tell me to take another round on the bag.

At a certain point I was wondering if it was just placebo, stopped taking it for a month or so, and was quickly back to feeling tired after training. Started taking it again, back to feeling energized. It really does work.

I've never owned a car since I live in NYC (I'm in my 40s), so the only transportation numbers I'm vaguely familiar with are with the subway. The MTA budget has gone way up over the past 50 years [1] and the cost to build the subway in NYC is hovering in the $2 billion/mile range. This is largely political and bureaucratic, as in Japan and Europe it's about $200 million - $400 million/mile. [2]

So clearly something is going wrong with the way we deal with our mass transit as well if Paris can do things for a fraction of NYC.

[1] https://nypost.com/2017/06/25/it-took-50-years-for-the-mta-t... [2] https://www.city-journal.org/article/why-cant-new-york-contr...

I hadn't been out to a dark sky in years so I went out to a deep part of Joshua Tree (Bortle 2-3) one night not too long ago just to see some stars. Wow, I was not expecting that many Starlinks up there.

Sure, but it appears as if the LLM just doesn't understand dancing and rhythm. I don't know why, but an old music video by the band Jungle came to mind -- just a kid dancing, and while it definitely cost more than $100 I'm sure, it couldn't have been all that expensive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JkDzNOgO3U

Edit: oh I remembered another, The Blaze said their first music video cost them $100 to make: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UivZrL2znh0 and their follow up didn't cost a whole lot more they've also been on record saying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54fea7wuV6s

Yeah, I bought an ErgoDox EZ and tried to get used to the ortholinear layout, but after a couple weeks things just still felt off. It's been in my closet for years now. This UHK looks really interesting though, thanks!

I've seen a lot of friends and family members almost immediately get offered surgery for shoulder pain. It's just often the default for people that do surgeries for a living.

I also had a pretty painful shoulder issue at one point, where the pain just wasn't subsiding for months. I tried massages and acupuncture as I didn't want to do surgery, but it wasn't helping at all. The thing that fixed it for me was just really focusing on doing pull-ups. I couldn't do them at all when I started, so I began with dead hangs and scapular pull-ups, eventually progressing to regular pull-ups, and then training with a "grease-the-groove" method once I could get a few per set. I stopped the training schedule once I was getting in around 17 pull-ups per set, and now just do 6 sets of about 7-8 pullups 3x per week spaced throughout the day. I'll also do some shoulder mobility drills [1].

Whenever I get lazy about keeping up with them inevitably discomfort will start arising again, but it goes away once I get back to strengthening.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP8YmmRMz6I

I haven't seen showtime on the subway here in NYC in a long time. And even when it happened more often, they generally would dance for all of one stop before moving to the next train car. So, what, like ~3 minutes of your commute?

Much more annoying to me these days are all the people that have decided it's acceptable to stare at their phone and zombie walk out of the train and up the stairs, completely oblivious to the world around them. They're not even making noise, just walking straight into other humans in a busy station while scrolling tiktok.

Were apartments $300/month in the deep suburbs of cities though? Because I'm always surprised to hear my parents tell me rents for 1 bedrooms in the place I grew up in outside of Boston are in the $2-2.5k range (confirmed just now, not an affluent suburb). Census data seems to put the equivalent in Massachusetts at $120/month in 1970, which would be roughly $1k/month in 2026. $300/month in 1970 might even be high for what people were paying in Manhattan in 1970.

I'm also wondering what effect it'll have on all the people that have been declaring their primary residence in Florida for tax purposes yet actually live up here in NYC a good amount of the time. My neighborhood in Brooklyn is filled with cars registered in Florida. If all of a sudden your pied-a-terre condo in Williamsburg is getting hit with $40k+/year in property taxes it might no longer make sense to try and move your residence to Florida to avoid city/state income tax.

FTA: "Although paying for excess hours can cost less than hiring new cops, overtime contributes to future pension costs.

“If your last few years before you retire, you work 300, 400 hours of overtime and bump up your pay by $40,000, that all goes into the salary that your pension is based on,” said Ana Champeny, director of city studies at New York’s Citizens Budget Commission."

So yeah, it seems like a bad idea to be able to scam the pension system like that.

At least here in NYC, a large part of a NYPD officer's pension is calculated based on a 3-year look back from their retirement date, so there is a huge incentive to work as much overtime as possible in order to bump that number in your last few years of service. There are lots of stories of NYPD handing out easy overtime in massive numbers for each other, particularly when they are about to retire.

Teachers are the easy ones to point to, it is hard to be mad at an underpaid teacher who receives a reasonable pension for life. We certainly can be mad at NYPD scamming the system to get $100-200k/year for life.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-nyc-police-overtime-...

[2] https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/newly-retired-nypd...

Now do parking

For sure, and if I'd ever need to use Python I'd want to strictly enforce that across my team (pre-commit hooks or whatever).

Code readability of Python isn't an advantage during write; it's an advantage while reviewing.

This is completely subjective though. I personally find that Python's lack of static types makes code very difficult to reason about. Yes, some devs will write decent comments and name things in a way that's easier to read, but most devs are lazy (myself included) and things get out of hand quickly.

But this is also a subjective opinion, and you could argue that I feel this way because I spend most of my time in TypeScript, Go, and Rust.

There's not a lot, unfortunately. This paper is a literature review and the claims are weak, but there's something there that should be investigated further: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12392120/

Paul Stamets has evangelized psilocybin + lions mane + niacin for years in a microdosing format, but again, the research is lacking largely due to prohibition.

For sure, and lions mane is one of the three things Paul Stamets has been talking about for years to take in combination with niacin and psilocybin (microdose) to support neurogenesis. Low doses of psilocybin have only very mild perceptual changes, much less than smoking weed or drinking alcohol (for me). But again, there's not much science on it which will hopefully change.

There's (minimal) research on psilocybin doing just that. One of the tragedies of prohibition is that we just weren't able to study these psychedelic compounds easily for 50+ years.

American productions constantly feel like they think their audience are idiots these days. It's nice to watch a European production where they don't assume their viewers are going to also be doom-scrolling and feel the need to summarize what's going on by having a character say the summary out loud every episode.

We've had decades to do something about it, but if Trump deciding to step into a completely unnecessary war and blundering the entire thing is what makes everyone wake up then I guess that's a silver lining.

There's a long history of doing yogic practice in the dream state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_yoga

But Brooklyn is an old city that's hard to wire, unlike those new Italian cities... /s

And here I am sitting in Brooklyn and haven't had one apartment that has had fiber as an option. I get to pay Spectrum $90/month for "400/20" and in reality get 100/10.

Ah, I see, that's also very common. Taken all the way it can develop into nihilism, which is one of the two extreme views in Buddhism [1]. I fell into that early on and abandoned my practice for many years. I found that once I found the Mahayana teachings on emptiness [2] and then the stories of the Vajrayana masters [3] the practice became joyful again and not bogged down by some narrow view of what meditation is.

[1] https://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Two_extremes

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81 and particularly as formulated in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prajnaparamita

[3] for example Saraha: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saraha and Tilopa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilopa

I've never liked the way meditation makes me feel

This is common. A true meditation practice brings up a lot of stuff, from general body aches and pains to deep emotional things you may be unconsciously suppressing. With time and persistence, and with the right teacher, it becomes liberating though.

Is this not a form of meditation?

It could be, but it depends on what you're cultivating. If you're spaced out, day dreaming, then you're practicing distraction. Meditation is practicing the opposite of distraction, to become aware of the mind's true state.

I was naive for ever thinking the Tether stable coin scam would actually implode

I had a few people from my life send me this article because they know I've been a software engineer for 20 years and were thinking "wow, see you could do this too!". None of them noticed they were misleading customers. None of them knew the FDA sent them a warning. All of them thought this person was really smart for using AI to create a company on his own, no other humans involved.

So maybe the NY Times thought it was enough to make people question the ethics of the company to add a sentence or two of "AI-generated images/website", but in reality I think people read this as a positive solo entrepreneurship story and missed the ethical grey area and the fact that this indeed took thousands of unseen humans to build.

"That gave Matthew Gallagher breathing room to fix some shortcuts he had initially taken, like swapping out the before-and-after weight-loss photos for ones from real customers. Some photos on Medvi’s homepage remain A.I.-generated."

Cool, another scammy internet company preying on people's insecurities. Glad the NY Times spent the effort to tell us about it and didn't spend any time questioning this company [1].

[1] https://www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-c...

My teacher (former gelug monk of 20+ years) said during one talk years ago that Buddhism could be considered a form of Hinduism, as of course there are so many streams of Hinduism and no singular form of it. Buddhism had to be in dialogue with the environment that it sprung from, even if it rejected core tenants of mainstream "Hinduism" of the time (primarily caste, ritual purity, the denial of atman, etc). And of course the Jains were doing similar things in that early period.

So yeah, Buddhism came out of Hindu tradition, and Hindu tradition brought teachings from Buddhists back into their spiritual paths as well (like Hatha yoga in the Amrtasiddhi [1] and even Patanjali's yoga sutras contain a good amount of early Buddhism in it [2]). It's almost as if the teachings on interdependence are correct!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amritasiddhi

[2] https://www.academia.edu/25517181/Some_Problematic_Yoga_Sutr...