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MyProtein manufactures raw protein powders without artificial flavours: soya, pea and hemp. That way you can add your own preferred/safer sweetener to the shake, or just drink them quickly raw (you can gulp down 30g of protein in under 10 seconds, it’s not a big deal). Or you can use them in certain food preparation (e.g combine with oat flour, peanut butter, water and a sweetener; make small balls that you can eat as a snack). Soy protein in particular has a creamy, silky, luxurious texture when mixed with water, very pleasant and can be a perfect substitute for custard-type desserts when sweetened, or can be used as a sauce/soup thickener.

If the craving for bullshit food (chips, candy, pasta etc) doesn’t stop, that’s either a signal for nutritional deficiency of some kind (your body is still searching for something), OR a signal that you’re not hungry enough, to eat the healthy options. I spend regularly months-long periods eating the exact same ultra-basic food every day: steamed vegetables (not even salt) and home made biscuits from grains, nuts and seeds. I don’t struggle with cravings for other foods, because all my nutrients are in there and it satiates me. If I don’t feel like eating my food, then I wait until I’m hungry enough to want it. My diet is extreme, but it proves a point.

Just drink protein shakes? There are soy protein ones that are completely inoffensive and pea protein which isn’t tasty but much cheaper. Do professional athletes actually eat only meat to meet their protein requirements? Because even if you’re not a vegan I imagine that amount of meat every day gets pretty gross.

I don’t really get the Pinterest hate, but from what I understand it’s because their walled garden content came up in web search results. Anyway I’ve been using their app for over a decade. It’s the best place on the internet to explore visual art. The content is manually curated by users and the feed/recommendation algorithms are super good. It’s got very few and inoffensive ads too. The only issue with it is now the occasional AI content.

There’s Chinese analytical labs which identify the fragrance molecules in a perfume. You just have to send them a sample. The caveat is if the perfume used natural oils or captive materials; then the lab won’t be able to identify everything. There are also leaks of formulas that are circulated in perfumery circles; many famous perfumes are already known. Anyway you can then purchase the individual materials and recreate the perfume.

It’s so strange to me that I’m now using Google maybe a couple times a month (and then only through a proxy like Mullvad’s leta). This would have been inconceivable 15, even 10 years ago. I don’t want to get too philosophical, but wow, how times change.

That doesn’t mean DDG is anything special, only that Google has become incredibly bad.

I’d call this performative news consumption. Information overload is mainly a result of legitimate complexities in the world. It took only a little while to find in today’s item about Hamas a timeline describing October 7th as “the beginning of the current conflict”. A very neat and comfortable summarisation, that also happens to be vehemently rejected by many people. It’s very silly.

Except Apple has a country’s worth of users, whose livelihoods are reliant on them. The “state democracy” is right now more subordinated to tech oligarchies, than vice versa.

Vim existed before Jetbrains IDEs. It’s also much more general. I use Vim to write literary works and manage my knowledge base. There was also a guy who was using Vim as his IRC client. Vim can be the only program you need for editing text, which turns out is most of what we do on a computer. It’s nice to have a single tool for this, that never resists when you try to adapt it. Vim is actually a great example of the practicality of a good philosophy.

Edit: I doubt there’s any feature in the more specialised editors, which you can’t also get from Vim.

Naomi Klein’s article in the guardian

Exactly, and there’s no wording I can imagine coming from the manager who requested this, which wouldn’t make it sound like the plain abuse that it is. But the guys who obeyed the manager and implemented it didn’t care. The mentality of parasites.

They literally pay engineers to come up with crazy grey hat techniques to monitor people’s online activity. And those scumbags are probably HN users. It’s sinister. I wonder about the wording used by the manager behind it. It probably sounded plain evil and nobody who worked on it cared. It makes you wonder what else those parasites do that we haven’t discovered yet.

Against site rules to post generative text

Simply put, if we’re living during such a major technological revolution, why does using software suck in such disastrous ways that were unthinkable even ten years ago?

It actually varies by segment. The least technical people are enthusiastic about AI. The moderately technical (e.g tech hobbyists, artists and power users) are repulsed. The segment of tech professionals are themselves divided, but I think based on how much they like/hate their career as programmers. Either way, what’s very different about this AI bubble is that the early adopters are predominantly the least technical users. This is a notable inversion of the typical adoption curve.

My guess is it’s probably due to AI assistants/vibe coding.

The transition from assembly to C was to a different layer of abstraction within the same context of deterministic computation. The transition from programming to LLM prompting is to a qualitatively different context, because the process is no longer deterministic, nor debuggable. So your analogy fails to apply in a meaningful way to this situation.

Would you say this comment needed major changes, in order for a MAGA supporter to feel that it is applicable against his own political adversaries?

The elephant in the room is actually one American company having unencrypted access to global internet traffic.

I think it’s extremely naive to think Cloudflare is anti-government. It’s more likely that they’re a US Intelligence company, whose purpose is to decrypt and monitor global internet traffic.

Do you really need a source that people motivated by arrogance and greed are repulsive to everyone else?

They dig through (your) history, in search for examples of corruption or evil.

Sir if you could finally add keyword filters, I wouldn’t spend half a second considering an alternative. I sorely missed this the past years while HN has been spammed with AI marketing.

This is long, but trust me when I say, that about halfway through, it will answer your question fully.

https://www.newstatesman.com/business/economics/2024/02/the-...

This gist of it is that central banks tried to stimulate investment in the economy by purchasing bonds, which lowered their yields and made them unattractive to institutional investors. As a result, institutional investors had no choice but to use the QE printed money to invest in stocks instead. This greatly repressed the risk in the stock market, while decoupling it from profits, because for a long time “numbers would only go up”.

Separately, the repressed borrowing costs (another intended effect of QE) enabled big tech to consolidate their monopolies, creating the attention harvesting platforms of today. Alongside inequality also being amplified by QE, those platforms started to favour rage baiting.

The combination of high risk appetite + algorithmic promotion of outrage enabled a kind of business model which is based on nothing except ridiculous dreams. Elon and his Tesla are therefore the quintessential creatures of the era.

has this great ability to Impress An Idiot

Literally the killer app of AI.

The 1971 decision didn't solve stagflation it just kicked the can down the road

It kicked the can down the road for half a century. It bought a lot of time. This approach, of betting on a miraculous solution in the future, is deeply ingrained in policy making; it’s not unique to the neoliberal reform. In fact, the next solution could just be figuring out how to kick the can again.

The next phase looks like it will entail gov intervention, by issuing loan guarantees, or by mandating the investment of national savings into specific industries, like manufacturing and energy. Capital misallocation and the return of stagflation will lead to another crisis, but in a few decades from now.

Pegging to gold by itself doesn’t really solve anything, if the overarching system remains based on relentless exploitation by selfish interests. Sooner or later, overdraft facilities will emerge for gold that doesn’t exist; so, the traumatic cycles of boom and crash will be repeated. Not to mention the deflationary dynamic, which will overwhelmingly favour those who already own gold. In general, you can’t de-politicise monetary policy (by fixing its supply), without inevitably amplifying the overarching system.

Is it not true that China has enough domestic demand to not rely on exports? That was supposed to be the whole point of dual circulation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_circulation

Do you find Lyn Alden insightful? I remember studying her articles a few years ago on the inevitability of hyperinflation due to oil shortages, which never materialised.

The deindustrialization of America was the greatest wealth transfer from working people to corporate elites in history, dressed up as "free trade."

You make it sound like this was a conspiracy, and perhaps it did devolve into that eventually, but this system was introduced at the time in order to deal with the stagflationary crisis of the 70s. Only because things had gotten so bad, did Reagan and Thatcher manage to get the democratic support for making the transition.

Very emotional post.

What does this mean really? That is their means.

It means Americans are providing mainly a financial service, by managing the dollar. The value of their currency therefore doesn’t accrue from a real economy, which, by definition, only includes consumer goods and services.