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Cake day: September 14th, 2024

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  • It wouldn’t be a 30% higher electrical bill overall. It would be 30% more for whatever power you’re using for this specific device, which, if it’s ordinarily 10W while in sleep and an average 100W while in use, and you use it 50 hours per week, or 215 hours per month, that’s a baseline power usage of 21500 watt hours in use and 5050 watt hours from idle/sleep/suspend. Or a total of 26550 watt hours, or 26.5 kWh. At 20 cents per kWh, you’re talking about $5.30 per month in electricity for the computer. A 30% increase would be an extra $1.60 per month.



  • Many kid movies raise some troubling implications about personhood and moral agency with anthropomorphized non-human characters (Toy Story and life/death/abandonment, what do obligate carnivores in Zootopia eat, etc.).

    But Bee Movie inexplicably just dives right into it instead of leaving it unexplored on the edges. If the bees are fully intelligent beings with rich inner experiences, what moral obligation do we owe them? It’s a mess of a concept.




  • why a train journey from San Francisco to Los Angeles has to be 12 hours long

    That’s its own saga, with a bunch of factors specific to California politics (and national politics with funding and permitting California projects). The California High Speed Rail project intends to connect SF to LA in less than 3 hours (and the original 2008 plan aimed for a 2020 operational start date), but we’ll see if that ever comes to fruition.

    Also, I guess you guys do not regularly travel from New York to Los Angeles for a weekend trip, just as we Europeans don’t usually do that with Stockholm and Barcelona (which is a distance the average European would also travel by plane).

    One wrinkle in comparing things is that the US’s cultural affinity is less tied to geographical proximity than in Europe. Obviously European villages and cities and major population centers were established long before rail, much less before automobile highways and commercial air travel (or even before global television broadcasts), so each local region will have its own culture and language.

    In the U.S., with the population centers built up much more recently, cultural affinity between cities or regions is distinct from geographical proximity. So for many, a weekend getaway or a one-week vacation will tend to look to other similarly sized cities. One joke in the TV show 30 Rock was the idea that someone from New York would want to move to, or even visit, Cleveland. This is especially true for those who aren’t straight white Christians, where much of the geographical footprint of the United States represents urban islands where you might feel like you belong, and where you’d want to hop from island to island rather than explore the vast areas geographically nearby.



  • You’re right about all that, but it’s worth noting that U.S. population centers tend to be coastal. New York to Chicago is one of the closer city pairs between the 10 largest cities in the U.S. Here’s the driving distance from New York to each of the other 9:

    Los Angeles: 2800 miles (4500 km)
    Chicago: 800 miles (1300 km)
    Dallas: 1600 miles (2500 km)
    Houston: 1600 miles (2600 km)
    Miami: 1300 miles (2100 km)
    Washington: 230 miles (370 km)
    Atlanta: 900 miles (1400 km)
    Philadelphia: 100 miles (160 km)
    Phoenix: 2400 miles (3900 km)

    Dallas and Houston are close to each other. New York, Philadelphia, and DC are close (and are already connected by the most popular passenger rail line in the US). But the others are all pretty spread out.

    So the type of travel people might imagjne doing in the U.S. tends to be weighted towards pretty far distances.



  • There’s three metrics to think about:

    • Actual number of years reduced/increased
    • Actual probability of that change in lifespan
    • Statistical certainty that the trend we observe is actually linked to the variable we’re studying.

    Russian roulette (traditional 1 round in 6 chambers) in a hospice ward (where everyone has been given a prognosis of less than 6 months to live) would be a very high certainty of shaving months off the life of 1/6 of the studied population. In the grand scheme of things, that’s not a very high risk. But at the same time, we can look at it and say “yes, shooting oneself with a revolver is very bad for health.” Putting a more or less deadly round in the chamber is probably not going to be a hugely significant change in outcomes, even if we can objectively say that one is better or worse for the person’s health than the other.

    Almost all dietary/nutrition studies involve much smaller swings in lifespan or health conditions, probabilistically over a smaller portion of the population, with less statistical certainty in the observations. But the science is still worth doing, and analyzing, because that all adds up.


  • This study shows inflammatory markers are increased on a ketogenic diet: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6922028/

    This rat study shows increased senescence in heart and kidneys in long term ketosis: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ado1463

    However, Cholesterol is not a disease - its essential for life - the concern has never been cholesterol but atherosclerosis - if someone has elevated LDL, undamanged and unglycated (as on keto) and they are concerned they should get a CAC score so they can see their actual plaque burden.

    What you’re asking for is being studied. Here’s a meta study from 2013:

    However, one established risk factor of CVD, i.e. LDL-cholesterol, still turned out to be harmfully affected by the VLC regimen, most probably attributable to the larger amounts of saturated fat in the diet(Reference Bueno, de Melo and de Oliveira1). In their discussion, the authors stated that future meta-analyses should investigate the impact of low carbohydrates (LC) v. LF on other important pathological markers, e.g. endothelial function, in order to further assess the safety of LC dietary therapies.

    This is reasonable, since evidence from prospective cohort studies has shown that endothelial dysfunction represents an independent risk factor for the development of many CVD including atherosclerosis(Reference Inaba, Chen and Bergmann2). We, therefore, carried out a meta-analysis to compare the effects of LC and LF regimens on flow-mediated dilatation (FMD). FMD of the brachial artery is a non-invasive measure of endothelial function, furthermore reflecting the local bioavailability of endothelium-derived vasodilators, especially NO. Inflammation of the endothelium is regarded to play a major role in the destabilisation of atherosclerotic lesions, therefore paving the way for future CVD events(Reference Inaba, Chen and Bergmann2).

    Their results:

    In our meta-analysis, LC dietary protocols were associated with a significant decrease in FMD when compared with their LF counterparts. A recent meta-analysis of observational studies including a sample size of 5·547 subjects has observed that a 1 % decrease in FMD is associated with a 13 % increase in the risk of future cardiovascular events(Reference Inaba, Chen and Bergmann2)

    Along the same lines, here’s another study with arterial measurements that shows reduced blood flow and arterial function for those who stuck with a high protein diet: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/000331970005101003

    Look, none of these studies are, standing alone, enough to really change things. But it seems to me, from the outside that you’re cherry picking your own results to justify carnivore diet.

    The high carb versus low carb discussion is complicated and has a lot of factors at play. But the evidence for animal versus plant based low carb suggests that animal product diets are more harmful than plant product diets of similar macronutrient profiles.

    Moreover, the overall trends show that those who eat a lot of whole grains (which are, by their nature, high carb plant based foods) have lower mortality than those who don’t. The same is true of those who eat a lot of fruit (again, high carb plant based food).

    Trying to tease out which of a million variables is truly responsible for cardiovascular health isn’t easy, but a lot of the overall trends can be seen:

    • Whole grains good
    • Whole fruit good
    • Red meat bad
    • Cured meat really bad
    • Seafood good
    • Legumes good

    Now, you can quibble with confounding variables, but at a certain point trying to argue that minutiae starts looking like religious apologetics, really cherry picking examples in favor while ignoring examples against. Coming up with a coherent theory of “fiber not important” or “the foods our genetic ancestors ate are somehow bad for us now” is an uphill battle, and I’m not convinced that the carnivore diet is anything more than a scam designed to sell books.



  • If somebody wants to eliminate even more, they could try out a low carb, or even a ketogenic diet or even a zero carb diet.

    Most recent studies of long term ketosis show accelerated aging markers, and some potentially harmful increases in LDL and VLDL cholesterol. Some propose periodic resets out of ketosis to avoid some of the accumulated long term issues, while taking advantage of some of the short term benefits for overall insulin sensitivity and obesity.

    The human body has many, many ways to meet its nutritional needs. We’re omnivores and we have lots of anthropological history of different cultures surviving primarily on carbs, primarily on animal products, and all sorts of in between.

    There are plenty of issues with people on carnivore diets, too, so I would caution against trying to swing the pendulum too far in the other direction. I’ve never seen anything suggesting that there’s a statistically significant delta between a high carb whole foods diet and a low carb whole foods diet. And even within those frameworks, it’s entirely possible that the qualitative differences between one whole food still makes a difference compared to another whole food, like the observed studies regarding red meat being bad, fatty fish being good, legumes being good, fermented vegetables being good, etc.

    Nutrition science is pretty incomplete. We’re only recently learning bits and pieces about the role of the microbiome, and haven’t even finished accumulating the information we started learning in recent decades about endocrine feedback loops in nutrition and metabolism. It’ll take a lot of data and analysis to have confidence in what people are saying, and I personally take it all in with interest but skepticism.






  • Spit out a random e-mail address and record which e-mail address was given to each IP.

    The author mentions it’s a violation of GDPR to record visitors’ IP addresses. I’m not sure that’s correct, but even so, it could be possible to make a custom encoding of literally every ipv4 address through some kind of lookup table with 256 entries, and just string together 4 of those random words to represent the entire 32-bit address space, such that “correct horse battery staple” corresponds to 192.168.1.100 or whatever.


  • Base64 encoding of a text representation of an IP address and date seems inefficient.

    There are 4 octets in a ipv4 address, where each octet is one of 2^8 possible integers. The entire 32-bit ipv4 address space should therefore be possible to encode in 6 characters in base64.

    Similarly, a timestamp with a precision/resolution in seconds can generally be represented by a 32-bit integer, at least up through 2038. So that can be represented by another 6 characters.

    Or, if you know you’re always going to be encoding these two numbers together, you can put together a 64-bit number and encode that in base64, in just 11 characters. Maybe even use some kind of custom timestamp format that uses fewer bits and counts from a more recent epoch, as an unsigned integer (since you’re not going to have site visitors from the past), and get that down to even fewer characters.

    That seems to run less risk of the email address getting cut off at some arbitrary length as it gets passed around.


  • The use of a “+” convention is just a convention popularized by Gmail and the other major providers. If you have your own domain, you should be able to do this with any arbitrary text schema, and encode some information in the address itself, especially if you don’t care about sending email from those aliases: set up your email service to have a catchall inbox that can further be filtered/forwarded based on other rules.

    It can be cumbersome but I could see it working at getting the information you’re looking for.