To add something similar: I am now at the point where maybe a few times a day I can visualize a glimpse of a memory, but otherwise it is blank and I have no visual dreams.
But it does not hinder the ability to think about complex systems in any way. My day job involves making 2D technical drawings from multiple angles, 3D modelling, and of course to come up with the solutions before putting in the work of drawing/modelling stuff.
There is an interesting reddit community 'CureAphantasia' with resources to develop your ability to visualize mental images. Together there are ca. 25 posts that offer a complete guide that might as well have been a book.
Software engineering takes surprisingly little responsibility compared to other engineering disciplines. This seems like a good development to me.
Of course you can't expect someone who just put something online as a hobby project to take much responsibility. But to ask some basic security/reliability from companies, foundations etc... Shouldn't that just be normal?
The overloaded "software engineering" label can also refer to formal software engineering centered around examples of DO-178C for aviation software, IEC 61508 for railway software, ISO 26262 for road vehicle software, EAL5+ for cybersecurity related software, etc. It's somewhat unfortunate the label is also applied to CRUD websites and mobile applications, even there there is a world of difference in the various levels of formal engineering applied.
It's somewhat unfortunate the label is also applied to CRUD websites and mobile applications,
These websites and applications can still have vast security implications depending on what kind of data is being collected.
The advertising industry has done security a huge disfavor by collecting every bit of data they can about everyones actions all the time. Adding some ad library to your website or app now could turn it into a full time tracking device. And phone manufactures like Google don't want this to change as the more information they get, the more ads they can stuff in your face.
To give an example from my software at work, structural engineering:
You make a 3D-model (BIM, Building Information Model) of the steel skeleton of some project. The software can than generate 2D drawings, the blueprints. All beams, colums etc should be labeled in the drawing with the steel profile and quality (if non-standard).
However the software has a terrible label placement algorithm that happily switches around the labels of adjacent elements. And it does so without notice after some changes to the model. That is behavior that can lead to pretty dangerous mistakes.
The reply of the software company: you have to check it anyway. That is why you get paid, right?
> But to ask some basic security/reliability from companies, foundations etc... Shouldn't that just be normal?
For SW ? No way. For electronic components, yes, for mechanical components, yes, but not for software. It is not cool. Fixing bugs is much, much harder than modifying UI elements (hello Google, Microsoft) with every release.
As it was explained to me warts are caused by a virus, which at some point the local skin tissue no longer attacks. Any treatment that provokes the immune system in the area without damaging the tissue too much has a change of waking up the immune system to the wart's virus.
If that is true it is no surprise to me all sorts of folk medicine work on warts.
On average man burns ca. 2500 kcal per day, mostly in rest. One hour of reasonably intensive cardio burns 500~600 kcal. If you have two such workouts a week it comes down to an increased energy use of 2*600/(7*2500) = 7%. Or a large meal. Just looking at the numbers it seems spending some time at the gym is not going to do much for loosing weight. Or said differently: eating 7% less is easier.
Of course cardio and strength training are useful for building/preserving muscle mass and general fitness. But for weight loss looking at food seems more effective.
One hour of reasonably intensive cardio burns 500~600 kcal. If you have two such workouts a week it comes down to an increased energy use of 2600/(72500) = 7%. Or a large meal. Just looking at the numbers it seems spending some time at the gym is not going to do much for loosing weight. Or said differently: eating 7% less is easier.
Not sure about this. Herman Pontzer's work shows that the body adapts by burning fewer calories later, so your energy expenditure is the same. Burning 600 calories with exercise means burning 600 fewer later, like burning fewer calories during sleep or fidgeting less.
Not this again: “Burning 600 calories with exercise means burning 600 fewer later.” No it doesn’t. That work is highly misinterpreted.
Because it doesn’t ELI5 how body mass and composition and steady vs unsteady state actually play into it, people take away a meaningless self serving interpretation.
If you start running 4-5 times a week, I guarantee you’ll be eating significantly more and burning significantly more. Unless you’re intentional about restricting your eating, weight will most probably stay the same, but you’ll be burning far more calories.
But keen eyed reader perhaps you object with “but you’ll move less and nap on the couch more, it will balance out like Pontzer’s work seems to say!” Haha, but no. Well yes to napping, but no to balancing out. It’s literally impossible. There’s no amount of napping that makes up for 13+ miles runs. There’s a lot of people who regularly do 10 to 20 mi runs on weekends. They can literally burn more calories just in the run than a sedentary person does in an entire day. And that’s their regular routine. Take a look at Boston to see 30ish thousand examples of it.
As one example, My weight has been steady state for decades, but I started running marathons two years ago. I had to start eating an extra meal. And when I take it easy for a couple weeks after each marathon, my appetite ramps down.
And if you don’t start eating more you’ll just get injured and be forced to stop running.
Pontzers work is bad. Ask any endurance sport club and they’ll laugh at it.
I don’t think most people (besides some naive readings of that research) should come to that conclusion. The proper conclusion is that it will offset some of the calories burned by exercise through reduction in NEAT (non exercise activity thermogenesis), but not all of it. So a 600cal exercise may only have an effective net calorie addition of say, 400cal, due to reduction in NEAT.
The problem becomes when people do the naive calculation of exercise calories (Eg, I ran 2 miles so I burned 400cal, so I can eat 400 extra calories), and come to the wrong conclusion.
So we’re focusing on the anecdotal part to ignore the part where I point out the naive reading of his conjecture literally defies thermodynamics? I pointed out it’s literally impossible for it to work for a subset of the population.
Over a hundred thousand endurance athletes in just the USA would have to literally defy the laws of thermodynamics for the naive reading to work.
I can see why the question ignored that and focused on the personal story that went along with the hard facts and stats.
Pontzer's work isn't about napping. It's about your body having a set point for how many calories it burns, independent (up to a factor of +/- a few hundred calories) of how much exercise you do. For most people this is true, as their work shows. It may not be true for extreme athletes. I don't think Pontzer's team of dozens of people working over ten years misunderstood basic thermodynamics. Their work clearly points to "compensation" -- the body making up for energy it burned during the day by gently lowering the metabolism later on.
Saying "burning 600 calories now means burning 600 less later" gets the point across. It's pretty much on the money for some people. For others compensation may not be total. I guess I'm not really sure where your beef is.
For hundreds of thousands of people it’s not true. That is not an exaggeration in numbers.
Handwaving away large numbers data points that disprove a theory is not how science is supposed to work.
And as we have seen in this thread, the lack of clarity on the nuance discourages people from making exercise.
Over simplifying it to 600 burned, 600 saved later is harmful and also inaccurate. (and yes More inaccurate than my loose choice of saying nap which you pointed out that led you to the wrong conclusions on my understanding, please consistently apply that critical standard)
Also an endurance runner and read Pontzer's book. I do enough running for my wife to get pissed off! I agree with you that there's definitely more work which needs doing to understand metabolism in the context of endurance athletes. I don't think his work is outright nonsense though. Here's something to think about...
I ran 21 km yesterday, in zone 2, in a fairly glycogen depleted state. That was about 4:30min/km for 21km, with 600m of elevation - about 1500kcal of energy. I didn't eat or drink anything throughout the run. I'm a big nerd, so I took a lactate sample at the end. I didn't hit the first ventilatory threshold for the whole run and that indicates I'm burning a large proportion of fat compared to a normal person (and probably a normal recreational runner).
Afterwards, I ate a banana and had a couple of spoons of peanut butter + honey. A few 100kcal. Fast forward to the evening. I didn't eat any more than I usually would do if I had a few days off running. I went on with my day as normal and recovered fine the next day. I didn't feel hungrier than usual. Fairly standard. My body is well adapted to this kind of exertion. I think my body is quite efficient at doing every day things. I don't get out of breath walking up stairs, for example. Maybe it's fair to say I'm more energy efficient than a regular person. Perhps, I don't need to eat any more than usual immediately after running because I'm burning a high proportion of fat and my metabolism is quite efficeint anyway.
Someone who has a poor aerobic system wouldn't be capable of doing that. They'd likely be running at a much higher heart rate and bonk after 10km having not eaten any carbs the day before. They'd also likely need to eat a huge bowl of pasta afterwards just to feel OK. I suspect this person would feel like crap for the rest of the day (maybe even multiple days... Imagine.. they've likely just done a 10km at VO2max untrained) and I could completely imagine them having a nap or watching TV for the rest of the day as they'd have no energy to do anything else. Their bodies are not adapted to this kind of exertion. They are not efficient. Their body needs to rest to get back in equilibrium.
The energy requirement is the same in both cases but it comes from a different source. In my case the high fat oxidation is acting as a battery/buffer. In the average person, those fat stores are not really accessible when doing anything more than sitting or light walking. Both examples are in equilibrium but present in different ways.
This is mostly unrelated to the current point, but you’re unquestionably fitter than the average person. I used to dance for about 15 hours a week, and I have no idea what I actually burned calorie-wise, but it was plenty of cardio.
After about a year of dancing, I had a moment where I needed to run after someone about a half kilometer away. It was incredible- I’d never felt so buoyant while running. After I passed the message on, I decided to do a measured run. I ran a six minute mile in my late twenties with zero warm-up after having not run in over a decade. I wasn’t even out of breath, it was fucking easy. Cardio is a life hack.
First, note that my biggest point is that the way his group presented the work has led to gross over simplifications that actually cause harm when they help deter people from making changes, and the group has not gotten the word out that those interpretations are incorrect.
It’s pretty clear the effect of exercise is neither extreme. It is definitely not the naive 100% of calories burned in regular exercising are balanced out by metabolic reductions elsewhere compared to the same person not regularly exercising. And it’s definitely not 800 burned regularly means 800 mores than the person would if they didn’t exercise regularly.
It’s going to be in between, and I would wager it’s like backwards graduated tax brackets in terms of compensation percent.
It’s been a while since I read his paper, but if I recall right it actually did hand wave away the endurance athletes. But endurance athletes are not a binary yes no state andHand waving away obvious conflicting data isn’t logical or scientific. And so especially when people are on a graduated spectrum all the way up to the immediately obvious theory breakers running 60+ mi/week. Where would the cut off come? 15mi? 20mi? 25mi? Above what cut off should we ignore data to make the naive theory work.
Pontzers work shows that a 150lb male, dependent on their activity they can burn anywhere between 2000 to 3750 calories on average per day in a maintainable fashion that can go on for years. I.e activity is highly impactful to total daily caloric expenditure.
Moreover, they also showed that exercise beyond that upper limit of 2.5x the base metabolic rate is very possible for temporary durations, weeks even. The extra energy comes from stores like fat and obvious is not sustainable over years.
Even at minor increases of daily exercise for sedentary people, a regular 400 calories of exercise in one study, leads to increased total daily expenditure of around 225-250 after the body is fully adapted.
If that’s not your understanding of pontzer’s works then there is nothing pedantic about my comments. But it’s understandable if you’ve been confused because pontzer has almost willfully obfuscated the actual interpretation of his groups data. Their actual data & equations versus how they message them and explain their findings is shameful.
My own experience matches closer to Potzner's work. I see some initial loss on the after exercising but the rebound is really fast. Perhaps if you keep it up everyday there can be some long-term weight loss but it will not be continuous, and if you stop the weight will come back fast.
Isn't that kind of like saying that the tooth decay will come back real quick if you stop brushing your teeth?
Most people need to supplement their activity with exercise nowadays because otherwise their lives are very sedentary. It's a forever thing, unfortunately for those that don't enjoy it.
Your weight is an equilibrium between calorie intake and caloric expenditure. Increased weight increases baseline expenditure, hence the equilibrium.
If you stop exercising, but keep the same caloric intake as before, yes, it will rebound really fast, because the equilibrium point will stay the same. If you want to move the equilibrium, you either need to do the exercise regularly forever, or reduce your caloric intake, or build significant amounts of muscle (fat free body mass) to increase your baseline. expenditure
That's just not possible. You aren't going to be burning less calories during sleep after a workout, you're going to be burning more due to increased protein synthesis as your body recovers (unless the workout was very light).
Reduced fidgeting leading to 600 calories less in a day is not reasonable, either.
To drive this home, just look at professional cyclists : a lot of them have to eat 5000+ calories a day, because they burn 3500+ calories just training, on average, for years and years.
Additionally, if you work out more, you will increase your fat-free mass significantly.
In any case, Pontzer's work never seems to claim you somehow compensate against activity expenditure, it's actually a very strong independent variable in the model of the linked study?
When it comes to economics it never ceases to amaze me that we build an entire system on the basic assumption that everyone acts primarily in their own self-interest, and that that system somewhat manages to function.
Luckily when it comes to regular cake cutting there may be a host involved that just wants to give his guests something nice. And the guests hopefully just enjoy the cake instead of being overly sensitive about the fairness of the divisions.
I hope it's clear that this isn't about actual cake cutting.
But rather as a stand-in for any resource that people want to figure out a fair, equitable way to distribute.
So you should read this as a guide to how different countries might be willing to fairly divide a contested piece of land, when different parts of the land have different qualities (e.g. suitability for farming, value in mining) and the different countries value those things differently (e.g. one is good at building mines, the other prefers to protect the environment).
There are a lot of conflicts in the world over resources that need to be divvied up in some way, where everyone really is looking out for the self-interest of their state or nation or community.
There's maaany possible justificatons for contesting previously non-contested resources. Historic or otherwise, justified or not. And those reasons change over time, change of leadership, economic or climate conditions, or even technological progress (resource previously considered uninteresting suddenly becomes valuable - and thus, often contested). Fairly (?) dividing whatever is contested, doesn't solve that problem.
One fix is to just accept that changing circumstances enhance or degrade whatever piece of the pie you got.
Or to keep 'moving the knives' continously. (Re-)distribution possibly enforced by military power. Oh wait... that is how it works!
The system functions? Maybe in the current times, but not long term as we exhaust the earth's resources and jobs get taken over by technology to the point it becomes meaningless.
When the host gives their guest something nice, the host is acting on their interest to please their guest. Or their interest in being a friend. Or their interest in seeing their guest happy. By definition, the only interest you posses is your own, even if that interest is a benefit to someone else.
Only straw-man arguments in economics use self interest to literally mean like “hedonic self interest” or layman’s self interest.
Economics actually does the opposite, the “self interest” is basically “whatever people want”. What do people want? They want to maximize their utility! What is utility? Whatever people want!
> The syncytiotrophoblast is the outermost layer of the placenta, the part that is pressed against the uterus. It’s literally a layer of cells that have fused together, forming a wall. ... There’s no other structure like this anywhere else in the body.”
> When evolutionary biologists like Chuong mapped the genomes of these cells, they found that the protein that allowed these cells to fuse into a wall, called syncytin, didn’t look like it came from human DNA. It looked more like HIV.
So the entire premise of the placenta evolving from a virus rests on the fact that the organ has a unique function requiring a unique protein in the body. Saying the source probably is a virus seems quite a leap of thought. And aren't there many highly specialized proteins in the body?
Has anybody has some more information on what protein in a retrovirus looks similar to syncytin?
Prince has been doing this for 20 years and is in my opinion the gold standard, with good support for footnotes, endnotes, page headers and other little extensions that are only relevant for printing. https://www.princexml.com/
If wish we could merge this comment with the thread where people are defending Youtubes right to show ads. I am so glad there is technology available to choose what I want to read and see without being forced too much other content.
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