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AdamCraven commented on Why thinking hard makes us feel tired   nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/rzk
itchyouch · 2 years ago
I'd like to argue that it is possible to fight the balance game to an extent.

I've also fought a similar battle to you in a similar manner by "fix everything according to best practices."

When it comes to supplements and nutrition, it may be an impossible game, but what's important in finding the right approach is understanding at least the basic mechanism of action and knowing what you're targeting.

What I'm hearing you say is that you had an app with a performance issue, and you couldn't pinpoint whether it was CPU, Memory, Disk, Network, etc, so you solved it by doing a wholesale system upgrade by giving it all the basics that modern science says are the typical health best practices. Magnesium/Iron, exercise, gut biome, oral hygiene, etc to help. All the things you've listed are anti-inflammatory (of course there's other benefits) but generally, anti-inflammatory things are pretty good at making the body run better.

NAC on the other hand, is a precursor to glutathione, a significant anti-inflammatory molecule in the body, and usually the limiting reagent for glutathione synthesis. So it's also arguable that NAC had an anti-inflammatory effect on the body similar to the effects you received from your regimen.

Finding the right supplements are possible for sure. Usually what is needed though is a thorough analysis/observation of someone's diet and then working back the potential malnourishments that are most likely to occur and in alignment with the symptoms. But usually this takes months and years of learning and understanding to even know where to begin when it comes to suggesting a supplement.

AdamCraven · 2 years ago
Have enough supplements to cover your bases and ideally cover it off with whole foods when possible.

To be clear, I found it wasn't a good use of time to spend years experimenting with many supplements that end up working temporarily and then having an antagonist effect on something else that appears months down the line.

The best use of time was taking a holistic approach. Supplements didn't save me - but without some basic supplements I wouldn't have been saved. And I agree, some basis in nutrition is important.

AdamCraven commented on Why thinking hard makes us feel tired   nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/rzk
tysam_and · 2 years ago
I have chronic fatigue issues that go in and out of remission, and the buildup of glutamate seems to by far be the biggest factor for me.

N-acetyl Cysteine and other blood glutamate scavengers (BGS) like malic acid and pyruvate are indispensable in these scenarios. They don't solve the issue but dampen it a bit.

Additionally, a ketogenic diet helped me a lot.

Most of all, high dose niacinamide holds it in remission at times, though I have a theory it's caused by a well-set-in, chronic infection as the reduction in symptoms with niacinamide correlates with the symptoms of fighting off an infection (very swollen lymph nodes, histamine release, sometimes nausea &etc, headaches, some other clear indicators, etc). I've been on it for about 7-8 weeks or so and we're still going!

That said, having energy is a gift that is hard to quantify. Chronic fatigue takes away your ability to think about anything, so you have to have discipline to not think about anything sometimes...which also takes mental energy. It's a bit of a living hell, for suresies.

Here's hoping I get to stay in remission. <3 :')))))

AdamCraven · 2 years ago
I used to have CFS, but apart from the occasional temporary post viral fatigue that many get, it’s gone. And what is CFS but long term post viral fatigue?

One thing I learned is to ignore figuring out the exact supplements, because you’re playing an impossible balancing game with poor feedback mechanisms. There’s too many inputs.

What helped me was a combination (no one thing can solve it) of therapy (being able to listen to and not suppress emotions), key supplements (magnesium/iron - check out lactoferrin and anaemia of chronic infection), exceptional oral hygiene to reduce inflammation (4 minutes per brush), exceptional gut health (many viruses cause problems with the gut), exercise (eventually), and more…

I never used niacinamide or any of the supplements you used, which shows you that there’s no single approach. I agree that it appears to correlate with an unaddressed infection.

AdamCraven commented on Footsteps of pi   axleos.com/footsteps-of-p... · Posted by u/codyd51
AdamCraven · 2 years ago
I always wondered if some hidden pattern would be exposed when visualising numbers in unconventional ways in numbers with no known pattern such as Pi or prime numbers. A sort of multi-dimensional rendering that suddenly reveals a hidden pattern.
AdamCraven commented on ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants   d3.harvard.edu/navigating... · Posted by u/bx376
AdamCraven · 2 years ago
Well, they buried the lede with this one. Using LLMs were better for some tasks and actually made it worse for others.

The first task was a generalist task ("inside the frontier" as they refer to it), which I'm not surprised has improved performance, as it purposely made to fall into an LLM's areas of strength: research into well-defined areas where you might not have strong domain knowledge. This also is the mainstay of early consultants' work, in which they are generalists in their early careers – usually as business analysts or similar – until they become more valuable and specialise later on.

LLMs are strong in this area of general research because they have generalised a lot of information. But this generalisation is also its weakness. A good way to think about it is it's like a journalist of research. If you've ever read a newspaper, you often think you're getting a lot of insight. However, as soon as you read an article on an area of your specialisation, you realise they've made many flaws with the analysis; they don't understand your subject anywhere near the level you would.

The second task (outside the frontier) required analysis of a spreadsheet, interviews and a more deeply analytical take with evidence to back it up. These are all tasks that LLMs aren't strong at currently. Unsurprisingly, the non-LLM group scored 84.5%, and between 60% and 70.6% for LLM users.

The takeaway should be that LLMs are great for generalised research but less good for specialist analytical tasks.

AdamCraven commented on Notes from building a blog in Django   til.simonwillison.net/dja... · Posted by u/theptip
sneak · 2 years ago
It's really not a good idea to use dynamically generated pages to run a blog.

There's a reason static site generators exist. This should be made clear that this is just a toy/example app to demonstrate Django, not something someone should actually use.

Generating the pages on each request is madness, and is why Wordpress in the default configuration (without WP Total Cache, which allows the httpd to bypass Wordpress entirely for most requests) falls over as soon as it's linked from any media site. Let's stop repeating these engineering mistakes in language after language.

Compile your blog to static pages and deploy those. Hugo, Jekyll, and a million others await you, as well as CF Pages, S3, GitHub Pages, Netlify, and others.

AdamCraven · 2 years ago
As someone who uses a mixture (django, Hugo), I say it’s fine use dynamic sites to run a blog - there’s millions of them out there.

They are usually easier to administer for less professional users, as well as being able to quickly modify from standard web interfaces.

If it’s backed by a cache like redis it’ll easily handle Hackernews level traffic, even at very short cache times.

AdamCraven commented on Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?    · Posted by u/revskill
AdamCraven · 2 years ago
https://adamcraven.com/writing/

Alignment between people and technology, mostly. Much aggregated from my other site (https://principles.dev).

- https://principles.dev/blog/first-principles-thinking-a-visu... - post with 3d graphics

- https://principles.dev/blog/where-are-all-the-software-carto... - one that took the longest to write

- https://principles.dev/p/relatedness-pattern/ - A principle

AdamCraven commented on Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?    · Posted by u/revskill
umtksa · 2 years ago
https://umtksa.net for my drawings

https://umtksa.github.io/ for other stuff

AdamCraven · 2 years ago
The minimal design on the blog looks great.
AdamCraven commented on XML is the future   bitecode.dev/p/hype-cycle... · Posted by u/tannhaeuser
gnulinux · 3 years ago
I've been working in the tech industry in the US for about 5 years. Ever since I knew myself I've been coding. From middle school to high school, given any problem, like Sudoku, or keeping up daily chores, my solution was Programming! Programming wasy homebase. Then I studied it in uni, thought I was kinda good at it, and loved it.

But when I started working in the industry, I realized that it's absolutely exhausting. Hype after hype, fad after fad, modern after modern, refactor after refactor. I have a workflow, I know how to build apps. Then one day director of Ops comes and completely and utterly changes the workflow. Ok fine, I'm young, will learn this. Month passes, it is now Terraform. Ok fine I'm young, will learn this. Now we're serverless. Ok fine, will learn. Now everything is container. Ok. Now everything microservice. K. Now turns out lambdas aren't good, so everything is ECS. OK will rewrite everything...

Look I'm not even complaining. But it feels like I'm stuck in a Franz Kafka novel. We just keep changing and changing the same things again and again because that's the new way to do. Big distraction. Destroys your workflow. Forget about all the util scripts you wrote last 6 months being useless.

I don't even know how I would do it. Maybe I would do this the same way if I had any power. But that doesn't change the fact that it's a bit ridiculous. Fun but tiring. Entertaining but exhausting. Cute but frustrating.

AdamCraven · 3 years ago
It's because a lot of engineers are learning to become better plumbers, not better engineers.

Trying new technologies means you're mostly becoming better at using someone else's APIs - this is the path to eventual burn out as the churn continues.

There is a better path - See through the hype. Ask those around you what's the downsides to this approach? And you'll often get blank stares... Why? Because they don't know either - And if they don't know the downsides, they don't really know. They are following the hype curve.

Focus on the fundamental engineering principles and asking better questions - take the bottom-up approach and the reward is you'll find teams that aren't taken by the hype curve so easily.

PS. There are a lot of good technologies that come out, but staying behind the hype curve a little helps you make better judgements over time.

AdamCraven commented on Transcending My Father's Abuse   valspals.substack.com/p/t... · Posted by u/exolymph
crazygringo · 3 years ago
If this post resonates with you, there are two books I highly recommend, both by the renowned psychologist Alice Miller [1].

The first is For Your Own Good (1981), in which she describes the "poisonous pedagogy" of emotional and physical abuse passed down from generation to generation, and how we minimize and turn a blind eye to it because we want to follow the 4th commandment "Honor thy father and thy mother" (or in this case, a Confucian equivalent) -- at tremendous cost to ourselves, our own children, and society at large. It is one of the most eye-opening books I have ever read.

The second is her more recent The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting (2005), which is more therapeutic and focused on how people's physical pain and sickness can dissipate when they are able to finally stand up for themselves and their own emotional needs, rather than continue to pretend their abusive parents were actually good.

Alice Miller's first book, The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979) is her best-known, but in my opinion, the above two books show her understanding evolving to become even more sophisticated.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Miller_(psychologist)

AdamCraven · 3 years ago
I would avoid Alice Miller, because she abused her own children[1]. “The body keeps score” I’d recommend instead

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/True-Drama-Gifted-Child-Phantom/dp/....

AdamCraven commented on Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?    · Posted by u/_ajoj
AdamCraven · 3 years ago
It gets you more of whatever you love doing - even if no one reads it - because you get better at whatever you write about.

If you knew no one would ever read your writing, would you still write it? If yes (the likelihood is no one will read it apart from your future teammates) you'll have found your subject.

It can give you jobs, learning & connections, but it also takes time. Time that can be used for other things that could get you the jobs, learning & connections you want without writing. There's no one way to approach it, you need to find what works for you.

For me - I've written a lot (mostly as principles), but only recently I've focused on learning how to write, which meant I needed a blog to write on and a way to make it fun for me ( https://principles.dev/blog/first-principles-thinking-a-visu...)

u/AdamCraven

KarmaCake day252April 12, 2012
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