bpizzi (u/bpizzi) - Readit News

bpizzi commented on Bulgaria to Adopt the Euro euronews.com/business/202... · Posted by u/geox

what are those odds looking like in the mid future? How many european governments are currently considered on the "extreme" spectrum? And what makes you think the Euro implemented in 2002 is the reason for the non-reoccurence of a war ended in 1945?

Studying the root causes of the two world war would certainly enlighten

bpizzi · 2 months ago

It is just something we, the children of those who fought, promised to our grand parents on their deathbed. Such things matters.

bpizzi commented on Bulgaria to Adopt the Euro euronews.com/business/202... · Posted by u/geox

Mainan_Tagonist · 2 months ago

You simply do not know if he is objectively wrong. On the basis of 25 years of Euro, what we have observed is that in the eurozone, capital follows productivity, and countries tend to specialise in line with what their factor endowment and national inclination will let them. The Euro is usually "sold" as a miracle solution when it has only really been successful for countries that had a very export oriented string industrial sector, and even then, with mixed results (see Italy). Bulgaria can hope for capital inflows and increase in productivity but should also bear in mind that these factors are highly independent on economies of scale and overall sheer size of of the existing industrial base. Capital outflows and alignment with standard european prices may well be in order. This taking the average population age may be a killer. We'll see.

bpizzi · 2 months ago

I think you may be forgetting the big picture, which is to never have Europe spawning a World War again. In that regard, the fears (rational and irrational) of those with tendencies for isolationism are simply not relevant.

bpizzi commented on Bulgaria to Adopt the Euro euronews.com/business/202... · Posted by u/geox

4gotunameagain · 2 months ago

It is clearly not in the benefit of Bulgaria to join a shared currency with advanced, manufacturing, positive export surplus countries like Germany.

Losing control of the currency will result in all domestic manufacturing to become more expensive (therefore incapable to compete with higher quality German goods), and all manufacturing capabilities will disappear in favour of the most cancerous form of industry, tourism. Like what happened to Greece and Portugal.

bpizzi · 2 months ago

Bulgaria has already pegged its currency (the lev) to the euro through a currency board since 1997. This means it already lacks independent monetary policy, and joining the euro wouldn’t significantly change that. The exchange rate is fixed, and inflation differentials are already impacting competitiveness.

Moreover, Bulgaria does not directly compete with Germany in the same product categories. Bulgaria is integrated into supply chains, often providing components or assembly work for German companies.

You are only 7M. I’ve got the feeling that it is just not large enough to significantly be distorted by eurozone monetary policy, at least in the way that might affect much larger economies.

bpizzi commented on How I program with LLMs crawshaw.io/blog/programm... · Posted by u/stpn

brabel · 8 months ago

Yes. If the AI is not integrated with the IDE, it's not as helpful. If there were an IDE plugin that let you use a local model, perhaps that would be an option, but I haven't seen that (Github Copilot allows selecting different models, but I didn't check more carefully whether that also includes a local one, anyone knows?).

bpizzi · 8 months ago

> (Github Copilot allows selecting different models, but I didn't check more carefully whether that also includes a local one, anyone knows?).

To my knowledge, it doesn't.

On Emacs there's gptel which integrates quiet nicely different LLM inside Emacs, including a local Ollama.

> gptel is a simple Large Language Model chat client for Emacs, with support for multiple models and backends. It works in the spirit of Emacs, available at any time and uniformly in any buffer.

https://github.com/karthink/gptel

bpizzi commented on Cardio fitness is a strong, consistent predictor of morbidity and mortality bjsm.bmj.com/content/58/1... · Posted by u/wjb3

weatherlite · a year ago

Why is Vo2Max important for people who aren't professional athletes? It's not that I'm not curious about my number I'm just not sure how helpful it is going to be - I need to understand what pace I can hold 5k, 10k, 21k and eventually 42k. I think the best way to know that is racing again and again and getting a good feel for your aerobic / threshold zone. Whether my Vo2max is 51 or 52 - does it matter to me?

bpizzi · a year ago

> looking at VO2 max in relation to all-cause mortality, we see a very clear trend. Simply bringing your VO2 max from ‘low’ (bottom 25th percentile) to ‘below average’ (25th to 50th percentile) is associated with a 50% reduction in all-cause mortality. When you go from ‘low’ to ‘above average’ (50th to 75th percentile) the risk reduction is closer to 70%!

https://peterattiamd.com/category/exercise/vo2-max/

bpizzi commented on Cardio fitness is a strong, consistent predictor of morbidity and mortality bjsm.bmj.com/content/58/1... · Posted by u/wjb3

apatheticonion · a year ago

I got a indoor bicycle trainer (with power readings) and do intervals in Zone 5.

I created a custom "track" on TrainerDay and spend about 20 minutes 2-3 times a week doing this.

It feels like dying - but I like being able to extract the most value out of the lowest time investment

bpizzi · a year ago

Yeah, I'm in Team Rowing (indoor) myself, and 30min of HIIT every week is HELL. My next session is in 1h...

bpizzi commented on Cardio fitness is a strong, consistent predictor of morbidity and mortality bjsm.bmj.com/content/58/1... · Posted by u/wjb3

keybored · a year ago

Some of my peers are deep into running. I don’t get it. Running is sometimes fun for me but most often painful.

Then I overheard one of them (the fittest) say to a budding runner that he [should] do mostly easy sessions. Okay what’s easy to him? He said that so slow that it can feel awkward and unnatural. What?

Then I searched around and found out about Zone 2 and how you should do most of your work in that zone when building aerobic fitness. And that it is characterized by being able to hold a conversation, although strained.

I searched around and found atheletes like amateur ultrarunners say the same thing.

Then it hit me. I’ve probably been jogging a lot in Zone 3. Or higher? Because the harder you go the more benefit, right? That seems to be the basic logic for everything.[1] Relatively short, painful sessions. Have I been conditioning myself to associate cardio with more pain than is necessary for the average session?

So maybe I should just go on the stationary bike today, do a “conversatitional” (talk to myself) pace and listen to my audiobook for an hour? And try to not let my groin fall asleep.

[1] With nuances like go-to-failure for hypertrophy in weightlifting and more back-off-a-little for strength training.

bpizzi · a year ago

There's also value in spending some time in zone 5 [1]: this is where the heart is really trained as a muscle, and where the cardiovascular system is pushed to its limit (the famous vo2max: increasing vo2max is done in zone 5, for ex. with HIIT [2]).

Zone 2 is all about giving the mitochondries a chance to get better at providing a steady energy flow over a long time, mainly by optimizing for burning fat as fuel instead of glucose, avoiding lactate accumulation during the process [3].

In between, in zones 3 & 4, you get a little of both those ends of the spectrum, it's still helpful to a degree, but it's not really optimized: that why it's deemed preferable to spend the bulk of your training time in either your zone 2 or zone 5.

The ideal composition of a training period seems like 90% zone 2 and 10% zone 5, and going for more than 1h of zone 5 per week seems not that interesting. Also, mixing zone 2 and zone 5 in the same training session is not ideal, it's better to stay focused on one thing at at time.

[1] https://peterattiamd.com/category/exercise/high-intensity-zo...

[2] https://peterattiamd.com/category/exercise/vo2-max/

[3] https://peterattiamd.com/category/exercise/aerobic-zone-2-tr...

bpizzi commented on USDA ignoring the science on low-carb diets unsettledscience.substack... · Posted by u/RelaxedTree

rafaelero · 3 years ago

Why are you relying on meta-analysis of observational studies when we have meta-analysis of RCT's?

bpizzi · 3 years ago

I’m all ear actually, if you could kindly point me to the relevant material.

bpizzi commented on USDA ignoring the science on low-carb diets unsettledscience.substack... · Posted by u/RelaxedTree

tpush · 3 years ago

The authors of that meta-analysis adjusted for serum cholesterol, which defeats the entire point. Saturated fat intake above a certain threshold is associated with CVD because it causes an uptake in serum cholesterol, eventually leading to atherosclerosis.

Saying saturated fat intake doesn't correlate with CVD when ignoring serum cholesterol is entirely uninteresting, and not what anyone's claiming.

See also this[0] comment on that flawed meta-analysis.

[0] https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/92/2/458/4597393

bpizzi · 3 years ago

Meta-analyses are not a panacea, that's clear. As I suspect you know well, two further meta-analysis came to the same conclusion: Chowdhury 2014 [0], De Souza 2015 [1]. More recently, Kang in 2018 [2] and Zhu in 2019 are also stating that they fail to find evidence of a clear association between SFA consumption and risk of CVD.

Obviously, as science is what it is (and that's a good thing), those study are debatable and do have weak spots.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24723079/ [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26268692/ [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31791641/ [3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30954077/

bpizzi commented on USDA ignoring the science on low-carb diets unsettledscience.substack... · Posted by u/RelaxedTree

tpush · 3 years ago

If the diet is high in (processed) red meat: higher cancer risk. If the diet is (too) high in saturated fat, increased cardio vascular risk.

bpizzi · 3 years ago

> If the diet is (too) high in saturated fat, increased cardio vascular risk.

You may want to take a look at this meta-study [0].

> “A meta-analysis of prospective epidemiologic studies showed that there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD.”

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20071648/