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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • Bread and pizza are not per se ultra processed. They can be depending on how you bought them.

    Right like an apple is a plant. Harvesting, washing, slicing, and cooking it into a pie in your own kitchen is technically processing it, but it’s still a whole food as the slices are in their whole unaltered form.

    Taking millions of apples, grinding them, emulsifying them and separating them into constituent components, enzymatically pre-digesting them then pressing that concoction into a mould shaped vaguely like apple slices and adding in a barrage of artificial flavors and sweeteners to make it resemble the taste of apple pie? These apples have been ultra processed. It’s done for the sake of corporate profit. Pies made in this fashion make more product per ingredient and are longer lasting on the shelf.

    Research is showing foods like this are making us fat not just because they’re tasty and we naturally binge, but because they’re literally interfering with our body’s ability to self regulate hormonally.

    The calories from these foods, while not breaking the laws of physics or anything, also come with baggage. The food is already extensively broken down by mechanical and chemical processes; things that our teeth and gut normally have to do. The result if you eat them often is having a bunch of meals that hits your system fast, basically like a runner’s energy gel packet. It’s taken us a long time to discover but research is indicating that this is inherently very bad for us.

    This propaganda about good and bad foods has kept me underweight for most of my life.

    That all being said, I agree with you, and I expect all of the nuance around this to get twisted and lost into yet another bead in the endless string of worthless diet fads and hacks that nobody can stick to and do more harm than good. I literally already see “wholesome” aisles popping up in some stores where they use all the same harmful processes to make the food but game their ingredients list to only be things that people can pronounce.



  • No I know what you mean, it just doesn’t track

    Even if it’s, say, 80% accurate under optimal conditions

    Why are we using 80% as an example when it’s definitely impossible for the most skilled interpreters to beat a coin flip? Right like you see the issue? The problem isn’t that it’s sometimes unreliable the problem is that is fundamentally impossible to derive any meaningful information from it

    What you’re arguing for is similar to the thought experiment where they have an airport scanner that can tell with 99% accuracy whether someone is a terrorist (spoiler: even with this level of accuracy, the scanner cannot be relied on alone, because counterintuitively due to false positive rate, the end result ends up being that only one in a thousand positive scans is a true positive).

    But the polygraph is simply not similar to that thought experiment. It’s like “narrowing your search results to better manage your resources” based on the results of asking a magic 8 ball. Which is why it’s illegal to submit polygraph as evidence in court


  • For cops interrogating like a random dude they suspect of a crime, have a little evidence on, mix in some questions they already know, etc. yeah I can see it. Part of the broader interrogation, maybe the machine really is just adding some pressure.

    But for a job interview at a three letter agency? I mean who isn’t aware of the truth of these machines at that level? There really isn’t any interrogative leverage if both people know it’s a carnival game, and it’s illegal to hold it as leverage against them in any further proceedings



  • I mean I don’t agree with him giving special treatment to his buddies, but why is the FBI wasting time on polygraphs, which are a totally debunked pseudoscience?

    Says in the article they started using them in ‘94…in ‘98 the supreme court ruled that these ‘tests’ were inadmissible in court. Because even back then it was proven that it’s impossible to determine the truth via polygraph at a rate better than simply flipping a coin.

    My only guess is they might ding you on the polygraph if they already learned something through less than legal means, but it’s preposterous to think anyone making it into the FBI would be unfamiliar with the uselessness of the test itself


  • I got super burnt out on the content in Dawntrail just because it felt like they got very comfortable in their formula and kept funneling everything into it more and more

    Endwalker I already began having issues. A lot of the dungeon content felt dumbed down. I disliked how they mandated the pull-pull-boss formula in all dungeons. Especially combined with the crazy self healing they doled out to all tanks, it felt like the pack management got oversimplified, which was a double edged sword because in addition to being boring it made those sections take longer.

    It was especially disappointing to me after Shadowbringers had some of the best and most comically massive boss to boss pack pulls in the entire game (Mt Gulg) and in many cases allowed you to pull directly into mini bosses, or had special tech that let you spawn enemies early (Qitana Ravel). I had a ton of fun learning these strategies from other tanks while doing roulettes on my dps and healers, and then teaching the optimal strategies to others when I leveled my tanks.

    I was mixed at the time because I felt the actual dungeon boss fights in Endwalker were a lot of fun, and then I really enjoyed the extremes and savage content (Although I was also beginning to feel weary of an over reliance on floating bosses and arena sized bosses. I play tank in high end content and I love the gameplay loop of anticipating the boss moves and pre-positioning myself to bait their attacks, or lining them up well for my melee dps players). It also helped a lot that I loved the music and the story of Endwalker.

    I should note I’m also very sensitive to the state of the casual content because I like to level and ~gear every job in the game. So I spend a lot of time in dungeons and such, running through content with FC members, and so on. I had a goal at one point to orange parse the extremes with every job in the game (extremely doable with the uncapped tome equipment and memeing on food and potions lol, it’s really just a test of if you can execute your rotation the whole fight without dying) and I did get at least one orange with each job. So having the ability to have fun while leveling all my jobs (a very time intensive task) is very important to me.

    But yeah when Dawntrail dropped the dungeons felt even more restrictive than ever before, the boss fights hadn’t really improved much, and it felt like all of the jobs themselves got even simpler in their rotation. To the point where I felt like it didn’t even matter what tank I picked, it was basically the same rotation. Like the 6.3 Paladin rework to finish turning all the tanks into Warrior clones was just so gut wrenching to me. I looked at my hot bars one day and realized I had all the “same” buttons in all the same places. 1-2-3/4 combo, then press your big burst button 3 times, reach over here for your oGCDs. All of the defensive cooldowns were totally homogenized as well. I guess I’m a final fantasy boomer now but I used to like stressing the healers out by memeing them with Dark Knight’s old invuln and stuff like that lol.

    It used to feel like I could get a lot of variety just from switching jobs but for Dawntrail I only bothered leveling one of each type (tank healer melee range magic) because at some point, after being able to make my own fun with the process for years and years over multiple expansions, it just felt like I couldn’t anymore. Eventually I stopped keeping up with the game entirely and for the first time ever I’m considering skipping the next expansion launch, which has always been a huge event for me that I take time off work for.

    Anyway wow sorry for the rant, I started out just having a couple things to say but I guess I just hadn’t really processed all of that until now lol. TL;DR kids these days don’t realize the game was sooo much better back in myyy day






  • I think it’s not drawing the line but rather choosing your battles based on what is realistic for you.

    Right so the main trap that happens is you never allow yourself any stillness (call it whatever you want: rest, calm, acceptance) because there’s always something of urgent importance you think you should be doing.

    But that’s a classic recipe for burnout, and what happens is people crash super hard and then they’re not only doing nothing for the problem that stressed them out in the first place, but everything else in their life suffers as well.

    You can’t carry the weight of needing to take care of your aging parents and work a demanding job and dedicate your life to climate activism and anti genocide activism and voting reform and human trafficking and animal abuse and and and and and…

    You just can’t. The same way you just can’t deadlift a thousand pounds. Accepting that fact doesn’t make you spineless, it just means you know how much your spine can take before it snaps.

    In short: radical acceptance is taking time to read a novel and spend time with your kids even if the world is ending. It’s not an endorsement of ending the world, it’s accepting your limitations and deciding that life is worth living regardless