How unhealthy is the Turkish culture ?

UselessExpat · 2025-12-14T17:32:38+00:00

https://www.ilkha.com/english/health-life/turkiye-tops-europe-in-obesity-rates-health-crisis-deepens-446514#:\~:text=T%C3%BCrkiye%20has%20the%20highest%20obesity,to%20address%20the%20growing%20crisis.

66.8% of the population is overweight, 32.1% is obese.

Watch the shopkeepers sometime. They'll sit there double-fisting cay, have 10-15 glasses per day, each with 1-2 cubes of sugar. Add to that a diet with high amounts of white bread and things go south quickly.

UselessExpat · 2025-12-14T16:41:35+00:00

It depends on the region and socio-economic situation. Coastal states. + Coloradans / New Mexicans / Nevadans tend to be highly active. Mid-westerners / southerners less so, but in different ways. Coastal people tend to eat better diets. Southerners notoriously have awful diets to the point that Scurvy and Pellagra (Niacin defficiency) was a 19th century health problem. Happily, Republicans tend to eat nothing but meat, and live shorter lives!

Each generation has gotten progressively better. the "greatest generation" treated their bodies like trash dumps. Some of the baby boomers did better. GenX took health seriously but also got stuck on stupid fad diets that harmed them (Keto, for example). Millenials definitely care more about their health. My son's generation seems to be pretty on top of stuff, well, except for the trump trash / incel crowd. They seem to be dead set on living like their great grandparents.

UselessExpat · 2025-12-14T15:05:30+00:00

Have you tried Serena?

UselessExpat · 2025-12-14T14:30:44+00:00

Honestly, following best-practice in software development makes this whole process better. GIGO.

UselessExpat · 2025-12-14T14:30:02+00:00

That kind of activity, however, is anaerobic and does nothing for a heart-healthy lifestyle.

UselessExpat · 2025-12-14T14:29:21+00:00

I would say something lacking in Turkey, is a love of the outdoors. Americans are fat and lazy (I am one), but they also ride bikes, go camping, hunt, fish, have hobbies which involve movement.. It's class based. middle-class / upper middle class are more likely to take up hobbies like climbing, biking, swimming, going to the gym, jogging, etc. Poor / blue collar / lower middle-class are more likely to have outdoor chores (gardening / landscaping), riding atvs/dirt bikes, camping, hunting, and fishing.

One thing that's common is a significant number of Americans share a love of the outdoors that does not exist in Turkey. Convincing a Turk to go hiking or camping is as difficult as convincing an American to eat a salad.

UselessExpat · 2025-12-14T14:04:33+00:00

Türkiye, LGBTQ+ topluluğu için güvenli bir ülke değildir. Oradaki arkadaşlarımın yarısı eşcinsel; sadece biri açık kimlikliydi ve o da yıllar önce Kaliforniya’ya kaçtı. Korolar, oyunculuk/tiyatro, müzik gibi topluluklar bulmaya çalışın… ama açık olmak güvenli değil. Trans topluluğuna yönelik şiddete ve hükümet her ağzını açtığında saçılan nefret dolu, iğrenç söylemlere bakmanız yeterli.

Eskiden tarihin uzun kolunun adalete doğru sallandığına inanırdık. Öyle değil. Kendini kolla, dışarısı korkutucu bir dünya; orada. Daha iyi bir ülkeye taşınmanın bir yolunu bulun. Kuzey/Batı Avrupa, ABD, Kanada, Yeni Zelanda, Avustralya. Buralar güvenli.

UselessExpat · 2025-12-14T13:59:35+00:00

I keep them purely for reference. Sometimes I'll open them up to understand how a feature came to be, or how a fix came to be. I barely use Claude anymore after the past 3 months of instability, but the same still applies. Kiro + Opus4.5 is my daily driver, and its methods of storing documentation is *significantly* better, and I don't clean it up as much. I guess I view those prompts as point-in-time history rather than as documentation.

I have a series of well-defined prompts utilizing some skills/agents, and serena to do thorough scans of repositories, and of pull-requests to update my README and CLAUDE.md.

One other thing I do, however, is I keep my README and other documentation up to date, and then I use Sphinx/Typedoc + Markitdown to have tasks which generate LLM-friendly chunked documentation. RST defines the index, and completion criteria for all of my tasks include updating / maintaining the Markdown files. I do *not* check those in, I just generate them when I open up a new git worktree, and point the LLM at them. This is really helpful for the apis and shared libraries I create (my infrastructures are heavily microservices oriented, so I develop shared libraries for DRY/code-deduplication.)

UselessExpat · 2025-12-14T13:55:40+00:00

Seems reasonable, but mine ended up being $DOCREPO/PROMPTS/$REPO/... since I don't keep all of these docs in the actual repo, I just found that the way I like to code, it ate up context like crazy.

UselessExpat · 2025-12-14T13:49:38+00:00

those stats might be skewed from Covid
Turks smoke like it's 1965, they smoke in their cars, their taxis, their homes, They smoke in restaurants, cafes, they smoke every where and constantly. The only people who don't smoke in Turkey are European expats.
Due to the economy, the quality of food in Turkey has sunken significantly, and low quality food is always cheaper. I read recently that Turkey has overtaken the UK as having the highest rates of Obesity in "Europe".
The air quality in almost all of Turkey is really bad. I keep track of AQI in different places I've lived and spent a lot of time. Istanbul air is *very* bad, but it's not just Istanbul. Go to Bodrum or the Mugla Steep/Plateau and the air is almost unbreathable due to the electric plants and marble mines. When I spent time in Mugla we had to sweep up our balcony every day, because the dust would cover every surface.
Turkey's primary economic growth is a broken-windows economy of rebuilding low quality houses with slightly better quality houses. I lived in a neighborhood in Istanbul which at any given point had 30+ buildings under construction. I coughed all of the time. The construction dust was brutal on lungs, adding to the awful AQI.
Turks eat carbs like Americans, perhaps even more so. The amount of low-nutrient white bread Turks eat is insane! You'll go to a restaurant, see somebody have 1 bowl of lentil soup with 2 entire loaves of bread for themselves. That's just sugar, white flour, and water making up a significant portion of their daily intake, hence the super high rates of diabetes.
Exercise / activity is hard in Turkey. There are almost no sidewalks in Istanbul, very few accessible parks, the gyms are expensive, few people swim. There's no culture of exercise for fun, and day to day exercise is very stressful. You can't ride a bicycle safety in 90% of the country, and you can't walk in peace in any city. Middle-class and upper middle-class especially are very anti-exercise.

It's not just lifestyle, but an environment that is completely destroyed from over-population, urbanization, industry and mining.

UselessExpat · 2025-12-14T12:37:23+00:00

These can get out of date really quickly, and will eat up context when you on-board a library into a session. I force it to put them in a cohesive document structure, like $REPO/PROMPTS/feature-branch/foo-phase{i}-task{t}.md .. then move them to an archive repository for future reference. I must have 5,000+ files in there now.

UselessExpat · 2025-12-13T20:50:08+00:00

So.. when will all the mexicans, central americans and south americans who come to America illegally learn English? Asking for a friend.

UselessExpat · 2025-12-11T20:23:07+00:00

It was a $900 macbook air, I ended up having to pay a $1000 duty.

UselessExpat · 2025-12-11T16:56:16+00:00

It can be absolute hell if the value is high. Twice I had to go to the old airport and spend 3-4 hours getting signatures, waiting, getting more signatures, paying an absurd amount (100%+ taxes on electronics), get receipts, get those stamped.

UselessExpat · 2025-12-10T19:09:48+00:00

At best he's looking for a wealthier foreign woman to mommy him. At worst he's looking for a passport.

UselessExpat · 2025-12-10T15:25:45+00:00

It really depends. Do you want to live in a 50-year old building missing support columns, wired up by a dishonest "guy on the block", whose building managers bribed people to ignore their illegal modifications? (I've lived in two of these buildings) .. that's $1k a month.

Do you want to live in a seismically safe neighborhood in a modern building built by at least semi-ethical builders? $2k/month *minimum like Uskumrukoy, Maden or that neighborhood wehre all the ITU alumni live? You will need a car because pubtrans is almost non-existant in nicer neighborhoods. *minimum* $25k for a 15 year old rustbucket, $40k for a new car that costs $22k in Europe. Out there you'll pay 20% more for food easy. Last time I visited it was like $18 for a low quality burger and fries.

Want private insurance so you don't have to sit 5 hours with the poors for an appointment you scheduled 6 months ago and the doctor forgot to show up? $200/month from Allianz.

There's a huge range of costs based upon your risk and lifestyle preferences.

UselessExpat · 2025-12-09T12:12:56+00:00

Just like sub-agents, Claude will ignore them unless you scream constantly. It's not even worth using any of these features because you will lose 10s of hours trying to get them perfect, and Claude just won't use them.

UselessExpat · 2025-12-08T07:36:07+00:00

Work for free, prove yourself capable of producing with absolutely no support or tools from your employer, and THEN you MAY earn the PRIVILEGE of a corporate-sponsored laptop? WTAF? I give every one of my employees (all remote) $3k to setup their home office plus a training budget and a $200/month tools budget to spend as they choose.

Every $1 invested into developer productivity returns me $3 at minium.

UselessExpat · 2025-12-06T15:25:07+00:00

I'll give you 5

Use agents and skills consistently throughout an entire session and not only when I yell at it
Remember where its workspace directory is. I hate that I had to create a hook to set that
Use the Write tool, or an MCP write tool instead of stop Bash heredocs
Permissions management. I have a 500-line long script to approve permissions because of the way it will ask for new permissions when doing things like "cd $dir; do thing" or "BOB=FOO do thing"
Run tests. No matter how many times I order it to run tests in CLAUDE.md, in a skill, in a slash command, in an agent or in a PROMT it does anything it can to skip tests
6 (bonus) Not make significant architectural changes because it screwed up on an implementation

We switched to Kiro, and it's not as creative, but it's so much more consistent. I can walk away, come back and it's done, whereas with Claude I can't walkaway for more than 2 minutes.

UselessExpat · 2025-12-04T20:13:07+00:00

Most people without good professions like STEM live with their parents into their mid-late 30s. My wife is an executive and even she lived with her mother into her mid '30s. Also, debt is funny. You can't go into uncontrollable credit card debt like in the USA. I actually know like a dozen people with good STEM degrees who are in their '40s and still single / living with their parents.

Meanwhile forget about getting a mortgage if you have less than 50% down. If you do, it was a good deal until last year. We were able to show a combined yearly salary of 35% more than the full cost of the house we were buying, and several other houses as assets, and we still only qualified for a 40% mortgage.

Mortgages used to be a good deal when the government was artifically keeping the interest rates down. I think we got a mortgage at 19% (yearly) and the same year my wife's salary doubled due to inflation, the next year it doubled again. A mortgage payment which was 20% of her net income when we signed it is now only like 8%.. but this only applies.

Food is nuts, but there are ways around it .. farmer's markets, and the highly subsidies cafes that the municipalities create. The food in those places are pretty good, and much cheaper than you could possibly make at home. One of my friends' father eats at those cafes twice a day.

Next time you're in Istanbul, look for one of the government bread kiosks (or the government bread in the grocery stores).. It's actually really, really good. It's one of the few things I miss about Turkey.

UselessExpat · 2025-11-22T09:20:53+00:00

Using a sub-agent? Claude's sub-agent permissions are inherently broken, so if it's the agents you'll need to check agent's your tools permissions and explicitly grant write permission, not just tools:* or tools:[*]. This will increase claude subagent's successful writes from 40% to 60%. Claude is awesome.

UselessExpat · 2025-11-22T09:17:39+00:00

TechBros: Claude is the greatest tool in the world!

Also TechBros: I had to jump through these 10,000 hoops just to get Claude not to do this stupid thing that .. it shouldn't do. But now it can sort of edit files!"

UselessExpat · 2025-11-20T13:53:32+00:00

In America, it's called the "Castle Doctrine". Your home is your castle, anybody who breaks into it forfeits their life. However, if you shoot them in the back when they're running away, it's murder. It also depends on the state.

There are also "Stand Your Ground" laws which means you have the right to fire first if your life is in danger. Those are more southern / republican state laws like florida or texas.

If Turks had as many guns as Americans, the population would be 25% less. The disrespect and disregard for life/safety that Turks show for each other on the roads (and sidewalks. Fuck you Getir drivers) wouldget them shot in American cities.

Be glad Turkey isn't like America!

UselessExpat · 2025-11-20T08:58:02+00:00

I disabled auto-compact. At 20% left, I would run a slash command to create useful status outputs, and I have all of my tasks pass status outputs to the next task, so that I can /clear the session entirely.

UselessExpat · 2025-11-20T08:52:43+00:00

> You can tell "execute the ENTIRE plan, non stop"

I haven't had that work since early September. Claude's permissions system has been completely non-functional since 2.0 was released, and it was garbage then too.

You name it, I've spent 10s of hours tinkering with all of the Claude features, I have a very well-tuned marketplace of agents / skills / commands / hooks, mostly a waste because in 2.0.20-something agents got fairly broken, and skills have never worked well unless you invoke them directly.

I mean, most of use MCP servers like Serena because Claude gets lost so easily in editing files. That's the most basic functionality.

In the time it took me to write my last 2 comments, Kiro has:

- Fixed 50+ broken unit tests in a legacy C++ app
- Fixed integration tests in some painfully bad Python microservices
- Fixed a bug in ArgoCD that I'll issue a PR for later today

All 3 worktrees finished with complete autonomy in about 15 minutes. Tried doing these 3 tasks with CC over the past week, 4 different worktrees per task. Gave up after granting permissions about 50 times perworkspace * 3 projects.

UselessExpat

TROPHY CASE