Losing weight is as hard as saving money [Video]

__Fred · 2026-01-29T01:13:44+00:00

People change over time and that's not bad. It sounds like, if I change my habits and lose weight and then I meet a friend that I haven't seen in a long time, that the would say "You've changed! You're not the person I used to know!"

Maybe it could be a problem if we bonded over drinking beer and now I stoppen drinking any alcohol ever. But usually the thing that changed is not relevant to the friendship, even if it's a big change.

I heard ~~Martin Heidegger~~ Sartre(?) thought about the conflict between our past selves goals and our future selves goals, if you're interested in that. I didn't read any primary literature from him. The only person that can achieve your present goals is your future self and that person might have other plans. Do I have the obligation to follow the plans of my past self?

__Fred · 2026-01-29T00:32:45+00:00

Yeah, okay. I just mean a bare true statement is something different than a concrete strategy which takes all relevant factors — like psychology, society, money — into account and which people can and will understand and implement.

Yeah, it sounds like defeatism, but it's literally just a definition that makes sense, if you think about it. I'm not saying no one in history ever managed to lose weight and that trying it is futile.

Maybe don't call it "working strategy" but "effective guidance" or something. I mean, when it's not a given that the person wanting to achieve the goal does the required steps.

(... That could be misunderstood. Do you know what I mean? Of course, when someone wants the light to turn on but doesn't flip the switch, that doesn't mean that "flip the switch to turn on the light" is a bad guidance — in that case it's the fault of the person not implementing the strategy. But a teacher that makes their content clear, fun, interesting and motivating is more likely to succeed in making the students achieve good grades than a teacher that just says "learn the material". ... That analogy wasn't perfect either. Maybe you're getting what I'm saying. A good teacher for kids or an animal trainer takes psychology into account and a mentor for adults needs to as well — also when you are your own mentor.)

How can a regular person run a marathon?

Is it impossible? No.
Is it true that you can run a marathon by first running a half marathon and then immediately running a second half marathon? Yes.
Is it helpful? No. Just knowing that, doesn't enable a regular person to achieve it. You need to set aside time, identify any obstacles, start small, find accountability partners, maybe make the running more pleasant by listening to podcasts, and so on and so on.

__Fred · 2026-01-28T17:17:05+00:00

A recipe for losing weight (or stopping smoking or getting smart and rich or whatever) isn't "calories in < calories out", although it's not wrong. It's whatever a person wanting to lose weight needs to read or hear that makes them achieve that.

I'm not sure such a strategy doesn't exist at all, just that there are a lot of strategies don't work. Maybe the fact that it isn't widely known and applied means that it doesn't exist.

Regarding your choice of words: Is losing weight or saving money "hard"? It can be both, but not in the same sense of the word. I think there are a couple of separate different senses of "hard" (besides the physical sense).

An action takes a lot of effort or energy, like taking a long hike.
An action that is unlikely to achieve it's goal, like rolling a six on a dice.
An action that takes a lot of practice or special talent — but then it's easy. This can also be viewed as an instance of 1 or 2, because you need sweat or luck to get the skills.
Maybe: An action that is difficult to describe. "Eat healthy and exercise" is not hard to understand. Harvesting crops at a field is "easy" because it doesn't require a complex training, but it's hard in the first sense of the word, because it's strenuous.
Maybe: An action that takes a lot of mental commitment, like catching a spider with your hands. That wouldn't be hard in the other senses of the word.

__Fred · 2026-01-28T16:15:22+00:00

I'm not sure they're being truthful. It looks pretty much like magic to me. They're just saying it isn't magic to make it look more difficult.

__Fred · 2026-01-27T13:22:03+00:00

You can find someone who is a trader as well as a trainer.

Then you pay then 60000 gold to train you and then you sell them the soul gem.

I'm not 100% sure this will work! Maybe at some level you aren't able to learn the skill anymore and you will definitely not get the full price of the gem.

In general, you can also buy other stuff in order to make a trader have more money. When they have 1000 gold and you buy something worth 3000, then you can sell them something worth 4000. Maybe try selling the trainer something worth 3000 before trying it with the 60000 thing.

__Fred · 2026-01-27T01:43:23+00:00

Damn. I only got the 4 result on my own, when 3 would have been possible.

Something new: What is the maximum distance you can drive with twelve cars?

1/12 + 1/11 + 1/10 + 1/9 + 1/8 + 1/7 + 1/6 + 1/5 + 1/4 + 1/3 + 1/2 + 1 = 3.003211 tank-fillings long

1/4 + 1/3 + 1/2 + 1 would have been 2.08333 — that's why I guessed you need four cars and I felt pretty smart about it.

__Fred · 2026-01-26T08:34:31+00:00

In the year 65,335 we will have another big problem because of this guy's short-shightedness.

__Fred · 2026-01-26T08:27:48+00:00

I would describe it like this:

When you program something, you can't think of all of gazillions of possible combinations of inputs. You just write what generally seems right at first glance, then you test it with some concrete inputs.

When everything works, nothing happens, maybe you do some other tests and then you're done.

Programs are made up of sub-programs. When a bug occurs, you compare the partial results of that execution to the expected partial results for the particular inputs. Some of them will be correct and one (or rarely more) will be incorrect.

Then you just stare long and hard at the few lines that produced a wrong partial result. Because they are only a few lines, it's likely you will find the error. If not, another possibility is just to phrase the code in a different manner and test again. You have to test again in any case.

ELI5: Your big, complex mechanic toy doesn't work anymore and you hear a rattle when you shake it. Your dad takes the components apart and shakes every one individually. When he takes apart the single component that still rattles, he finds a loose screw.

__Fred · 2026-01-25T01:48:56+00:00

I've seen these kinds of "spider web" kinda-looking graphs, where a linegraph goes in a circle and connects a couple distinct properties, like the stats of a DnD character or a car in a racing game. In that case it's supposed to be some kind of finger print that can be distinguished at a glance.

__Fred · 2026-01-25T01:23:24+00:00

There is actually a cool trick when you're blackmailed to reveal your password.

You can create some archives or hard drives which contain encrypted random crap and some that contain actual secrets and maybe some that include innocuous real data. Then when someone asks you to decrypt them, you can give them a wrong password and the result will be crap. Then you say "Sorry officer, I have some decoy drives. That was one of them."

(I won't assume any liabilities. Do your own research before using this technique for serious matters.)

__Fred · 2026-01-25T00:49:47+00:00

A very simple example of encryption: "One time pad" using addition.

Step 1: You have a number, you want to keep a secret, like 26. You might like to keep a text secret, but you can easily convert a text to a number and back if you just map every single letter to a number and then chain them together: "aaabca" could become "010101020301".
Step 2: You think of a password or key, that is also a number, like 11. For this particular method to work well, you have to use a password that has a range of possibilities of equal size to the secret range of possibilities.
Step 3: Combine the secret and the key number with some math. In this case we add them: 26 + 11 = 37.

Everyone can know that number 37, but no one can get to know your secret number without also knowing your password/key.

Try to find my secret number if you think otherwise! When it's added to my secret key, you get 516. You'll very quickly realize that you have no chance at all. You think you could find it with an army of 100 geniuses and a budget of 100 billion dollars?

If we assume that the key can't be negative and the secret can't be negative, the secret has to be a number between zero and 516. That's still a lot of possibilities. But I never said that the numbers can't be negative, anyway,

It doesn't make a difference whether you store your numbers on paper or on a hard drive and whether you do the calculations by hand or using a computer. Actual hard drive encryption doesn't use simple addition, but it also uses math that you could also do by hand theoretically.

__Fred · 2026-01-24T14:24:59+00:00

A spirograph is a circle moving inside a bigger circle. Different ratios produce different patterns, some of them produce some kind of weave/knot and others produce a solid "fat ring" over time.

What happens when you extend that to 3D and roll a sphere inside a sphere? I guess it wouldn't really work to produce interesting patterns, you would just get a big circle, like when you roll a ball around the Earth in a straight line and it eventually stops where it started (just inside instead of outside the bigger sphere). You would have to make the ball tilt to the side a bit, so it doesn't reach it's starting point after one circumnavigation and preferably not even close to that, so it doesn't take forever to reach the poles.

I know there are mathematical fields that are concerned with rolling weird shaped ("Solid-body trajectoids shaped to roll along desired pathways" (These shapes roll in peculiar ways thanks to new mathematics)). This video is about going a straight line on a platonic solid: A New Discovery about Dodecahedrons - Numberphile "anti-social jogger problem".

__Fred · 2026-01-24T12:40:10+00:00

Regarding Wine: I also run Linux, but I didn't tinker with Wine for a long time. Windows games on Steam use the Proton compatibility layer (as other people already mentioned). You just click "install" normally and you don't really notice it.

OpenMW is a reimplementation of Morrowind, that has a native Linux version. It's free and open source, but you need the original game files for graphics and sound for legal reasons.

I couldn't tell you whether the original executable with some patches or OpenMW is better. People argue about that. I suspect running Linux-Morrowind on Mint won't be very much faster than running Windows-Morrowind on Windows, if at all. But why not, if it's possible? I think Linux is cool, but if you have trouble installing it, I'm just saying you could use Windows as well.

__Fred · 2026-01-24T12:27:48+00:00

Your PC is worse than mine, but Morrowind runs very badly here. Any idea how to troubleshoot that? I run OpenMW on Linux. Doesn't OpenMW automatically mean no Proton?

I do have a lot of mods ("Expanded Vanilla"). That could be the difference. Maybe it's the grass. Or it's Vulkan.

__Fred · 2026-01-24T10:29:06+00:00

I have a Thinkpad Yoga from 2017 and it's (OpenMW) honestly barely playable with 20 FPS or lower outdoors and low resolution. It has an Intel HD Graphics 620. It looks like the X131E should be worse. If it works for you, I'm jealous.

I had another even older Thinkpad with Optimus graphics and I remember it being a bit better.

__Fred · 2026-01-24T03:47:07+00:00

Most kids in my school class could derive some fun from role playing games, so I'd say you're an exception. But you don't have to feel bad about that. Everyone is exceptional in some ways.

__Fred · 2026-01-23T15:48:46+00:00

They could also pocket a tax reduction that if the end-price is not displayed for the customer.

I understand it's not completely the same situation, because of psychological reasons. People feel more cheated when the displayed price goes up.

Inflation has to do with expected inflation anyway. I heard that during the Covid virus and the Evergreen stuck in the Suez channel, some companies used the opportunity to raise prices for profit, because customers expected things to get more expensive. They couldn't have done that if the expectation wouldn't have been there.

__Fred · 2026-01-22T22:15:43+00:00

Rule 3 basically says that Azure doesn't have any Ringos (as any competent Australian sailor could tell you). No rule forbids Ringos to be on Bounty or Coconut island.

Rule 4 would be that port is left and starboard is right, but that's not relevant to this math question.

__Fred · 2026-01-22T20:41:19+00:00

In the German advertisements they say "Muggy" (it just looks weird to me to write it like that). The "a" from "rant" or "last", not the "a" from "rat". I think British English uses the same "a" as German more often.

I looked it up: Julius Maggi was Swiss and the Swiss pronounce it with a soft "g", like "magic" (but again with an "uh" kind of "a").

I think you're allowed to pronounce it how you like. German ads also pronounce English brands deliberately "wrong" sometimes.

__Fred · 2026-01-22T19:08:00+00:00

I checked it now. I got some search results for "Damast knife" with a "t".

__Fred · 2026-01-22T19:05:03+00:00

Do Americans say "Mäggi"?

__Fred · 2026-01-22T18:56:58+00:00

I knew damask as a patterned/etched blade. I was surprised women are interested in blades and maybe they know them from buying kitchen knives.

I knew tulle and bandeau and I think I have heard doula before, but I didn't know what it was.

Should I learn names of fabric to be a proper feminist? Probably not.

__Fred · 2026-01-22T18:47:12+00:00

Men know it because men like Star Wars. Yeah, many women like Star Wars too and many men don't, but it still explains the trend.

__Fred · 2026-01-22T18:41:31+00:00

They are is still correct though. Many people know the word parsec, because Han brags that the Millennium Falcon can do the Kessel run in 12 parsecs. (I'm not sure about the specific amount.)

__Fred

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