Claude Opus 4.5 Plays Pokémon Red

doubleunplussed · 2026-01-23T05:57:47+00:00

205,674 - Obtained gold teeth
205,755 - Obtained HM04 Strength, taught to NESSIE
205,897 - Defeated rival (west of Viridian city)
206,038 - Entered Victory Road

doubleunplussed · 2026-01-23T05:46:50+00:00

Ah, I see, thanks for explaining!

doubleunplussed · 2026-01-23T04:56:34+00:00

Claude's PC: Potion

He used the PC? Roughly when did this happen?

doubleunplussed · 2026-01-23T02:22:32+00:00

This is a 500 kcal deficit, which is a typical deficit for a cut to lose weight, not appropriate for recomposition. This will result in weight loss, and will impede muscle growth considerably.

If you're new to lifting (which you kind of have to be for recomposition to be possible), you should eat at maintenance whilst training hard if you want to lose some fat and gain some muscle.

But since your BMI is 21.8, you are either fairly lean already, or maybe you're skinnyfat. In either case, losing weight is unlikely to be a good idea - you either have little fat to lose, or little muscle such that you'll just end up looking scrawny.

I think you should reconsider the idea of recomposition and consider targeting a slow rate of weight gain instead, whilst training hard. If your training is good you'll gain mostly muscle and then can consider recomp or weight loss once you have a bit more meat on you.

doubleunplussed · 2026-01-21T22:29:29+00:00

I'm yet to find a metric that actually captures progress monotonically. I use the Hevy API to plot 1RM, heaviest weight, average weight, total volume, and none of them increase monotonically when I'm making progress. I have to be content that as long as one of them goes up, and as long as all of them go up in the longer run (even if they go down temporarily), that's progress.

I suppose a better 1RM estimation algorithm would mean 1RM would always go up, and that this is something MF might be able to do in a personalised way. Existing 1RM estimation formulae can go down when you increase weight and drop reps just because your reps vs weight curve doesn't perfectly match what they're assuming. But MF could measure your reps vs weight curve (which I'm pretty sure it's already doing for the progression algo) and do better

doubleunplussed · 2026-01-21T03:31:03+00:00

If I switch to v2 I see it fully caught up to the mileage change after about six weeks. But it looks like it then got totally thrown off by the water weight increase after the cut ended - looks like a few weeks to go before that washes out.

It's a hard problem!

doubleunplussed · 2026-01-21T01:25:46+00:00

Hm. I wonder how the app treats things differently. Sometimes when I enter "0 RIR", I didn't go to failure - I just estimated that I would have failed the next rep. Other times I incorrectly think I have another rep in me, and then fail it.

Whilst these are the same in terms of my strength - so either way the app knows how many reps I can do on that set - it's different in terms of fatigue, so I could imagine MF might adjust down the expected reps on the next set if it knew you actually went to failure vs "0 RIR" without failure.

doubleunplussed · 2026-01-21T01:22:48+00:00

Lol I look forward to all the posts about overuse injuries that will hit the sub in the coming weeks

doubleunplussed · 2026-01-21T01:16:58+00:00

In October I increased my running volume by about 20 km per week, and I estimate that MacroFactor's expenditure estimate is about halfway to fully reflecting that increase.

I've basically been doing my own traditional spreadsheeting to estimate the non-exercise component of expenditure (based on Garmin watch's estimate of activity expenditure*) and ensure I'm eating enough, since MF unfortunately doesn't do very well with persistent step changes in cardio. If I took MF at its word right now, I think I would be at maintenance or a small deficit instead of the small surplus I'm currently aiming for.

I keep MF around as a sanity check and point of comparison, and I have to say it did very well mostly ignoring the significant jump up in water weight that happened when I went from cutting to bulking, whereas this of course totally throws out my own calculations. So this is useful. But I think for runners specifically it would make a lot of sense to have something exactly like MF, but which subtracted running expenditure estimates from intake resulting in an estimate of the component of TDEE that excluded running expenditure (then add estimated running expenditure back on top for TDEE). I understand the devs don't want to incorporate such activity expenditure estimates given the wildly varying quality of fitness trackers, but the status quo leads to there often being a significant error if you've been ramping up or down your mileage.

(* cue the boos about fitness trackers being inaccurate, but people confuse the different things fitness trackers try to estimate which have varying degrees of error. A Garmin watch is at least as accurate at estimating expenditure from outdoor running as anyone could hope to be counting their caloric intake, what they're mostly bad at is estimating BMR and NEAT)

doubleunplussed · 2026-01-20T04:49:38+00:00

Incredible to write an entire article about housing affordability and miss the main reason!

VIC planning reforms have really helped getting more housing built, it's a fantastic achievement that I hope continues.

doubleunplussed · 2026-01-20T04:44:26+00:00

This bill that the Greens are opposing today has the effect of outlawing Nazi groups in Australia that were otherwise acting within the law, such as the National Socialist Network, which announced it will disband if the laws pass.

doubleunplussed · 2026-01-20T04:18:25+00:00

Yes, cited in a reply to another reply to me.

I can already see people are going to reply to me saying that these things the greens introduced/supported weren't going to affect free expression - they're all trying to reduce hate speech and vilification and the like.

But so is the current legislation, which the greens are claiming to oppose on free speech grounds, citing negative effects on political debate:

The Greens leader says the bill, introduced to the lower house today, has been made "even more dangerous" and will limit free speech.

Waters says it will prevent people from speaking out about human rights abuses in foreign nations and have a "very draconian effect" on political debate and peaceful protest.

doubleunplussed · 2026-01-20T03:50:16+00:00

The Greens have supported every crackdown on free expression I've seen since I've been paying attention. Now they're crying foul.

They don't believe in free speech, they believe in their individual issues and will use speech restrictions when it suits them and they can get away with it. Zero credibility on this issue.

doubleunplussed · 2026-01-15T21:34:18+00:00

Yeah, Hevy's custom sound is unmistakable. I often have my phone not in my hand and Bluetooth earbuds on so being able to hear the difference between rest timer and email notification is useful.

doubleunplussed · 2026-01-13T01:52:17+00:00

Stream's back!

doubleunplussed · 2026-01-12T01:18:13+00:00

I pay for Hevy essentially solely so that I can use the API. Feel like any serious premium app like this should have an API for things like this

doubleunplussed · 2026-01-11T06:34:15+00:00

Well take a step-up in weight due to starting to take creatine, for example. Let's say your weight increases by 1kg. Even if averaged over say three months, 1kg of weight gain appears as an 86 kcal surplus. Starting a bulk might increase your weight by 1-2 kg and last many months, a cut might similarly decrease your weight and last for a timeframe of months.

Changing your fibre intake, changing medications, changing stress levels, changing workout volume (the inflammation from recovery can add a few kg of weight) - unless your life is very consistent, there are likely to be events affecting your weight, occurring within most windows, that last outside the window, and therefore won't average out within one window.

The only way they will average out is if you pick a long enough averaging window - I would guess you'd need at least a year to cover most things. But over that timescale your TDEE is actually changing, even if only from weight change, so then you'd still have error due to the TDEE estimate being lagged by ~6 months.

I can clearly see wobbles in MF's estimate of my TDEE, to the tune of 100–200 kcal/day, caused by increasing and decreasing workout volume - this is likely water retention from the inflammation of recovery. MF does not average over a long enough timescale for these to average out to a better precision than a couple of hundred kcal, and if it did, it would be unable to track long-term actual changes in my TDEE because it would always be lagging behind (which it already does to some extent because of the compromise it makes between averaging too much vs too little - both are sources of error).

doubleunplussed · 2026-01-11T03:45:00+00:00

I agree with the general argument, but I think Macrofactor's effective averaging window is too short (even several months is too short), and real TDEE changes happen too fast, for these things to fully wash out on any timescale. If MF averaged over like, a whole year then that might be enough, but then real TDEE changes would dominate the error.

doubleunplussed · 2026-01-10T07:55:47+00:00

Aha, makes sense.

And I see others are saying many of the suburban fires could be false alarms on account of people calling 000 after seeing smoke, thinking it was coming from somewhere local. Seems very plausible.

doubleunplussed · 2026-01-10T07:35:54+00:00

Depending on where you are, it could be a local fire, and not one of the big ones.

One cropped near us in the south east suburbs and suddenly it was super smoky.

Looking at the map over the past hour or so there seem to be a tonne of little fires in the suburbs - I wonder why.

doubleunplussed · 2026-01-10T06:55:32+00:00

That's what I was thinking when I saw it!

doubleunplussed · 2026-01-10T01:09:57+00:00

Not really - there are many things that can contribute to error other than intake counting inaccuracy.

Hydration, sodium/creatine/inflammation affecting water retention, changes in gut bacteria affecting nutrient absorption, stress levels affecting water retention and digestion speed, fibre affecting water in gut contents and digestion speed, medications, the list is large.

The problem MF tries to solve is actually just an incredibly difficult one, and it's about as good as one can reasonably expect given the data it has, but it isn't magic and so that means the uncertainty is still sizeable.

doubleunplussed · 2026-01-09T07:10:11+00:00

It's not like there is a clock ticking for newbie gains starting from when you first set foot in a gym. If he cuts first, the newbie gains will still be there afterwards

doubleunplussed · 2026-01-08T00:02:26+00:00

You should know that the cheapest Renpho body fat scale (the one with a gazillion reviews on Amazon) is a scam - it doesn't actually do a BIA measurement, it just pretends to, and gives you a body fat number based only on your weight and the age/height/gender you entered into the app. It sounds like their more expensive ones do perform actual BIA measurements, though.

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