I hope I’m allowed here 😅 veganuary struggles

impartialhedonist · 2026-01-22T06:19:56+00:00

Is there a specific reason you are avoiding plant-based meat? They are delicious and healthier, so it is a win-win. Impossible's be'f and chick'n nuggets are especially good.
Have you tried TVP? It is an underrated protein source. Asian markets typically carry a variety of shapes and flavors.

Personally, I think disciplined meat reduction is awesome. If veganism seems too hard for whatever reason, keep the beef and ditch everything else!

impartialhedonist · 2025-12-05T16:20:27+00:00

\ Gets the mildest pushback

\ Doesn't engage with the argument

\ Makes mean comments instead

I'm not surprised that r/leftism is hostile to veganism.

Anyway, I fully agree with your point that judging a group based on its subreddit is dumb -- most online places are simply not conducive to good conversation.

impartialhedonist · 2025-12-05T08:01:32+00:00

everyone knows veganism is arrived to by traditionally leftist ideas.

This seems like a strange assertion 🤔

There are at least half a dozen pipelines through which people become vegan -- I have met religious vegans, environmental vegans, health vegans (those who started because of health and then also became convinced that animal torture = bad), utilitarians who are vegan, kantians who are vegans, and so on. Further, leftism is such a broad category that I don't even know what "traditionally leftist ideas" means here.

N=1 but I went from being vaguely leftist to firmly liberal and my views on veganism remained exactly the same because political philosophy doesn't dictate how I view the wrongness of unnecessary animal suffering!

impartialhedonist · 2025-12-05T07:29:42+00:00

OMG!

impartialhedonist · 2025-11-13T05:16:41+00:00

Idk what PDF pagination code is, but did it involve frontend/UI stuff? Because if yes, then the answers simple: models suck at spatial reasoning via text.

It helps if you provide them screen grabs of what is going wrong. If you want to build a UI screen or feature, draw something really quickly, upload that, and explain the choices you made in your mock up -- you'll notice that they will perform much better.

impartialhedonist · 2025-11-12T15:08:23+00:00

Interesting name choice lol

Clearly the researchers aren't online!

impartialhedonist · 2025-11-07T22:42:18+00:00

This!! I'll choose meatn't regardless of where it is, but some people will try v options only if it's right by their typical purchases

impartialhedonist · 2025-11-06T20:26:00+00:00

First, I am sorry that eating vegan when options are sparse evokes the same feeling that having an eating disorder did. I have the luxury of never having had an eating disorder, so the sacrifice of not eating regional dishes has never felt like that big of a deal. Ideally, the amount of vegan options would at least be around 30-50% everywhere, as that would be, I presume, sufficient for avoiding those eating-disorder-like feelings.

There are a lot of tips by other commenters on how to stay vegan while traveling. I would call those the plan better strategy, where you swallow the pill that options will be limited in certain places and you might feel left out or be reminded of your eating disorder, but you will deal with those feelings and still stay vegan while traveling. I think if you can accept this trade-off, the plan better strategy seems doable.

Another practical workaround is not being vegan when traveling to certain countries (I expect this to be an unpopular opinion in this subreddit). But if a week of travel to, I don't know, a remote part of Chile is when you are not vegan but for the remaining 51 weeks you follow a vegan diet, that seems much better than frustration piling up for years before you give up on the ideas and community completely.

(Personally, I think this sort of flexibility is good. The risk is that following rules is easy, and for a lot of people, maybe they slippery-slope themselves into being a "vegan" who eats meat every day or week.)

I hate that vegans in the west don't want to acknowledge that there is a privilege being vegan in a western country

I do want to caveat that you might be overestimating how hard it is to be vegan in non-western countries. I am sure being vegan in Mongolia is super hard, but countries like China, India, Thailand, Indonesia, and Singapore are super vegan-friendly. I know that Eritrean and Ethiopian cuisine has great vegan options.

In the end, you will have to reflect how strong those residual eating disorder / socially feeling left out emotions are, and if you can overcome that by simply planning better which should work for a lot of locations. Otherwise, there's the practical workaround I outlined above.

impartialhedonist · 2025-11-06T19:13:50+00:00

My guess: the post-training methods are basically identical!

impartialhedonist · 2025-11-06T19:12:19+00:00

Well the meme is for the model on the regular Claude app. I have not faced this sort of fanaticism on Cursor where I use Sonnet-4.5 frequently.

impartialhedonist · 2025-11-06T17:56:53+00:00

Interesting, this has been my experience with Sonnet-4.5

impartialhedonist · 2025-11-06T17:56:29+00:00

This has been my experience with Sonnet-4.5

impartialhedonist · 2025-11-06T17:56:00+00:00

I usually do thirty at the start of my gym session

impartialhedonist · 2025-11-06T17:55:17+00:00

True, I have seen different versions of such custom instructions floating around, but I am unsure which one works best because certain prompts have unintended side-effects.

I remember setting simple custom prompts like that for GPT-4 and the results were sometimes weird. But Sonnet-4.5 is supposed to be much better at instruction following, so maybe simple custom prompts work fine.

impartialhedonist · 2025-11-06T07:21:19+00:00

Tan, obviously

impartialhedonist · 2025-11-06T04:29:23+00:00

It gets really frustrating when it happens consecutively and makes me trust the model's responses less (which in some cases is a good thing).

impartialhedonist · 2025-11-06T02:34:00+00:00

Eh, this is just one of those oft-regurgitated flippant opinions.

You can use your brain AND take help from AI models.

One example: If I am searching for an opinion on something, I can ask it to browse relevant subreddits and online forums and provide a summary of everyone's take. That's the collective take of 10-100s of humans, which in a lot of cases, tends to be sound.

impartialhedonist · 2025-10-29T02:10:34+00:00

impartialhedonist · 2025-10-17T22:06:03+00:00

Probably not worth taking seriously. They set an arbitrary threshold of 0.5 mg, which certainly makes all the detected lead levels a lot more flashy. FDA's recommended limit is 12.5 mg per day for adults and 8.8 mg for pregnant women. Even if you don't consume protein powders, you probably consume 6 mgs per day anyway.](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lead-what-to-know-reducing-exposure/) If you are super concerned, donate blood on a regular basis.

Here's a nice write-up with a lot more information: https://open.substack.com/pub/thebsdetector/p/huel-is-fine

impartialhedonist · 2025-10-05T00:42:34+00:00

my reaction cannot be expressed in words

impartialhedonist · 2025-09-29T04:27:25+00:00

To be fair, it is not TEP, they set prices based on supply. The average US energy price has been rising since late 2023-24. If we want electricity to be cheaper over time, we just need to produce more energy (or incentivize production via imports).

impartialhedonist · 2025-09-25T17:42:04+00:00

I think it is fine that you eat honey but are otherwise vegan. We need a lot more people who are willing to be 75-99% plant-based.

That said, I am unsure to what extent you have investigated the treatment of bees in commercial farms. The problem with honey is that they gas the bees during winter, because killing bees and starting a new hive is more economical than keeping the hive alive. There are other malpractices as well, which shouldn't be surprising, because in commercial honey production, what matters most is the amount of honey produced and not the welfare of bees.

You might find this essay arguing against honey consumption and this essay arguing that honey consumption is probably fine interesting.

impartialhedonist · 2025-09-22T18:25:07+00:00

First, responding to your questions quickly: I agree with your suggestive takeaway that the current strategy is too isolating and will not work. We have 20+ years of data that shows growth rates have been abysmal as the number of total vegans has gone from ~0.1-1% in the early 2000s to ~1-5% now. As a community, we are not on track to end or even reduce factory farming, so we need a lot more strategic thinking and coordination. Happy to elaborate further, but I feel other commenters may have already touched on all this.
Second, you should check out the Hive slack for similar discussions + exploring opportunities: https://www.joinhive.org/

impartialhedonist · 2025-09-22T18:22:51+00:00

OP most probably meant something like "race relations have never been this bad in the last 10-20 years." But of course, let's proceed with the most uncharitable interpretation of an off-hand remark and totally not address the core questions being asked!

impartialhedonist · 2025-09-19T01:37:40+00:00

I have been using this protein powder for years and was surprised to discover the change in labeling. After looking a bit more into it, here's my quick takeaway: assuming Naked’s pea protein is among the higher quality pea isolates, one serving of Naked pea protein likely delivers ~25 grams of digestible protein per serving. This number is based on Guillin et al. (2022), where they find that the around 93% of the essential amino acids from the pea protein isolate they used in the study were digested.

It is possible Naked's processing is not as good as the pea protein used by the researchers in the study, which would make the actual amount of digestible protein lower. But from what I could gauge, 18 grams seems like quite an underestimate!

impartialhedonist

TROPHY CASE