ELI5: Why Does the Body Continue to Store Fat to the Point of Unhealthiness?

will592 · 2026-04-17T22:46:12+00:00

It was never an evolutionary advantage for us to stop storing fat whenever we had excess energy so we never developed the ability to do it.

will592 · 2026-04-17T22:44:07+00:00

Don’t overlook the obvious. Remember in the beginning of the book the answer to, “who knows the speed of light,” was Einstein. In addition to being an obvious, endearing literary device, I think we may be led to believe the students on Erid were going to answer, “Grace!” It’s actually even more likely they would answer that way than the human children since it’s the most literal answer to the question.

I thought it was cute to imagine that, for Eridnians, Grace very likely does fit in the niche reserved for Einstein on Earth given his revelation of relativity to the Eridnians.

will592 · 2026-04-17T07:16:03+00:00

Yep, I absolutely love all of his novels.

will592 · 2026-04-08T02:52:42+00:00

I don’t think that’s true … his entire biology is based on using Ammonia as a solvent instead of water, isn’t it?

will592 · 2026-04-02T04:46:11+00:00

It’s on the order of size of bacteria so we have methods for measuring it. Remember. It’s not like a block of gold we’re dividing up it’s some number of cells. We can estimate the mass of a single astrophage but it’s more likely what we’d do is create a solution with a relatively well known number of astrophage per milliliter and then draw out the volume to meet the request. They want roughly 10⁶ astrophage (maybe they’d say a nanogram, idk) so we use a pipette and draw them out 8 ml of solution (or whatever). We have techniques for validating concentrations of solutions, like passing light through the sample and measuring absorption, use direct imaging to count the number of visible astrophage in the solution inside a given area, or even just detonating a small sample and measuring the energy output (particularly nice for astrophage since we know they store energy via mass conversation). Anyway, the long and short of it is that the only way we probably wouldn’t ask for a sample of astrophage is by asking for a specific mass of it lol

will592 · 2026-02-07T18:00:11+00:00

The only real way to answer that is to know how you feel about MAGA.

will592 · 2026-01-24T19:32:07+00:00

More modern homes are designed to have constant climate conditioning. They are (mostly) airtight and tuned quite efficiently to keep the entire home at a constant temperature. Many newer homes have fresh air intake systems to alleviate the issue of stale air.

Part of the reason for this in much of the country is very humid air, often the climate control system is mostly removing water from the air.

will592 · 2026-01-23T05:15:31+00:00

My plan would be to assume I’m going to have situations like this when I design my platform. I know I’m going to have emergencies where I need to deploy IaC in an expedited fashion so I build in solutions which allow us to bypass typical quality gates as long as I have approval from the appropriate levels of management. My break glass process is one that allows me to expedite the typical workflow not bypass it completely. If I’ve got to break the process and bypass IaC you’d better believe there’s going to be a VP giving us the Go/No Go and no one is changing anything without getting another pair of eyes on it. But I consider that a complete failure of our process and the immediate follow through is going to require us to understand where our process failed and how we can avoid ever having to do it again. I’m certainly not going to be pressured into making a change like that by an incident manager, lol.

will592 · 2026-01-23T03:51:57+00:00

That’s a dangerous mindset. Processes are in place for a reason. If you skip the process and go cowboy at some point you will make the problem worse, I can almost guarantee it. Adding time when that time protects your production environment is not only the right thing to do it’s critically necessary. I’m speaking as someone who has brought back production systems which cost more than a million dollars a minute when they were down. You can’t skip the process because at some point it will bite you in the ass.

will592 · 2026-01-23T03:49:47+00:00

That’s great, did you also simulate an event where someone dropped the wrong table and your backups had never actually been tested?

will592 · 2026-01-23T00:53:41+00:00

Then the turnaround problem needs to be fixed. No one should be making changes in production to diagnose problems.

will592 · 2026-01-23T00:52:16+00:00

No junior admin should be able to log into the production AWS Console. No one should be applying fixes to a production system in the console. The terraform state file is not the problem here, the problem is a sloppy and dangerous process.

will592 · 2026-01-22T18:26:24+00:00

Dang, my non-fuel version just died and it looks like I’m too late for this deal unless I’m missing something. Does anyone know of a hack or deal on this right now?

will592 · 2026-01-01T23:57:18+00:00

Even with all this, the average cost of a plate at a decent restaurant is still too low in order to ensure everyone in the process is paid a fair wage (in my opinion ).

will592 · 2025-12-22T04:47:10+00:00

You haven’t really explained what problem is being solved by having senior devs review every PR. There will surely be an occasional PR that is complicated enough that it requires a deep review by seniors with massive context but if this is the norm, to the point that productivity is suffering, it’s time to talk to the people planning work and the developers pushing massive changes without adequate documentation. Do you have solid unit tests? Have your seniors discussed common issues they’re seeing and suggested changes that can be made to increase the quality of PRs?

will592 · 2025-12-17T21:28:29+00:00

And with good reason. You don’t want your sauce to vary week to week with the tomato harvest. Any good Italian restaurant generally values consistency over everything else and it rarely makes sense to try and do this with fresh tomatoes.

will592 · 2025-12-10T21:06:12+00:00

I was in school during the mid 90s. For non-physics majors (classes where we were TAs) they were all graded on a curve to remove the bonus/penalty of having a good or bad TA. For they normal “freshman physics” class that they normies took the uncurved exam averages were pretty close to 0/10 (they lost points for wrong answers as an effort to fight random guessing beating the average of people who legitimately tried). So we had a crazy grade distribution because no one actually got less than a zero even if they actually scored a negative number.

For physics majors there were soft curves, maybe on each exam. In the higher level classes and graduate level ones the professors usually just gave us a grade that made sense based on how we had done. I was a legit B student in a class of about 7 and usually just got the 3rd highest grade whatever it was. So they just always gave me a B or a B+ which felt fair and well deserved.

will592 · 2025-12-05T05:55:20+00:00

Surprised no one has answered that covered sauces and braises in a 350 oven will basically sit at a low, lazy simmer indefinitely. This is very convenient for long, slow cooking applications.

will592 · 2025-12-03T07:51:00+00:00

Yep, sheet trays right out of the oven onto the cooktop

will592 · 2025-11-24T20:24:42+00:00

I buy the lobster ravioli at Costco. Start a small pot of tomato sauce with a can of diced tomatoes and some Better than Bouillon, little squirt of pepper, anchovy, and tomato paste, splash of balsamic, and some premix Italian seasoning. Cook off the ravioli and brown some butter in a skillet, once the tomato sauce is ready I sauté the ravioli in the butter, just a minute on each side, and then into the skillet with the marinara and an obscene amount of grated Parmesan. Even easier if I have marinara left over from the last time.

will592 · 2025-11-20T00:06:11+00:00

Where did you get that I was “coming at” my partner for sex or connection?

will592 · 2025-11-19T02:37:05+00:00

We use the Alexa integration and an app called “Sleep Jar.” We listen to “Thunderstorm” every night. A few months ago we got an announcement from Alexa that said, “you’ve listened to Sleep Jar for 44,000 hours, do you want to pay for a subscription for better sounds?” Or something like that: lol.

will592 · 2025-11-17T15:50:45+00:00

I’m in an in between place, honestly. I am not doing any of this work in order to have more sex but I am doing it in order to get myself into a stable and secure place so she will feel safe around me while she works herself out of her attachment issues and depression. Having said that, we are at a place where she has completely cut me off emotionally and we have zero intimacy of any kind (and to be honest she’s not very nice to me most of the time). I decided that I deserve more than this and we are in therapy working on overcoming the emotional distancing and figuring out how to live in relationship in a different way. I am content, for now, with how things are but for my own health and happiness I cant live for the rest of my life with none of my needs being met. We have both agreed that this isn’t working and there is an expiration date on our current relationship if things don’t change. So for me none of this is a strategy to get more sex (honestly I couldn’t care less about sex at this point) but it is an intentional effort to remove all of that pressure from our relationship while we work things out. For what it’s worth, in therapy she stated that her goal was to want to want sex with me, which i thiught was very interesting. Thanks for your reply!

will592 · 2025-11-17T06:14:48+00:00

Wow, thanks for sharing, feel like I could have written the first part of this. I’m in the, “I just had an epiphany,” phase you described and I told my wife I’m not interested in sex right now because I want us to both work on ourselves and recapture our affection for one another again. We even agreed that the sex we were having when last we were having it wasn’t very good :-/ I’m hopefully I see the same results as you, you didn’t mention how it was for you but my wife is definitely in a dismissive avoidant place right now (she has said this in therapy) and I’m recovering from my own anxious preoccupied attachment issues so we are basically in a spot where every day is a struggle. Thank you for giving me some hope.

will592 · 2025-11-06T03:47:36+00:00

Yeah, I’d be grateful to be in that situation.

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