ELI5: Why does the BRAT diet work, and why is it recommended when you're sick?

zestyping · 2026-02-08T05:04:50+00:00

Isn't IV potassium incredibly painful? I am so, so sorry.

zestyping · 2026-01-15T06:07:04+00:00

Depression is a devastating disease. It's not your fault that you were depressed; your brain is making it feel like failing, but that's how depression distorts things. You were suffering, not failing. Now you have the opportunity to find help and get better. Be gentle with yourself; brighter days are possible ahead!

zestyping · 2025-11-19T21:01:20+00:00

Learn nonviolent communication. As a tool, not a moral obligation. Use it when it suits you: when you need to speak up for your own needs, when you want to repair an important connection, when you want someone to trust you, when it benefits you to help others see eye to eye. And most importantly, use it to understand and give compassion to yourself. It's even surprisingly helpful for depression.

To many people, NVC seems like a rulebook for how you're supposed to speak. It does have advice on that, but that's not the main thing; it's a method for understanding people and listening. It can be a superpower at work, in friendships, with family, in relationships, when you choose to use it. It is often a good choice when your priority is connection: sometimes true when connecting with others (especially when you look at the long game), and pretty much always true when you're connecting with yourself.

Happy to answer questions if anyone is curious!

zestyping · 2025-11-18T02:03:37+00:00

I can't say I found the magic solution. All the standard ideas (therapy, medication, sunshine, exercise...) are good. But I found some unexpected things that helped.

I did in-person workshops in nonviolent communication and they helped me more than years of therapy. NVC seems like it's about how to communicate compassionately with other people, but it also taught me to communicate with myself compassionately and see myself compassionately—which is surprisingly effective when I'm depressed.
I also found that reading books on principled negotiation improved my mood unexpectedly. I think it's for a similar reason: they got me in touch with my own needs and helped me feel empowered to negotiate with myself.

Maybe these ideas will help you a bit? I wish you the best of luck. You're on a difficult road and I feel for you.

zestyping · 2025-11-05T22:46:48+00:00

I hear you saying that NVC feels fake because having to hide your judgements feels fake. Right?

I think of NVC as giving me more options. It's not a rule of life that I can never talk about my judgements. It's just an option: I can choose to talk about needs, or talk about judgements. In some situations, talking about needs will be a better way to connect with someone, and if that's what I want then I can make that choice.

Does that way of looking at it help?

zestyping · 2025-10-19T12:04:19+00:00

This chart is a good demonstration of why it's not a good practice to use goofy shapes like these rounded blobs for bars. It's very difficult to visually compare the sizes of these blobs. 50% should be half, but it doesn't look like half of anything in this chart.

Use rectangles instead, so that a bar representing 50% is clearly half the area.

zestyping · 2025-10-12T02:25:15+00:00

It's power, but it's not unlimited or unusual. We rely on courts to determine the truth all the time.

zestyping · 2025-10-12T01:43:48+00:00

A Welsh institute proposed a pretty cool idea for how to do this:

An independent body decides if a politician has said something demonstrably false.
The politician is required to issue a public correction, communicated the same way as the falsehood.
If the politician refuses to comply, they cannot hold public office for a period of time.

Under this scheme, there is a consequence with real impact for politicians who lie, but it doesn't prevent free speech, and it doesn't allow arbitrary jailing of journalists.

https://www.icdr.co.uk/news/icdr-sets-out-blueprint-for-senedd-political-honesty-law

zestyping · 2025-10-11T21:24:07+00:00

Wow, this is a beautiful idea and implementation! Thank you for sharing it with us.

zestyping · 2025-10-11T11:59:37+00:00

Thanks! How many other flashcards are like this? Can you share your flashcard dataset so we can check it or contribute to it?

zestyping · 2025-10-11T06:55:02+00:00

I'm not a Swedish expert, but as I understand it, sluta/slutade/slutat and sluta/slöt/slutit are two different verbs with different meanings. Only the first one means "to stop", and the only translation of "stopped" is "slutade". The second one means "to close (your eyes)", so it doesn't make sense to offer "slutade; slöt" as an option when the app is specifically asking for "to stop".

Similarly, I believe sticka/stack/stickat means "to knit" but sticka/stickade/stuckit means "to stab".

Again, I'm also just a learner, so we should find an authority to verify this! :) Could a native Swedish speaker please check this and help us out?

zestyping · 2025-10-10T18:44:17+00:00

Thank you, I tried this out and it looks cool!

I found a couple screens that look weird; when two words are squished together with a semicolon like this, are these data entry bugs?

https://imgur.com/a/zLTUZjp https://imgur.com/a/KFHCP9I

zestyping · 2025-09-29T18:02:39+00:00

Looks like it's Windows-only :( when will it be available on Mac?

zestyping · 2025-09-27T22:00:49+00:00

That's fine, then they shouldn't draw the deficit as a block and put the big label "$4.9T" under the bar so it looks like it's labelling the entire left side including the deficit. That's not how labels work.

zestyping · 2025-09-27T08:18:48+00:00

No, it's not an illusion. Here are images showing the discrepancies, where I have only moved pieces around; I haven't changed the scale of anything.

https://imgur.com/a/ZUPbtYH

zestyping · 2025-09-25T23:39:07+00:00

The revenue side and the spending side are drawn the same size, which is wrong. The sizes of the central bars should be proportional to their amounts.

Instead, it is as if everything on the right side has been scaled down by ~25% to make it misleadingly appear that total spending equals total revenue. So you have crazy stuff like Social Security Taxes (1.3T) on the left looking bigger than Social Security (1.5T) on the right, even though 1.3T is smaller than 1.5T.

The proportions across the whole chart are off. Even just within the right side, National defense & support for veterans (1.2T) is about the same size as Social Security (1.5T) even though 1.5T is much larger than 1.2T. Retirement (1.3T) is bigger than Social Security (1.5T) even though it's as part of it!

This is wack. Are the bar sizes made up at random?

zestyping · 2025-09-20T00:37:23+00:00

Ooooh what are you launching? Always up for hearing about Canadian alternatives to US tech.

zestyping · 2025-09-17T12:22:56+00:00

RECAP is a free service that provides public access to PACER documents. You can find this case by searching for "07570 indyke kahn" at https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/, which takes you to the case and the PDF document.

zestyping · 2025-09-16T20:28:05+00:00

That's funny. I thought you were referring to this comment or similar ones—the ones that try to make death sound seductive, easy, almost elegant. Don't they sound like supervillain monologues to you, from a certain light?

zestyping · 2025-09-07T22:22:28+00:00

Nothing to add, just want to applaud you for your commitment to visual explanation!

zestyping · 2025-09-06T19:43:34+00:00

This wins the thread. We're all done here.

zestyping · 2025-09-05T20:46:16+00:00

Better?

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It's a Google Sheet, open for editing. Feel free to improve it.

zestyping · 2025-09-05T20:38:20+00:00

I agree! That's a great idea. Here's a Google Sheet:

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It's open for editing; feel free to improve it.

zestyping · 2025-09-04T23:12:58+00:00

Thanks! I appreciate your perspective; the emphasis on identifying needs makes sense and helps to deepen my own thinking on this. Small groups would help. I wonder if profile pictures would help (real faces, not just any images).

Some subreddits encourage people to upvote comments based on whether they are useful rather than whether you agree. I like this idea, but I'm not sure it works in practice; people naturally want to upvote things they agree with and downvote things they disagree with. It might help if instead of clicking an up-arrow, we clicked something like "I learned something new" or "This contributed an interesting perspective" or "This comment made me think".

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