What about fiction vs non-fiction? Travel vs escapism? This is hugely subjective, and very personal. What one person finds educational could be a navel gazing time wasting pursuit to someone else.
"the "deep" thinking associated with reading has always been a bit of an elitist idea" - precisely. This is all about massaging the categories such that consuming or producing a given type of media in a particular style is "good" and everything else is inadequate.
So if I read a bunch of tech manuals, I'm not a reader because it's not fine literature?
What if I read them as PDFs? What if I print them? Where's the line?
I think we ought to call it something other than simply "reading", because the author seems to be leveraging the dual-meaning of that word to make their point more strongly. But "consuming literature for enjoyment" doesn't come off quite as spicy as pretending that others that don't are illiterate.
Java's RMI sounds similar ... but I haven't really seen much of that used in a robust way. You can only ship serializable state which becomes quite limiting after a while. Shipping the data and reusing the same code across nodes seems to accomplish the same thing with less headaches.
You need to ramp up, of course. Given you're training at an appropriate rate, and you're doing sensible things - you should be fine. By sensible things I mean: short and intense weight training, intense cardio sessions, and not-too-long endurance sessions (eg: < 5h). More endurance is fine, but it can be very fatiguing, especially for the older athlete. If you ramp up to those over time, you needn't worry about "free radicals" (that's an oversimplification).
Recent research highlights a number of things, but what sticks out is that it's important to maintaining muscle mass because we lose a bunch as we get older, and loss of muscle is a leading morbidity factor.
There are (illegal) substances that are highly effective for treating these issues, PTSD, etc. Psilocybin, ibogain, etc. Obviously when administered correctly, with therapy, etc.
It seems to me that cannabis users aren’t seeing the benefits of the aforementioned group. My experience of cannabis stoners is that it’s used to numb out and for escapism, which certainly aligns with what you’re saying.
First off, you're arguing with someone who mostly is in agreement with you.
"please provide a strong argument for this statement, with numbers and sources" - I see you provided me none of what I asked for.
"Or are those not people to you?" - can't you read? Why pull in this kind of derogatory bullshit.
Again, I'm no apologist - far from it - for the crimes of the USA's hegemonic foreign policy and meddling in other country's affairs. But I specifically asked for numbers here. Even including the various conflicts you mentioned - not to mention Vietnam, Cambodia, most of Central and South America - you must have an upper bound for that number.
But you don't seem to mention anything about the actual reality of the CCP and its horrendous toll on human life - mostly to its own citizens. The OP was saying the USA has killed far more than China. That is stupendously, outrageously wrong - Mau is responsible for far more deaths than even the wildest accounting of US atrocities.
"China doesn't go around the world using it's military to force it's will upon people" - it literally has secret police stations in the USA and Canada where they punish Chinese abroad that have disobeyed dictates. WTF are you on about?
"The US is the 4th Reich and the most evil government to ever exist" - for Christ sake. Yes, there is a tremendous amount of really shady shit in the USA's (recent) history, but 4th Reich? Most evil government?? If you really believe that then I'm wasting my time here with someone who's brain is broken.
Ahh, looking at your history of 1-liner comments it's clear you're mostly into low effort trolling. And your comment is so outside the bounds of reason that I must presume you're either wildly uninformed or acting in bad faith.
"Their self serving reasons are irrelevant" - I disagree, we have no idea what kind of filtering or injection of BS has been done to this model.
When you outsource your thinking, you have to be extremely careful that the model doing your thinking is acting in good faith. I have no idea what the CCP may have put into this thing. Not that the US based models aren't suspect, but the CCP certainly doesn't engender trust here. That said, I still use them, but I'm under no illusions that "their self serving reasons are irrelevant".
I see you're getting downvotes, but my intuition strongly aligns with yours. Many of the top minds/academics in (North) America are from overseas, and most of the time that's India and China. And it's been this way for a long time, and it basically makes sense from a numbers perspective. Note that I say this without a particular bias for or against.
So when many of the top minds, publishing most of the top papers in your country got educated in USA but will most likely return to their country of origin - that needs to be factored in to the calculation (especially if tensions increase). At the end of the day I think it's arrogant and wrongheaded to pretend that the USA has dominance in R&D, against China in particular.
That's precisely why it's a good example. It's always taken work to lose weight, just because it's not common doesn't mean it's impossible. The common rhetoric loses that nuance, that's my point.
I didn't say anything else, you're reworking what I'm saying here and distorting my message.
"US intelligence has killed and ruined the lives of far more people than China has" - please provide a strong argument for this statement, with numbers and sources.
I'm no apologist for the US Intelligence and related organizations (not by a very long shot), but that is a very extreme statement to make.
This is in Canada. Our healthcare problems are both well known and well documented, but also strongly resistant to being solved. I do wish we had a system as efficient as what you describe. I’ve personally been on the receiving end of this nonsense. And it is actively costing lives every year. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of course.
No joke, it’s actually a lot easier to schedule an assisted suicide than it is to receive proper treatment in a large number of cases.
No it’s not. It’s just not. If someone doesn’t like what I wrote they can hack it, ignore it, or vibe code up an alternative for their Xerox Alto for all I care.
Privilege has nothing to do with it, nor does respect. Wtf.
I think the dumbing down of things is a closely related yet adjacent issue. And I too absolutely despise the enshitification you’re describing.
I drove a BMW rental recently, and I swear it felt like I was driving around a toy. Such obvious HCI usability concerns, even my wife (non techie) was appalled and able to call out many obvious and stupid design decisions. It felt like a vibe coded car. A vision of the future, no doubt.
That’s the “diets don’t work” line. I’m not denying that most people use AI for the path of least resistance, but I am saying that there’s more potential than just that, and it’s almost entirely overlooked in the broad debate.
The thing is - everyone complains about AI stealing our attention and understanding. But you can just as easily use an LLM as a tool to gain a deeper understanding. It's just the default path for most folks is "Hey clanker, do the thing" rather than "Hello clanker, please tell me about how that thing works".
I've done at least a little of the latter, and it's amazing how underrated it is as an educational tool - especially for the solo individual.
Absolutely - you used to have to control the richness of the fuel mixture manually. You used to have to crank it to start it, manually interact with a clutch to shift gears, etc.
I appreciate the tactile joy of interacting with simple systems like those, but most times I just want to get where I'm going. Freeing my attention from those tasks allows me to pay more attention to the (inattentive) drivers around me, and try my best to not die.
Eventually a computer will handle driving for most of us, and we can lament about all the things we've lost there too. If you zoom out, most of us don't have an in-depth understanding of how an entire city works (power, garbage, sewage, maintenance, public services, politics, etc), and couldn't coordinate the various activities to keep it running if we had to. We live in towers of abstraction.