Have enough supplements to cover your bases and ideally cover it off with whole foods when possible.
To be clear, I found it wasn't a good use of time to spend years experimenting with many supplements that end up working temporarily and then having an antagonist effect on something else that appears months down the line.
The best use of time was taking a holistic approach. Supplements didn't save me - but without some basic supplements I wouldn't have been saved. And I agree, some basis in nutrition is important.
I used to have CFS, but apart from the occasional temporary post viral fatigue that many get, it’s gone. And what is CFS but long term post viral fatigue?
One thing I learned is to ignore figuring out the exact supplements, because you’re playing an impossible balancing game with poor feedback mechanisms. There’s too many inputs.
What helped me was a combination (no one thing can solve it) of therapy (being able to listen to and not suppress emotions), key supplements (magnesium/iron - check out lactoferrin and anaemia of chronic infection), exceptional oral hygiene to reduce inflammation (4 minutes per brush), exceptional gut health (many viruses cause problems with the gut), exercise (eventually), and more…
I never used niacinamide or any of the supplements you used, which shows you that there’s no single approach. I agree that it appears to correlate with an unaddressed infection.
I always wondered if some hidden pattern would be exposed when visualising numbers in unconventional ways in numbers with no known pattern such as Pi or prime numbers. A sort of multi-dimensional rendering that suddenly reveals a hidden pattern.
Well, they buried the lede with this one. Using LLMs were better for some tasks and actually made it worse for others.
The first task was a generalist task ("inside the frontier" as they refer to it), which I'm not surprised has improved performance, as it purposely made to fall into an LLM's areas of strength: research into well-defined areas where you might not have strong domain knowledge. This also is the mainstay of early consultants' work, in which they are generalists in their early careers – usually as business analysts or similar – until they become more valuable and specialise later on.
LLMs are strong in this area of general research because they have generalised a lot of information. But this generalisation is also its weakness. A good way to think about it is it's like a journalist of research. If you've ever read a newspaper, you often think you're getting a lot of insight. However, as soon as you read an article on an area of your specialisation, you realise they've made many flaws with the analysis; they don't understand your subject anywhere near the level you would.
The second task (outside the frontier) required analysis of a spreadsheet, interviews and a more deeply analytical take with evidence to back it up. These are all tasks that LLMs aren't strong at currently. Unsurprisingly, the non-LLM group scored 84.5%, and between 60% and 70.6% for LLM users.
The takeaway should be that LLMs are great for generalised research but less good for specialist analytical tasks.
It's because a lot of engineers are learning to become better plumbers, not better engineers.
Trying new technologies means you're mostly becoming better at using someone else's APIs - this is the path to eventual burn out as the churn continues.
There is a better path - See through the hype. Ask those around you what's the downsides to this approach? And you'll often get blank stares... Why? Because they don't know either - And if they don't know the downsides, they don't really know. They are following the hype curve.
Focus on the fundamental engineering principles and asking better questions - take the bottom-up approach and the reward is you'll find teams that aren't taken by the hype curve so easily.
PS. There are a lot of good technologies that come out, but staying behind the hype curve a little helps you make better judgements over time.
It gets you more of whatever you love doing - even if no one reads it - because you get better at whatever you write about.
If you knew no one would ever read your writing, would you still write it? If yes (the likelihood is no one will read it apart from your future teammates) you'll have found your subject.
It can give you jobs, learning & connections, but it also takes time. Time that can be used for other things that could get you the jobs, learning & connections you want without writing. There's no one way to approach it, you need to find what works for you.
What are the genetic variants? I can’t access the paper, but I assume if anyone can we’d be able to run our DNA results (from 23andme, etc.) through this to see how high we score.
It does actually work on Intel macs - albeit very slowly. I left the process on in the background and my computer kept locking up. Once I realised what was causing the lock ups - I checked the process and it had indexed a very small number of the photos.
I worked at Nokia as a SWE in Berlin when that email dropped into my inbox. A few days later, it reached the press. We mostly thought ok, fine. What’s next?
Before that, we’d been building an app for Nokia N97 handset users, an ever-decreasing market - all the engineers on the team had iPhones.
We thought after that email that the next step would be to go on Android. Sure, Nokia would contract a little as it lost its platform, but the platform wasn’t that valuable. It was the great handsets - software wasn’t Nokia’s forte - the leadership structure just didn’t have the vision to bring it together.
When the meeting rolled around, we all went to a big conference centre at the heart of Berlin to watch the announcement of the future vision. Stephen Elop appeared on a gigantic screen, talked a bit before laying down the new vision. It was going to be Android, right? It made perfect sense, the ecosystem was growing and aligned to Nokia. But, no - Stephen announced that the future of Nokia was with Microsoft.
I walked out of the conference when I heard that - standing outside of the conference hall. I knew two things at that moment. One, there wasn’t going to be a future for Nokia - there was no way Microsoft under Ballmer’s leadership could produce an ecosystem. Secondly, I realised that Elop was still Microsoft’s man - He didn’t make the logical choice that fit with Nokia’s culture - It was going to be a takeover by Microsoft.
The project I was working on soon got a new boss. We thought this would align with the new vision of the company. He took us into a room and projected a picture on the wall of a mountaintop surrounded by clouds. He said, “I know you must feel a bit like this, unclear about the direction, clouded about what the future holds. Don’t worry… I also feel like that, too”.
The new boss did eventually make a decisive decision - the N97 app that we were building was to be kept, but it was going to be focused on an even smaller niche of the market, N97 users who were pro skiers. I left soon after.
The takeover by Microsoft did eventually happen, and the rest is history.
To be clear, I found it wasn't a good use of time to spend years experimenting with many supplements that end up working temporarily and then having an antagonist effect on something else that appears months down the line.
The best use of time was taking a holistic approach. Supplements didn't save me - but without some basic supplements I wouldn't have been saved. And I agree, some basis in nutrition is important.