I wish Firefox existed in a world of 'perfect competition' where multiple independent browsers existed, with none of them able to out-compete the others, and with all of them implementing the HTML and CSS specs as quickly as possible, in order to escape 'perfect competition'.
But we went beyond 'perfect competition' and now have Chrome or Safari, with Firefox as this poor kid that we have to cater for too. The problem with Firefox is that they have just enough users to be a blocker on features such as scoped CSS, which we really should be implementing right now, as it is the way to go. However, Firefox are not planning to do scoped CSS urgently.
Without them then we could go back to the IE6 days of no innovation, and I think we have that with Safari, which is also slow to implement some cool things that have been in Chrome for a while.
I used to use Firefox but nowadays it is the IE6 of the browser world, it still has to be accommodated, even though the world has moved on.
I am actually Apple-phobic, a diehard linux user and incapable of doing simple tasks on Apple products. However, I think they have got a winner here. Although people talk of Vista Aero, it is more sophisticated than that, and, when this rolls out, Android will look distinctly old fashioned and low status, even if it is better as far as accessibility. I like what they have done here, even if it is not for me.
Disagree on almost all points. Glass and the relative absence of color, texture and patterns make it look cold, detached, almost inhuman and absent of anything your eyes could rest on. There are ways to make this approach look cool and futuristic, but it suffers from the same downside as a lot of the white/glassy modernist architecture: the human eye abhors lack of detail and natural/organic patterns and texture. (It makes for a great canvas for graffitti though...)
Meanwhile, Android's Material You/Expressive design language is taking almost an opposite approach. Personally, I prefer it to Liquid Glass by a wide margin.
Architecture without structural integrity is terrible no matter how it looks. User interfaces that aren't usable and clear are bad no matter how they look. Sure the human eye enjoys looking at trees with thousands of leaves, but you won't find a person who enjoys a UI with a thousand buttons on screen.
To me visual noise in user interfaces is a severe distraction and I tend to prefer applications with minimal UIs (not minimal features). I disabled text cursor blinking in the browser and use a program to auto-hide the mouse pointer after a few seconds because it can distract me from reading.
I do like this new UI Apple shows here, though I would probably get tired of the effects if I had to use it for extended periods of time. Just like animations look satisfying until you realize they slow down everything you do on the computer because often their main purpose is marketing and not usefulness.
Musk considers Twitter as the 'town square' and he wants to bring all of those features for payment and whatnot that apps in China already have to his 'town square'.
I think he has been off the ball with Twitter/X, using it as his own private megaphone rather than building out the features, however, encrypted messaging is going to be the cornerstone of future developments such as a means of payment, or a WhatsApp rival and so on. I find it hard to believe, but maybe there is a cadre of engineers at Twitter with a vision of what it should be, and building out a serious platform.
One reason people hate these elements is that they were overused.
However, with that over use, people were giving HTML a go. For someone new to writing HTML, it was very rewarding to be able to use <blink> or <marquee>. These were the gateway drugs of the HTML world, and, anyone that used these elements would eventually learn not to, or maybe not, if it was their mySpace page.
It is easy to hate on the <blink> and <marquee> elements, much like how every snobbish graphic designer can chortle about stupid people using Comic Sans, however, all of these no-no's had great utility in giving people confidence to give things a go.
Genuine answer, I am definitely not a sports nutrition expert.
Your body creates all of the creatine that it needs. However, to do this, your body will need to get all of the nutrients that it can't make for itself.
The brain is like the 'kernel' and the body is mere 'user space'. Regardless of what the situation is in the body as a whole, the brain is top priority, and this applies to creatine. Trust your body, it will ensure that it has adequate creatine for the brain, no matter what happens to you.
Clearly there are advantages in supplementing creatine as any person in the gym will tell you. However, you have two options, either you supplement or you don't. If you don't want to take the supplement route then you can optimise your diet so that your body gets all of the raw inputs it needs. This means adequate levels of everything needed, without the junk.
My suspicion is that the brain and liver have a better idea of what level of creatine your body needs than any medical expert or social media influencer on the planet. Primates have been doing this for millions of years, standing on the shoulders of mammal DNA that has been dialling it in for hundreds of millions of years.
For me it is therefore a philosophical question. Do I want to believe in nutrition or do I want to believe in gym-bro science?
Aside from the alleged benefits for the brain, there is also the body. I don't want my muscles to be any larger than they need to be. In highly demanding factory jobs or in the military, the people with 'Rambo' bodies don't seem to be as effective as those that have muscles that have auto-sized to the demands placed on them. There is a cost in calories and nutrients to having excess muscle (and fat, for that matter).
It seems to me that the body works on a use it or lose it basis. Don't use your legs and they wither away. Don't use your brain and the same applies. My theory, for which I have no evidence, is that, with your internal organs, the same applies. If you are getting your creatine from animal products or supplements, will your liver lose the ability to create creatine? I don't know, but why run the risk?
By taking the nutrition route I am not running the risks of side effects. With creatine it began with elite athletes a few decades ago and only recently have fitness industry devotees been taking creatine en-masse. We don't know if there are long term side effects because there are no centenarians around that were taking creatine in the 1940s.
A final aspect to it is integrity. If the belief is in nutrition rather than supplements, then one cannot accuse oneself of cheating. Different strokes for different folks, if people want to pump their bodies with supplements, hormones and whatnot, that is on them. They want to be the fastest or the strongest. I don't. My believe is in what I consider to be a healthy diet with zero supplements apart from vitamin B12.
My advice is to take it and learn from your body, to see what the effects are, then end the experiment to see how you compare on a Mediterranean or a whole food, plant based diet. These diets are the benchmarks for longevity, which is what you might want to optimise for.
Everything else can come from a whole food, plant based diet.
Vitamin B12 is made by bacteria in soil that are important for nitrogen fixation. Animals ingest vitamin B12 because they don't wash their food, we wash our food and therefore any B12 that is in soil.
Meat eaters get second hand B12 that has accumulated in animals, so their requirement is met by eating animal products including dairy and eggs.
Plants don't actually need B12 so there is no B12 in them.
Iodine is something that I choose to get from iodised salt, which is almost supplementation, but I stay clear of all processed foods that have been fortified and supplements. This is also philosophy - I am not an animal. Most livestock gets a smorgasbord of supplements with calories coming from corn, soy or whatever is cheapest.
I am in the process of tidying up my dad's estate, and, despite the mountains of stuff he bought, there is not one single thing that I want for myself. I am done with stuff, particularly if it has bits missing!
I am sure that, if I went to any hoarders home, it would be exactly the same. There would not be a single item that I would want to walk away with.
Younger me might have thought this store to be great, but I am done.
It requires a special mindset to want stuff, to trade stuff on eBay, to collect stuff and to see it as valuable. Stuff is at the low end of what interests me, life is about people and ideas, not stuff.
You also have to believe in money if you are into stuff. But my status has nothing to do with money or how much stuff I have. I wish I could flip the switch and make it so that I wanted to hoard money and own stuff. But, once you have gone outside your basic needs, stuff starts to own you, rather than you owning stuff.
The thing is that, with the mountains of stuff that I have had to dispose of, all of it required real humans to put in the effort to design products, get them made, get them packaged and to get them sold. They did it with pride, yet, here I am, detesting the stuff.
The tech products that were hot five years ago but useless today are what amaze me the most. Take your humble TV. I can remember a time before flat screens, then there was the time when you had dead pixels. Right now I have a huge TV to dispose of. To all intents and purposes, it is perfect. Twenty five years ago, it would have been beyond anyone's dreams, jaws would have dropped. Yet now it is worth $150, if I could find a buyer.
Hence, max respect to those such as the owner of the Bin Store that can face up to the 'empty gifts of capitalism' and make a business of making sense of the stuff that mere mortals like me want to run away from.
I have a mother-in-law who has 30-year old electronic gadgets she has no idea what they are for... Image-search turns up no results... (A few are in their original packaging - those are identifiable - but typically useless)
Her box of random cables and "wall-wart" power supplies is huge - puts my old bin to shame... (well, I have since organized my "collection", labelled and sorted everything into many smaller storage bins - sighs... as the story goes, "oh - I no longer need this ancient connector/cable, so I will get rid of it", only to inevitably need it 2-months later, so now I keep them all, but label them...)
I resigned myself to re-buying things, though of course I love USB-C is a common charging cable.
Instead of a drawer full of wall warts, I have a drawer with a little baggie full of the ends of warts, which I connect via twisted wire if I have to to a few of the wall warts I have.
So true! I just recently found an old bag full of ancient phone and other device chargers and charging cables and let me tell you, it felt so weird. I have mostly forgotten that there used to be so many variations - every brand had their own version of what mostly is a simple power connector.
The best was physically identical connecters with vastly different voltage profiles, so if you plugged in the wrong one bam magic smoke is gone, sadness.
The non-communicable chronic diseases are what my parents new, when they were still alive.
Recently I had to get my late father's paperwork in order and this meant going through lots of medical stuff. There was also paperwork regarding my mum, it was IPF that got her.
I also had to take a sack full of pills down to the chemist to get disposed of. This is in the UK where we have the NHS. The NHS would prefer to have people in good health whereas I suspect that the private healthcare system of the USA prefers to have people in bad health and medically dependent. It is just a different business model.
What surprised me about the NHS paperwork was how much of it was focused on lifestyle choices, so that means living a physically active life and eating certain foods.
My dad did the doctor visits and the pills but he did not do the lifestyle recommendations. He would behave like a tired toddler if you put fruit and vegetables on his plate. He was also heavily car dependent, as if any other mode of transport was not 'manly' enough for him. We had concerns for other road users with his driving but we could not get him to take the train, never mind walk as far as the nearest shop, five minutes away.
Alcohol was another cause for concern. Although never drunk, he would drink every day. He would have it with his greasy food, thinking he was eating like a king.
I know diet and nutrition is controversial, however, the NHS were wanting him to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, and there were forms so that he could fill in how many grains, nuts, seeds, potatoes, vegetables and pieces of fruit he was eating. He wasn't eating any of those things, he was on the saturated fats, which invariably come from animal products. There were no checkboxes on the form for meat, cheese or processed foods, which is no surprise since there is no fibre in any of this stuff. There aren't any antioxidants either.
The NHS prefers lifestyle interventions rather than pills. This varies by doctor, but, this is the general idea.
Age related diseases are not due to age, in this day and age. They are down to poor lifestyle choices, cancer and all. Forget genetics too, sure, some people win the lottery, and others lose the cancer lottery. But the more you know then the more you realise that no amount of pills, procedures and testing will spare anyone from blocked arteries due to saturated fats with side portions of bad cholesterol.
It is the same with alcohol. If we treated pensioners as if they were under age, to ban them from obtaining alcohol, then there would be a lot of miserable pensioners but they would be living a lot longer. Same with processed food and animal products, if we banned pensioners from such things then they would be miserable but live out to be a hundred years old.
Face to face with my dad's NHS paperwork made me realise that I knew what I was reading all along. For decades we have known what gives you the non-communicable chronic diseases. We have also known that it is fibre and phytonutrients from whole foods that enable your body to protect itself against things such as inflammation.
Looking for cures is grift. There is no cure or treatment for those that spend hours a day consuming toxins whilst they pretend they are living like a king just because they are eating heavily marketed animal products that are sold as 'good for protein'. With health and longevity, you can't have your cake full of transfats and eat it.
Except they are due to age. While lifestyle changes may make some conditions less likely or less severe, don't kid yourself into thinking you can avoid them all forever. Nor is lifestyle change an easy path for most people. If it were, many of the lifestyle diseases would be gone, because we know so much about them. Of the diseases in the article, only NASH (non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, called MASH in most of the article, presumably a typo) seems to be strongly related to lifestyle.
The government (or society, whatever) could reduce lifestyle diseases by closing the roads so that people do not drive, requiring jobs to be 50% physical, turning off electric lighting after 9pm, banning overly tasty packaged food, observing a sabbath, etc. Like that will ever happen. The studies are clear, so why don't we do this?
GLP-1 agonists are showing us that behavior has deeper roots than simple choice. People on these medications are able to choose the healthier choice without feeling something lacking, but when they are discontinued they typically return to old habits.
In the meantime, there have been successes at treating lifestyle diseases and giving people better, happier lives. I wish they could stop their behaviors, but I like that they have a chance to treat atrial fibrillation, coronary artery disease, etc.
> Age related diseases are not due to age, in this day and age. They are down to poor lifestyle choices, cancer and all. Forget genetics too, sure, some people win the lottery, and others lose the cancer lottery. But the more you know then the more you realise that no amount of pills, procedures and testing will spare anyone from blocked arteries due to saturated fats with side portions of bad cholesterol.
I wish more people understood that. Medicine definitely has its place but if you don't put in the preventative work on your side it's a losing battle.
I know 80+ years old who go skying every single day in winter, still chop their own fire wood, &c. Meanwhile there are plenty of ~50 years old who are already in worse health/shape, eat like shit, sleep like shit, never exercise, complain about their bad backs and bad knees, bad digestion, &c.
Medicine is very good at keeping you alive, but if you want to keep a good quality of life there is nothing medicine can provide that is even remotely as good as being fit. And even if you lose the genetic lottery: medicine will be much more effective if you have a clean base, you better go to chemo with an extra 20kg of muscle rather than 20kg of fat, high blood pressure and diabetes
30 year olds don't get Alzheimer's no matter how unhealthy their diet and lifestyle is. There are things you can and should do to improve your odds, but overall old people are going to be less healthy than young people.
Ya for Alzheimer's, the two people in my family who've had it had bad diets (think dining out lavishly every night or sugar-addiction) and poor hygiene (like having every single tooth pulled). I also suspect chronic lack of sleep is my dad's worse health trait. I don't get why they don't work on this stuff personally.
I would like to see a version of the app that assigns names, as in 'Fred', 'Bertha', 'Kevin' to given birds, algorithmically. I get the same birds in my garden and I already know what species they are, but, I wouldn't mind knowing if my favourite birds have got new mates, or, if I am down the road, some way from home, to confirm that it is 'Kevin' that I see, as in the same 'Kevin' that frequents my bird bath.
Consistently assigning names to different blackbirds might be tricky, but, for other birds, I am sure that some AI algorithm could do this.
> We need to cut down on producing it first, recycle it second, and then bury it as deep as possible.
You mean 're-use' rather than 'recycle'?
It has always been 'reduce, reuse, recycle' but what bemuses me is how this is nigh on impossible for normal people, even those that do their recycling and say the right things about caring for the planet.
Being serious about it means an end to having a consumerist lifestyle. This can be difficult when kids are involved. Mountains of plastic are just there with kids, in everything they do. You can't take your child out of society to live as if it was two centuries ago, their friends and the parents of their friends will have this abundance of plastic, whether it is LEGO bricks or food containers. It is just unavoidable. Capitalism as we know it would collapse if we got serious about plastic.
I am quite serious about plastic, albeit by accident. On a whim I went 'whole food, plant based', which means no processed foods or animal products. One unintended consequence is that my recycling and rubbish shrunk to a fraction of what it used to be. I no longer have plastic trays, plastic bottles and what not, just a few plastic bags, a few tins, a few glass jars and a modest amount of paper.
If I am lucky enough to get a good plastic container, I really will upcycle it.
If I meet up with relatives that live the middle class life, then, vegetable peelings aside, they will create more waste in a weekend than I will create in approximately four months.
I enjoy not having the cognitive dissonance that goes on with buying single use plastic containers whilst knowing that nothing really gets recycled. I am also 'beginner level' when it comes to the art of being 'zero waste', there are those that create no more than a small jar full of plastic in a year.
My relatives genuinely believe they are doing their bit by putting lots of plastic in the recycling, and they would frown upon someone that did not follow their example. They live in a very different consumerist world to me. But, if everyone lived like me, there would not be a lot of the economy left!
People are deeply wedded to their single use plastics. Realistically, cutting down on plastic means an end to the plastic foods that most people enjoy eating, whether that be ready meals, take outs, animal products, produce from far-flung parts of the world and sugary beverages.
A century ago, nobody had anything plastic. Given our consumerist ways, you wonder how people lived back then, when most domestic waste consisted of ash from fireplaces.
A ban on single use plastics is what we need, not any Band Aid recycling solutions. You never see LEGO bricks or anything valuable in the plastic recycling stream, all of it is single use plastics. But a ban on single use plastics would mean people paying for a lot of glass, steel and waxed paper. This comes with problems of its own.
Imagine you are driving a truck load of yoghurts from Italy, over the Alps, through France and to the UK so that middle class people can buy them. If those yoghurts have to be in glass jars then the diesel bill for this important middle class delivery will rise considerably, due to the extra weight of the glass. More CO2 would be emitted getting these vital yoghurts from industrial unit to toilet bowl.
Not buying the yoghurts is not an option as the mind-numbingly boring job of driving the truck hundreds of miles is considered gainful employment. Therefore, 'reduce' is not really an option, so that means 'recycle' or landfill. Anecdotally, as in my instance, 'reduce' is definitely possible and definitely the way to go, but, given how most people live, it is a total non-starter, mostly because it would require dietary changes.
> On a whim I went 'whole food, plant based', which means no processed foods or animal products
Plant-based can include some animal products, though. That's the definition I'm familiar with.
Anyway, I'm curious to know how you get your food without packaging. Do you literally grow and can everything yourself?
When I buy salad, it comes pre-washed in a large plastic container. Even when I buy the far more expensive locally grown stuff in the summer, it comes in a plastic bag.
I can get berries in small cardboard boxes, but only during the short window when they're growing locally. Otherwise, if I want berries, my choices are to get them frozen in a plastic bag, or fresh and in a plastic container.
I do buy some foods in steel cans, like beans. If I bought dried beans, they'd come in a plastic bag. Our lentils are shipped in a box and wrapped in a sturdy plastic bag. Then we can get tomatoes in glass bottles.
There are a few things I get without any packaging: bananas, apples, potatoes, onions, broccoli. But those things are in the minority. They are mostly shipped from far away, in bulk in cardboard boxes, I believe. There's another small window when you can get them locally.
But we went beyond 'perfect competition' and now have Chrome or Safari, with Firefox as this poor kid that we have to cater for too. The problem with Firefox is that they have just enough users to be a blocker on features such as scoped CSS, which we really should be implementing right now, as it is the way to go. However, Firefox are not planning to do scoped CSS urgently.
Without them then we could go back to the IE6 days of no innovation, and I think we have that with Safari, which is also slow to implement some cool things that have been in Chrome for a while.
I used to use Firefox but nowadays it is the IE6 of the browser world, it still has to be accommodated, even though the world has moved on.
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