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You are changed by the intention behind your decisions. Someone who continually chooses to do things out of greed turns into a greedier person. Someone who continually chooses compassion becomes a more compassionate person.

Even if the external outcome is the same, the direction towards which the person evolves is vastly different. And when lifted out of a narrow thought experiment, in real life, who you are does determine all the great and small ways you behave, and the methods you are willing to employ.

That’s why in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ says “It was said to those of old, you shall not murder, and whoever murders will be liable to judgement. But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgement.”

You will find similar principles expressed in Buddhist teachings, or the Bhagavad Gita, or Confucian ethical philosophy. In this instance, anger on its own is merely a seed. But if left to grow, and it grows by you watering it, then eventually it expresses itself in a much more destructive way.


Maybe this is how it works, but how can we know this?

It could also be that doing good things for selfish reasons creates habits of doing good things, and after a while that is who you are and what you do.


There’s some real research into relevant topics and evidence-based models of how and why people change.

Generally, a period of ambivalence precedes change (most of the time, though there are documented cases of “quantum change” where a person undergoes a difficult change in a single moment without the usual intermediate stages and never relapses).

Ambivalence exists when a person knows in their mind reasons both for and against a change, and gives both more or less an equal mind share.

When that person begins to give an outsized share of their attention to engaging with thoughts aligned with the change, it predicts growing commitment and ultimately follow-through on the change.

The best resource I know of on this topic is “Motivational Interviewing” in its 3rd or 4th edition. It has a very extensive bibliography and the model of change it presents has proven itself an effective predictor of change in clinical practice.

Based on my understanding of that research, I’m inclined to agree with GP.


That's very insightful. Could you share some references for further reading? I'd like to explore this topic a bit on my own.


The main resource that I recommend is the one towards the bottom of the comment: “Motivational Interviewing” by W.R. Miller and Stephen Rollnick. I’ve read the third and fourth editions. The third edition is more concrete but also more complex, and more focused on the field of clinical psychology, while the fourth edition is a shorter book where it’s been generalized more to be more applicable to all kinds of helping relationships, but contains fewer specific examples of clinical practice.

In the second edition they had not yet broken up the concept of “resistance” into “sustain talk” and “discord,” which I found to be a helpful distinction.

About 10% of the book is its bibliography, so if you want more information about a specific claim you can usually find the primary source by following the reference.

Miller and Rollnick are the ones who developed the technique of motivational interviewing, so they have a strong connection to much of the research cited.


There are multiple ways, all of which are useful for you to decide whether it's true or not.

First, you can trust in the wisdom of those who came before you, i.e. scripture. Second, you could trust in tradition, which may say such things. Third, you can use reason yourself. Fourth, you could rely on personal experience.


Another way to think of it is:

If you tend to engage in suspicious behavior, you'll probably start regarding others with suspicion. Essentially, your actions will engender your world view.


This is a good take, and I agree that habits can do that to people.

On the other hand, the intention behind the habit/action easily twists it in actuality to something else.

I think the “fake it till you make it” I brought up upthread a great example of this. Yeah, it might end up with the fake becoming something valuable, or you building character, or whatever.

Or, the habit that is getting built isn’t positive hustle and tenacity, but just a habit of outright lying, constantly reinforcing itself.

Sometimes it’s impossible to see from the outside what is which until it breaks down.


My favorite tell-tale sign:

> The gap isn’t just quantitative—it’s qualitative.

> LLMs don’t have memory—they engage in elaborate methods to fake it...

> This isn’t just database persistence—it’s building memory systems that evolve the way human memory does...

> The future isn’t one model to rule them all—it’s hundreds or thousands of specialized models working together in orchestrated workflows...

> The future of AGI is architectural, not algorithmic.


#2 AI Labs: Anthropic sets the pace in the talent race

> November 2022 didn’t just mark the launch of ChatGPT—it kicked off the AI talent race. We analyzed retention across top AI labs, and one clear leader emerged: Anthropic. An impressive 80% of employees hired at least 2 years ago at Anthropic were still at the company at the end of their second year—a figure that stands out in an industry known for high turnover. DeepMind follows closely at 78%, while OpenAI’s retention trails at 67% but remains on par with large FAANG companies like Meta (64%).

> Talent poaching with precision: Anthropic is siphoning top talent from two of its biggest rivals: OpenAI and DeepMind. Engineers are 8 times more likely to leave OpenAI for Anthropic than the reverse. From DeepMind, the ratio is nearly 11:1 in Anthropic’s favor. Some of that’s expected—Anthropic is the hot new startup, while DeepMind’s larger, tenured team is ripe for movement. But the scale of the shift is striking.


You must be referring to the Battle of Agincourt, as Henry V was heading back to Calais after laying a too-prolonged siege of Harfleur, during the 100 Years War.


Agincourt sounds right. Thanks.


If it's Agincourt, then Bret talks about it quite a bit in the article. Essentially, it was the best case scenario for bows and even then both the French infantry and cavalry were able to advance and get to the English lines. However, both were weakened enough that they were defeated by the English forces waiting for them.


She is one of the great American novelists. She’s won 8 Hugo’s. There’s the Dispossessed, a great novel.


I forgot the Dispossessed. So Ursula is now two book wonder.


Downvoting team seems to disagree. Maybe she truly is only one-book wonder.


Tried many ORMs to get them to work in SQL, but EdgeDB's was the one that worked extremely straightforwardly, literally without any issues that weren't due to not following the instructions.

No bugs, no configuration errors, no nothing. It all just worked. So I think you guys deserve more recognition and credit for what is clearly a very well-engineered product that I intend to use for some of my personal projects.


Have you tried drizzle? If so, what's your beef? (The only one I've had is lack of down-migrations)


Addressing your core question: Drizzle is a great ORM with a tastefully designed API—it's clearly a product of love. But it’s still an ORM, and it’s confined by certain design boundaries that come from being a library. For example, what if you want to use TypeScript, Go, and Python on your backend? Do you run three ORMs, each with different APIs? With Gel, you have one data model and a unified querying layer—the true source of truth.

We have a blog post about that and more [1].

---

By the way, if you visit Drizzle’s website, you’ll see that Gel is one of their biggest sponsors. We worked closely with Drizzle to ship a first-class integration with Gel. You can use Gel’s schema and migrations, and Drizzle will just work. You can even use the Drizzle query builder and EdgeQL side by side if you want.

[1] https://www.geldata.com/blog/a-solution-to-the-sql-vs-orm-di...


> Do you run three ORMs, each with different APIs?

Yes and you absolutely have to. That's not a disadvantage, it's just how it is. Because SQL is the absolute bare minimum. The lowest common standard. And not a great one. Null handling and typesystem for example are way inferior to those of good programming languages. So why would I leave those productivity gains on the table?

Using EdgeQL simple means I have another programming language at hand.

> EdgeDB has a robust type system that's most [sic] comprehensive that most ORMs

Well yeah. And it is inferior to the programming language I use. Hence, this comes at a disadvantage to me.

> We've also built a query builder for TypeScript

Aha, so then... why not build a query builder for every language, just like with ORMs?

Sorry, not convinced. We would be better off by improving on SQL itself.


> And not a great one. Null handling and typesystem for example are way inferior to those of good programming languages

There is no mainstream programming language that I know off that offers what are table stakes for an RDBMS.

For example, even trivial SQL things like a constraint saying 'at least one of these two fields must be empty, but both can't be empty' is missing in the "advanced" type systems in mainstream languages.


First of all, your example constraint is not possible to be statically expressed in SQL anyways. In the typesystem, that is.

Sure, you can create a constraint for `'at least one of these two fields must be empty, but both can't be empty'` but that will only be applied at runtime. It's not like any dmbs (to my knowledge) will reject the query at parse-time. Or else, please show me an example of how you would do that. (and don't use constraints or indexes, because those only work at runtime)

Second, I deliberately said "good programming languages" and you changed that to "mainstream programming language". You know what? If all your mainstream programming languages (however you count or define those) don't support that stuff, maybe it's time to move on and choose a better language.

In Scala at least, it's trivially possible to define such a constraint with types. That ensures that you will never by accident violate that constraint. And that is guaranteed at compile time, so no one is gonna wake you up in the night because your query failed due to that condition you specified.

If you don't believe me, I'm happy to show you the code to encode that logic.


> First of all, your example constraint is not possible to be statically expressed in SQL anyways. In the typesystem, that is.

So? The DB will prevent you from violating the constraints, because it cannot tell in advance (i.e. before getting the query with the data in it) whether the data violates the constraint.

> It's not like any dmbs (to my knowledge) will reject the query at parse-time.

What parse-time?

     echo "INSERT INTO tbl_test (c_one, c_two) VALUES (3, 4);
Where's the parse-time in that?

TBH, I am still failing to see your point - this looks like an artificial restriction (the query must be rejected before you present it to the DB).

Whether you call it runtime or compile-time or parse-time, the DB will not let you violate the type safety by accident.

The point is that the DB will enforce the constraints.

> Second, I deliberately said "good programming languages" and you changed that to "mainstream programming language".

Well, if your bar for "good programming languages" rules out all the mainstream languages, what's the point of even discussing your point? The point you are making then becomes irrelevant.

> If all your mainstream programming languages (however you count or define those) don't support that stuff, maybe it's time to move on and choose a better language.

For better or worse, the world has rejected those better languages and relegated them to niche uses. Shrieking shrilly about your favourite languages aren't gonna make them more popular.

You know what's more realistic? Teaching the users of the "poorer" languages that they can get all those benefits of type enforcement in their DB without needing to switch languages.

> In Scala at least, it's trivially possible to define such a constraint with types.

In more than a few languages it's possible to do that. I'm thinking more Prolog, and specific SAT solvers than Scala, though. There's benefits in doing so.

However, the minute you plug an RDBMS into your system, many benefits can be gained without switching languages at all. Like real constraints for XOR or composite uniqueness, referential integrity, NULL-prevention, default values, etc.


> What parse-time? (...) TBH, I am still failing to see your point

What I tried to say was: in some programming languages, this insert will not even compile. So you don't have to write a test, you don't have to spin up a test database or anything, it just doesn't compile. And I prefer that over having to wait until a query is actually sent before I get an error.

This is relevant for me because 1.) it makes me more productive since I get the error much quicker and I don't have to write a test and 2.) it prevents getting calls in the night because something broke.

I hope that makes it clear.

> However, the minute you plug an RDBMS into your system, many benefits can be gained without switching languages at all.

Yeah, but that doesn't invalidate my original point, does it?


I don't really have time to discuss this in depth, but note that:

1) I still disagree somewhat on the finer points,

and

2) I've upvoted your post anyway because other than the finer points on which I disagree, you make good points anyway.

Cheers :-)


> Yes and you absolutely have to. That's not a disadvantage, it's just how it is. Because SQL is the absolute bare minimum. The lowest common standard. And not a great one. Null handling and typesystem for example are way inferior to those of good programming languages. So why would I leave those productivity gains on the table?

I think... we're in a agreement? :)

EdgeQL doesn't have a NULL (it's a set-based language and NULL is an empty set, this tiny adjustment makes it easier to reason about missing data). And because it also has a more robust type system, allows for limitless composition and easy refactoring, it has far greater DX than SQL => you're more productive.

There's a footnote here: EdgeQL doesn't support some of the SQL capabilities just yet, namely window functions and recursive CTEs. But aside from that it is absolutely a beast.

> Well yeah. And it is inferior to the programming language I use. Hence, this comes at a disadvantage to me.

Maybe, but I'm curious how you arrived to that conclusion. I assume you mean that using the power of a high-level programming language you can force ORM to complete submission and that's just not true. Most of the time you'll either have grossly inefficient multi-roundtrip query code (hidden from you) or let ORM go and use SQL. Obviously that's an extreme scenario, but it's surprisingly common in complex code bases and logic.

> Aha, so then... why not build a query builder for every language, just like with ORMs?

We are. We started with improving the network protocol (it does less round-trips than Postgreses and is stateless) and crafting client libraries for MANY languages. All client libraries support automatic network & transaction error recovery, automatic connection pooling, and have generally great and polished API. Not to mention they are fast.

We do have a query builder for TypeScript. But we also have codegen for every language we support: place an .edgeql file in your project and you get fully typed code out of that. That said, we will eventually have query builders for every language we support. There's only so much you can do in 3 years since we announced 1.0.

> Sorry, not convinced. We would be better off by improving on SQL itself.

Significantly improving SQL without starting from scratch isn't possible. Adding sugar - surely is possible, but we are 100% that the productivity boost we deliver with EdgeQL is worth going all in (and our users agree with us).

In any case, with Gel 6 we have full SQL support (except DDL), so it's possible to use Gel along with ORMs if that's needed. We are not SQL haters at all.

We have this blog post that was on HN front page a few times, it's a good read and explains our position: https://www.geldata.com/blog/we-can-do-better-than-sql


> Most of the time you'll either have grossly inefficient multi-roundtrip query code (hidden from you)

Or you spend 5 minutes actually putting some effort in to configuring your ORM. Maybe spend 30 minutes learning if it's your first time. People will spend weeks handwriting SQL to save hours of ORM tuning.


In my experience it is the exact reverse. You spend weeks configuring or tuning your orm calls when you ccould just spend a few hours optimizing your sql. There is a reason most orms has a raw SQL escape hatch.

The sweet spot is typesafe sql libraries. You write your raw sql and library deduces the return type from the database and gives you typesafety (sqlx is really good for this, sqlc for go is similar). It gives you almost all the benefits of ORMs with almost no downsides.


For me, personally, I do a ton of fullstack work in JavaScript-land, but also have Python services for ML-heavy needs, and it’s nice to define one schema that at its root is still SQL while generating query clients for multiple languages.


Drizzle still lacks a lot of features / stability (bug fixes required).

Hopefully it improves over time.


Having worked with the core team I can only say that they are amazing. I'm sure they'll figure it out, but database tech is gnarly. Takes time.


Dostoyevsky was truly great and could see the true and important things about the world, while Nabokov's contribution to literature will not be remembered past this century. One foresaw what the death of absolute good would do to the world—the casual mass murders of millions in places such as Germany, Cambodia, Stalinist Russia. The other is famous for Lolita.

“Don’t be afraid of anything, ever. And do not grieve. As long as your repentance does not weaken, God will forgive everything. There is not—there cannot be—a sin on earth that God will not forgive the truly repentant. Why, a man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. How could there be a sin that would surpass the love of God?

Think only of repentance, all the time, and drive away all fear. Have faith that God loves you more than you can ever imagine. He loves you, sinful as you are and, indeed, because of your sin. It was said long ago that there is more joy in heaven over one repentant sinner than over ten righteous men. Go now, and fear nothing. Do not be offended if people treat you badly. Do not hold it against them. And forgive your departed husband all the harm he did you. Become truly reconciled with him. For if you repent, you love, and if you love, you are with God. Love redeems and saves everything.

If I, a sinner like yourself, am moved and feel compassion for you, how infinitely much more will God! Love is such an infinite treasure it can buy the whole world and can redeem not only your sins, but the sins of all people. So go and fear no more.”

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov (pp. 64-65). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.


There was no shortage of casual mass murder before the 20th century, not infrequently perpetrated by religious orders. The Mongol invasions in the 13th century, An Lushan rebellion in China in 750, Albigensian Crusade in the 12th century... it´s a long list I´m afraid - we are not a tame species.


It's a good quote for orthodox christians, I'm not sure it would make anyone else want to read dostoevsky though. I'm a dostoevsky liker and orthodox christian myself so this isn't an issue for me but in this venue I feel like you could have made a better choice for representing him.


It's interesting what people take from this passage. I was primed by alangau's statement that Dostoevsky predicted the death of absolute good, and the mass slaughter of millions, when I read

> There is not—there cannot be—a sin on earth that God will not forgive the truly repentant.

To me, this sends a horrifying message. A self-righteous individual can kill millions, wake up to the terrible reality of their act, repent, and be bathed in the joy of a loving god's forgiveness. They need suffer only a moment's guilt, before proceeding fearlessly back into the world.

And yet, according to alangau's sibling comment, the passage was deeply moving to him. Perhaps my horrified response is a deep motion of sorts, but that isn't a typical usage of the phrase "deeply moved."


That is an interesting view of it. I mentioned this elsewhere but I happen to share a religion with dostoevsky so this idea is familiar to me and no longer jarring. It does violate a certain idea of fairness or consequence that most people subscribe to, and that contradiction is all over the gospels so it really is one of the original ideas of christianity.

And ultimately this view of repentance is kind of unhelpful in a practical way when dealing with incredibly damaging behavior. We can't really judge the sincerity of someone's repentance, ultimately it is between them and god. We can restrain them from being in a situation where they could commit that act again though, just in case.

Something I think about often is an event that occurred in my home town when I was a young adult. A child, 12 or 13, old enough to know better, was playing with the stove and set the house on fire. One of their siblings died in the fire.

How do you react to that as a parent? You love the child, have to go on raising them. No punishment even makes sense, the idea of taking away the nintendo or whatever is simply grotesque, and what could be accomplished by anything proportional to the consequence? The only thing left is forgiveness. I think this is how it is with god and your hypothetical monster.


While I do understand your point, there's a difference between being irresponsible and being willfully murderous. Personally, having grown up among orthodox christians, I've seen too many cases of self-righteous people lapsing and committing bad things and then finding comfort in their religiousness. "Be afraid of believers, they have gods that forgive their sins" - that kind of thing.


* They need suffer only a moment's guilt, before proceeding fearlessly back into the world.

It is not a true repentance if one can wash off their guilt in a moment. True repentance is eternal burn.


> They need suffer only a moment's guilt, before proceeding fearlessly back into the world.

Well, maybe not. Dostoevsky was Orthodox, so I don't know how he would think about this...

From a Catholic perspective sin has both temporal and eternal consequences. God can forgive a truly repentant person any sin, ordinarily through the ministry of the Church by the power and authority of Christ, establishing or returning a person to the life of divine grace in their soul, but the temporal consequences of their sin/s may remain to be repaired.

By analogy, suppose my neighbor became unreasonably angry with me, becoming so incensed that he threw a rock at one of my windows causing it to shatter. Then, after a day of cooling off, he apologized and asked forgiveness. Now suppose I granted him forgiveness, moved by his sincerity and a mutual desire to repair the relationship. The shattered window remains — the glass needs to be cleaned up, and a new window must be purchased and installed. Maybe my neighbor has the resources and skill to do the repair himself; or maybe he can pay directly or reimburse me for contract labor; or maybe he can't afford the repair but promises to pay me back; or maybe one of his family members pays me instead. One way or another, the window will be repaired and my neighbor bears responsibility for it.

So sin, generally, is like this, from the Catholic POV. If the forgiven sinner is not able to make repair before their life ends, then they will suffer in purgatory after death before enjoying the beatific vision. The purification will be more severe depending on the number and gravity of sins. Some mystics claim to have been informed about souls that will suffer in purgatory flames hotter than those of damnation until the last moment before the general judgment, so terrible were their sins and unrepaired consequences of the same.


What would you have chosen to represent him?

I think it's important you choose what affects you most. I was deeply moved reading this when I was atheist, so who am I to say what will and will not move others?


I'm not sure, I think the strength of his writing isn't well captured in quotes. But it seems like this one resonates with more people than I expected so I concede I was wrong about this.


Wow. Your quote was the first time I’ve read any Dostoyevsky and it had tears welling in my eyes. I will absolutely find more to read. Thank you.


The quote is truly the quintessence of Dostoevsky's works. A classic orthodox christian hodgepodge base, served with heaviest spicing of obligatory suffering of all kinds - both physical and mental, all perversely portrayed as a virtue.

It's kinda like alcohol, and if we go with this comparison - Dostoevsky promotes drowning in it as a salvation. Put bluntly, that shit ruins lives, not mends them. But Dostoevsky does not just write about it, he carefully designs the whole narrative to make it look like the only logical choice and wholeheartedly promotes it. And that's why I just can't stand his works, despite all their psychological, artistic and linguistic/literary merits. This insane cultural gap is simply too big to cross for me.

It all makes sense in historical and cultural context, of course, but that's exactly what puts an expiration date on Dostoevsky's works. They're a product or a very specific culture, and thus will no longer be relevant when their parent culture will finally wither away (and, personally, I sincerely hope it naturally does, for I see it as way more harmful than positive).

There are literature works that would remain relevant for a long while, but Dostoevsky is not one of those.

Just my own personal opinion.


I read the quote in Alyosha's voice, I don't remember if it's really him. I'm by no means a Dostoyevsky expert and I read the book, halfheartedly, a long time ago. So please do your own thinking when I say that Ivan, not Alyosha, is closest to the author's heart.. he wrote about the three brothers because he was trying to resolve the conflicts between (at least) 3 archetypes of the Russian soul! Too humble he was, to try to generalize that to the world, but the downside is, later readers can't help but put in their own interpretations, or selectively quote stuff that aligns with their lonely hearts..


I believe those words are said by the elder Zosima in one of the early chapters when he has several visitors. Not Alyosha - although it's been several years since I've reread the book.


Ah thanks! I do, now, remember the foul stench of Zosima's body :)

Again, liberal amounts of salt/lime may work, to stop it from turning allegorical.. https://www.quora.com/What-do-you-think-Dostoyevsky-was-expr...


In my experience, people often conflate forgiveness, reconciliation, and redemption. They are distinct things. People also often do not understand the role repentance plays (evangelical Christians are _especially_ prone to miss it entirely).

We can forgive someone for horrific things they've done, even when they are utterly unrepentant. Forgiving them is changing our attitude about the harms the offender did from anger and hatred to acceptance and peace. This does not mean saying "what they did was okay," but rather accepting that they chose to do something horrible, learning to make peace with their hurtful choices, and focusing on healing the damage to ourselves and others rather than seeking to injure the injurer.

Reconciliation is mending a damaged relationship between two (or more) people, as much as it can be. Unlike forgiveness, true reconciliation requires that all parties make an effort - the injured party must put in the work of forgiving the offender, and the offender must do the work of repenting.

"Repent" now means "make a show of acting sorry" in evangelical Christian circles, but genuine repentance is very different. It is recognizing the harmful choices you have made and truly regretting them, and as a natural outgrowth of that regret, choosing to do what you can to heal the damage you have done. It means accepting the consequences of your choices; a repentant offender expects to be distrusted and treated differently for their crimes, and does not resent it, realizing the shattered relationships (emotional, familial, civil, and otherwise) are part of what they chose. Without repentance, others may forgive an offender, but reconciliation is not possible - if the injured continue a relationship with the aggressor, it is necessarily a stilted, broken, fragmented one.

Redemption is rarer and harder to achieve than either forgiveness or reconciliation. It is when reconciliation succeeds and goes beyond success, giving birth to something fuller and more beautiful than what was first broken. Adapting the words of my lost-yet-beloved faith, "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. Behold, He is making all things new."

This is not, in my experience, how conservative Protestant evangelicals use these words. However, in the decades I practiced Christianity, I slowly found these ideas in the Bible, despite the ludicrously-wrong exegesis practiced in US churches, by reading the texts many, many times. I find a great deal of truth and wisdom in them, considered this way. I hope perhaps my explanation can help you understand why so many people resonate with the message recorded in the Gospels, and the one that Dostoevsky so loved.


suffering can reflect virtue if it's a reaction to guilt, it just shows that people have capacity for moral self reflection


If you think the point of your work is what you end up being famous for, then you have no moral ground to stand on


How should one decide what to read?


Huh?

If you're going to write a book, for other people to read, you ultimately want people to understand and recognize your ideas/the point of your work. It has nothing to do with morality.


I'm talking of the poster, judging the Lolita author for being famous for Lolita. Thinking that judgement is through fame is a morally depraved, evil outlook


Oh I see. I don't disagree with you point then, but the context here is 'immortal works' and that's definitely strongly correlated with the popularity of the work. 'Immortal work' ~= 'still popular long in the future'


How should one judge a writer if not by the body of their work?


You didn't judge the writer by their body of work. You judged the author by which works are famous.


If I write a cautionary tale about the seductive evils of fascism,

with an unreliable narrator who's a cog in the evil machine, and obviously deluded about it,

and deeply unpleasant detailed descriptions of the awful cruelty perpetuated by the nazi regime,

and some fascists really like my book, because detailed descriptions of awful nazi cruelty are their jam, and they really identify with my evil, unreliable, deluded narrator

and a lot of people haven't read my book, but they know the kind of person who like my book - fascists

should I be judged by the popular reception of my work?


With this chain of events, at minimum you should be judged as someone who failed and accidentally created a fascist book.

But also, it is a bit suspect chain of events. Because it is quite unlikely that your books describe Jews in much sympathetic human way. Fascists would not like that. You wrote a book about suffering fascist and per your book ideology, fascism is bad when the fascists themselves suffer. That is just critique of concrete fascist regime from the point of view of the fascist.


Yes if your work encourages there to be more fascists


There is the exemplary manga Blame!, in which the intelligent machines have run amok and turned the whole Solar System into one dystopian megastructure, and the safeguard protocols, like an immune system gone awry, have wiped out the majority of humans. The hero is an agent tasked the reviving humanity, which requires him to embark on a centuries-long journey through this megastructure, which is something like Journey to the West meets the Odyssey.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blame!


The greatest kind of growth isn’t any of these three metrics she mentions.

It is wisdom and self-mastery: the ability to know what is right and wrong, the control to continually transform yourself, bit by bit, something that makes everything around you better.

These things she talks about are fine, but in the best lived life, they merely follow from the first.


There is no feeling so reassuring in Japan as knowing I am always within a 3 minute walk of yet another tuna mayo onigiri.


Did you ever see whole grain rice onigiri or was it always white short grain rice? I feel like whole grain would be blasphemy over there.


The onigiri would not stick together. The short grain rice has lots of amylopectin, while whole grain, brown, and basmati have much less.

It would fall apart and be very difficult to eat.


The amylopectin details may be right, but the rest is wrong. Conbini's sell brown rice onigiri (look for 玄米), it's just usually a very limited selection. They don't fall apart, and you eat them the same as normal onigiri.


Have you checked the list of ingredients to check for a binder of some sort?


After posting this comment I then decided to look into it (in my usual way) and just looking for homemade brown rice onigiri what I found was that at least the couple of recipes I looked at used short grain brown rice (which I did not even realize existed) and/or recommended using more water than usual.


Whole Foods carries a store brand short grain brown rice at a reasonable price that I really like. It’s one of my go-to rices and essentially the only thing I go to Whole Foods for, as I haven’t found a comparable product or price point elsewhere. I think it’s about $2.50/lb these days.

I just finished some tonight, and I’m certain it’s sticky enough to hold its shape.


Yup, if you want to do it at home, make it a little bit mushier. I don't like it, but it is very doable. Commercially they may use a binder, I don't know, I just wanted to make sure people knew they're available!


I did it tonight and when i picked up the rice i used wet fingers to give it just a touch more binding ability. Worked well. Kids loved it. Am excited to eat the brown rice onigiri tomorrow.


Why would short grain brown rice have less amylopectin than short grain white rice?


Because all the different rices are quite different plants? I think.


There is no white rice plant. It's all brown rice with the bran removed. Brown short grain rice doesn't have different starches than the same rice without its bran.


Here's an interesting article about white and brown rice characteristics:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8116841/


Seven different plants called 'rice'. For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rice_cultivars


> The cultivars listed in this article may vary in any number of these characteristics, and most can be eaten whole grain or milled (brown or white).

The article you posted backs up what I'm saying. Brown/white is a result of processing, not genetics.


Whole grain rice and rice with beans in it are very popular in Japan in recent years with mainstream health conscious consumers

(Similarly plant based food has also become much more available in cities)

However the health benefits of brown rice are questionable when the outer layer retains pesticides or other toxins


It's not blasphemy per se. Wholegrain rice is popular for health reasons, and convenience stores carry wholegrain onigiri sometimes


Why would anyone ever voluntarily eat a whole grain rice onigiri?


White rice has one of the highest glycemic indexes.

Japan has a 12% diabetes rate, which is just above the US at 11%.


this says it's 7% in Japan: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/diabetes-... , but I found another source that says 12% for 2016.

Diabetes scales with obesity and age. Japan has a very old population, but less obesity than the US. White rice despite its glycemic index is not super high calorie. If it's a contributing favor, it's because of weight-gain, not glycemic index.

edit: better source: https://www.diabetesatlas.org/data/en/country/101/jp.html, https://www.diabetesatlas.org/data/en/country/211/us.html

There's more diabetes in the US.


IIRC sticky rice is the worst among white rices. I find it tasty but try to eat basmati most of the time.


> White rice has one of the highest glycemic indexes.

This is correct, but do keep in mind the impact that cooling down has on starches.

A fresh bowl of rice is very high, but cool it for a couple of hours and the GI drops considerably.

Cool it overnight and it drops even more. Onigiri is usually in the cooled down to over-night range.

This never makes rice particularly good from a GI perspective, but preparation is a considerable factor.

---

One study, but this is fairly well reproduced: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26693746

And a more general write up: https://www.diabetes.org.uk/guide-to-diabetes/enjoy-food/car...


I don’t get that. I would say the same about white rice. Why would I ever eat it when I could be eating delicious black rice?

And before you start, I eat a gō of rice virtually every day.

I’m genuinely confused about the popularity of white rice.


I had no idea black rice existed until you mentioned it. I imagine that this is likely the same for many others.


Black rice exists, I've seen it in a shop of a friend, though not tasted it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_rice

There are also other food items which have versions that are black in colour, some of which could be not naturally, but by processing them in some way, for example, black garlic.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_garlic

Googling your favorite food name with "black" as a prefix could be interesting.

ChatGPT, generate for me a program to automate this, given a list of favorite foods.


Don’t forget red rice! Rice is crazy and my old ideas of wetlands and white rice have been crushed by reality.


Black sticky rice is a favorite dessert of mine. I always have to resist it when I see it on a menu at a Thai restaurant.


What is gō? It is hard to Google.


It’s the Japanese equivalent of “cup” as a measurement unit, and at 180 ml is about 76% of a US cup. Japanese rice cookers are marked and filled in units of gō. You put n gō of uncooked rice in it, and then fill water up to the n mark. One gō is roughly 150 grams of uncooked rice, which amounts to around 530 kcal. Traditionally, a wooden box was used to measure one gō: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Masu,_One-Gō_measure...


A Japanese measuring unit for rice, kind of analogous to "one cup" in US kitchens. Measuring cups distributed with rice cookers are usually one gō in volume even in the US.


Board game. You place one rice grain at the first field and double it for each next field. Eat it all.


"go of rice" works. It's 3/4 cup.


Had so many tuna mayo onigiri from 7/11 for breakfast in Japan.


You've never been to the country side.


3 minute and a little over 100 yen.


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