As a former React developer, I can't help but look back at the monsters we created. We spent a decade optimizing developer experience, only to outsource the hardware costs to the user’s RAM.
2013 - my 8GB [0] MPB was enough to run docker on my MPB, not light-speed but smooth-working-speed. Every website was blazing fast though.
2026 - Same budy runs VSCode and Sketchup (big project) offline as day 1. I played Factorio last year. Hacker News and Wikipedia works great, google and GitHub are ok. But 95% of the internet is not decently usable: Gmail, WhatsApp, Messenger, local gumtree - that one crash without an Ad-bloquer.
We've reached a point where a machine capable of 3D modeling can't even render a chat interface.
In all honesty, developers know better. I am not writing web everywhere for recreational purposes, but economical. There is not incentive to not externalise the cost.
That's fair, everyone's optimize for their own incentives.
I don't think knowledge is involved here. Hardware tax just isn’t directly paid by the people making the decisions so it it's not seen as a constraint. In other word: "don't care".
Young people take note too: build habits that support a healthy body and mind for the long run:
- Sleep well
- Stay active, spend time outside
- Maintain social connections
- Avoid excess (or all) sugar from non-whole food especially in drink
- Eat a LOT of vegetables: roots, leafs, fruits, seeds (<- nature's protein concentrate for future plants)
Nutrition matters, but it’s not the center of health. Sleep, movement, and relationships do more for long-term health than nutrient optimization ever will.
Not medical advice. Just a sleep-deprived person preaching what they fail to practice
Thanks for the interesting thoughts, your questions definitely makes sense to me.
"Children and animals can’t consent" view from _mst is a non perfect position but perhaps better that considering the opposite? Children can be groomed to consent and others animals training to. Here's a sensitive topic but I think it adds to the conversation: It has been reported dogs been used to rape humans. That's horrific for the victim, however consider this: sure the dog somewhat consent, but is it his own will if the trainer ask him to?
This is not to contradict you demonstration based on erection. Regulations for animals are sometimes justified, though they are extremely loose when tied to consumption.
I think the 'children can't consent' concept generally works.
I think the 'animals can't consent' thing is a retroactive justification for what is either ick, or a religious hangover.
I've had female dogs on heat try to hump me. Is that not consent?
We don't get dogs permission before breeding them.
The concept of bodily autonomy for animals is basically non existent.
The argument was originally that it was 'unnatural' but gay rights put the nail in the coffin there. 'consent' sounds good, but it isn't what's going on. It's the same 'unnatural' position, without the intellectual honesty.
Problem for me is. I kind of agree with the current cultural position. But there's no actual framework around it, and I don't like arbitrary rules for arbitrary reasons.
unnatural argument is to be ignored IMHO, it does't makes sense outside our emotional feeling and has multiple (and contradictory) interpretation so you'll end up arguing on each cases and don't have a rule/framework.
A thought experiment from Jonathan Haidt:
> Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France
on summer vacation from college. One night they are stay- ing alone in a
cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if
they tried making love. At the very least it would be a new experience for
each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a
condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide
not to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes
them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that? Was it
OK for them to make love?
I'm not saying unnatural is a good position. It is at least consistent with the attitudes we see.
Re the thought experiment. The standard argument is that of birth defects, which is obviously avoided. You could point to evolutionary pressures for the taboo also.
The thing is, kind of like pedophilia we've drawn a hard line. You could make the argument that someone the day before their 16th birthday is the same as the day after, therefore it's ok. I think the line being clear has more utility than the alternative. In this situation we're being invited to redraw a line, but where to put it? Do we make the getting pregnant illegal? Not being careful enough? So I would keep the line where it is.
Internal gear hubs are pricy but great. I’ll strongly advise against a conventional derailleur with a mid-drive motor: the derailleur needs a thinner chain which wear faster, especially with a motor that apply more torque than a normal human. Internal hubs allow to use a 1s chain or better: a belt. Then you’re good to go for a loooong time. There’s also the (super expensive) Pignon mid drive with integrated speeds, a bit like the Schlumpf’s but for e-bikes.
Pro of derailleur’s e-bikes: their price.
[waited long time to do that] - a former bike mechanist
edit: the problem with faster wear isn’t the risk to break but the decease in efficiency which will affect your motor health (heating) and batterie capacity. If you’re on a budget there’s a compromise: find your favorite gear and replace the derailleur and cassette with a single speed front and back sprockets (and chain). Beware that might not be adapted to hilly roads as GP environment.
This gets repeated a lot, but isn't true. Cheaply made single-speed and 6/7/8 chains aren't any more robust than nice modern 10 and 11-speed chains. Shimano CUES (11-speed) works fine for ebikes.
Belts are fine, but less efficient than well-maintained chains. And they require special frames with some way of breaking the rear triangle.
I wasn’t comparing 6/7/8 with 10 and 11 but with 1 speed. Those are indestructible. But as you noted the quality of the chain is also important.
As for the chain you might be right, but a well maintained chain over time needs more work that many wants to invests. It’s an option for the hobbiest and sportmans but not for most of daily commuters which want something that just work, days after days and years after years.
Also, e bike users tends to user the higher speed way more than others so that sprocket wear off faster than others, accelerating wear even more. I’ve replaced many cassettes with all the speeds almost brand new and the faster one totally destroyed.
> I wasn’t comparing 6/7/8 with 10 and 11 but with 1 speed.
I covered 1 speed in my earlier comment (“single-speed”) too. There are some nice graphs at https://zerofrictioncycling.com.au/chaintesting/ (although that testing doesn’t cover single-speed chains).
> As for the chain you might be right, but a well maintained chain over time needs more work that many wants to invests.
Right! Totally reasonable to prefer not to maintain a chain.
Not sure if you’re straw manning intentionally so I’ll imagine the best: a misreporting of his words. Here they are:
> One winter when my roommate and I both were navigating our latest setbacks, we couldn’t make ends meet and we literally went hungry. There just was no money for food. We would go to the catholic food box donation center and they gave me a box, but I was vegan and the box was full of garbage Spam and Frank and Beans type stuff that I ended up just settting out on the curb. I would rather go hungry than develop health problems from filling up on ultraprocessed hydrogenated oil government peanut butter.
Being hungry isn’t starving, the way being out of breath is different from suffocating.
> Humans are omnivores, veganism is a choice
To understand his choice to not eat the box we might paraphrase him: "humans are natural whole food eater, not UPF eater".
It depends on what "human" definition is used: homo sapiens (biologie)? A poor American (context)?
If someone makes a decision base on wrong information, what’s to blame: the informations he got or his judgement ability?
Two dimensions to interpret this:
- article author judgement on what’s healthy based solely on its personal nutritional knowledge at the moment.
- the judgement of his decision, solely on the details of this post.
IMHO the only fault here is to omit more information he was basing his decision. But reading between the lines: he repeat being "hungry" but never saying "staving". That’s a huge difference: being hungry isn’t a health hasard.
Author actually frames the situation as more dire level of hunger then just "dinner was late by two hours" kind of hunger. The state of euphoria he describes when he could steal some basic food suggest hunger was quite serious. Not eating enough is actual health hazard, especially in the puberty even if you are not in the "loosing muscle, brain matter and veins material due to body eating itself" starving level.
Second, I am comparing it to the baseline in article - eating peanut butter, beans and hot dog sausage. I am not saying it will instantly kill you.
I agree with having a good helmet, however to be honest my first motorbike ride and car drive at 60kmh were terrifying. Also many people never bicycle even in a 30kmh limites zone because they don’t feel safe.
But I don’t want to downplay speed, as you noted it’s probably the key: most motorbike death are because speed or loose of control without involving any other vehicle. Also small cylinders (< 50cc) are almost absent in the death toll. If suicidal motorbikes with good helmet are allowed, so should be the bicyclists (with good helmet).
Suicidal motorbikes are allowed with license and insurance though. Not saying that's optimal for public safety, but that's a big distinction.
I think that's the logical line between e-bikes an electric motos: at what power or speed do you want to start requiring some kind of licensing or insurance?
Yeah licensing and plates would be interesting. Although an e-bike is lighter than a scooter and will make less damage to the other person, the driver weight is probably signifiant too.
Not sure how that works in the US but in France (and probably Europe?) everyone supposed to get a "civil responsibility insurance" that will cover many thinks including accidents on non-insured (legal) vehicle.
- "cardiovascular mortality ": > eating approximately 50 grams of soy protein a day (no small amount as this translates to 1½ pounds of tofu or eight 8-ounce glasses of soy milk!) in place of animal protein reduced harmful LDL cholesterol by 12.9 percent. [1] Such reductions, if sustained over time, could mean a greater than 20% lower risk of heart attack, stroke, or other forms of cardiovascular disease.
- "risk of cancer": many studies shows breast and prostate cancer reduction, but that is probably more related to isoflavones (Phytoestrogen) than fibers.
makes it sound like this is unrelated to soy specifically and more about displacing less healthful things (like higher saturated fat and caloric animal sources)
That’s fair. Re-reading the citation: tofu and soy milk contains very low amount of fibers so it’s probably not a greet exemple to illustrate "soy protein" if the fibers are at play. Or they aren’t. A dive into the source seems reasonable.
Note that saturated fat is also present in plants based food like peanut butter, although that one also contains tons of fibers (absent in animal sources). Coconut oil on the other hand is a tasty evil.
As a side note, for many vegetarians and vegans, “alternative meats” actually mean hundreds of different legumes (fresh, dried, milled, split, fermented…) and other delicious plant foods. They’re packed with macro and micronutrients that can replace[0] those found in meat.
Taste is a bit trickier: nothing will ever taste more like flesh than… flesh — and taste is subjective anyway. Meat substitutes can be tasty, but they’re not the same. Which brings me to this:
the masses are not going to give up meat and eggs
That’s true. At first, giving up meat just to eat “fake meat” can feel like a downgrade. But the real key to change is curiosity. There are so many ingredients and recipes to explore. Classic egg-and-milk pancakes are great — but why eat the same thing all the time when there are so many combinations of plant milks and oils to try? I used to love pig and chicken. Now my favorite staples are fried tempeh and lentils with nutritional yeast.
0: I like to joke that meat replace beans, you get the idea. Fun fact: meat is viande in French, from latin vivenda which mean "which sustains life" and used to describe any edible. I think english meat have a similar etymology from mete.
Is regenerative breaking signifiant on long routes? I barely brake on long distance but the gas pedal is used almost uninterrupted. My naïve guess is truckers optimize even more their acceleration/beaking.
2013 - my 8GB [0] MPB was enough to run docker on my MPB, not light-speed but smooth-working-speed. Every website was blazing fast though.
2026 - Same budy runs VSCode and Sketchup (big project) offline as day 1. I played Factorio last year. Hacker News and Wikipedia works great, google and GitHub are ok. But 95% of the internet is not decently usable: Gmail, WhatsApp, Messenger, local gumtree - that one crash without an Ad-bloquer.
We've reached a point where a machine capable of 3D modeling can't even render a chat interface.
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