Of course it's incomplete. Any explanation of nutrition that doesn't include mention of at least calories, macronutrients and micronutrients isn't useful for understanding what's actually going on or being able to make an effective nutrition plan.
There are hundreds and hundreds of studies linking ultra processed food to all kind of health issues, and not a single one linking ultra processed food to any kind of benefits, not a single one praising their nutritious values.
The only benefits ever listed are shelf life, convenience, better margins for the producers, etc.
> praising their nutritious values [...] The only benefits ever listed are shelf life, convenience
Availability is the most important value of nutrition, above all else. I expect your comment was made having more nuance, but that just highlights the importance of a clear definition. Without it we are left to guess at what it is you mean.
Sustenance is a health benefit. Shelf life is a health benefit. Convenience is a health benefit.
If you have options when choosing food, a framework that helps you choose the better option is useful. The history of food production is mostly centered around developing options that provide, as a baseline, the three advantages you casually dismiss.
All three preservation techniques are practiced today as they have been since antiquity. It is not clear to me where food so preserved are likely to fall on the processed / ultra-processed spectrum...
Microwave meals go back to the 1950s. If anything the standard American diet was worse in the 1980s. The idea of "health food" was only starting to go mainstream.
Take this with a bucket of salt because I haven't read much on this topic.
But just reasoning 'rationally', I assume the argument is that the Iliad / Oddysey were told in cultures of predominantly oral tradition? So likely, just as with the game of telephone, the story got told and retold, and distorted, many times until someone ("Homer") decided to write it down?
So the argument being that Homer is not the 'creator' of the stories, and might just be someone who wrote it down?
Or perhaps the argument is that no single person wrote it down?
There are some plausible arguments that the authors of the Iliad and Odyssey are not the same, even if they must have been closely related.
For instance I find very plausible the hypothesis that the Iliad was composed by a man and the Odyssey was composed by a woman.
The main reason is the striking resemblance of the Iliad with an action movie, in contrast with the Odyssey that looks exactly like a chick flick.
More seriously, the Iliad focuses on a lot of things of great interest for the men of those times, like gory details about the best methods to kill or maim opponents in combat, or athletic competitions, while the Odyssey focuses on many things of interest for females, like clothes, food, gardens, romance, and it even has several passages that look quite feminist, despite being written millennia ago, by complaining about the discrimination unjustly enforced by men against women. The Odyssey also has a lot of strong female characters that are more important than the men, e.g. Calypso, Circe, Aurora, Nausicaa, Penelope.
The text of the Odyssey also contains evidence of being composed later than the Iliad, perhaps by several decades (due to some evolution of the language). So it has been hypothesized that the Odyssey was composed by a female relative of Homer, e.g. by his daughter or niece.
In any case, the author of the Odyssey mastered perfectly the same kind of language and poetic structures that were used in the Iliad, so he or she must have studied for many years the older poems in the same tradition, like the Iliad and the many others that have been lost.
A very large number of verses and short sequences of verses from the Iliad and the Odyssey are much older than the complete poems. However, someone, i.e. "Homer" alone, or with his assistants or relatives, had integrated all the older inherited poetic fragments into big coherent epic poems, before they were recorded in writing.
Aurora is the Latin name of the Goddess of the Dawn, one of the very few gods that have been inherited since Proto-Indo-European times. After migrations, the Indo-European people have adopted most of their gods from other populations, preserving only a few of their ancient gods, like the God of the Sky, Greek Zeus = Latin Jupiter and the Goddess of the Dawn, Greek Eos = Latin Aurora. Despite superficial differences, the Greek names and Latin names of these god and goddess are the same, descending from a common form through phonetic alterations (Dieu => Zeu- = Ju- and Ausos => Eos = Auror-, through regular phonetic changes, while -piter means father and -a was added to Auror to make it more similar with most other female names).
In the Odyssey, there is a lamentation about how the female goddess Eos = Aurora is strongly criticized for taking human lovers whenever she wants, while when the same thing is done by male gods, like Zeus = Jupiter, that is overlooked or even praised. Therefore this criticism about how promiscuity is treated differently by society for females and for males is millennia old.
You have a point that the Odyssey also mentions athletic competitions, not only the Iliad, but the importance and the amount of space dedicated to describing such events is much less than in the Iliad, where an entire chapter is dedicated for this and there are very detailed descriptions of the techniques used by each competitor.
In the Odyssey, the athletic competitions are just a vehicle used to highlight the physical abilities of Odysseus, demonstrating that even if he is older he can still easily outmatch younger competitors.
In the Iliad, the athletic competitions are described much like a radio or TV commentator would describe the events to spectators, focusing more on the description of the actions of the competitors as a show of skill, than on the results.
I can see why people would be irritated by 1 and 2 and they happen to me too, but I have just reframed how I think about them.
If someone jumps on something I'm struggling with, I take it as an opportunity to really pay attention to what they're doing and try to learn. They might just be way stronger, but they probably also have some better technique ideas.
For #2, I just take it as a slightly awkward attempt to reach out and socialize. Advice isn't harmful. At worst it's a mild spoiler (oh well), or just wrong (then ignore it). At best it's a great chance to learn something.
I'm awkward and it's rare for me to start a conversation, so I just take someone else talking to me as an opportunity to connect without having to make the awkward first step, and try to spend a minute or two (at least) talking with the person.
It's a bit insulting to assume that having more than a dozen tabs open must be "disorganized", especially in a context where it is likely that the power user in question is using browser extensions. Something like TreeStyleTab makes it easy to keep hundreds of tabs organized with clear, easily-manipulated structure, and lower friction than manually creating and curating bookmarks.
It looks like you're either showing off your own ignorance of tools that enable workflows you can't imagine, or you're assuming that everyone's organization methods must resemble your own habits.
I think the real answer is that Sora-style AI slop videos just aren't as addictive as we thought they'd be.
I let my kids have access to the app in the hope they would be inoculated against being obsessed with AI video and it actually worked. They got bored in like 2 days.
It simply doesn't compare well with handcrafted short form videos that are already plentiful on TikTok (which I absolutely don't let my kids watch).
Yes, fortunately slop is pretty unwatchable after the novelty wears out. Even the lowest common denominator stuff NFLX churns out is in a different league.
I was talking to other people re: difference between code & other domains. Code is, for customer, what it does.. not how it does it. That is - we can get mad about style, idioms, frameworks, language, indentation, linting, verbosity, readability, maintainability but.. it doesn't really matter for the customer if the code does the thing its supposed to do.
Many things like entertainment products don't work that way. For a good book/movie/show, a good plot (the what) is table stakes. All of the how matters - dialogue, writing style, casting, camera/sound/lighting work, directing, pacing, sound track, editing, etc.
For short format low stakes stuff like online ads, then the AI slop actually probably works however.
Same for say making a power point. LLMs can quickly spit out a passable deck I am sure. For a lot of BS job use cases, that's actually probably fine.
But if it is the key element of a sales pitch, really it's just advanced auto-formatting/complete, and the human element is still the most important part. For example I doubt all the AI startups are using AI generated sales pitches when they go to VC for funding.
IMO slop fits best for "art that isn't the point".
A promotional flyer for an event could work perfectly well in plain text. The art is pure social signal - this event is thrown by the type of people who put art in a certain style on their flyers. Your eye is caught and your brain almost immediately discards the art.
Same with power point - you make a power point so that everyone knows this decision was made by the type of people who make power points. A txt file and a png would have gotten the job done.
Same also with memes - you could just _say_ a lot of these jokes, but they're funnier with a hastily-edited image alongside.
If you're interested in making and finishing a game, there is no good argument to be made for writing your own engine unless you have some very very specific rendering requirements (e.g. you want your game to be in hyperbolic space or something, or have 3D portals).
In every other case by writing your own engine you'll be wasting your time on a million already solved problems instead of actually, you know, making a game.
If you're interested in game engine development, or graphics programming, and not so much in finished games, then you can write some engine code as an educational exercise, though.
> Contrariwise, it's possible (but harder) to have no sense of taste and merely copy what most would regard as "good taste" and be perceived as having "good taste."
Exactly. This idea comes up time and time again, but the cost/benefit just doesn't make sense at all. You're adding an unbelievable amount of complex tooling just to avoid running a simple formatter.
The goal of having every developer viewing the code with their own preferences just isn't that important. On every team I've been on, we just use a standard style guide, enforced by formatter, and while not everyone agrees with every rule, it just doesn't matter. You get used to it.
Arguing and obsessing about code formatting is simply useless bikeshedding.
I disagree with almost every choice made by the Go language designers, but `Gofmt's style is no one's favorite, yet gofmt is everyone's favorite` is solid. Pick a not-unreasonable standard, enforce it, and move on to more important things.
Yeah it would probably be a waste of time. It's a nice idea to dream about though. It would be nice to be able to look at some C# code and not have opening curly brackets on a separate line.
>> The goal of having every developer viewing the code with their own preferences just isn't that important.
Bah! So, what is more important? Is the average convenience of the herd more important? Average of the convenience, even if there was ever such a thing.
What if you really liked reading books in paper format, but were forced to read them on displays for... reasons?
I think the SC software mindset here is: I am in that group, got mine. The analysis ends there. And the higher your perceived ability the less worried you are about the future.
