Omega-3 is an EFA

My bad, “I’m not a scientist” bit me hard here lol, though I did read that if you get your omega-3 from plant sources (linolenic acid) its absorption rate is extremely low comparing to sources like salmon.

Regarding supplementation, I feel like having to do that because of inherent issues with your diet is somewhat of a dirty hack (I do take some supplements though, so I’m not gonna pretend like it is not an option).

Even taking this claim at face value, we would have to solve plant based diet issues, such as insufficiencies in some vitamins (e.g. B12), complexity of getting sufficient amount of essential amino acids (esp. omega-3) and omega-3, slow but steady reduction in an overall amount of nutrients present in both vegetables and fruits etc.

And if we say that the answer is to “engineer” foods: fortify grains with vitamins, come up with “equivalent on paper” diary replacements (e.g. oat “milk”) etc, then we need to ask ourselves whether this is actually the answer? Can we effectively reduce foods to a small number of “key ingredients” and add them everywhere? Is this sustainable? What about the environmental impact of running all those factories that “engineer” plant-based alternatives to the foods our ancestors ate for generations?

I do not know the answer, I’m no scientist, nor proponent of any specific way forward. I just read stuff. The only thing that I do believe is that there is no silver bullet.

Books I find very interesting:

• In Defence of Food
• Ultra-Processed People

UPDATE: Corrected that Omega-3 is indeed not an amino acid

The article you’ve linked ignores two very important points: how much of that land is marginal (not suitable for growing crops) and the fact that our monoculture approach to growing crops is as much (if not more) devastating to our environment.

There’s no way to put it apart from “humans destroy habitats”, and I don’t think that it makes much difference whether the land was dedicated for grazing or crops.

Any study that mashes together processed and unprocessed meat in epidemiological setting is next to meaningless in my opinion. You can associate basically anything this way.

Guess where read meat and processed meat intersect? McDonald’s, for example. Now tell me that eating sirloins kills me.

Type hints are cool. Runtime enforced type hints are cooler.

https://github.com/beartype/beartype

The last paragraph doesn’t have to be a problem though

It is not yet, but the trajectory implies it may become a problem down the road. We’re, sadly, living this decade, where you can no longer ignore where a certain service is heading and how it monetises itself.

Mandatory “don’t put Signal and Telegram in the same sentence” notice. Not to be a snob, but Telegram is not “secure and private”, all chats are not end-to-end encrypted by default, everything is stored on Telegram’s servers with “forever-ever” retention. The end-to-end encryption is opt in, uses a dodgy encryption algorithm and has some limitations in terms of who you can contact and from what device etc.

Telegram is owned by Pavel Durov who also created the largest Russian social media platform VK, which later was overtaken by Russian state as a tool for crowd control and propaganda. Even if we assume that Pavel no longer has any ties with Russia and its “government”, his biography should still raise at least some questions around whether one should trust Telegram.

And finally, Telegram seems to be going the “everything app” route lately, which makes it a one stop shop of personal communication, public channels, news, bots, stories etc. (you name it). While it is not a bad thing in objective terms, these features are not built with privacy in mind, as that would pose quite a technical challenge. This means that Telegram’s privacy and security will only be sacrificed more and more to get more of the social features out of the door.

/rant over/

All good, the downvotes are not my doing :)

I tolerate it, though barely. But that’s not the reference I was trying to make :)

Literally uninterjectable

One time I’ve tried to do it and it is not fun. I guess I’ll stick with pleb init.vim for now.