It's all over in Norway too. Anecdotally it is definitely more common than steroids already. I can only find statistics on the legal ones, but they show that 10% of all women in their 50's are prescribed the ones for weight reduction <https://www.fhi.no/he/fr/folkehelserapporten/samfunn/legemid...> (Fig 13).
I'd make a distinction between Semaglutide/Tirzepatide and other GLP-1 agonists that are available through the regulated pharmaceutical system with strong evidence for particular uses, and ordering unregulated peptides from China based on a subreddit's recommendation.
I used to be on a biohacking/nootropics discord a decade ago. People were trying to treat their depression by ordering research chemicals from Russian labs or synthesizing them themselves. Huge difference between that and going to the GP and getting a Prozac prescription, with semi-regulated supplements being in the middle. That's analogous to ordering peptides from sketchy suppliers, getting a GLP-1 prescribed by a doctor, and getting a peptide facial from a medspa.
I would assume that an order of magnitude more people are getting prescription GLP-1s than are ordering other peptides from online suppliers and injecting them.
Hard liquor is absorbed faster than beer which leads to a stronger rush effect. It's similar to snorting vs shooting cocaine. When the effect hits faster, the psychological association between the stimuli and the effect (sensitization) becomes stronger.
This effect has been demonstrated with rat studies using cocaine:
It's easier to drink more units of alcohol faster when it's more concentrated, and not full of bubbles.
I don't think its so much that it's absorbed faster than it's just physically possible to drink 200 ml of liquor faster than it is to drink 1600ml of beer.
Let's go Polymark on this one. We have a race to alcohol poisoning.
Alice gets ∞ of the Champagne of Beers. Bob gets one bottle of EverClear.
Ready. Set. Go
I think Bob wins.
One could also be obnoxious and argue that liquor is more easily concealed, transported, etc, therefore facilitating alcoholism more effectively by allowing a larger landscape.
If the US wants to abdicate their position as a global hegemon of every waterway and trade route this seems like a good way to do it. The US is much less dependent on the Strait of Hormuz than its competitors.
Ten years down the line it may be the case that India will sail up and enforce toll-free waterways instead. That will never happen as long as the US puts up the resources for it. The American taxpayer will be better off if the burden of global free trade is borne more equitably.
It's not like the US did massive world wide power projection (capabilities) out of altruism. It's a necessity to project their political and economic demands.
If the US citizen think being a super power is to expensive, that's fine for the world. No empire lasts forever. The US can become an important regional power, having its destiny more influenced by the upcoming super powers that fill the vacuum.
Why even maintain such a vast navy to consume money in international waters? Just protect your immediate coast line, why would you care what's going on in the Pacific or Atlantic Ocean or the Arctic, that's just costing money.
-cide is a latin suffix that quite simply means "kill". Trying to call ethnic cleansing genocide is like calling divorce mariticide or moving away from home patricide.
The correct latin term would be something like "expulsio gentium".
Raphael Lemkin, the guy who first coined the term "genocide", considered "cultural genocide" (the killing of a culture if you will), a central component of genocide.
Also, I don't know if you've noticed, but people generally resist being ethnic cleansed, and so the perpetrators have to kill a lot of them.
The post you replied to suggested a real solution to the problem. It was implemented in my current org years ago (after log4j) and we have not been affected by any of the malware dependencies that has happened since.
It's an interesting idea. I did some napkin math based on the Solaris Urbino 18 bus. The buses have about 45 square meters of ceiling area (18m by 2.5m). Assuming efficient solar panels you could get 250w/sqm. That works out to 11.25 kwh/hour. The bus advertises with 600km of range with 800kwh of batteries so that is 1.33 kwh/km. Hence it could do ~8km/h on average when it is sunny.
The math does not really work out to a viable product with this bus, but it is not too far off. A city bus that has been purpose-built for low speed in urban areas without other traffic may work as it can make some sacrifices. For instance, since it runs much slower on average it would need smaller engines. It could also use more light-weight material since it won't need to handle high speed collisions. If it is just used for short distances within a city center it could also do away with seats. Lower speed should also lead to lower consumption.
The Solaris Urbino 18 weighs 17.5 tons curb weight. Assuming fuel consumption is pretty linearly related with weight and you could get it down to less than half, you could get a bus with a range of 10 miles per hour of charging. If it drove for 6 hours a day, but got charged for 12, 20 miles on average per hour is possible.
Yeah I wasn't clear enough but I was really thinking about the most limited form of "transportation", low speed, low weight, so minimal frame and no protections really. Basically a string of bus stops on wheels. Maybe an average speed of 13mph would be enough. That's 3 three times the average walking speed.
Why bother? Put the charge station in the bus stop instead. They have a longer runtime to charge and the bus does not have to be slow.
Potentially easier to maintain too.
Why bother ? Have the solar panels on top of the tram warehouse, use the tram batteries for storage, swap empty ones for full ones when needed. If the solar array is down use the grid. That way you divid points of failure instead of multiplying them
> I'm sure they must exist somewhere, but battery-powered trams are not popular.
Yes, they do exist. The Alstom Citadis at Rio de Janeiro, which I take often, uses a supercapacitor for small pieces of its route (mostly crossings where the third rail would be damaged too often by vehicle traffic, or be impractical); according to the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alstom_Citadis), the Alstom Citadis at Nice uses batteries for parts of its route (https://www.railway-technology.com/projects/nice-trams/). I'm sure there are others.
In my experience, non-coders with LLMs can go beyond simple scripts and build non-trivial small applications nowadays, but the difference of outcomes between them and a competent coder with LLMs is still staggering.
I have - somebody in my mushroom foraging group wrote an app that predicts what kinds of mushrooms you are likely to find in different spots in our area, based on weather forecasts and data he's been collecting for years. It's a dead simple frontend/backend, but it works, he built and deployed it himself and he had zero coding experience before this. Pretty impressive, from my perspective.
As a programmer I can see all the rough edges but that doesn't seem to bother the other 99% of people on the group who use it.
Only in one sense. As code is now cheaper, abstractions meant to decrease code quantity have decreased in value. But abstractions meant to organize logic to make it easier to comprehend retains its value.
Previously there was a tension between easy-to-write (helper functions to group together oft-repeated lines of code, etc) vs easy to read (where often modest repetition is fine and is clearer). I felt this tension a lot in tests where the future reader is very happy with explicit lines of code setting things up, whereas the test author is bored and writes layers of helper functions to speed their work up.
But for LLMs, it seems readability of code pretty much equals its writability?
To make code more authorable by LLM, we approximately just need to make it more readable in the traditional sense (code comments, actual abstractions not just code-saving helper functions, etc).
I hope so, but it adds an extra difficulty
Easy to understand is not always an absolute metric, a project with many lines of code can be easy to understand for a team with a certain experience and difficult to understand for another team with a different experience (not less but different).
Now I will have to think about "easy to understand" for AI
