Agreed - it's all in the dose and the response. Not even mentioning the selection pressure for us to adapt to at least small amounts of alcohol in our diet, which has been present in basic things such as fermented fruits that we had to eat in our ancestral environment.
Fair, but it depends on how far you want to go down the memory lane. It's not unheard of that Greeks would live until they're 60 or 70yo. That's about 2500 years ago. Not as much as 100s of thousands of years ago, but the selection pressure is still present, and who knows how far back it might have gone.
I think nobody would argue drinking a lot of alcohol, or substantial alcohol, is detrimental for health.
The question being argued is whether drinking a small amount of alcohol is detrimental to your health. This is a different matter altogether.
We, humans, have been drinking alcohol for millenia. I'm skeptical to the idea that a small amount, say, a glass of wine for lunch every day or so, can harm us, especially for active individuals. There has been a natural selection process for us to adapt.
I believe what Taleb is doing here is of great public value, and I commend him for that.
I spent some time working with CBT for alcohol use disorder, mainly treating "active individuals". I've heard your line of reasoning many times. No level of alcohol consumption is considered risk free from a scientific point of view, at least the view of the senior researchers and professors I worked quite closely with.
So, I don't think this is providing "great public value", on the contrary I would suggest spending time with the research and treatment of the many individuals starting out thinking that "a glass of wine for lunch every day or so" can't "harm us".
From a certain point on we must start being adults again and become aware that some health risks are worth the price when it comes to drinking a glass or two of wine/beer every-once in a while. Because wine/beer have helped us become more of a social animal over the millennia, i.e. have helped us become humans, and suddenly reversing that for the sake of, I don't know, 6 months-a year of prolonged living in their late 70s - the 80s is not worth it.
With that said, I'm fully aware that excessive alcohol intake (i.e. alcoholism) has been destroying lives for millennia, too, but that's what life is, we can't turn it into this aseptic thing where every risk is accounted for.
I almost completely stopped drinking because it hurts my surfing performance, and surfing so so much nicer then drinking, so it was a good trade off.
But I’m curious nonetheless, can you give some examples of those risks? I keep seeing people mentioning them, but haven’t seen many well informed reasonings
Medical risks are the most commonly mentioned, for instance, alcohol is a major risk for cancer and, in some regions, has overtaken smoking as a leading risk factor. But in my personal experience, the most damaging consequences of alcohol use (disorder) are its negative effects on relationships with spouses, children, other relatives, and friends. It doesn't only affect the person willing to take the risk, but also others.
What a puritanical response.
By your argument, anything that could be abused is verboten. Feel free to live (and argue that way). I'll do the opposite. I'll trust to documented, well researched data rather than someone's "Trust me bro" reasoning.
I think your base assumption is flawed: just because we've been drinking alcohol for millennia doesn't mean it's safe or good for us. Natural selection doesn't magically fix everything; there needs to be some sort of selection pressure, and "dying a little bit younger" is likely not enough to weed out people who don't get the "alcohol is good for you" genetic mutations. Especially when people who drink only a moderate amount of alcohol still overwhelmingly live through and past reproductive age.
Whether or not a drinker is an "active individual" may not affect the damage (or non-damage) alcohol does; there's no reason to assume that changes anything.
I like a drink here and there as much as the next guy, but I'm not going to pretend there's zero harm.
No, no. You got this backwards. You and others arguing your point have to find solid evidence that small alcohol quantities have that “risk” or “harm”.
In absence of evidence, it’s a better default to think that it’s not harmful as explained by my arguments above. I’m not arguing selection pressure is a strong argument in favor of no harm, I’m arguing that it's a better argument in absence of strong evidence saying otherwise.
The linked document explains how there’s not such thing as strong evidence in habit of the small alcohol quantities are harmful hypothesis. Making papers and running studies is hard, they depend on small sample sizes and statistical analysis that more often than not is flawed.
But, alcohol is something that has been present in our ancestral environment (e.g. fermented fruits). If anyone's telling me, our bodies didn't learn to at least tolerate small amounts of it without any major side effects, I'm going to be asking a lot of follow-up questions.
I think it's much easier to argue this case than, say, tobacco or "drugs", which are arguably more recent inventions, depending on your exact definition of drug.
Same logic applies to heavy metal like lead and others. Also cyanide and arsenic. And so on. We still actively avoid them. Just because we can tolerate them via various process does not mean it wouldn't be better to avoid them altogether and minimise exposure.
One could argue that small exposure to these metals is what caused us our body to develop defenses against them. If you remove the "small" exposure, you remove the cure, so to speak. Similar to how small quantities of cyanide create an adaptation in your body, but a slightly bigger one would kill you. Minimizing exposure can be net negative for us, as humans, and four our future children.
If alcohol was invented today, people would be like "no way we allow a juice that makes you happy, stupid, aggressive and endangers yourself and others and has high addictive levels".
If alcoholic drinks were invented today they would probably taste about as good as junk food so there would be no loss. Can you imagine any business promoting a product that requires years to sitting in precise storage!?
Lots of things we eat and drink and use would be illegal if invented now. Refined sugar, many herbs. Even rice can contain arsenic, as can some root vegetables. Maybe even electricity - something that is easily fatal, and can start fires?
I'd agree, but alcohol isn't necessarily highly addictive. The addiction depends on the dose quantity and frequency. I'm talking, a beer or wine, not necessarily liquor. I mean, let's look at the real word: for every alcoholic addict, there must be _at least_ one person that casually drinks one drink a week or two.
I agree. To clarify I do jot mean alcohol is highly addictive but that highly addictive drugs are more harmful than alcohol because of the difficulty of moderation. Most people I know drink alcohol but have no problem not having it for a few days, and usually drink reasonable amounts.
Omnigent seems to compete more against Orca https://github.com/stablyai/orca
They both went to be the Agent IDE layer, where you come with your tasks and everything is taken care of. I've been using Orca for a handful of tasks and have been largely enjoying it. My default barebones workflow is ghostty + zmx on ssh connections.
In constitutional monarchy systems like the UK, the king/queen serves a merely representative and largely symbolic role. Morocco's king actually rules over the country. That is a big difference.
Can you elaborate on what symptoms do people with ADHD have that the ADHD “sympathizers” don’t? How can one analyze themselves “on close inspection” to know if they truly have ADHD?
ADHD usually runs in families. There will likely be a direct relative who went undiagnosed, but who fits the ADHD criteria. Also symptoms from early childhood onwards - it's not something that just happens one day. It's a lifelong pattern of behaviour.
If you're concerned I strongly recommend you speak with a professional. Everyone's ADHD manifest in slightly different ways and nobody on the internet can diagnose you.
Not OP, but I would say that people's self analysis should focus around examining/describing their own internal existence, not external-view terms from the medical industry. If you suspect you have a problem that can be diagnosed and helped by the medical industry, go right ahead and seek out that help. But regardless you've also got to do the work internally, and externalizing your locus of control onto the medical industry undermines that.
I use Adguard/wipr to great success. Why's uBlock Origin better? Also, wipr now has filtr, which provides URL filtering at the macOS level, so it's as efficient as it gets.
I think the limitations are similar to the manifest v3 issues that the Chrome version has. Specifically, you (the ad blocker) send the browser a list of sites to block, instead you blocking them yourself. That means it's way harder to do clever things like scriptlet injection to find ads and get around adblock detection.
Seconded for Wipr. It's my favorite adblocker I've tried yet (although 1Blocker is also really nice). And if the author sells it to some creepy company, the Safari API means that the new owner can't spy on my viewing. I'm not sure how it could be materially improved by using less privacy-respecting APIs.
Quick question: how do you distinguish content blocker extensions from regular extensions? All the Adblockers I know have to use both to be effective at hiding ads, especially on YouTube.
In that case, the new owner can still do the spying.
I use AdGuard, Wipr, and uBlock Origin Lite on my iPhone, and uBlock Origin on desktop.
I swear there are little gaps in each that the others get, but they're very minor. When uBlock Origin Lote recently released on iOS (within the last year), I noticed a few more things blocked. I also prefer the custom element removal or uBlock and can reuse my desktop filters.
It's free, so I'd recommend adding it as an addition to the bunch.
I wanted to mention that `zmx` is a beautiful piece of minimal software that basically has gotten rid of my tmux and zellij use. Uses a ghostty-based terminal emulator for each session, supports pretty much all of these features by leveraging ghostty. I truly don’t see the benefit of something like herdr over this minimal, robust setup. If I really wanted a lot of customization for AI assistants, I’d consider using Orca, but my current zmx approach works OOB and it’s solid. Great software!
Thank you for mentioning zmx. Reading through their repo, it’s like someone read my mind, took my instinctive, almost pre-verbal, half-formed/quarter-baked preference for `screen` over `tmux`, beautifully and precisely formalized it into an actually lucid opinion, and then instantiated it as an actually real piece of software. I’ve used it for an hour and it already feels like second nature; I somehow have muscle memory for features that I didn’t even know it had until I instinctively used them and they were right where I expected them to be. Seriously, thank you.
My pleasure. Make sure you check out the thriving ecosystem of tools around it as well. I’ve seen a few projects building on it in a prettt creative way.
I really want to like this. Ideologically I'm on board. Who wouldn't want to avoid all this multiplexing complexity and pitfalls? But deferring the window management to the OS sounds great in theory, but in practice it falls short (at least for me).
I work on both MacOS and Linux. Even if I were to figure out a perfect window management approach, I'd have to do it twice, and then figure out a way to "attach" to a layout of windows essentially. And then make it cross-platform... or live with zero organization, or at best some kind of flat structure. That's a immediate non-starter. Even if I focused only on a single OS, I still don't consider this a viable approach. It would be like removing browser tabs, and saying let's let the OS manage all this nasty UI stuff.
So then the next immediate idea is let's just have the Terminal itself manage UI. Ghostty supports tabs, splits etc. Great. But if I need to restart Ghostty for whatever reason, my entire layout vanishes and I have to set it all up again?
For me tmux is not just about the attach/detach part. A session is a personal "layout" of the workspace I've organically landed on for this task. Maybe it's a few windows with splits. Maybe it's just the single window with or without a split. Maybe it's a more browser-like just X amount of windows (tabs). If/when things get overwhelming I branch off into a new session for one (or more) sub-tasks. Little fzf-based utilities allow for nice fuzzying over sessions and what not. Or maybe you just run the different sessions in actual different physical OS windows. You can mix and match however you feel that day.
So if I'm in project x, working on feature y, and I detach and walk over to my other computer I can SSH over and continue as if nothing at all changed and retain the exact layout of what I was using before. Simultaneously in another physical window (or a tab) I can just switch to another local (or not) session and instantly be mentally in a different context, working on a different project or feature. Or I can SSH into a server and resume a debugging session left (intentionally) open for a while (which may consist of a few splits/windows/what not).
Maybe I'm missing something. I'm curious how your day-to-day workflow looks like. I imagine if I was 100% bound to a single machine, I could make it work with a tiling wm. But even then Ghostty crashes or something else happens and poof your entire work layout is gone and needs to be re-created (even if the individual pieces are safe).
If you do most of your work on a central server and treat your other devices as thin clients, then (afaik) Tmux/Zellij are the way to go – not to mention if you want to multiplayer with colleagues.
(I know Wezterm has remote session multiplexing in beta, but I’d be surprised if you can re-attach from a different machine.)
Lately I’ve been experimenting with embracing the total scriptability of my favorite terminal, Kitty. Its creator is famously outspoken about non-native multiplexers, precisely because of the pitfalls you mentioned and because they hold back the terminal ecosystem.
Couple of recent issues I’ve had: washed-out colors in Claude Code, desktop notifications not passing through, scrollback weirdness, and image protocol mismatches.
I used to treat Zellij as an OS to build my own IDE in. Now it’s Kitty.
I save layouts as a Kitty session. Important limitation: this doesn’t persist running processes. And so enter zmx. Whenever I need a process I can reattach to I wrap it in zmx.
A terminal agent can interact with the kitty cli to create splits and such. I’m still on the fence as to whether that’s safe. Probably not. Also, tmux is likely better represented in the training data. Currently experimenting with running claude inside tmux (multiplexing) inside nono (sandbox).
Niri is a perfect window manager approach, in my opinion. I don’t need tmux. Just Niri + Foot (terminal) and it’s perfect for the way my brain works. If you haven’t tried it, I highly recommended it.
Huh. The person you're replying to specifically mentioned they connect to the same tmux session from different computers. Niri is great, but how's it relevant here?
