teleoplexy
1d ago
Do you by any chance have Gilbert's syndrome? My pet theory is that it could be related although there's literally zero evidence that it is
teleoplexy
2d ago
For sure! I noticed I never got "the rush" many get after a cardio workout, I'm just more on the edge, not less
teleoplexy
2d ago
I'll admit right away that I'm late to the party - the Motte, SSC and the subculture around all of it seems to have pretty much died down and I'm not sure where to find everyone other than Twitter, which I refuse to use. But I think I want to catch up with all of the stuff that happened and was important to you all at the time. I'm aware of multiple SSC best-of compilations, but what about the others? Don't we have some legacy other than Scott?
So, to the survivors, I have two questions:
- What do you think are the best articles/arguments/comments/posts of the past decade?
- What's the book/article/comment that attracted you to the community in the first place?
teleoplexy
5d ago
I take 400mg Magnesium Bisglycinate 1-1.5 hours before sleep. No weird dreams, no feeling in the legs either
teleoplexy
5d ago
When I got diagnosed with RLS, doctor did a blood test but did not find any kind of deficiency. I think it’s worth trying it again. Testing supplements myself is a good idea, I’ll try it after ruling out electrolyte imbalance. Thank you!
I would also wager that your depression is a symptom of an underlying physical problem.
I don’t think I’m currently depressed, but let’s see whether any of the advice I got here changes my mind on this!
teleoplexy
5d ago
Literally Gatorade? Despite the advertising, the "electrolytes" in Gatorade are mostly sodium. One potato has ~8x the potassium of a 20 oz Gatorade, IIRC. Some of your symptoms are consistent with your electrolytes being completely wack. Slightly supported by the mentioned magnesium supplementation combined with high sodium, but no mention of potassium, phosphorus, or calcium.
I actually don't know anything about micronutrients and that's on me, I'll do the research. I haven't seen anyone mentioning that this can have a connection to sleep quality.
Not just Gatorade, of course. I salt my food a lot which I assume counts as more sodium, but I haven't supplemented anything else. I just checked and Macrofactor also has a micronutrient tracker, I'll start using that today.
Maybe try tracking micro-nutrients in cronometer, and seeing if you are hitting adequate intake for everything? It's hard to get enough potassium, especially at higher sodium intakes since the ratio of potassium and sodium also matters.
I think potassium is a really likely culprit. When I worked out my didn't have a lot of vegetables and the fruits I ate didn't contain a lot of it too. I was likely very short of the required ratio.
I used to live with a very high level athlete, it wasn't uncommon for him to allocate like 10+ hours for bed. You can get away with a lot less if you are not training hard, other stressors are low, or if it's a short stint but some people just naturally need more sleep time.
I find I feel great with 7:40 hours when I'm not working out and it's hard for me to reshuffle my routine during work days due to family obligations, but I'll see whether I can do it and feel good in case I can't solve it while working out.
teleoplexy
6d ago
Thank you taking your time to respond!
Even though you say it doesn't matter when you do the workouts, it has to matter somewhat, right? For example, if you did a workout 2 days ago you would sleep better than if you did one today.
I experience severe side-effects from insomnia so on day 2 I usually just sleep easier just from the sheer lack of sleep on the previous day. But after intense workouts the symptoms usually persist for 2-3 days.
From a practical level, try to give yourself more than 7hr 40m to sleep. Obviously its better to sleep through the night, but it's okay to wake up if you get overall enough.
That's what I have been doing, more or less. If I don't get enough sleep during the night, I just wake up later, but I find it inconvenient enough from the work-life balance standpoint to actually try to resolve the underlying issue.
teleoplexy
6d ago
Seems like it, in all honesty. I'll try just doing Zone 2 cardio for a while and increase it in 5 minute intervals weekly.
I can't google anything useful about my issue and Claude is largely unhelpful, the doctors try to diagnose me with depression (I have a very well managed SAD, so I technically might qualify but this is not the main root cause), sports medicine physicians just don't exist where I am, so I want to dump the list of the symptoms I have and see whether you guys can help me come up with a direction to dig.
The main issue: when I do sports, whether it's cardio or weightlifting, I find it really hard to sleep. Fundamentally, my sleep is more fragile. I fall asleep easily all of the time, but when I work out it's easier for me to wake up during the night (for any reason, e.g. noise, wanting to go pee, being too hot, being too cold) and harder to fall back asleep after I wake up.
- I've had those problems regardless of whether I'm depressed or not. But in general, I'm not depressed. I get depressed when I don't get enough sleep consistently.
- Given the allotted time slot of 7 hours 40 minutes, when working out, I sleep 5-6 hours, when I'm not I sleep around 7+ hours.
- I've worked out consistently for over a year and during all of that time my sleep quality was in the dumpster. As soon as I stopped, it improved drastically. I stopped waking up in the middle of the night as much and I have no trouble falling back asleep almost entirely. I thought that if I power through sleep issues, they are going to go away, but they didn't.
- I tried to start working out again and bad sleep quality was back after the first session.
- If I engage in a physically demanding activity (for example a hike) bad quality returns the same day.
- I have a restless leg syndrome and drink magnesium for it. Magnesium removes the feeling in my shins almost entirely, but it seems like it flares up more when I work out. Rolling out the shins doesn't help.
- When I work out, I am constantly thirsty, regardless of how much I drink. Due to that, I wake up to go pee 2 or 3 times a night. I tried to stop drinking 1-2 hours before going to bed, but it just feels really uncomfortable.
- I was working out both when I restricted calories and when I was supporting my current weight. When restricting calories, I woke up due to being hungry sometimes (I attribute that to the sleep being fragile).
- Working from the assumption that this might be related to the restless legs syndrome, I tried to refrain from targeting legs in my workouts, but it doesn't really matter which muscle group I target.
- I maintain strict sleep hygiene, so we can rule out external factors.
- Room where I sleep is cool, dark and (reasonably) quiet.
- I tried working out in the morning and it doesn't matter when I do it.
- I thoroughly stretched after the work out (when I did work out) and I also stretch before going to bed.
- I tried adding more electrolytes (i.e. Gatorade), but I don't know what the hell I'm doing or what I'm measuring. In any case, I eat a lot of salt as is and I didn't notice any difference when adding additional electrolytes in my diet.
I desperately want to see a doctor, but they are trying to diagnose me with a mental health problem rather than a chemical imbalance. Feel free to ignore my complaints about doctors and suggest me to see a doctor, but I'd be grateful if you could spell out what I should say to him.
teleoplexy
12d ago
I agree, they can't be substituted and the examples I gave are specifically the exceptions to the rule.
teleoplexy
12d ago
Most of the games, yes. But some of games can certainly put you in the head of someone else: Disco Elysium, Mouthwashing, Pathologic series, Omori, Signalis. They are much more of an exception to the rule, though.
teleoplexy
13d ago
I disagree, the only thing that it requires from you is that you are Russian and lived in Russia. It’s actually funny how every review for it that I’ve heard from non-Russians is negative, but Russians love it. In general, I’m a bit baffled that foreigners try to read Sorokin because it’s akin to trying to understand an inside joke without any context.
I'd be happy if you could provide any examples - news articles, maybe even social media posts. The reason I'm asking is I've been to community development meetings in multiple cities in Canada and I've never seen anyone but nimbys opposing new builds and rezoning changes. The main concerns I've heard in those meetings is that high-rise buildings bring crime, put less tall houses in their shadow, change the character of the community, pose threat to children due to the increased traffic.
teleoplexy
14d ago
Is there a concrete example where self-defined Canadian marxists/communists/socialists have been against building new housing?
teleoplexy
1mo ago
Sorry for sidetracking (great post btw) - I've just realized that you are FTTTG. Loved your "Contra DeBoer" essay, I still link it everywhere DeBoer and trans issues are mentioned together.
teleoplexy
2mo ago
The meme-ness of it is the main reason I'm opposed to widespread normalization of trans minors. I've seen multiple young people (my relatives even) playing around with the idea of transitioning based on the social and online groups they were in. All of them stopped being interested in gender when separating from those groups. One push from a gender-related medical specialist and I can totally see any of them cementing gender beliefs into their identity.
teleoplexy
2mo ago
Also curious about Trump County, CA
I'm not against these tools. I think those are actually pretty cool and useful. However, whatever Adobe does with Photoshop and the examples you give are to me the motte. When it's used as a tool, I have no qualms with it. When it makes artist's life easier without compromising the artistic vision it's amazing, it's the best outcome. The bailey in the argument against AI art is twofold:
- It is currently most commonly used to generate slop using a single prompt. It is already a huge problem, to a point where indie search engines add an option to filter it out. The OP is asking why is there outrage against the AI, and the reason for it are not the tools that you and I agree are impressive. The problem lies in the lazy one-prompt slop, which I had in mind when writing the post.
- The future promise of the technology is generating full blown songs, pictures, videos just by using a prompt and without compromising on quality. This future, once again, is not an ideal outcome for me because even if the future GenAI doesn't compromise on quality, the one-promptness of it will still compromise the vision.
For me art is about communication and connection. I'm often looking to understand what an artist says to me. More often than not, I like art is interesting to me on an emotional level, rather than rational or entertainment value level. I feel like I'm connecting with the artist.
Consider A Crow Looked At Me by Mount Eerie. This album deeply affects me when I listen to it. It's a visceral experience - I'm a husband and this album conveys grief and loss a husband experienced when his wife died. It reflects the personal experience of Phil Elverum. Don't get me wrong, AI could have written the same album, it probably will make an equally or more emotionally impactful album in my lifetime, but an AI haven't experienced what Phil Elverum has experienced. To me, the value of this album is not in a crystalized commodity of musical album, that AI could produce. The value resides in the personal message from Phil to everyone who has experienced loss. Each part, the lyrics, the music of this album was tortured out of him by himself. His work has some kind of unquantifiable emotional value. A statistical model can approximate these feelings and produce an average representation of grief, but a masterful artist expresses those emotions directly. AI doesn't "understand" the assignment in the same way a human does.
As another example, let's take Rothko. His pieces are banal at the first glance. Plain color on a big canvas? I mean, I could do this myself, unironically. But, regardless of how hard it was to make his various Untitleds, I still care about Rothko's intentions - like when he tried to make rich people depressed while they eat in Four Seasons restaurant.
After visiting the location of his future artwork, Rothko stated that he hoped to "ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room."
Rothko stated that “He achieved just the kind of feeling I’m after - he makes the viewers feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall."
The stated intent is funny to me, it's absurd. He miserably failed in his endeavor to make rich people depressed - they just ignored the murals, to Rothko's dismay. But those murals represent something tangible. A prompter can try to approximate the intent, but I'm not interested in a statistical approximation of what makes rich people depressed, I'm interested in what Rothko thought could make rich people depressed because it tells me something about Rothko. It's interesting to me how he approached depression, what he viewed as depressing, why did he view it like that. AI art won't tell me something about the prompter because by its nature, it's a statistical representation of what the average output to a given prompt looks like.
There's lots of art that's soulless, lots of art that exists solely to make money - and that's great! A lot of projects by good artists are financed by doing the dirty money-making work: the gaming example of it would be Josh Sawyer conceiving Pentiment in 1990s, but only being able to make it in 2022 as an ostensibly pet project. I like Josh Sawyer's other projects, but Pentiment is great in part because it's was a pet project that he cared a lot about. There's nothing like Pentiment because it's the result Josh Sawyer's passion. Lots of artists work in the advertisement industry to make ends meet and make art that they care about in their free time.
I'm afraid that if AI art makes life more difficult for the Taylor Swifts and the Marvels and the Corporate Memphisers and Ubisofts of the art sphere (the purely money focused business endeavors that result in entertainment art), artists that I care about will suffer by an extension as the field becomes less lucrative for everybody.
TL;DR:
- There's entertainment-value-only art and thoughtful art. I don't claim that the latter is better than the former, or vice versa. I just happen to like thoughtful art more.
- When I'm interacting with thoughtful art, I'm looking for the artist's intent and for the feelings that authors try to convey through their art.
- Putting your feelings through generative AI is a statistical approximation of your feelings, rather than a more valuable to me direct representation of those feelings. I'm trying to connect with the author through the art and I think that this connection can't be established through an AI lens.
- Author's intent can't be purely conveyed through AI art.
- The part of the art industry that AI aims to colonize subsidizes the art that I care about.
I still think there are uses for AI art. If it could replace Marvel or Corporate Memphis designers or any decorative-only, illustration art, furry porn, I wouldn't shed a tear for what we've lost. But, if it happens to also choke the part of the art industry I care about, the advent of AI is unacceptable to me.
teleoplexy
3mo ago
Do you believe that Times Opinion only interviewed pro-Hamas doctors? The Times Opinion team oversaw the whole questionnaire and polling process.
It's very easy for me to believe that some Americans are to some extent pro-Hamas. It's even easier for me to believe that the Americans who ended up volunteering in Gaza are pro-Hamas.
What's the Motte's perspective on why Trump's "fake" (contingent) electors scheme not a great deal? Truthfully, I'm not very familiar with the US electoral system, so I'd be grateful for any and all corrections.
As far as I understand, this is not the first time when an alternative slate of electors was submit - 1960's Hawaii election seems to be another example and it became a precedent of when it's permissible to submit an alternate slate. From what I'm seeing, though, the differences between this example and Trump's scheme are
- The election hasn't been certified yet in Hawaii, while it has been certified in all of the states for which alternate elector slates were submitted.
- There was legitimate uncertainty who won - famously, the difference in Hawaii was 110 votes, while Trump's lawsuits were predicated on widespread fraud during the election. Apparently, Eastman knew that those lawsuits are dead in the water. In this case, I'm not entirely sure what's the steelman case for Pence not certifying the election, and what was the purpose of the alternate slates (other than to overturn the election, that is)
teleoplexy
3mo ago
Canadian elections are almost all culture war nowadays, though...
teleoplexy
3mo ago
Congrats! First one for me too, honestly didn't expect it.
teleoplexy
3mo ago
Sidetracking a bit - I’m really impressed by ublock origin efforts to fight Youtube ads. And they don’t take donations to boot. A group of indie devs really managed to put up a good fight against Google’s anti-blocker department.
It already functions in most workplaces, honestly. At least everywhere I worked at there was a clause about notifying management when you start dating another employee, with the underlying assumption that it would prevent uncomfortable situations regarding power dynamics. It's not that uncommon, you don't need to introduce new laws to do this.
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