Fair enough! (Nice to see another Canadian here, too.) :)

This happened to me the other day too. I don't know why I get suckered into it.

I had a problem where my LSP was returning ??? at the beginning of completions; there were some non-UTF-8 characters in there and I didn't know where they came from. ChatGPT said it was a known problem from some Visual Studio compile flags when they get passed to Clang. In retrospect, that's stupid.

But it said it could solve the problem for me by intercepting the .rsp files, stripping the bad flags, and then passing them on. It wrote a little python script to launch the lsp and strip the flags.

I ran it and it seemed to work, but my testing protocol was wrong, and I was just seeing some correlation--the problem was intermittent, and me putting the script in place happened to coincide with some good responses from the LSP.

When I tried shutting down emacs and starting it again, it couldn't stay connected to the LSP through the script, and of course it couldn't. So the script was never really in play. After searching around for a while, it was a known error with a package called eglot-booster, and it was easy to fix by turning off a particular flag.

I have since instituted a rule where it MUST, WITHOUT FAIL, provide a citation for anything it tells me. If it can't find a citation, it MUST mark the section as unverifiable. That has helped a lot.

From my experimenting, Gemini is excellent at giving citations, but it gives up very easily if you tell it to do something and it can't do a complete job. I tried to have it summarize all the commands in a package that started with : (colon). It did an incomplete job, and when I asked it to do it again, it just told me where the documentation was. Claude did an excellent job. ChatGPT also did a partial job, but maintains conversational context better, so you can often get it to fix its own problems.

It may be just as good. It's Gemini, after all.

And I'm saying that if they can't get it the usual way, that MAY be a problem with the health system, not your friends. I was denied statins for YEARS because I was 'too young' to need them, even though my cholesterol was very high considering I was actively racing bikes.

It was only once I went to a cardiologist for something unrelated that he said, "absolutely not," and immediately put me on the statins, and I'm currently at the highest dose available. Despite the fact that I myself am nowhere near overweight *I* may end up on a GLP-1 drug because they also have better health outcomes for people like me. But the time between my first adverse cholesterol readings and the prescription of the statin was TEN YEARS.

Incidentally, I've never talked to a professional, non-sports dietician that wasn't completely useless. They asked me irrelevant questions about my diet and when confronted with the fact that they could do nothing, made up garbage that later, more expert sports dieticians told me not to do. Most of what a dietician does is exactly what we all know: smaller portions, more vegetables. Useless.

You are specifically talking about people who are somehow in need of the drug. They're overweight and sedentary by your OWN description. The reality is that in most cases, losing that weight, however they do it, will lead to better long-term outcomes. It doesn't matter that they're doing it in a way that you disapprove of, they'll probably live a healthier, longer life for it. If what you're concerned about is quality of life, drop this weird strict adherence to the right way to lose weight and get healthy. It is not more moral to suffer for your weight loss, that's what I tried to get across in my first post.

GLP-1 drugs have existed for decades and are extremely well tested, well tolerated and have more benefits than side effects. Even just from the perspective of side effects, it's almost certainly better to bear the ones associated with Ozempic rather than the ones associated with obesity, coronary artery disease or type 2 diabetes. From a public health perspective, to me, it's a no brainer. Loosen the restrictions, get people losing weight FIRST, and then try to fix the other problems with their lack of exercise and poor food choices. The other way around is a waste of time.

I hope you come back to check this.

So I'm close to 50 now, and I don't really care about my bf% anymore. I'm much higher than I used to be, but I really can't stress enough how healthy I am, fitness-wise. I'm a competitive masters swimmer. I cycled more than 5000km last year (135 sessions, about 250 hours worth) and while I only swam for 40h and 75km in 2025, I usually swim more like 250km a year, for 100+ hours. I lift weights to maintain my bone density, because cycling and swimming are both weight-bearing exercises.

I think your goals are GREAT, and I hope you accomplish them. I'm just at a time in my life where my goals are to extend my active lifetime and the body fat mostly doesn't slow me down. I'm almost certainly into the 20% range now, but people with this sort of bf% have LESS all-cause mortality. (Fat is protective in later life; getting sick will starve you and survival can often hinge on how your fat reserves hold up.)

Anyway, good luck with all of that! Those goals sound more than attainable, and it's good that you have a plan!

It's not clear what you mean by 'overuse', though.

Like I said, I have a friend who has never been overweight, let alone obese. She takes it 'off label' to quiet the food noise. She'll never lose any weight on it, but she doesn't need to. It's a mental health drug for her.

You're also describing people who claim they can't lose weight, and you blame their diet. But the implication here is that they SHOULD lose weight, they're just not doing it 'the right way'. But if their health outcomes will be better, it's not clear why you think this is 'overuse'.

Further, even if they DO eat a bad diet on Ozempic AND they lose weight, it necessarily means they're eating LESS than they would've without the Ozempic, so again, how does this count as overuse? Indeed, if their diet is bad and they're losing weight, it means that they've made their diet LESS BAD.

This is senseless moralizing about what the 'right' and 'wrong' way to lose weight/eat less is. The reality is that even if you're 100% correct about the people YOU know and they SHOULD move more and eat better, you don't know what the situation is for other people. While the folks you know may get on it and eat poorly and still lose weight and do nothing with that, SOME people will use that opportunity to get to the gym, to make their diets naturally healthier, etc.

You haven't made a compelling point as to why this is 'overuse'. The fact that people are getting it in shady ways is more of a condemnation of our health system than anything.

'More productive' HOW? More lines of code? More features completed? More bugs filed? More bugs fixed?

Unless I know exactly how he's measuring productivity, this means nothing at all. Maybe it's just 'more programmers are using AI', in which case he hit his metric, but I don't know how it translates into actual *work done*.

CEO slop, just like Bezos numbers.

This is overly reductive.

I was an amateur competitive cyclist and swimmer for years and years. It left me with an eating disorder and body dysmorphia for a long time, because I DO happen to be good at dieting and eating less. I don't actually recommend it to people, honestly.

But many people have something called 'food noise'. When they're not eating, they're always thinking about food. GLP-1 cuts the food noise down considerably. I have a friend who's never been fat, but she's microdosing GLP-1 because it helps get rid of the food noise that rattles around in her head all day long. If you're someone who has persistent food noise, it's HARD to not eat. It's miserable. Your physiology is telling you to do something and you're refusing.

I happen to be great at being hungry. I walked around with a persistent headache and a sick feeling all day long, but I'm pretty good at suffering, so I just did that. I'm 190cm tall and I was as low as 72kg at some point. It didn't make me THAT much faster as a cyclist. I would've been better off being 80kg and spending more time in the gym. Now I'm 95kg (220lbs) and I deadlift 400lbs (180kg).

So I've DONE THE TIME, and I will tell you that keeping weight off is hard even when you're disciplined. I weighed my food. I went to bed hungry. I looked at myself in the mirror and thought I was fat, because that's what doing these stupid things will do to your head. It took me years to get over my disordered eating and I don't know that I'll ever outrun the dysmorphia. I still ride and swim and lift, and I'm constantly annoyed at how little I like my body.

GLP-1 is great for people, and they should use it. I'm not sure why we spend time moralizing about this stuff. If you're obese or diabetic, GLP-1 will make you healthier and help you live longer. It'll help you lose enough weight that you might be able to start doing exercise that you want or spend time in the gym, but I don't think that's a mandatory requirement. I'm on statins because I'm genetically predisposed to very high cholesterol (and this was true even in my 20s and 30s, when I was at my lightest). Take the medication. That's what it's for. Are you gaining weight now that you've come off of GLP-1? Go back on it. We fuckin' did it, man, we made a pill that will make your life longer and healthier, and we're sitting here debating whether people should use them if they want/need to? What a waste of time.

I actually think this is the ONLY way for Apple to come out ahead in this AI era. Don't spend money on data centres and huge training budgets, let some other sucker do that work for you, and let people pick whichever one they want. Look how badly Microsoft is doing. Hemorrhaging cash on a service that everyone knows is vastly inferior to nearly everything else out there.

Apple had a lot of hubris coming into this, but I think it may have accidentally saved them.

I'm with you, but with some caveats:

- If I set a timer, Siri will keep listening and it is insane how many things it will interpret as 'cancel that timer'
- I asked it to start an indoor pool workout today on my watch. It transcribed it properly, and started an 'Other' workout. This is worse than just saying, "I don't understand"
- It is deeply obnoxious when I ask for a detailed weather report for Siri to just say, "it's partly cloudy today," or something equally terse. There is an incantation that does eventually give me the weather I want, but having to coax it out makes me crazy. When I'm asking for information like this, I'm usually changing clothes or bustling about some other way, so I would rather not have to pick up my phone and open weather and do this all manually. I'm just trying to get some information that Siri has access to and I don't know why it won't just GIVE IT TO ME.

I want Siri to be as dumb as possible but no dumber, but it's currently much dumber.

I have made this point before, and I'll make it again, but the entire line of 26 OSes (save TVOS) are much worse. It's not just liquid glass. Sometimes the glass effect is legitimately cool.

The OSes are now completely incoherent in some cases. Buttons do things you don't expect, action items are hidden behind buttons that you don't think to press. MacOS 26 has icons in its menus, and there are different icons for similar things, similar icons for different things, and too much visual clutter in general. It also fails at its primary stated claim: to get the UI out of the way so you can see more of your content. Not only are the controls bigger and stupider, thus hiding more of your content, much of your content is visible in a completely unusable way. It's pointless to show me more text if the text is unreadable because there's something translucent behind it or on top of it. The UI takes up measurably more space. But WatchOS somehow made small touch targets EVEN SMALLER. It's an across-the-board massacre.

This is what Apple gets for promoting a print advertising guy to head of design (and arguably for allowing a hardware designer to be head of design as well), and allowing him to ignore the HIG. Go read the Human Interface Guidelines that Apple published in the past. They're still so good. Do not trust a UI designer that is unwilling to take lessons from that manual.

Up yours, Alan Dye. We're glad you're gone and Meta's problem now, you absolute hack.

That's not the fault of the apps. Some of the fundamental UI elements like side panels are just transparent. They didn't do that and sometimes they can't change it. Apple's own Apps egregiously put transparency in all sorts of places it doesn't belong. This is squarely on Apple and Alan Dye. Thank goodness he left and took a bunch of people with him so some real designers can start fixing it.

Nobody asked for you either, and yet here you are.

This is deeply ahistorical.

First of all, let's admit that the problem is one of the West's creation. Great Britain and the USA and all of Europe are to blame for the existence of the state of Israel. But Israel has consistently and unambigously been a settler-colonial state for its entire existence, has broken international law for its entire existence, and has been the aggressor for its entire existence. It's a religious ethno-state that exists only to commit genocide against Palestinians.

So 1940s Europe and North America are to blame for Jewish people being forced to occupy Palestinian land, but certainly Israel as a government has been nothing but horrific the whole time. This is all well documented.

I learned my anti-Zionism from Jewish Women. Israel is a monstrous state, anad you're either a bad or uninformed person if you defend them. Period, end of story.

Some creators do both. Some of my favourite people to follow are artisans that do woodworking or metalworking or interesting sorts of crafting. I love videos of old Chinese dudes making or fixing teapots and stuff.

Hard to believe that AI is going to stomp those folks out--the whole point is I want to see what a skilled human can create in the real world. My enjoyment of the content is specifically linked to the fact that a human makes it and that I could either potentially make it or buy it for myself.