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Cake day: September 14th, 2024

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  • Focusing on ultra processed foods specifically calls out the obvious problem - we were significantly healthier before these foods were invented, and are less healthy after.

    But what confounding variables have also increased during this time? Do we have endocrine disruptors in our drinking water or food packaging or in the foods themselves, from microplastics or whatever? Have we been fertilizing our fields with industrial waste containing toxic “forever chemicals”? Have we become more sedentary at home and at work? I mean, probably yes to all of these.

    I do believe that nutrition is more than simple linear addition of the components in a food. But insights can still be derived from analyzing non-linear combinations (like studying the role of fiber or water or even air in foods for the perception of satiety or the speed that subject ingest food), or looking towards specific interactions between certain subsets of the population with specific nutrients. We can still derive information from the ingredients, even if we move past the idea that each ingredient acts on the body completely independently from the other ingredients in that food.

    And look, I’m a skeptic of the NOVA system, but actually do appreciate its contribution in increasing awareness of those non-linear combinations. But I see it as, at most, a bridge to better science, not good science in itself.


  • “Very little fiber”, “Frequently have a lot of oil”, and “Relatively high in salt and sugar” aren’t a classification, they’re vibes.

    What you’ve listed aren’t classification criteria. These are generally common characteristics within the category, and a basis for investigating what causes ultra processed foods to generally be bad.

    I’m in this thread arguing that the scientists have the data to be able to just analyze correlations and trends of those characteristics directly, rather than taking the dubious step of classifying them into the NOVA category to begin with.

    It’s not pseudoscience or not science though. The models are the models, and I think they’re bad models, but I don’t think they’re outright unscientific.


  • The NOVA classifications are difficult to work with, and I think the trend of certain nutrition scientists (and the media that reports on those scientists’ work) have completely over-weighted the value of the “ultra processed” category.

    The typical whole grain, multigrain bread sold at the store qualifies as ultra-processed, in large part because whole grain flour is harder to shape into loaves than white flour, and manufacturers add things like gluten to the dough. Gluten, of course, already “naturally” exists in any wheat bread, so it’s not exactly a harmful ingredient. But that additive tips the loaf of bread into ultra processed (or UPF or NOVA category 4), same as Doritos.

    But whole grain bread isn’t as bad for you as Doritos or Coca Cola. So why do these studies treat them as the same? And whole grain factory bread is almost certainly better for you than the local bakery’s white bread (merely processed food or NOVA category 3), made from industrially produced white flour, with the germ and bran removed during milling. Or industrially produced potato chips, which are usually considered simply processed foods in category 3 when not flavored with anything other than salt, which certainly aren’t more nutritious or healthier than that whole wheat bread or pasta.

    If specific ingredients are a problem, we should study those ingredients. If specific combinations or characteristics are a problem, we should study those combinations. Don’t throw out the baby (healthy ultra processed foods) with the bathwater (unhealthy ultra processed foods).

    And I’m not even going to get into how the system is fundamentally unsuited for evaluating fermented, aged, or pickled foods, especially dairy.



  • Base64 encoding of a text representation of an IP address and date seems inefficient.

    There are 4 octets in a ipv4 address, where each octet is one of 2^8 possible integers. The entire 32-bit ipv4 address space should therefore be possible to encode in 6 characters in base64.

    Similarly, a timestamp with a precision/resolution in seconds can generally be represented by a 32-bit integer, at least up through 2038. So that can be represented by another 6 characters.

    Or, if you know you’re always going to be encoding these two numbers together, you can put together a 64-bit number and encode that in base64, in just 11 characters. Maybe even use some kind of custom timestamp format that uses fewer bits and counts from a more recent epoch, as an unsigned integer (since you’re not going to have site visitors from the past), and get that down to even fewer characters.

    That seems to run less risk of the email address getting cut off at some arbitrary length as it gets passed around.


  • The use of a “+” convention is just a convention popularized by Gmail and the other major providers. If you have your own domain, you should be able to do this with any arbitrary text schema, and encode some information in the address itself, especially if you don’t care about sending email from those aliases: set up your email service to have a catchall inbox that can further be filtered/forwarded based on other rules.

    It can be cumbersome but I could see it working at getting the information you’re looking for.


  • What sense does it make if you raise your population and everyone is miserably poor or on the edge of becoming poor?

    There’s an overall negative correlation between wealth and fertility, so it’s not like the rich are having a ton of kids, either. Or even the societies with decent metrics on wealth or income equality, still tend to be low birth rate countries.

    It’s a difficult problem, with no one solution (because it’s not one cause). Some of it is cultural. Some of it is economic. There are a lot of feedback effects and peer effects, too. And each society has its own mix of cultural and economic issues.

    And I’m not actually disagreeing with you. I think there’s probably something to be said for cheap cost of living allowing for people to be more comfortable having more children (or at a younger age, which also mathematically grows populations faster than having the same number of children at an older age).




  • Digg was the site that originally popularized up-votes and down-votes that are so typical on online posts today.

    No. Slashdot was doing that, and was popular before Digg launched. Reddit also launched before Digg was popular, about 6 months after Digg did.

    Meanwhile, algorithms that ranked content based on user votes were taking over all the web 2.0 darlings, including Flickr’s “interestingness” ranking system, by the mid 2000’s. Even outside of ordering comment threads, silicon valley was enamored with the idea of crowdsourcing indicators of popularity, and building algorithms around star ratings (including offline stuff like Netflix’s DVD by mail, OkCupid’s matching ratings for online dating, etc.)

    I see Digg’s use of voting as merely reflective of the overall trends in the mid-2000’s. They certainly didn’t invent it.