• 7 Posts
  • 33 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Others have covered that there were internal supports, so they were supporting nothing at all. But let’s assume they weren’t.

    I’m going for an intentional underestimate - so let’s say there are 10 people in your layer (I think 8 is more likely), then 24 above them, 18 above them, 18 above them, 25 above them, 14 above them, and 2 above them. I think most people would agree those are underestimates for each ring.

    That’s 101 people being supported by 10 people. If we take another underestimate that each of those people weighs 100 pounds (45.36 kg) then that’s 10,100 pounds (4581.28 kg) - or 1010 pounds (458.13 kg) supported by each of the 10 people in your ring, completely ignoring the weight of the metal rings visible in the picture. So I think it’s safe to say it was mostly the internal supports at work.








  • I’ll go a step further and say that, while I agree that vigilantism in general is bad for society, I don’t think that’s a universal truth. Targets and motives and effects matter. Sometimes vigilantism is both necessary and good. And that happens when the system itself becomes badly biased against true justice - where things are so bad that the people perpetrating the mass injustices aren’t even considered to be breaking the law, let alone just not being prosecuted for it. Not to Godwin things so quickly on purpose, but it would have been considered vigilantism to kill nazis as a German citizen in the 30’s and 40’s. I think most people today would agree that it would nonetheless have been completely justified. I’m not saying we’re that far gone just yet - but I’m saying when things get to the point where vigilante justice is the only justice, and when the system itself is structured to support injustice…

    I’m also not sure what Luigi did fits a strict definition of 'vigilantism", but that’s kind of irrelevant to the point. In a way he’s kind of an anti-vigilante? Using crime to handle horrible people who technically aren’t legally criminals?

    Either way, there are a lot of things deeply wrong with the US currently, on a systematic level, and it’s clear to almost everybody that the justice and healthcare systems are are major parts of that unwellness. The system as a whole has been getting worse and worse for decades. It’s frankly surprising that it took this long for something like this to happen - but I’m sure it won’t be the last time.

    It’s clear that a lot of people are feeling the same sort of way - it’s not often that a law-abiding citizen is publicly murdered and the nation, as a whole, celebrates and sends their well-wishes to the shooter. People wouldn’t react that way if they already felt the system was serving justice acceptably.




  • There was this game of dots I played against my 12 year old niece. The game was looking pretty even with two obvious large snakes building up - she ended up making the move that opened up the first, smaller snake for myself, hoping to force me to open the larger one for her. But I purposely didn’t claim the ending squares in the first snake, which let me avoid opening up the second for her. So she was forced to then open up the second snake to me, letting me claim basically the entire board.

    The second image explains it better - with the black lines as the setup she left me with, the usual strategy would be on the left, while I played as on the right, with the blue line as my last move.





  • While that’s true, and while it’s something I’d definitely recommend for others, I can’t honestly say that’s something I’ve mastered doing myself. To me, not finishing just means I have more work to do when it comes to figuring out how many calories I actually ate. While I could just guesstimate that I had 60% of that blizzard, I find that in practice I’m really not okay with being that wishy-washy with the numbers. The days where I have to just guesstimate kill me inside.

    And this situation with the blizzard is something I’ve dealt with. I had a mostly finished blizzard but couldn’t finish it. I had to mark the level of ice cream still remaining, empty the cup, then get weight measurements for the empty cup (​c), cup full of water (f), and cup full of water up to the level of remaining ice cream (w) - at which point the total calories eaten were (w-c)/(f-c) * B, where B is the number of calories in the full blizzard. If I could have avoided all of that by finishing the last 28% of that blizzard, you bet I would have.


  • My own advice:

    The diet I’m on, which has lost me 36 pounds (196 to 160) and counting since early April, is simple calorie restriction - I try my best not to go over 1500 calories/day, and if I do go over, I try to make up for it by going under on following days until things average out.

    Every time I’ve tried this diet or similar diets, I’ve had great success, as long as I’ve meticulously tracked and wrote down how many calories I ate each day. The times I’ve tried this diet without tracking have all ended up failing, even when I “tried” sticking to it for months. The moment I start writing numbers down, things just fall into place. So for me at least, that’s the key.

    Some notes:

    • Over the last 127 days my actual average calories/day has been 1472/day
    • I try to avoid meals where counting is very difficult or impractical. That means I try to avoid going to restaurants that don’t post calories and I’m not big on “real” cooking. If I do have a meal where a good count isn’t possible I try my best to overestimate - usually with 2500 or 3000 depending on how full I am since it’s really hard to eat more than that at once. I find it very difficult to go to most restaurants without getting more than 1500 calories, also, so I don’t eat at restaurants all that often anymore. Fast food places like McDonald’s are actually some of the easier options to work with, though.
    • I’ve made little to no effort to eat healthier - just less. I can have a blizzard from Dairy Queen if I want, but that’s 1100 calories and then I’ve only got 400 left for something else. I have mastered making delicious ice cream that’s just 300 calories/pint though. In practice I usually eat processed foods from a can, box, or bag that you just need to heat up or follow the instructions on the box for.
    • A scale is essential for getting accurate calories out of things like butter, milk, ketchup, ice cream ingredients, etc.
    • In general meats are a pretty poor choice - compared to other foods they make me a lot less full compared to how many calories they take up. I can eat 8 hotdogs (without buns) and fill up my daily calories in that one meal, and still be hungry - or I can have two cans of spaghettios (580 calories total), and be so full I almost can’t finish.
    • For me at least, after the first week or so I just stop feeling hungry in general most of the time. There are occasionally days where I only eat because I know I should, rather than because I got hungry.
    • When I’m on this diet, I basically never get heartburn, even after a day where I eat something that would usually have given it to me badly - probably the nicest part of all this.
    • Despite what the post says, I eat basically no fruits or vegetables in my day-to-day life.
    • In the past, I’ve incorporated extremely heavy daily exercise into my routine as well - I’m talking multiple hours a day, every day, for at least two months. While it did have some noticeable benefits like a very noticeably lower resting heart rate and increased strength, it had basically no visible effect on my rate of weight loss - looking at the graph, you couldn’t even tell which portions of the diet were subject to heavy exercise vs. heavy leisure. The lesson learned is that diet is far, far more important than exercise - you can offset an entire workout with a single cookie.
    • When I’m not making any dieting attempts at all, I’m a huge glutton. I’ve never gotten over 200 pounds, because any time I get close I start doing this diet - but if I ate the way I wanted to all the time, I could easily weigh 350+ pounds. I can very easily eat single 1200-2000 calorie meals multiple times a day. I’ve yo-yo’d a lot in the past few years but I’m hoping to more or less keep things permanently under control this time - once I get to 140ish I plan to raise my daily calorie allowance to the point where I maintain, rather than gain or lose, over time.

    An added bonus of writing things down is getting to graph things too!

    Note that I’m not claiming this is healthy. Just effective. Anyone can lose weight eating nothing but chocolate cake, as long as they eat sufficiently little. It doesn’t mean you won’t die from it.