But the people claiming that they were some special case that just "couldn't lose weight" no matter how little they ate were bullshitting you. They couldn't handle the suffering, and as such the calorie intake was larger than the calories burned. They wanted you to believe eating less wasn't the solution. The drug proves that it WAS the solution, suffering aside.
"No matter how little they ate" was always ridiculous, obviously everyone knows that literally not eating anything would result in weight loss.
To me personally, the drug proved that people really ARE special cases.
Before Ozempic, I lost about 80 pounds "naturally", by suffering immensely, then kept it off for years, again by suffering immensely. Every day, hunger was at the forefront of my mind all day, every day. It was the #1 concern in my life.
I eventually gained back about 40 pounds, then went on Ozempic.
It has been an eye opener because I now realize what it's like to not suffer from hunger. I realized for the first time that this is how "normal" people feel, all the time! The only way I could get fat now is by eating junk - so in a weird way I started to understand the judgement about being fat.
Some people are just "calibrated" correctly, and that was absolutely mind blowing to me.
When people say, "Dieting doesn't work," they almost never describe their dieting approach. How can all dieting be the same? In the majority of cases, people crash diet; they run an 800–1,000 kcal deficit, lose some weight early on, experience hair shedding and anxiety, weakness etc..., become irritable and miserable, and give up after a few weeks or a month or two. Then they blame dieting.
They don't say, "My dieting approach failed," but "Dieting doesn't work." It's like scoring 10/100 on a math exam and saying, "Math doesn't work." Brother what? Everyday math is being by people with lot of success. Dieting is being used by MMA pros for weight cuts, natural bodybuillders, actors, models, 100s of thousands of ordinary people on fitness subs like r/caloriedefict r/naturalbodybuilding r/CICO
Very few people accept that maybe there is a flaw in their dieting. There are experienced people who study this stuff for years; how can I, as a newbie, learn all this in a short period of time, fail, and claim that dieting doesn't work?
This. 1 Million billion times
this. Your story exactly mirrors mine and good
heavens I would never loose weight via the suffering route ever again. Losing weight normally I'm in constant pain and literally can't think of anything else-it's all consuming. I do not say this as exaggeration I would rather go through chemo again. At least that you can make the suffering go away sometimes
with meds.
Different people experience different levels of suffering.
I just started on a GLP-1, and it has already been an interesting lesson in the subjective nature of food drives and hunger.
I've heard for literally years the advice "just drink some water it will trick you into feeling less hungry".
And I've always suspected this was some bullshit placebo, because that OBVIOUSLY doesn't work (so I thought). Water doesn't replace food, it just fills up your stomach so that eating becomes somewhat more unpleasant. But the food/hunger drive is still there unabated.
Well, except after taking a GLP-1 I actually experienced the sensation of drinking something and having my hunger go down. Whatever that circuit is, it has been broken in me for at least my entire adult life. So giving me that advice had been like trying to explain the color to a blind person.
Which, oddly, ties a lot more into the subject title than the example the author gave...
These aren't constraints. These are preferences. Framing them like constraints makes it sound like the whole situation is out of your hands, and therefore owning a smart device is practically thrust upon you by external forces.
Just say it: you bought a smart kettle due to your completely adjustable preferences.
We are constrained by the decisions we have made based on the preferences that we maintain.
Thus-constrained, this person states that they're able to get 5 more minutes of sleep every night and still make coffee before taking the train to work. That's ~25 minutes per week, or ~1.8 hours per month.
They didn't have to choose to go to bed earlier in order to gain this time and still make coffee in the morning. They were going to make coffee with a kettle anyway and were constrained by a the necessity of maintainining ownership of a kettle with which to do that.
So they simply selected a kettle that can be safely automated so as to be ready at the right time every morning instead of one that cannot be. In exchange, they gain around 20 hours per year, for every year that this kettle lasts for. (What would you do for nearly an entire extra day, per year?)
Sure: It's adjustable, just as many constraints are.
Maybe there's even a coffee shop around the corner that they could work at instead, and they could just walk there and brew themselves a cup of coffee using the hot tap on the espresso machine before they start their shift -- and skip the train.
But maybe that wouldn't fit into the constraint of being able to support the dwelling that they prefer to live in.
So maybe they could soften that constraint as well, and live a little lower. (Maybe they can soften enough constraints that they can just live under a bridge somewhere, with no permanent dwelling, no job, and no coffee. Perhaps, if we look hard enough, we might find that even the constraint of living a life -- at all -- is also adjustable.)
GP might realize sooner or later that they need larger security margins, for when unexpected things happen; like really having to go to the toilets, spilling the coffee they just made, etc.
They can shift their daily schedule e.g. 30 minutes earlier and peacefully drink their coffee at home. They also should eat something at home or on their way, because hurrying in a cold morning with an empty stomach is not good. Source: personal experience. I did that for months as a student until I passed out one day in class.
If they don't like waiting for the train in the cold, they probably can find a warm place near the station, and wait there a little.
Yes, having coffee on the train is a preference, which is why I used the word "want". I suppose that having this job, or any job, is technically a preference. I decided to buy a smart kettle to satisfy my preferences given the constraints they impose. The parent asked why someone would buy a smart coffee device, and I thought it would be fun to give my answer for why, despite my general skepticism of smart devices, I bought one.
So mathematics is having the same issue all of the open source projects/maintainers have been dealing with for the past few years. Exciting times indeed.
Sounds like you'll be in line for the Nobel Prize next year once you derive all of this theoretically in a very elegant fashion! Think of the money they could have saved if someone had just come ask you to show them it was possible.
So you're mad at being consistently incorrect and being held to account with what is essentially, "believe my assessments that I have to continuously caveat as they become invalidated, over what you see and hear."
Honest question: doesn't this highlight how mundane and rote teaching has become? It's been distilled to the point that the lowest of the lowest common denominators can pass. The kids going through it are forced to learn things they will never use, unless it's going to be used in the more advanced class of the thing they'll never use until they graduate.
My hope is that this is a wake up call to teachers / professors to find a better way to evaluate students. To determine who has actually come away with a real understanding, vs those who were running around copying the assignments off of their peers anyway. These same people are now just skipping the peers and going straight to the all knowing oracle. It's the same as it ever was, degree mills.
> doesn't this highlight how mundane and rote teaching has become
The example questions given in the article do not assess wrote learning.
> It's been distilled to the point that the lowest of the lowest common denominators can pass.
Have pass rates been increasing? Unless I missed it, the article doesn't say so.
> forced to learn things they will never use
A computer science degree is not a coding academy, it's a basic grounding in an area of study. A computer science graduate should have some understanding of theoretical computer science and of computer architecture, say, even if they're unlikely to apply these topics directly in their careers.
> My hope is that this is a wake up call to teachers / professors to find a better way to evaluate students. To determine who has actually come away with a real understanding, vs those who were running around copying the assignments off of their peers anyway.
Academics are already aware of the importance of fair assessment, but it isn't easy, especially with LLMs in the mix.
> These same people are now just skipping the peers and going straight to the all knowing oracle. It's the same as it ever was, degree mills.
Students that cheat, and degree mills, are two different things.
Isn't that the point? To learn? If you're setting a goal that the students must pass, who cares if they get the information from the professor or they teach themselves?
I don't think "learning the material by other means" is the exam being "gamed".
I think the point is most students are cheating and not learning. Where they get the information does seem to matter. Adding friction was needed for most.
if they use ai to "cheat" the exam by having the ai produce material to learn off, then they literally have just replicated a paid tutor (for cheaper).
Why is that not desirable? As long as the exam does not allow ai usage during it, i don't see the problem.
You're giving a charitable interpretation which is not warranted in reality. Scores are down across the board and even ivy leagues need to re-think its long held honor code.
I don't think it's shocking to realize that most 20 year olds (especially those growing up and seeing that success is not tied to intelligence nor hard work at all)are taking advantage of a convenient tool to cheat when given the chance.
The point is that they're not using AI to learn anything, they're using them to pass assignments without even giving it a once over. They're basically blindly copy/pasting whatever the assignment is and then copy/pasting the answer.
When someone writes a piece of software and uses "#include ...", or "import ...", etc, do you come to them and tell them they didn't write the solution on their own?
