The most basic and implicit prediction you can make is "if I do this again I'll get the same result."

A little odd that it's adjusted for age but not wealth, which surely matters more.

Debian's images are not Secure Boot signed. You made that up.

Debian has shipped with a signed bootloader since version 10, released over 3 years ago.

I think they said the Debian boot loader was, not the whole OS image.

This sounds like a great way to quickly deplete most of your vitamins and minerals.

Potatoes have nearly everything you need to survive. You won't have any deficiencies until you eat only straight potatoes for a full year or more.

There was a British teen who went blind eating only fries and chips.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/british-teenager-went-blind-fro...

Agreed, it does sound that way, but it's amazing how many anecdotes there are of people who eat exclusively 1 type of food and thrive on it. I don't think modern intuition about nutrition is likely to stand the test of time.

The conclusion I have come to is that humans, when starting from an over-fed modern baseline, are robust enough to eat a totally shit diet for a couple months. This is also long enough to convince us it is worth blogging about.

The subculture of long-distance hikers who optimize by going fast and light (maybe 1-3 lbs food per day plus 10-20lbs of gear). They'll go for months on extremely weird diets that optimize for calories per gram while doing more exercise than they've ever done and generally be fine.

I've only heard that about carnivore diets, and it makes sense to me. Where can you find all the nutrients necessary for a mammal to survive? In the body of another mammal, of course.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought that potatoes gave you every vitamin and mineral you needed (except b12 which you can get from butter).

You can pick one of the usual Native American crop patterns and get a solid set of vitamins. Potatoes + beans + squash or something like that, maybe with some corn. Cf. Mann's 1491. If you're going for a minimal veggie ingredient diet these new-world combos work well as a base, in part because potatoes are pretty much a superfood.

B12 is a pretty important one if you want to avoid the title of section 1 of this article though.

And while butter contains b12, you'd probably have to be eating a few bars of it a day to get enough long-term.

That's my understanding.

The spudfit guy did only potatoes and a B12 supplement for a year. His claim was that he was getting everything else he needed from the potatoes.

Sweet potato doesn't contain B12 - you're probably thinking of Vitamin A.

Dairy doesn't contain enough B12 to supplement you on it's own, which is why the study recommends against and instead suggests taking an actual B12 supplement (Puritan's Pride lozenges)

4 weeks shouldn't be enough time to develop a serious B12 deficiency but doing this for longer could impair you cognitively.

fwiw, I wouldn't personally be a massive advocate of supplements - dietary sources are usually better if possible - so not sure whether the study's supplement recommendation here is a good one. Just quoting the instructions given to participants

Is there an easy way to test your B12 when on this diet?

It's typically via blood test, I'm not aware of any easier methods

Potatoes are a good source of vitamin C, B6, potassium, magnesium… Butter has vitamin A, D, E, B12, K2, etc. This diet doesn’t seem TOO crazy. Perhaps pairing it with a multivitamin supplement wouldn't hurt though.

I wouldn't quite say "most" as potatoes are surprisingly nutritious, but yes, it is notable that the article doesn't contain the words "nutrient(s)", "nutritious", "vitamin(s)" or anything similar I could think of.

I've always been curious whether many of these diets lacking appropriate B vitamin requirements might have a compounding effect w.r.t. people's interest & willingness to continue trying such diets...

>If you don't pull the lever, you're not responsible for what happens, at least in my opinion.

I disagree. I think there's some point at which minimal effort from you for appreciable reward for others puts an obligation on you. And that's precisely the reason the trolley problem is so popular.

You can use NAT6 if you insist but there's no reason to. The aforementioned privacy extensions keep you from being tracked long-term based on address alone and your firewall is still blocking incoming traffic.

What is that supposed to mean?

Guessing that this means there are a lot of confounding variables other than gut biome (environment, diet, genetics, etc) that are very difficult to isolate to prove causation, as opposed to correlation.

Gut biome being one of the most promising area of research, whose earth-shattering potential is about on par with the sheer complexity of the problem.

If you thought ML was difficult, try modeling a human being's digestive tube from mouth to anus down to the cell: welcome to a category of problems where climate and gravity are the "simple" ones.

On the other side of that space though, potentially the promise to increase by orders of magnitude our mastery of human condition both biologically and experientially.

I'm willing to go out on a limb and suggest that the workings of the human brain are still far more complex than that of our digestive system. If the amount of effort that has been put into trying to emulate the former with software had been put instead into trying to emulate the latter, I reckon we'd pretty much have it cracked by now (as in, you could feed some tool info corresponding to all the inputs into our digestive system and it would be able to spit out exactly what outputs would be produced in the average human). But unlike AI/ML, not enough people, ahem, give a shit...

The brain and digestive system are very closely linked.

I think to make an "AI" on par with simulating the brain, you would need to simulate the gut first. And probably vice versa!

Not sure I agree, but accept it's not my area of expertise. We don't necessarily want to simulate the human brain the way it does actually function biologically, rather simulate the its most useful behaviors, which are hard to see as being intrinsically linked to the workings of the gut.

There's an imperfect truth to the comment you're replying to.

You're right that it's unnecessary to emulate the brain down to its finest implementation details, down to the molecule or even down to the cell.

However, I contend that it's essentially impossible to create a "relatable AI" (an AI that behaves and thinks like humans do) without proper consideration of embodiment. A large part of why the brain works the way it does, at a macro level, emerges from the vehicle it's in, and broadly speaking both its afferents/inputs and efferents/outputs.

We are a symbiote.

Bingo, we are just bunch of bacteria walking around. Some organism become symbiotic over time like mitochondria, so it go incorporated into our cells to make energy. The whole concept that we as human-being is one organism needs to be revisited.

This is already understood, it's not like scientists aren't aware.

The simplified concept of humans being one organism will continue to be taught nonetheless, because it's extremely useful, and not even wrong in most contexts in which it's applied.

There's nothing special about this, you can say the same thing about any simple model in biology: that the brain is an organ inside the head is a simplification, any diagram of a homeostatic system or metabolic pathway that fits on a single page is a simplification, the "central dogma" of DNA -> RNA -> protein is a simplification...

All of these things are well-known. They continue to be used as models, because, well... they're useful models. And there's nothing wrong with that!

Even more generally, reductionism works but with known limitations which warrant a more holistic approach, and we can't work our way out of most real-world problems without this multi-layered approach. Welcome to empiricism in complex systems.

That it's certainly a valid thought with the information we have, and is being thought about, but requires further investigation to make an affirmative statement.

^ This is the best explanation of what I meant.

It got a brand-new filesystem a couple years ago.

UFS2 from FreeBSD? Brand-new??

The article basically says that you have to read the Bible to understand why you think the way you do about anything because you live in a country with a history of having a majority-Christian population. I disagree. Most people's ethical frameworks are very simple and are usually just least-harm principles with a little window dressing. And insofar as they aren't, they are usually not particularly compatible with secular society. For my part I don't see the need to give special attention to a particular ethical text just because so many other people have for so long.

I think you're diluting their content a bit, but I largely agree. Their thesis read (to me) like they're insisting that the Bible is relevant because it framed a lot of the choices we made in the past: that much is true, and fairly relevant. But whether or not the parables of the Bible have relevance to modern society is a completely different discussion, and one that I feel like this article is (perhaps unfairly) baiting people into.

It's definitely a secular fluff-piece, but I don't think the thesis is that outrageous.