Hi HN! OP here. Thank you everyone for reading and commenting. Thanks to your feedback I have done the following edits to the post:
- Added a comment on GLP-1 agonists. I wrote the article like it was 2023, not 2025. These drugs now exist and their benefits massively outweigh their drawbacks, particularly for people that really need help. Anything that helps out of the trap, particularly with this effectiveness, should be front and center. Thank you for pointing it out.
- Added a comment on my take on the usefulness of exercise for this process. I don't believe in exercise as a calory burner, but as something you need in order to be strong, fit, flexible and feel better mentally. It supports you in your journey. Exercise in order to burn calories to get lean is counterproductive. It is a thick wall of the mental fat trap.
- I realize that my struggles (and I don't say this lightly) have been a small fraction of what many of you had to go through, or are still going through. I also mentioned this in the article now. For some, it can be ten, a hundred, a thousand times harder than for others to break free from being overweight and be able to regulate their food in a way that is mentally healthy.
- I also added this: "Incidentally, I don't think this is about willpower (this is another parallel with Carr's insight). The decision to change comes from a deeper source. When I was most obsessed about asserting willpower over my eating, I was having the worst time and making bad choices. Getting out involves awareness, work, and a willingness to fail and keep on trying. The authors above say it much better than I can."
Hope again this was helpful for those with like struggles.
You brought up smoking and were mere inches near the truth but quickly ran away back into the lalaland... Smoking used to be more prevalent than obesity. Did we bring it down with "smoking positivity" and did shaming and harassing smokers only brought harm? What do you think?
For what it's worth, I believe that shaming is generally not helpful. For people to step out of a difficult situation, they need to be empowered. They will probably find your help more useful than you shaming them, or at least your sympathy. At least that's how I see it.
good article, I can (unfortunately) relate.
another aspect of the trap is when you have set backs (stress, life events) or get tired (long days, less sleep, emotional events) typically the first recourse is to stop the hardest parts: physical fitness, e.g., you take a car instead of bike/walk, skip sports, alcohol instead of water.
it's sometimes a vicious circle, you're tired due to overweight, thus eat more to get energy, making you more overweight.
Hi HN! OP here. I would have never expected to find interest here for ultra running. But of course there is -- thanks for the comments!
@n4r9: I avoid peanuts because I find them somewhat allergenic. I'll update the post.
ekr____: regarding fat, I think it's a personal thing. I get really tired of getting my calories through carbs when ultra running. I find it quite easy to scarf down 2000-3000kcal of nuts and they seem to sit well. But then again, I'm a slow runner (even by ultra standards). Also, indeed, the 30k stops are for a context with no race organization (no drop bags) where there's always a supermarket nearby.
@swah: thanks for posting! Stopping every 30k sounds crazy because it is crazy. But crazy is what ultra is, after all. I'm currently trying to "get used" to run 100k. In that context, carrying supplies for 30-40k (4-5 hours of running/shuffling) is reasonable. Stopping too often gives me more opportunities to get distracted, burn time and give up sooner than I would have otherwise.
> If you were my boss I'd be putting on my parachute and heading for the airstairs and expecting to see a plume of smoke wherever you impact.
(Ouch!)
You raise an interesting point. Perhaps, without a large amount of "bin #2" work, it's impossible for "bin #1" work to really take off. I've experienced this firsthand, and end up always doing a lot of "bin #2". But I wonder how much better it could be if I dared to focus even further. Or if it's at all possible and I'm just risking it too much.
Do you have any examples of the 80/20 idea actually killing a startup? I'm genuinely interested.
This could be interesting. My team works with Tailwind and we don't have a workflow that brings anything from Figma into Tailwind. So basically, we put Figma and our Tailwind prototype side by side, and make the latter converge to the former by trial and error.
Thanks for sharing! Exactly - I want to bridge that gap between Figma and code by combining v0.dev-style AI generation with Figma's visual editing capabilities. The idea is to eliminate that back-and-forth by letting you visually edit while the code updates in real-time, plus use AI prompts to speed up styling. I would love to hear if your team would find that workflow helpful!
We're building ac;pic, a cloud-based service that saves and organizes your pivs (pictures & videos). These are the things we do differently from most of what's out there:
- We use tags, not albums, as the organizational principle. Tags are associative; albums are hierarchical and resemble traditional folder structures (and a file cannot be in two folders at the same time).
- We tackle the overwhelm produced by having tens of thousands of pivs. We aim to replace that overwhelm by an "arcade" feeling, that makes the hard into easy and the easy into trivial.
- We identify duplicated pics & videos regardless of filename or metadata.
- We charge with a fixed + variable subscription model. The fixed part helps to maintain our fixed costs (salaries, working capital, etc), the variable is what every user pays for space used - at cost, we don't mark up storage prices.
- We use no AI; if we implement some AI in the future, it will be strictly opt-in.
- We allow import from Google Drive & Dropbox, as well as upload from all devices.
- We don't own your data, we only safeguard it. Exporting and importing all your data from and into our service is done as easily as possible.
If you're interested in using ac;pic, you can check it out and request an invite for the upcoming beta at https://altocode.nl/pic/ We'll send you an invite when the app is ready. Our horizon for release is measured in months.
If you're developing another solution that solves the same problem or works in the same area: feel free to contact us and share your experience; or browse our repo to see how we do things. Perhaps we were able to solve a problem that you were trying to solve yourself; our code is public domain, so you can borrow whatever you want from it. We're interested in solving the problem, not necessarily being the only ones that solve it.
Before your comment I didn't know about the existence of KeyDB, but now I do - thank you for that!
My main issue with scaling Redis is not performance or throughput, but doing it in a controlled, understandable manner which maintains consistency and ideally controlling what information goes on which node. In any case, it's great to find out about KeyDB. Thanks!
Thanks for the write up. I didn't know you could use Redis as a primary data store that is reliable enough to put in production. It has really made me curious into how to model outside of a SQL database. My next personal project I think I might try it with KeyDB free tier service (you can host your own, but I would just use the service since it is unlikely to gain steam and is more for having fun).
My mind wants to always normalize the data to the the extreme in a SQL database. So, it will an interesting exercise for myself!
Glad I could introduce you to KeyDB. It is a project I found in the Hacker Newsletter that I've been curious about for a while but I've been thinking SQL, SQL all the time that I never thought I would have a use case for it.
I added recently a bit more of detail in the document explaining when I would use redis (and when I wouldn't) to build production systems, here: https://github.com/fpereiro/backendlore#redis . For most applications, I think it's a viable alternative.
Modeling data with redis is great fun, and quite different to the relational paradigm. I hope you enjoy a lot your upcoming project!
- Added a comment on GLP-1 agonists. I wrote the article like it was 2023, not 2025. These drugs now exist and their benefits massively outweigh their drawbacks, particularly for people that really need help. Anything that helps out of the trap, particularly with this effectiveness, should be front and center. Thank you for pointing it out.
- Added a comment on my take on the usefulness of exercise for this process. I don't believe in exercise as a calory burner, but as something you need in order to be strong, fit, flexible and feel better mentally. It supports you in your journey. Exercise in order to burn calories to get lean is counterproductive. It is a thick wall of the mental fat trap.
- I realize that my struggles (and I don't say this lightly) have been a small fraction of what many of you had to go through, or are still going through. I also mentioned this in the article now. For some, it can be ten, a hundred, a thousand times harder than for others to break free from being overweight and be able to regulate their food in a way that is mentally healthy.
- I also added this: "Incidentally, I don't think this is about willpower (this is another parallel with Carr's insight). The decision to change comes from a deeper source. When I was most obsessed about asserting willpower over my eating, I was having the worst time and making bad choices. Getting out involves awareness, work, and a willingness to fail and keep on trying. The authors above say it much better than I can."
Hope again this was helpful for those with like struggles.