This is my personal approach too. I stock things with fewest number of ingredients. Example that comes to mind: RXBar might be UPF but there’s not much in it. Compared to your average name brand protein bar or granola bar.
Have you considered not bothering to bulk or cut and instead just maintain? Maybe you are saying that but I can’t tell. I lift 5-6 days a week but neither bulk nor cut. Just eating/consuming whatever is necessary to maintain and/or hit goals when I feel like it.
I don't feel so violently on one side of this or another, but I agree with the spirit of your comment as a child of the 80s.
I think I ate white bread or something very similar to it almost every day for lunch (in school). Cold cuts too. A shit-ton of pasta, but I'm my family is Italian, so that was a given no matter what. Tons of granola bars. Basically every processed baked packaged thing you can imagine.
Your point about sauce hits home too. Sauce purists may disagree but I despise ANY sweetness in your basic red sauce.
> In my neighborhood an electrical power outage is news; but yet another day of consistent electrical power supply is not news. But taking a step back, I think it is noteworthy! It makes my life better every day, and compared to the vast sweep of human history, it’s a huge positive anomaly. My life is full of stuff like this, as I suspect the lives are of many HNers.
This hit a nerve in a good way.
Something I think about is intersection of "cringe"-like content and genuine uplifting content. There's tons of stuff out there about how people take care of themselves, how they're improving their health, hair, body, mood, whatever. Obviously the influencer world is present in this sphere of content.
I suspect the content that leans way towards cringe goes way more viral, but if you step back, it's great so many people are trying/doing so many healthy and self-care-oriented things and making themselves feel better bit by bit.
I've seen this author's work elsewhere like Substack/Threads.
Good article, good writer.
But this whole post reminds me of a series of 1 or 2-line tweets. And I think that's the point. It's almost written as a series of scheduled posts that dribble out once a day for the next X days. Write once, re-purpose many times.
Your first problem doesn’t feel new at all. Reminded me of a situation several years ago. What was previous Excel report was automated into PowerBI. Great right? Time saved. Etc.
But the report was very wrong for months. Maybe longer. And since it was automated, the instinct to check and validate was gone. And tracking down the problem required extra work that hadn’t been part of the Excel flow
I use this example in all of my automation conversations to remind people to be thoughtful about where and when they automate.
Thoughtfulness is sometimes increased by touch time. I've seen various examples of this over time; teachers who must collate and calculate grades manually showed improved outcomes for their students, test techs who handle hardware becoming acutely aware of the many failure modes of the hardware, and so on.
Said another way: extra touch might mean more accountable thinking.
Higher touch: "I am responsbile for creating this report. It better be right"
Automated touch: "I sent you the report, it's right because it's automated"
Mistakes possible either way. But I like higher-touch in many situations.
Curious if you have links to examples you mention?
The teacher example was from one of those pop-psych books on being more efficient with one's time. I can't remember the title off the top of my head. Another example in the book applied the author's model of thinking to a plane crash in the Pacific. I'm sorry, man. It's been a long time.
I use a new chat/etc every time that happens. Try to improve my prompt to get a better result. Sometimes works, but that multiple chat rather than laborious long chat approach annoys me less.
Did you also find the intro negative for your own mental health in the sense that you had to bother thinking at all about it?
Feels like a huge component to me as a parent. What do I now need to know and do and react to, and how does my behavior affect the mental health of my kids.
I got curious, and looked at the DOM, and seems the editor when empty is just one line of the full page, which if you click anywhere else (like what I did initially, in the middle of the page) the editor can't be focused. Are you sure you clicked in the middle of the page?
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