I found this to be the case. Tried Sertraline for a while, gave me headaches and made me feel sick. Then as part of a new gym plan, started taking Omega 3+VitD daily, and I just felt a sense of calm and peace after a few weeks. The massive uptick in exercise probably also helped. I also felt quite an extreme uptick because I was a vegan for 10 years, and found out I had basically zero Omega 3 in my blood. I suspect one of the main reasons my mental health declined was due to the lack of Omega 3.
Disclaimer, not saying vegans should stop being vegans, just make sure you find a good supplement, and make sure you understand the difference between EPA/DHA Omega 3.
All my nutrient numbers improved when I became vegan because nearly every one in the US/UK is deficient in VitD, Omegas and B12.
Fortunately today’s vegan communities are much more aware of this so I started taking these supplements right up front and all my blood markers improved dramatically since when I consumed meat/dairy.
It’s annoying to hear some push back against this when it’s as simple as taking relatively safe supplements (just make sure you talk to a doctor, and not a social media influencer, about how much you should take, and if you get a chance to regularly check your bloodwork don’t miss out).
My cholesterol improved massively, but over time, a few, such as Omega 3 suffered. But those were ultimately my own fault, wasn't managing it properly. So, I'm absolutely not suggesting there's an issue with veganism, this isn't really why I fell out of it. So I do want to stress I wasn't suggesting people should steer clear of Veganism, just something to be mindful of. Oh, and my cholesterol immediately shot back up again when I stopped being a vegan. So, swings and roundabouts with every diet/lifestyle, I guess!
Why did you become a vegan if apparently even non-vegans are deficient in B12? Do you supplement B12? Since B12 is mainly found in meat, and B12 deficiency is irreversible.
why do you think the reason for them becoming vegan has something to do with B12 levels? likely they became vegan for different reasons, became much more aware of the importance of B12 and started taking a supplement.
every vegan should supplement b12, so they probably do too
> Fortunately today’s vegan communities are much more aware of this so I started taking these supplements right up front and all my blood markers improved dramatically since when I consumed meat/dairy.
Yeah but that sentence does not refer to why the person switched to being vegan, the first one does. In any case, let us not beat the dead horse there. :P Supplement B12 and it is fine.
No sentence referred to why they became vegan. Their nutrient numbers improved when they became vegan. This happened because becoming vegan moved them from a group who didn't know they needed supplements to a group who knew they needed supplements.
> In any case, let us not beat the dead horse there.
Possibly, deffo would have been a big factor. Anecdotally though, I forgot to take these supplements for a while recently, just got out of the habit, and definitely felt worse again for a bit. But, could have been a coincidence/something else
I think they meant their vegan diet didn't naturally have Omega 3 in it if they didn't take supplements; not that they couldn't take the supplements once they realised it.
Yeah I took that for a while, and did slightly improve things. Only problem I had at the time was those were super expensive in the UK. Maybe that's changed now
> Then as part of a new gym plan, started taking Omega 3+VitD daily, and I just felt a sense of calm and peace after a few weeks. The massive uptick in exercise probably also helped
I would bet that 95% of that improvement or more was due to the exercise.
Your anecdote is common: People start taking Vitamin D or fish oil as part of a bigger plan to have a healthier lifestyle and then they attribute success to the pills, not the lifestyle changes.
Possibly, but anecdotally, I went through a period of forgetting to take them again recently, and definitely felt worse again. Sleep started suffering, felt lower energy again. But, could have been a coincidence/something else entirely
> I was a vegan for 10 years, and found out I had basically zero Omega 3 in my blood
I see your disclaimer, but just for more context, vegans can get Omega 3 without taking pills per se. Flax seeds are an excellent source. I often add a spoonful to a bowl of oatmeal or as a pancake topping along with fruit sauce and granola.
Most people can’t chew flaxseeds effectively, so they grind them first or swallow them whole. (They are tiny.) Nutrition experts do recommend grinding them first to release the fiber and the beneficial fatty acids. Flaxseeds are helpful for constipation and may lower cholesterol as well.
Ground flaxseed goes rancid easily, however, so it should be kept in the freezer until you are ready to use it. If you buy it ground, you wouldn’t have to use the blender or coffee grinder to break those seeds up before you have breakfast.
Flax seeds are a very tedious and inefficient way to get omega-3 as a vegan, particularly because they contain ALA, a short chain omega-3, which our bodies are extremely inefficient at turning into long chain fatty acids.
Funny - I feel the opposite about chia. Soaked and plumped is when I hate them. Dry on salads/etc. or just submerged in an active bowl I'm eating is when I like them most - the crunch adds texture to what I'm eating.
I was at a junction the other day, there was some new Audi EV at the other side of the junction and I couldn't see a damn thing. I've got perfect 20/20 vision, never had any form of eye problem ever in my life, and I was completely blinded. I'm convinced if they'd turned the full beams on, I'd have disintegrated.
Part of the problem I've identified are SUV's and Trucks. Back home I drive a 4runner so I never noticed this but on vacation one week and we rented a Corolla. While the lights from other cars never bothered me in the 4runner, it was so apparent in the smaller Corolla.
I would see light behind me and go "why do they have high beams on" but then looking ahead it didn't look like they had their high beams on, I was just in a short car.
Now you're in a car that the US car industry doesn't want to sell, and thus you don't exist.
Do we need self-darkening HUDs? Like an LCD overlay that specifically mutes the intensity of these improperly engineered cars? Seems dumb, but it might happen.
I wonder if we'll just move to using IR for the really high beams? That probably doesn't do anything good to the human eye at high intensities, but if you could augment the driver's vision and not blind everyone at the same time that would be nice? Let's bring back the Cadillac Deville!
Some high-end cars use banks of lights all pointing in slightly different directions, and they autodim the lights pointing directly at headlights coming the other way.
EDIT - also:
> Now you're in a car that the US car industry doesn't want to sell, and thus you don't exist.
To be fair, this is related to the cars people want to buy. Everyone's making SUVs because they sell like hot cakes.
Edit: sorry, I shouldn't post US rules on a UK topic. For penance, a fact about lighting in the UK, reverse lights weren't required until 2009!
There are rules. FMVSS [1] says lower beam headlamps must be mounted between 55.9 cm and 137.2 cm above the ground, and upper beam headlamps must be mounted not less than 22 inches nor more than 54 inches. The height ranges match, but are specified in different units
But that's a big range.
These rules end up being the stick used to regulate vehicle lifts and lowering; you could lift a vehicle higher, or drop it lower but very few people will do the work to relocate the lights.
this is also my understanding. The range is large because it caters to passenger cars, lorries and construction equipment. Construction equipment is seen are more rugged (it often is) and this is now projected as a desirable trait for SUVs and pickup trucks.
The irony is that SUVs and pickup trucks do not need lights 137 cm above ground, but that height is perfectly legal in too many countries. These vehicles are a menace and should be legislated out of existence.
I will always champion the compact pickup truck. A 1980s S-10 or Toyota Truck (HiLux) can do light truck things, is relatively economical, and doesn't have a large footprint. Alas, nobody makes similar vehicles for US/Europe anymore --- kei trucks are still made for Japan, and less developed economies can get simple small trucks. Maybe some of the EV compact trucks will actually be made.
Another one of those quirks of law that appears to be there to help avoid burdening the legendary smallholding farmer whose teenagers are hardworking farmhands towing around 8 head of cattle in the work truck, but which mostly just enables a bunch of idiots driving around surburbs in gleaming-clean four-door pickups that have never carried anything in the bed but a couple bikes or a little camping gear.
I'd be all for exemptions to any rules for anyone who proves ownership of a working farm or ranch but you can bet that no regulation of any kind will ever be enacted to curb the disaster that CAFE rules caused to "car" size.
I came from exactly that sort of community. The fact of the matter is that teen would have driven that truck regardless of the law permitting it.
IMO, this sort of thing should work more like the way fair use works. A cop could pull you over for a traffic violation, ticket you, and then when you go to court you push the defense of "I'm a farmer and I was doing farm work" to get the missing license charge dropped (but you'll still likely end up with a traffic ticket to pay).
Generally speaking, cops aren't patrolling farming roads anyways so you'd really not need almost any exemption in place.
Farmer's kids are already exempt from 99% of road and licensing requirements if they are on farm business. I was 12 years old driving around in an old truck without a license plate or license, sometimes hauling massive loads, and it was 100% legal because it was for the farm and my parents were farmers. And honestly there were far more dangerous tasks done on the farm than that so I don't see a real problem with it.
> you can bet that no regulation of any kind will ever be enacted to curb the disaster that CAFE rules caused to "car" size.
I'm not a big EV person, but afaik EVs don't have efficiency standards and so they don't have to conform to CAFE footprints, so we can get compact vehicles again, hopefully. Up to manufacturers to put them for sale, and people to actually buy them, of course.
Sure. But unfortunately the effect of stupid CAFE on the whole fleet nationwide has been so extreme that the 85% of cars that are still gas have grown to be enormous, so understandably no one feels safe driving a little Civic if they can afford at least a CR-V and ideally a 3-row SUV.
Plus, giant EVs have more room for batteries and most Americans think 300 miles of range is necessary even if they drive 20 miles a day and even if they can charge at home!
This is a huge hole in the regulatory regime. It doesn't make sense to be as wasteful with electrons as we are with hydrocarbons. Sure the electron can be generated cleanly or with higher efficiency, but that doesn't negate the pursuit of encouraging increased utility.
No? You can just make a 2 ton massive EV with a massive battery to get more range, ruining the roads more, using more resources to make that battery. Basically the Rivian model.
Yeah I'm in a really low Civic Type-R, so when I'm opposite some kind of SUV, and also at a slight angle, was basically at direct eye height with their LEDs. I definitely don't have the same problem with older bulb based SUVs though
you weren't in a short car, you were in a normal car. Society really needs legislation around auto obesity. Cars are too big, too high, too heavy, all at despite being less practical than a station wagon from twenty years back.
Blame the obama CAFE regulations that accounted for wheelbase and car volume, giving manufacturers lower fuel economy standards for larger cars. Then the CAFE standards that hold trucks/SUVs to a lower standard.
The economically efficient way to get the fuel economy result would have been to increase gasoline taxes, but that's a non starter politically. Higher gas prices would allow people to choose to keep a cheap gas guzzling truck/car, buy a new more efficient and expensive car, or buy a new slightly more efficient slightly more expensive car. It would have been simpler though and given consumers more choice.
While drastically higher gas prices would have been the proper solution, the CAFE standards did not incentivize people to buy larger/taller vehicles.
People’s desire to sit higher up and be in large vehicles, which have always been more expensive than smaller, lower vehicles, is what causes them to be bought. And once a significant portion have them, it becomes safer to be in one yourself, further incentivizing their purchase.
But 99% of the time, it’s just because people like the feeling of sitting higher up than others, and the ego boost from taking up more space. The simple evidence is the popularity of Suburbans/Sequoias/XC90s/etc over minivans, like Sienna/Odyssey. There is absolutely no functional benefit of the former over the latter, yet the former is more popular.
Minivans really did suck in comparison to most SUVs. The vast majority of them were underpowered, had electrical problem, and their insides fell apart rather quickly.
I can't say I have experienced those issues between Odysseys and Siennas, but those are quality problems, nothing inherent to the concept of a minivan. I don't believe a minivan is or was underpowered for 99% of people's needs, especially to move family in a 1 hour radius.
It's funny that you point out Japanese companies as the actually worthwhile minivans. You're not pointing out the shitwagons dumped out there by Ford, Dodge and Chevy that were the bulk of the market. I remember the Astrovans being especially bad. There was a lot of stumbling around by US makers switching over to things like fuel injections and electronic controls. A lot of this left some amount of consumer dislike to particular brand names. Then when you add that SUV/Crossovers started showing up when manufacturing of cars had improved greatly these new models were more apt to be considered quality it made a big difference.
What? I’m almost 40, and my whole life it has been common knowledge that American cars are of inferior quality compared to Japanese cars.
It makes no sense to buy a GM Suburban or Ford Expedition because you think a Stellantis Pacifica is low quality. The Japanese minivans have always been there for purchase, if you wanted a quality minivan.
People have been choosing to pay extra for bigger, taller cars because they want bigger, taller cars to signal ostentatious consumption, not any other reason. I’ve heard this direct from many, many people on why they chose an SUV or pickup truck over a minivan (though they will couch it in terms like “cool” or “sleek” or whatever).
i wonder if the incessant marketing from US auto companies had anything to do with this "desire". Why invest in more efficient engines, at lower profit margins, when you can convince your customers that their obese vehicles are all the protection they need.
There are very few countries where pedestrial fatalities have continued to rise, and the US and Canada are two of them, driven in large part by auto obesity.
You point to popularity, but I will mention that it is impossible to buy a sedan from US automakers today. The reason why is simple - profit. Larger cars are more profitable. When combined with incessant marketing that a pickup truck makes you more "manly", you can manufacture "desire" and "preference".
>but I will mention that it is impossible to buy a sedan from US automakers today
Toyota/Honda/Subaru/Mazda/Tesla/Volkswagen manufacture sedans made in the US, that you can buy today. Not sure why it would make a difference where it is made anyway.
If you wanted a lower priced sedan, you would choose from the 10+ great options, cheaper than a larger vehicle, and buy a sedan.
Which means if you paid more for a larger/higher vehicle, it is because you wanted the larger/higher vehicle.
Well either that or completely privatize the infrastructure needed to operate those cars like multi-lane roads and parking lots with no mandatory minimums for road width and parking lot size.
yes, what is "normal" has been redefined to align with what is more profitable for the US auto companies. There is no real reason why most US drivers suddenly switched from sedans to large SUVs and bloody pickup trucks in the past 40 years. Except for profit.
Honestly the worst offenders for shooting the lights right in your eyes are the Jeep Wranglers. I drive a work truck on occasion and the Jeeps are about the only vehicle that still get me looking for the fog line. High intensity lights are still really annoying though, and my eyes are probably 7-8ft off the ground.
Wranglers are often lifted via the aftermarket, and I bet a lot of people who do that don't ever stop to consider whether the headlights need to be realigned after.
My experience has been all Wranglers unless they have aftermarket "eyelids". I think their stock lights have zero angle and just blast straight ahead without pointing towards the ground. Most high intensity lights tend to point at the ground so you don't usually get it straight into your eyes.
That's the worse for you driving a work truck. For people in shorter cars, the Wranglers might actually be above our sightlines, and the Dodge Ram tailgating us is among the worst.
I high-beamed one of them, then they turned their high beams on - it was a shockingly ridiculous amount of light that's simply dangerous anywhere. Fuck Audi.
Man, this feels like a vehicular instantiation of class war. Pay enough and you too can blind others on the road.
One thought I've had with the matrix projectors on my Lightning is that it would be nice if they were able to dim parts of the beam that were below the normal threshold for low/high. It reliably turns off the bright parts above that line, but it seems like the "low beam" area is fixed. So on small hills and such I'll occasionally beam people directly in the face with a lot of light. Mostly that happens when the distance is still far enough that it won't be nearly as bad as when you're just across an intersection, but it's still fairly bright IMO.
I assume regulation prevents the dynamic lighting from including the low beam section.
Yeah quite possibly actually, I did think at the time if they were angled down slightly, it wouldn't be half as bad. So that checks out. But does show there needs to be some kind of solution for uneven situations like that
I've been around long enough to find it absolutely astonishing, that you can now fit a computer with 16gb of ram, 265gb of storage and a quad core processor, with no cooling, inside a keyboard.
It is astonishing! It's especially impressive when you realize that the motherboard itself is so small that most of the keyboard interior is basically empty space [0].
For a comparison, the "similar" computer from 2006 [0] had a maximum configuration of 4xCPU @ 1 GHz and 8GB of RAM. It weighed 60 lb (27 kg) and looked like this:
Those capabilities have been in a much smaller slab you have been able to carry around in your pocket for the last 5 years minimum, and that slab was a fully functional computer with full touchscreen display input, microphone/speaker, and cellular.
The Samsung S20 Ultra (2020) has 16gb RAM 256GB of good fast storage, and with Dex you can connect it to a monitor and keyboard+mouse via a USB C dock and get a desktop window environment.
Of course the RPi costs less, but marvel over that, not the form or compactness. RPi innovated on cost, but this capacity in this form is everywhere. They don't even use most of the space inside the keyboard, the compute module is all the size of a smartphone.
Yeah it's the cost as well that's impressive. I've got a Samsung S25 Ultra in my pocket right now, but it cost like... £1200, so I'm less blown away by that somehow
The iPhone Air has an A19 (50% faster than M1 in single core and 10% faster in multi-core benchmarks), 12GB of RAM and up to 1TB of storage in a space no larger than the raised bar the camera sits in.
Yeah, I get the feeling. I'm torn to be honest, because I quite enjoy using it, but then I sift through everything line by line, correct things, change the formatting. Alter parts it's gotten wrong. So for me, it's saving me a little bit of time manually writing it all out. My colleagues are either like me, or aren't sold on it. So I think there's a level of trust and recognition that even if we are using it, we're using it cautiously, and wouldn't just YOLO some AI generated code straight into main.
But we're a really small but mature engineering org, I can't imagine the bigger companies with hundreds of less experienced engineers, just using it without car and caution, it must just cause absolutely chaos (or will soon).
I use it as more of a focusing tool. Without it, I frequently get distracted by small rabbit holes (I should add more logging to this function, oh I should also add some doc comments, oh I should also refactor this, etc) or I don't have the energy to do small touch ups like that. Having a bunch of agents do tiny fixes in the background on separate branches keeps me on task, prevents me from bloating PRs, and makes it more likely that I choose to do these small QoL improvements _at all_.
Not quite an open-source project, but I did a massive blog post series on Microservices in Golang. It sort of became a bit of a defacto starting point for a while, it was an immense amount of work and effort. But I found my inbox flooded with people asking for advice, and honestly, writing about it all made me realise how ridiculous Microservices often are. I could tell many of the people asking me didn't really need them, and I found myself trying to advise them away from it. So I ended up with loads of work, but with caveats all over the place trying to convince people they didn't need any of it.
Then I accidentally wiped the database powering my blog, lost all the content, and had loads of people asking me to rewrite them all. Most people were polite, but there were a lot of pushy and entitled people as well... It's a bit of a shame because it was by far the most popular thing I ever did, and they ended up being a massive pain and regret
Worked at Netlify briefly, and the amount of plates they have to spin to keep all these integrations so smooth was super impressive. Some super impressive stuff under the hood. Also a lot of coordination between different projects. Shame to see Vercel not assisting with these efforts as other frameworks do.
Disclaimer, not saying vegans should stop being vegans, just make sure you find a good supplement, and make sure you understand the difference between EPA/DHA Omega 3.