rubashov

The debate around the original asian exclusion acts is kind of interesting to read. A lot of articles from the time are reproduced online. The common sentiment was that white americans didn't want to compete with people willing to work 16 hour days. The fear was a generally compromised quality of life. Of course all this nuance gets boiled down to mere "toxic racism" by the NYT. I mean it's not like large numbers of asians willing to study huge numbers of hours a week have had any affect on quality of life or opportunities for today's students...

I wish someone like Bill Gates would stop doing sisyphean third world do-gooder junk and fund some long term, large controlled studies on humans instead. It seems to me that to do actual science on human health you need space program like money. So instead we get all this observational garbage.

> anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity

I've seen claims that having few friends shows up in mortality worse than than a pack-a-day smoking habit. Of course that's all hand-wavy statistical controls, but then again so is the stuff on exercise and calories.

A digital electric pressure cooker is a better option than a slow cooker in my experience. I use one. Pretty much everything cooks inside 20 minutes, even a whole frozen chicken. I cook tons of stuff straight from frozen.

But still, preparing the food once or twice a day is a distracting pain. It would be great if I could just stop off at street vendors or fast food stores and eat well, but as it is that stuff will kill you.

Food prep is by far the most time consuming and drudge heavy daily task, but it remains pretty much impossible to eat healthily if you don't cook daily. Short of paying a personal chef or landing a full time housewife there doesn't seem to be a solution. Restaurants and prepared food just don't have the economic incentive to use high quality ingredients.

I've had the experience of trying to read Nabakov and Nietzsche and in both cases being sure most of it was sailing way over my head. I kind of enjoyed the stuff anyway, but as a working adult I don't have time to screw around with secret decoder rings. Wish I did.

I tried to do a couple coursera courses and found the video lectures highly inefficient; very needlessly time consuming, even watching them sped up. All I really want is a glorified text book with quiz grading and a final.

Isn't this to some degree a matter of fixating on consumer brands? To my understanding Japan still runs a massive trade surplus in high tech equipment and parts and has many super profitable firms making that stuff. The parts that go into or make your phone or TV comes from Japan. This is just what I hear.

You explain the memory locality issue well but the question is how is the situation better in any other language.

How is your example a language thing? Would a JITed language improve the locality of the m_numLoadedAssets variable? I'm not quite sure I get it.

> the biggest gains are made on an algorithmic level

I have had a few experiences of simply porting something rather directly to C++ and seeing 10X speed and memory improvements. The 'hidden costs' in other languages are loads of unavoidable heap allocations and pointer indirection that really don't happen with C++. And C++ compilers do a ton of very smart optimization these days.

With the generic programming constructs and static polymorphism approaches in C++ you can often get really big performance increases over what's practical in C or Java. std::sort in C++, for example, has often been found a few times faster than stdlib.h qsort. It's because of compile time optimizations that languages like C and Java can't do.

I thought I was depressed and anxious for almost two years. It turned out I just had a chronic sinus infection.

I'm suspicious that a lot of what gets considered as psychiatric problems are really physical health problems. Anecdotally, a lot of people switch to a nutrient dense diet and cut out potential allergens and wind up feeling all better.

The article says hadza walk many miles per day but burn the same calories as sedentary westerners. How is this possible? Well you go look at the table in the study and the hadza are all 30kg lighter than westerners. The men are all apparently 5'4 and 115lb, if you look at the BMI. That's probably 115lb at sub 5% bodyfat, too.

The study claims to control for body size. I didn't read it. But I still suspect we're looking at an apples to oranges situation here. A little dude of pure muscle who has been walking 10 miles a day his whole life is essentially incomparable to a fat sedentary Westerner.

I don't think the data presented predicts that if you had 6' fat sedentary people walk three miles a day they wouldn't lose weight, but that's almost claimed in the article.