bartimaeus of uruk

degenerative AI

[bartimaeus of uruk @bartimaeusofusa]

he just like me fr

[bartimaeus of uruk @bartimaeusofusa]

@samlakig ☠️

[bartimaeus of uruk @bartimaeusofusa]

@pli_cachete @JamesOnTheCoast Psychedelics for avoiding phone use is not what I had in mind in the comments

[bartimaeus of uruk @bartimaeusofusa]

@nedsore Looking at you like

[bartimaeus of uruk @bartimaeusofusa]

@fuckpoasting @baelentina_ Come over! That dream is not dead yet

[bartimaeus of uruk @bartimaeusofusa]

@somewheresy The recoil from covid wfh policies to this hyper centralization is a bit unnerving even for ppl in their prime.
It tough for normal folks to wrap their head around it

[bartimaeus of uruk @bartimaeusofusa]

@giyu_codes This is like management consulting from first principles

[bartimaeus of uruk @bartimaeusofusa]

@naanthannaantha which baddie did that to you?

[bartimaeus of uruk @bartimaeusofusa]

@FeralPHunter They can’t. They don’t know how to

[bartimaeus of uruk @bartimaeusofusa]

My main regret is I went 9 years where I could afford ice creams every day and did not. Never again

[Dalton (Analyze & Optimize) @Outdoctrination]

Ice cream is actually one of the healthiest foods in existence, judging by a multitude of recent research articles.

There was a very highly publicized article that came out in 2018 out of Harvard.

It was for a student's dissertation, he found that ice cream was inversely associated with heart disease.

The nutrition department and the student himself tried repeatedly to "make the association go away" with different analysis, and checking his work.

But it didn't.

Not only was ice cream reported as beneficial,

it was actually one of the most beneficial dairy products analyzed.

With up to a 12% reduction in heart disease risk for having >2 servings of ice cream per week.

This wasn't the first study to find benefits of ice cream, and it also wasn't the last.

In a 2013 meta analysis of studies, they also found a protective effect of ice cream on diabetes.

You can see the bias against ice cream, as they don't even mention it in the main page.

That's despite ice cream showing one of the BEST results of any food studied for diabetes risk.

Another study from 2014 showed the same thing.

Again, this is a meta analysis, not just one study. They are pooling together all of the studies on ice cream and diabetes and still finding this.

The best result of any dairy food studied - here with a 32% reduction in diabetes risk.

The bias against ice cream is very strong in these studies.

A 2016 study once again showing the same benefit of ice cream for diabetes risk.

They say that the study above (Chen et al) showed "attenuated association" once diet collection information was stopped after hypertension or high cholesterol diagnosis.

They argue that this means that the association is invalid.

But not only did they not try to dismiss any other food studied like this, but this is just objectively not true (see above - there still was an association).

They also buried their results on ice cream in the supplementary tables so it didn't even make the paper.

That's probably because they didn't like the fact that once again, ice cream intake was inversely and strongly associated with diabetes risk.

So you really can't argue that there was some kind of agenda in favor of ice cream here.

More recent studies show the same thing.

A 2019 paper again showed a lower risk of diabetes with increased ice cream consumption.

And again, they put this information at the very end in the supplementary tables to try to hide it.

Finally, the most recent study in 2024 showed the STRONGEST association for ice cream's protective effect on diabetes.

There was a linear dose response.

That means more ice cream = less diabetes, straight up.

In fact, there was a 50% reduction in risk for having one serving per day.

Which, as you could guess by this point, was the greatest risk reduction of any dairy food studied.

Why would ice cream actually be good for you?

My main guess is the unique protective fats in dairy, that are abundant in ice cream.

◇ C15
◇ C17
◇ CLA
◇ TVA
◇ TPA

are fats almost exclusively in dairy fat, and all have unique effects.

◇ Mitochondrial enhancing
◇ Anti-inflammatory
◇ Anti-thrombotic
◇ Lipid lowering
◇ Fat burning
◇ Cancer preventing

I've covered these all at length in other content.

Of course, this is all observational.

This is simply seeing what people eat and then seeing what happens to them. It's not an experiment. That is definitely a limitation.

However, when you see the same association, consistently, across decades, regardless of analysis and confounding adjustment, you probably have something real.

This is not to say everyone should go and immediately pound gallons of ice cream for invincibility.

But... it does mean having reasonable amounts of ice cream is likely good for you.

[bartimaeus of uruk @bartimaeusofusa]

@samlakig Wrap it up. Time to find you a wifey

[bartimaeus of uruk @bartimaeusofusa]

@americakaran @adarshahgd @DrSJaishankar Just one more retort from daddy Shankar bro. Just one more!

[bartimaeus of uruk @bartimaeusofusa]

@giyu_codes @OfficialLoganK Now that’s swag I wanna see more!

[bartimaeus of uruk @bartimaeusofusa]

@samlakig manifesting good things to happen to my oomfs. Why not?

[bartimaeus of uruk @bartimaeusofusa]

@naanthannaantha just came off the kelsey Hightower pod and gonna do my nth timeline purge

[bartimaeus of uruk @bartimaeusofusa]

Few..

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Kelsey Hightower has one of the most inspiring stories in tech: he went from a technician installing DSL modems, through self-directed study and very hard work, to one of the very few Distinguished Engineer at Google whom Satya Nadella personally persuaded to join Microsoft.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro
03:34 Kelsey’s first job at McDonald’s
05:04 His non-traditional path into tech
11:45 Landing his first tech job with an A+ certification
15:33 His entrepreneurial years
19:45 Joining Google as a data center technician
27:48 Learning automation at a Rackspace spinoff
33:26 Moving into financial services
50:00 Building a reputation through open source
53:55 From configuration management to containers
1:08:20 The rise of Kubernetes
1:25:05 Why he almost joined NASA instead of Google
1:29:20 Defining DevRel at Google
1:38:20 Demonstrating impact at Google
1:41:20 Microsoft's offer
1:55:20 Learning how to slow down
2:06:39 Advising and investing
2:15:03 A people-first view of GenAI
2:24:27 Using AI with guardrails
2:28:26 Matching AI to the task
2:36:06 Staying relevant in the AI era

Brought to you by outstanding teams building products I love:

• @AntithesisHQ: verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. https://t.co/AKYm4cctss

• @sentry: application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers https://t.co/uoolyqTR6M

• @buildkite: CI software built to absorb whatever your coding agents throw at the build queue. OpenAI, Anthropic, Uber and others are customers: https://t.co/C05Ze9zzin

Three interesting learnings from Kelsey:

1. Side hustles and doing your own thing teach you business like no IC job can.

Before becoming a software engineer at Google, Kelsey was a manager for his comedian friend, operated a computer store, and did IT contracting. These gigs taught him logistics, planning, and about money. All this helped him be far more effective at talking with executives and acting as an executive sponsor inside Google.

2. Can you explain what your startup does without mentioning AI?

When Kelsey researches startups seeking his advice, he challenges founders to not say “AI” once. This means that they must explain the actual value their company creates. One unexpected benefit of this is that it often reveals there are easier, cheaper ways to achieve a goal than with AI.

3. It’s very rare to get an extra zero put on your compensation figure – but it happened.

Kelsey was a successful, well-paid Google engineer when Microsoft made him an offer that 10x’d his salary (!!). When Kelsey told Google he was planning to take the offer, it matched the offer, proving that his market value had massively increased. It shows that being well paid doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being paid at the correct market rate.

[bartimaeus of uruk @bartimaeusofusa]

@naanthannaantha Vacay every month is a must! Anything to look forward to builds excitement and happiness

[bartimaeus of uruk @bartimaeusofusa]

@shapiro500 Threejs seems amazing! But Why aren’t we seeing more games? Or am I out of the loop?

[bartimaeus of uruk @bartimaeusofusa]

@jashvira @atmoio @tszzl Stop! Such tweets will push the only good openai employee with an acceptable level of bad takes to kill himself (upload his consciousness to the nearest blackwell gpu)