I’m about to hit 40, and I’ve had this exact same experience. Even a single beer, shot of whiskey or glass of wine will leave me feeling depressed for at least a day afterwards.
For me it seems to correlate with having had COVID back in 2021, where prior to that I could still have 2-3 drinks and feel okay the next day. My suspicion/intuition is that it has something to do with a shift in my gut microbiome - from what I understand, alcohol can very easily disrupt one’s microbiome, and the state of my microbiome seems to have a significant influence on my mood.
I haven’t missed the alcohol though. It’s actually been a blessing for my general health and wellbeing.
I had a similar experience. For years I drank about 2 beers a night. Then in my early 40s, had a bout of "long covid" that lasted about 6 months. I have fully recovered, but can't drink like I used to. If I have one or two beers, I feel crappy and down the next day. Also the buzz isn't quite the same.
Precisely the same experience here. Since Covid even a single drink makes me feel bad enough to not want to again… and I always had bad hangovers. This is different
Interesting. I never connected it to covid-19, and truly cannot remember if it hit me as hard the next day or not prior to the pandemic. (Also, obviously I was younger then, too.) The only symptom I can connect to covid-19 is persistent tinnitus, which is pretty common among long-haulers (though I don't count myself among them).
However, I've also heard mention of people drinking less in general which could suggest a link.
Did you perhaps have H. Pylori and your antibiotics eliminated it?
I was also diagnosed with EoE recently - my understanding is that it also causes symptoms that feel like reflux, but aren’t. Very occasionally I might actually have a bit of reflux (evidenced by a bit of regurgitation), but the burning sensation that I used to attribute to reflux I now attribute to EoE instead.
Seems worse when I’ve recently been eating my trigger foods (mostly dairy). Sucks not being able to eat cheese :(
I suspect thats the case, but EoE became a thing for me within months of that ordeal so I suspect there is a connection. My EoE symptoms are difficulty swallowing and esophageal spasms. I have access to oral budesonide which does stop it however it elevates my heart rate.
Sounds to me a lot like Nietzsche’s prediction of the impact of the “death of God”.
Solzhenitsyn primarily focuses in this speech, it seems to me, on there being a growing lack of subordination to a higher spiritual purpose in the West, similar to that in the East, both having predictable consequences in terms of the collapse and eventual destruction of those societies. (Materialism and “anthropocentricity” take over and life loses its meaning.)
The superficial shape of the collapse in the East (under Communism) is different to that of the West, but according to him both suffer from the same underlying disease.
Except that spiritualism in the East is generational suffering. Imagine the Great Depression as a contagious and national feature.
When the Berlin Wall (accidentally) fell, I think it showed the West as far more durably attractive than the East was robust due to generational suffering.
So the question becomes China. Its dissidents do sound like Solzhenitsyn: the Chinese state successfully banned certain truths. But they have spirituality distinct from national suffering. And in 1978, you wouldn’t have seen the beginnings of materialism as well.
Were you supplementing with electrolytes while fasting? Don’t have any studies at hand right now, but fasting apparently causes you to quickly lose fluid and electrolytes.
I recently started doing 5:2 fasting and noticed on the day after fasting that I tend to get bouts of pretty bad orthostatic hypotension. Supplementing with a zero-calorie electrolyte on fasting days and the day after helped mitigate this.
For those potentially concerned about cancer risk from breaking fasts, from the article itself:
> Researchers should always be concerned about anything that could cause cancer, but Valter Longo, a biogerontologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, says that mice with the tweaked genes were “almost doomed to get cancer”, and that the slight rise in risk found in this study might not be applicable more broadly. For example, he points to a study he published in 2015 that found a 45% reduction in abnormal cell and tissue growth in mice that fasted compared with animals that did not.
The mice that developed precancerous growths were genetically modified to be prone to such cancerous development.
Yeah, all the research I've read says that fasting is actually preventative when it comes to cancer -- and possibly assists with starving out cancer cells during treatment of the disease.
Been using Alacritty daily for over a year now on Ubuntu for paid and unpaid (hobby) work and it’s exactly what I need: something that doesn’t get in my way, and it renders nicely. Performance on a ThinkPad with Nvidia graphics card is great.
I don't know if any data has been published. Michael Geist, a prominent Canadian lawyer who specializes in tech and media law and who manages an active blog on those topics in Canada, has published a good breakdown of the bill as it currently exists (it was essentially rewritten once a deal was made):
The bill threw smaller orgs under the bus in favour of larger ones like Torstar and Postmedia, which is par for the course in Canada where the government frequently gives a helping hand to incumbents at the expense of challengers. We love our protectionism.
> The bill threw smaller orgs under the bus in favour of larger ones like Torstar and Postmedia
The bill was trying to protect what little media outlets Canada has left, few people were clicking through when the gist of the article was on Google.
You can’t argue that Canadian media orgs don’t require government protection when they’re all completely reliant on a single American company to provide them the right exposure.
This isn’t correct. News media can, if they want, completely restrict google/meta previews or even disable google. Meta/google are huge revenue drivers for media.
But through a complex narrative the media has pretended that google and meta take their money, and so they got the govt to blackmail google/meta.
It didn’t work with meta. The blocked news (one of the options the law allowed). The media squawked because this hurt them, while meta is doing fine.
Ultimately now CBC can’t share on meta, and lost any deals it had with google/meta. They’ll get a portion of Google’s $100 million and that’s it.
My partner has a very white bicycle helmet and bugs are often flying into it for the same reason I think. Mines darker and it almost never happens other than the occasional and expected collision.
> It blows my mind though how the moment that someone offers free stuff, the first comments are people asking for more free stuff.
If you create something from the perspective of "I had to make this on my unpaid spare time..", then requests for additional work do seem annoying.
But is that the case here?
If I made a utility I thought other people could also benefit from I'd personally be open to suggestions. I'd ignore a lot of them, but every now and then someone requests something interesting that sparks motivation to expand the utility.
I have a tool I've been working on on and off, and after several years it's actually working. But I was barely smart enough to do even that. If people actually started using it and asking for features that would be a nightmare for me lol
“No” is your friend in such scenarios. “Because I made it for me and I don’t need that” is your other friend if people are insistent. (A screenshot of the “fork” button on Github might be a third, rather muscly friend who doesn’t like to talk.)
I do understand the desire to be helpful but one should put themself first when it comes to fulfilling requests. Just in case anyone gets here and is similarly discouraged.
I have one popular project I've worked since around 2010. Lately I've let some of the long time users who can also code maintain it though. It's a character creation editor for a game, a bit like second life in a way. (it's called pac3 for garrymsmod)
I don't have any numbers apart from steam workshop which claims 800k current subscribers, though that doesn't say anything about active users. But there are a lot of tutorials, discord groups, etc centered around this so I'd call it popular.
The way I maintain this project is not very professional. I maximize my own joy first because if I don't have that, I can't work on the project.
The community is loud, maybe because the community is also mostly young gamers.
Sometimes I break things and people complain. Sometimes they can call me names, write long emotional posts about how I should revert something and how everything was better in the past version.
But overall I enjoy working on the project and seeing the amazing things people create with it that I could never foresee.
There are several channels for feature requests (github, discord, steamcommunity), but I don't actively follow it. I usually check when I'm not sure what to do but still feel like working on it.
Sometimes people contact me directly to ask if I can add X feature. Sometimes that works.
For features in general I try to implement something everyone can benefit from, since the editor allows you to create things from smaller building blocks, I'd rather make those smaller building blocks necessary to create the high level feature that was requested.
I wouldn't count those comments as asking for more free stuff. I would think of them as feature requests, ideas, suggestions. Whether or not to implement them is totally up to the author, and the author could charge for those if they decide to implement it.
Isn't that the point of posting/ commenting on HN? So that we can discuss about the post? I see something on HN and after checking it, I would definitely comment on HN first.
As someone who has been working on open source software for 5 years now, GitHub issues are my primary source of truth for what users want and how to go about prioritizing features.
If people can’t be bothered to log an issue or thumbs-up/comment on an existing one, it can’t be such an important thing to them.
Yeah; comments fill a different use case. And for that reason I still find comments interesting.
I'd never write a github issue unless I have a clear use case for a feature, or a clear reproducable bug. And on the receiving side, I hate unclear discussion style issues - "This is cool but its slow when I do (hacky unsupported thing)".
But with comments you surface much more "raw" reactions to things. "Oh cool - I didn't think about the problem like that". "I've always wanted something like this for (some weird problem)", or "How come everyone who tries to solve this problem uses approach X? Is there a reason people don't use approach Z?".
Maybe as a maintainer, the beauty of HN comments is that you don't actually need to reply to them. Github issues sort of demand a response by their very being. If you leave them, they get in the way and make the issue repository basically useless. If you close them without responding, its kinda rude. And responding takes time. Comments, on the other hand, can just be comments. Its lovely.
Those who log issues are the hardcore users crowd that are bothered by something small, whereas new potential users that bounce because of something important generally don't bother making issues. You may be missing out on a lot of critical issues such as limited documentation and confusing API aspects by ignoring other channels of communication.
It's generally pretty easy to look at the tone of how recent issues are handled and know if the maintainer is drowning and would prefer that you keep the noise down, versus whether they're likely to feel energized by interacting with enthusiastic users.
You don't have to be hardcore to leave helpful feedback. If you think it's the latter, go file an issue.
That’s your experience; I’ve been working on open source software for 10 years now and GitHub issues are just one source of feedback; Reddit/HN, other forums, conferences, anything can be useful to meet your users and get ideas on what to improve.
> Whats your point? Aren't people allowed to discuss stuff other people share with them on the internet?
I think their point might be: such discussion might be fun for users, but could be unpleasant or unproductive for the maintainer. That's a totally different concern to express from "don't talk about this at all." Personally, the first thing I do with new software is see what I can do with it, and what I might want to do with it, and I can get carried away in a discussion thread. There's no harm in remembering that the maintainer might be here reading, and keeping their reaction in mind is no huge ask.
Philosophically, I try to embrace the zen of remembering that at the end of the day, while I would love to be helpful, strangers' concerns are not my concerns.
If I'm feeling overwhelmed, if I'm feeling burnt out, if the comments are too much or are unhelpful or are rude... I can tune them out. As the author, my goal was to solve a problem I had. I solved it. If the solution benefits someone else, that's gravy, but I've already put my energy back into the universe by sharing my solution one time in the first place.
Meh. I make free stuff and I'm completely okay with people asking for more free stuff. I might be thinking of adding something you say you need, so it's cool to know what other people's requirements are. If they're simple to implement, and other people submit a test case for it, I'm fine with enhancement requests.
HOWEVER...
I've had a few people who say things like "OMG. YOU MUST DO IT THE WAY I THINK YOU SHOULD DO IT" or "ADD THIS FEATURE OR YOUR NOT A REAL OPEN SOURCE CONTRIBUTOR." And that is definitely annoying. I have a thick hide and don't mind just ignoring those people, but that shouldn't be the default assumption. The people who work on open source projects are people, so don't be a pushy jerk when you're requesting features from FLOSS projects.
ALSO...
Let people revel in the approval of their peers before pointing out things you would have done differently. This is a cool bit of kit.
I see those requests as gratuitous feedback and ideas that could be useful. I‘m glad to have more requests. By no means I‘m going to implement them, but maybe some request triggers useful ideas.
> If I wasn't paid to work full time on open source software, I'd think very carefully about whether to do any open source work nowadays.
I've been maintaining open source software for two decades now, and I still love it when people ask for more stuff. It signals engagement and satisfaction and gives me very concrete directional guidance around where I should take my software.
I'm under no obligation to deliver on those requests.
My day job pays my bills, my open source stuff brings me joy.
Thankfully many open source projects stem from people solving for their own problems then benevolently sharing their solution. It isn’t for everyone and we are all grateful for their contributions.
The first two comments (by timestamp) are one guy (OP) asking for an Obsidian plugin, and the second one is a guy asking for the implementation of swimlane diagrams.
For me it seems to correlate with having had COVID back in 2021, where prior to that I could still have 2-3 drinks and feel okay the next day. My suspicion/intuition is that it has something to do with a shift in my gut microbiome - from what I understand, alcohol can very easily disrupt one’s microbiome, and the state of my microbiome seems to have a significant influence on my mood.
I haven’t missed the alcohol though. It’s actually been a blessing for my general health and wellbeing.