My understanding is that FOSDEM is run by volunteers on a shoestring budget mainly thanks to the support of the ULB (a university). They don't have security, they don't have badges or registrations, you can just walk in and out as you please. I have my doubts this is going to last if people start to deliberately try to take a fat dump on it to elevate their own ego.
FOSDEM organiser here. The shoestring budget is accurate, as is the badges or registrations thing. The security thing is not. We do have proper security. Organising an 8k people conference without would be unsafe and illegal.
I understand that those drugs are very useful, but in a way it feels for me like ancient Rome with its orgies and vomit inducing so they can eat more. At least looking at USA from Europe. The problem of sugar content, dietary choices and portion sizes remains. It is similar to gas guzzling cars.
Sorry if it seems not empathic enough, that was not my intention. I know that the use of such drugs may be medically necessary.
Edit:
To serious answers: I was wrong, I stay corrected.
> I understand that those drugs are very useful, but in a way it feels for me like ancient Rome with its orgies and vomit inducing so they can eat more.
"Wealthy Ancient Romans did not use rooms called vomitoria to purge food during meals so they could continue eating and vomiting was not a regular part of Roman dining customs. A vomitorium of an amphitheatre or stadium was a passageway allowing quick exit at the end of an event."
"Two of the most notable examples from Ancient Rome
center on the emperors Vitellius and Claudius who were notorious for
their binge eating and purging practices. Historian Suetonius writes
that “Above all, however, he [Vitellius] was … always having at least
three feasts, sometimes four in a day — breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a
drinking party — and easily finding capacity for it all through regular
vomiting” (Suetonius, Vit, 13) [1]. Similarly, the emperor Claudius was
infamous for never leaving a meal until overfed, after which a feather
was placed in his throat to stimulate his gag reflex (Suetonius, Claud, 33) [2].
In his writing, Suetonius takes on a disapproving tone when describing
the eating habits of Claudius and Vitellius, as highlighted by the use of
words such as “luxury,” “cruelty,” and “stuffed”(Crichton, 204). This tone
indicates that although binge eating and purging were accepted, albeit
uncommon in Roman culture, the practices were negatively associated
with gluttony and a lack of self-control. "
> Stories of this kind were part of the common currency of Roman political discourse. Suetonius devotes similar space to the sexual transgressions of Caligula, Nero, and Domitian – such behaviour is to be expected of a tyrant. The remoteness of the emperor’s residence itself must have fuelled the most lurid imaginations back in Rome.
Suetonius was born in 69 AD; Vitellius was emperor in 69 AD and Claudius was emperor from 41-54. They weren't contemporaries.
Purely from a cost perspective - imagine a 79 year old grandma.
Heavily overweight. She is already partially immobile. Pre-diabetic. She may have other conditions, further complicated by her weight. She's on a fixed income.
Which is more probable -
1) A dietary intervention that she attends once a week that revamps her entire daily consumption (but remember, she's on a fixed income) along with some intense exercise?
or
2) put her on a single medication that changes her tastes for sugary and starchy foods, reduces her cravings, reduces inflammation, and in turn, will make her lighter and more mobile.
It is a no-brainer for Medicare. This will save so many downstream costs.
These drugs (mostly) don't allow you to eat more unhealthy food, instead they make it easier to have the self control to avoid over eating / choose healthier foods.
To add, they actually prevent you from eating some bad foods too. At least in the compound versions that i know people on.
If they eat a lot of foods (some even good), their gastro issues are significant. So not only has it had substantial mental shifts around what they desire, but a bunch of foods are just not edible even if they wanted them anyway.
Yup. The people i know on this didn't even get it for the weight, but the behavior changes. This isn't letting them eat the same stuff and lose weight, this is changing what they want to eat.
They went from ADHD driven boredom eaters to not even thinking about food.
I have ADHD and the dopamine dysregulation really makes it hard to avoid eating things with sugar in it.
The semaglutide really helps, I'm on a lower dose of it 0.5mg/week and have been on it for over a year. I've lost a fair bit of weight but that has stabilized. It costs me ~$30 per month and I save much more than that on eating less food.
For me it really helps with chronic fatigue which was destroying my life. I think it really is a wonder drug for people with auto-immune issues. I was insanely sensitive to it when I started which I think is common with people with ADHD so I started really low and only very slowly worked my way up.
You should apologize for making it obvious that you don’t know how the drugs work (as illustrated by sibling comments). If your analogy is “gas-guzzling cars”, I would suggest you revisit your reading on the topic.
I think it's just a case of our ape bodies not being prepared for a modern world where calories are abundant - which is a good thing! It means people don't starve in developed countries.
We wear clothes because we evolved to not have hair. We wear glasses because we spend more time focusing on nearby objects. Some people need GLP-1 agonists because their body makes them consume food it doesn't need, and there's no scarcity to stop them. It's okay to use technology to adapt our bodies to a different world.
If everyone 30+ bmi can get to 30 for “free” (not sure where the subsidizing stops, for me it’s free if I’m over 30 bmi), that’s just too tantalizing to pass up, even if the moral applies.
At least it takes a load off one problem (obesity related diseases). Could it actually exacerbate unethical farming even more or lead to even worse outcomes? Hope not.
I've read that obesity and smoking are net positives for the cost of state-supplied medical care because it causes people to die younger and quicker.
My real concern is what you stated: the by treating some of the symptoms of a toxic food system we will avoid treating the causes (in the USA, we would do well to take soft drinks out of schools and treat adding sugar to foods as an sin to be taxed)
You may be wrong in the specifics of the mechanism of calorie reduction (reducing appetite vs reducing calorific absorption), but not in the general philosophy.
The obesity crisis (specifically in the US, but elsewhere too) has been caused by bad food essentially - food that is not only nutrient deficient, but also engineered to be as cheap as possible and addictive as possible to get you to buy more of it.
As ever, the US is attempting to fix the symptoms, as opposed to the underlying cause, following the general idea of 'if everyone does what they like, things will turn out ok (somehow)'.
Probably negative health implications of these drugs will surface as people become habituated, and we can continue to shake our heads and wonder how it all went so wrong over there.
It's unclear what the exact cause of the obesity epidemic is. Ultra processed foods are one theory, but not the only one. The US has been down the path before of making public policy from unsettled science, and it led to probably worse food.
Anecdotally, I can say that you absolutely can get quite fat on a diet of abundant "quality", minimally-processed food. It's just a little more expensive. I don't know how the food supply arguments about obesity can land anywhere other than "we should make calories more expensive" or "we should make it illegal to make food taste good", neither of which are remotely politically viable or morally justifiable.
One of the mechanisms of operation is to reduce your desire to eat.
Taking a step back, obesity actually is an adaptation. When food is scarce, you want your body to extract and store every gram of nutrition it can get. And that would provide a distinct advantage when you're trying to reproduce.
The thing is, GLPs don't only suppress eating. There are plenty of substances out there that can do that...and there are plenty of people who can't lose weight by starving themselves, because your body will try to maintain its weight.
The question should be "why isn't everyone obese, given the huge amount of calories available to humans?"
Obesity is not an adaptation. It's a total aberration. Storing energy in the form of fat is an adaptation. Becoming obese is overloading your entire system.
The issue is that the coding style depends on whoever wrote the external library, not on you, so this ends up working only sometimes. You can probably find some other combination that will help you find what you're looking for (I do this all the time when using Github's web interface) but ultimately this is just a bad experience.
When I hear Chinese CEO, I think they may be easily replaced and in the end the real CEO is Xi Jinping. I am sure it is a bit more complicated and I may have some prejudice, but how far am I? I would expect for a Chinese CEO that would behave like Elon Musk to disappear quite quickly. Am I wrong in this assessment as well?
> Chinese CEO that would behave like Elon Musk to disappear quite quickly
Why would you assume Elon Musk himself would immune from such "disappearing" if they pissed off someone powerful (like Xi Jinping or someone from other nations)? Have you see the man desecrate Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin? If he likes to critic politician, why the redline?
A lot of people listened to music from YouTube as their primary source besides an FM radio before Spotify was available as it is now. YouTube somewhat famously signed deals with music labels back in the day. Content ID was the controversial, but necessary compromise for the music to remain on YouTube. I am pretty sure a very significant percentage of music listeners globally listen mainly from YouTube, I did it and I also saw a lot of people doing it.
It may seem stupid or counter productive, but it is easy and good enough. YT Music is a clear upgrade for those users.
I think YT Music makes more sense than many of the Google initiatives and it will continue to make sense as long as they will have deals with music labels.
I use regular YouTube (not Music) for discovering music by way of playlist mix videos sometimes (such as the retrowave/chillwave/etc mixes by soulsearchanddestroy), but if I like a playlist well enough I’ll rebuild it in my Apple Music library with a combination of tracks on AM natively or in some cases with Bandcamp purchases. Music being tied up in YouTube long term is cumbersome, even with YT Premium offline downloads as an option.
Google already shut down their first music streaming service.
Trying to get your playlists out was a complete nightmare too, some moron at Google decided on a ridiculously poor data structure. It was something utterly absurd like a zip with a CSV file per track, that generally had only that track in it.
Well, they shut down two music services. The first was Songza, which they bought. They then took everything Songza had- namely their awesome mood-based, artisanally curated playlists- and put it into Google Play Music. Then they seemingly let go of everyone who maintained the playlists and never updated them again? Those playlists on Songza were _excellent_ and the Snoop Dog collabs were just delightful.
Not sure how Google internally makes decision but I imagine it works entirely quarter by quarter trying to measure individual Impact with no overarching vision or direction.
> Youtube's best audio is format 251: Opus with a variable bitrate target of 128k. Note that 128k Opus is approximately equal in quality to 320k mp3 (as in, it's generally considered transparent)
I care a lot about audio quality and I use YT premium for music just about every day. You also get enhanced bitrate on some videos with premium.
