@nprofile1q... there *is* a law for some people. The law of nature.

Some people (like my partner) slowly torture plants to death in their garden rather than grow them.

@nprofile1q... you sure he was honking out of frustration?

Any good truck driver worth his license would be honking because toddlers LOVE big construction / special purpose trucks, and it’s SO COOL when one of them actually acknowledges you.

My kiddo LOVES when the trash truck comes by… he races out to the curb and covers his ears just to the driver can honk for him.

@nprofile1q... Didn't DOGE cut a ton of funding for the CVE program at MITRE?

I can guess what one of those people was responsible for....

@nprofile1q... @nprofile1q... This is just going to lead to alert fatigue, and people tuning out alerts.

It already happens with lane assist. I rented a car for a 6-hour drive through the desert (flat, straight, dull) and lane assist was good enough that I didn't have to correct it... except for the panic-inducing alarm every 15 minutes telling me to put my hands on the wheel. The first time, I almost got rear-ended due to sensory overload - Everything started beeping and flashing, so I slammed on the brakes while my brain tried to figure out what threat I needed to avoid (and slamming on the brakes when traffic is averaging 80-90mph all around you is a bad idea). Eventually I saw the "put hands on the wheel" warning. WTF, toyota.

The thing was, my hands were on the wheel. I just didn't need to correct it, so the car couldn't tell... so it would flash lights and alarming beeps constantly. I eventually learned to just ignore those beeps, and I'd just tug at the wheel randomly to avoid them.

Thinking about an AI camera trying to figure out WTF is happening and blaring alerts all the time sounds like a great way to distract drivers into MORE accidents, not less. It's entirely predictable, but in 15 years we'll see investigations and committees trying to discover what went wrong.

Meanwhile, car companies selling adverse information so insurance companies can increase premiums will net tons of money for certain people, and other people will die due to distractions while driving. Guess which end of the economic spectrum will receive the better end of the deal...

@nprofile1q... all of the American laws against leaving kids in the car unattended that I’m aware of were written in response to heat, not kidnapping. It doesn’t take much for a car to heat to dangerous levels.

It’s funny though - people learn not to leave kids in the car because “it’s illegal” and the motivation for WHY it’s illegal gets forgotten. Then we need signs to remind folks that heat can kill pets, etc.

The law in California is particularly strict. A kid under 6 can’t be unattended in a car for *any* amount of time, with mandatory reporting requirements if certain professions (teachers, health professionals, etc) see it happen. It was a big enough deal that my kid’s preschool had staff available to attend your car if you needed to run in to drop off and sign your kid in while a younger sibling slept in the car. Given the number of infant siblings, I’m sure that saved a LOT of calls to the police.

@nprofile1q... Ooh.. the veggie thing is something I hadn't thought about, and a great idea. I'm terrible at eating veggies. Really, I'm terrible at eating anything that requires work to prepare... but I'm not a big fan of most vegetables so I'm extra unmotivated to eat them.

I probably snack in all the same situations as you do, but one that I've noticed that you didn't list is tired. I snack a *TON* when I'm tired. Getting off caffiene and trying to get into a reasonable sleep pattern has made a big difference for me. I don't know if being tired means I'm just less able to resist cravings, or if my brain is trying to supplement lack of sleep with sugar, but there have definitely been days where I get 2 or 3 hours of sleep, and I find myself frequently heading back to the kitchen/break rooms/vending machines looking for sugar. Especially on travel, where jetlag comes into play.

I actually hate tracking calories, too, but I've found that I'm less inclined to just snack on a food of convenience if I then have to go to my PC and record it (or email myself, if I'm not at home)... so really, the calorie counting just adds friction to unnecessary snacking. I don't use an app, though, I use an Excel sheet that lives on my home PC. That makes it extra inconvenient to snack.

It sounds like everything in your system works well for you. If you're cool with sharing, I'd love if you posted progress. I assume you're roughly my age or older, and given your technical leanings your baseline physical activity is probably roughly near mine (as opposed to someone who works service industry or as a bike messenger or something that doesn't keep them at a desk 10 hours/day). Seeing that others can do it is incredibly motivating.

@nprofile1q... I'm on this journey (again) after taking a hiatus. There are things that I found that really helped me the time -- it was so effective in fact, that weight loss became effortless and I was losing weight so fast I got worried that my cancer had come back and I deliberately broke all my habits to see if my weight would level out. It did... and then went back up, but I digress. A friend told me to do this, and I was convinced it was a gimmick and wouldn't work so I made sure to follow it to the letter mostly so I could prove them wrong. Win/Win for me - I didn't prove them wrong, but I dropped 35lbs in something like 12 weeks.

1. Drink watered down orange juice all day. I carried around a water bottle full of 1:8 organic orange juice, and it helped keep enough sugar in my blood stream that I didn't feel shaky from low blood sugar between meals, it was sweet enough to help with sugar cravings but not so sweet as to reinforce a sugar addiction, and it helps keep your metabolism from going into fasting mode and slowing down.

2. Start with a period of time with no sweets, and no added salts. I think I did 2 weeks, and this includes cutting things like artificial sweeteners, fruit, and even things like condiments (Ketchup has a *ton* of sugar, it turns out). Basically, I had to break my sugar addition, and in doing so I went through a full course of withdrawal (headaches, sleepiness, etc).

3. Chew your food exceptionally thoroughly, with your whole mouth (both sides) and really pay attention to the flavor. In my experience, there's mouth hunger and there's real hunger. There are plenty of times where I've eaten enough to be full, but what I'm eating is really good... so I'm mouth hungry for it, but I'm not actually hungry. Chewing with your whole mouth and keeping your food in your mouth longer helps cut down on mouth hunger.

4. Eat slowly (goes with #3). Eat for 10 minutes, then wait 5 minutes and see if you're still hungry. If you are, keep eating until you're not. I found I ate about half as much when I did these things, and I didn't feel hungry.

5. Eat when you're truly hungry; don't snack when you're kinda hungry. If you're not hungry enough to go through the effort of making yourself a meal, you're not truly hungry. This can really f*ck with meal times, but most of the time that doesn't matter. If you're truly hungry but you've got a family dinner coming up or something, have a small, non-sweet snack. I would do like 1 oz of beef jerky, or even something as small as 6 peanuts, to tide me over till meal time.

6. Actually eat when you're hungry - if you wait too long, you'll get over hungry, then over-eat.

7. No more than 3 things on your plate. Eat one thing at a time - don't bounce around. When you're tired of eating that one thing, move on and don't come back to it. It's a bit of a game, but if you're chewing your food thoroughly (like, way longer than you think you should be chewing), you *will* get tired of eating the same thing and want variety. That's when you know you're not mouth hungry for those flavors anymore. Move on to the next until you're sick of it. If you go back to the first, you'll get mouth hungry for it again.

8. Smaller portions. You can always go back for seconds. If you finish what's on your plate, and you're not sick of it, go get more of that thing before moving on. It feels bad to waste food, so we're inclined to over-eat rather than tossing our food... but if our priority is losing weight, it's better the food goes to waste than to your waist. Smaller portions help eliminate both. Relatedly - at a restaurant, ask for an extra plate and cut your portion in half at the start. Restaurant portions are huge, but if you make your portion smaller to start out, you'll be less likely to eat more than you actually need.

The biggest things for my quality of life were #2 and #1 - getting through that 14 days *sucked*, but after having no sweet things for 2 weeks, I was far less inclined to want to eat them. Like, I could walk past free cookies or donuts and not stop and pick one up - it was shocking even to me.

I'm currently struggling to get back into that habit (turns out, it's *much* harder now that I'm married and have a kid than it was 20 years ago when I was single and had nobody else to share my schedule with). One thing I noticed is that I shed a ton of weight really fast early on (as much as 3% of my body weight in the first week), but then it tapers off. It's also not uncommon for me to fluctuate 1-2lbs daily in either direction depending on how hydrated I am, so I keep an excel spreadsheet of my daily weight, but only look at the average over the last 2 weeks when tracking progress. This whole thing is about forming new habits and lifestyle change for me, so looking at a long average is more motivating long-term than celebrating the wins.

I'd love to hear more about what you're finding successful - just because you mostly post tech stuff doesn't mean you can't post other things. There's lots of infosec folks who I'm sure are in my boat... I'm eager to learn any tricks I can use to try to get an edge on this... It sucks going through life with tens of pounds of dead weight that just make everything you do that much more difficult.

@nprofile1q... @nprofile1q... Tracking everyone at a conference who entered a specific restroom would be next-level creepy.

@nprofile1q... You should *definitely* move that device.

I'm sure if someone were to accidentally move it into their backpack, then it accidentally fell into the nearest swimming pool, nobody would blame them.

@nprofile1q... I don't touch wordpress at all, but is there a way to programmatically know if a wordpress plugin's ownership changes?

@nprofile1q... @nprofile1q... Tell that to the FOSS maintainers who receive hundreds of fully AI-generated "vulnerability" reports that all turn out to be false positives.

If you want to use AI to find a bug, go for it. Validate the bug. Write a proof-of-concept (or have AI do it if you're not capable) and test it yourself. If your proof-of-concept achieves the desired results, then submit the bug and the POC.

There are people just haphazardly feeding FOSS baselines into local AI and asking for bugs, then submitting whatever their LLM tells them without validating that it's correct. This effectively floods the maintainers with false positives and makes it very difficult for legitimate bug reports to get through.

Also, just because Claude found a bug doesn't mean it didn't also report 100 false positives before it found a real one. Given the effort it takes to triage a bug report, allowing any random yahoo with a keyboard to blindly submit AI-generated slop equates to enabling a DDoS on your bug triage staff. It's not sustainable.