We probably all have anecdotal evidence here, but my father is a perfect example of being no longer employed and a ton of stuff declining. Yes, cognitively, but a lot of health. We're talking not just your "career". He was a commercial real estate agent. But in his 80s he was working at Menards as a greeter and stocker. And it kept him busy. Getting out of the house. Figuring things out. Meeting and talking to people. Walking. Talking. Scheduling things. He'd even tell us that if he stopped, things would just descend. And he was so right.
He had to stop to help take more care of my mom, and quickly, he just fell out of all these things. Cognitively. Health. Ability to do anything decision wise or to better himself just tanked.
Sample size of 1. A ton of confounding variables. But definitely wasn't his choice to stop working at a place because of health. The poor health came after being forced to quit.
Does make me worry about "taking it easy" when I get older whatever that means :)
As a general comment, I'd like to say that getting out of the house is a hell of a lot easier when you don't have to drive everywhere to participate in daily life. So and so family member sits at home and watches TV all day is a phenomenon caused primarily by our car-centric culture which, for the elderly, is a barrier to staying healthy both mentally and physically.
I do think that once an elderly person loses the ability to drive, it's often a big tipping point towards their decline. I would suspect that losing the ability to drive usually (but not necessarily) comes before losing the ability to navigate public transit.
But I don't immediately believe the link that 'car culture' -> 'earlier cognitive decline'. Car culture, for example, is usually associated with living on larger plots of land, which comes with its own set of tasks and chores that can keep someone older occupied. A smaller apartment requires much less ongoing work.
I think a lot depends on the individual and how they best stay active. More dense living probably provides easier opportunities to do things, whereas less dense living sort of forces you to perform ongoing tasks.
I'm no fan of car culture but I think to say it's the primary cause of living a sedentary life at home is an overstatement. I deliberately moved somewhere where I could walk to everything I needed including a fantastic central train station, I no longer even own a car, and yet... over the years my habits changed and I now spend a ton of time at home. My motivation to go out has simply declined.
There is a relevant concept in psychology called activation energy, James Clear provides a good introduction to it. Certainly in recent years screens seem to be incentivizing more stay at home behavior. People used to not own a TV, many quite intentionally, before our other screens were invented. But it is a very complicated topic.
Of course our activity levels change and in some cases go down as we age, but I'd like to submit that is a given, and that car-only infrastructure is an additional barrier on top of those natural tendencies.
It's simply much easier to walk to a coffee shop, or park, or wherever for those who have maintained their mobility (probably in part by living in a walking-centric environment) than it is to hop in a car, sit in traffic, for small things. It's less of a barrier.
Respectfully but strongly disagree. I'll argue you don't have to be a victim and can choose where you live if you plan ahead a little.
There's plenty of places where a car is not necessary and even if people think a car's necessary I'm often the only one on a bicycle in many places.. It's doable if you're willing to put in the effort.
I think that suggesting that an octogenarian either uproot their life to a less car-centric place or start riding a bike everywhere is a bit unreasonable.
You can choose to live where you don't need a car, but those places become fewer and fewer because of the distances needed for cars. (as in parking space minimums mandated by the city).
"Not just bikes" on Youtube goes into this a lot. Car-centricism is self-reinforcing. Eventually you have no such thing as a mid-density neighbourhood.
As far as I’m aware, every US city where it’s at all common (let’s say 10%+ of households) to live without a car, it’s extremely expensive to live. Are there gems that I’m unaware of?
There are cities in the Midwest with a large carfree share by necessity (income) but as far as by choice/design, Philly and Baltimore appear to hover around 25-30%
It's hard to really say from anecdotes. My uncle retired early and was sharp as a whip until 86 or so. Then decline hit him hard. There was no change in life circumstances, he just got old.
Also, I think you'll find that taking care of someone who can't take care of themselves is a lot of work. I had to do it for my mom for 6 months and its a ton of stuff. Talking to doctors. Arranging appointments. Etc.
"I think you'll find that taking care of someone" => I know you were writing this generically. And I'm just replying to this for the sake of all of us who do actually know what it's like taking care of someone.
But yeah. Holy shit this is hard. I've been doing this too. Had to move my mom and dad to a place a block from me when my mom was going through her final few months with Alzheimers. That was so hard. So gross. And then now with this descent of my dads. You are catching me fresh from yet another aorta aneurism surgery of his last week. This is bananas. Just endless worry, driving, appointments, cleaning, pills, macgyvering the endless broken down things in his life: the tv, the remote, the blood pressure monitor.
OMG. I see you. I feel you. :) This is a rough part of life y'all.
Saw similar with my grandmothers. One had a busy social live and volunteer schedule for 20+ years, the other.. did not.
A reminder that you cannot simply retire FROM something (work, commuting, etc) but must retire TO something (hobbies, social life, second career, volunteering, etc).
There's always more opportunities in the community than there are volunteers, so look around.
>A reminder that you cannot simply retire FROM something (work, commuting, etc) but must retire TO something (hobbies, social life, second career, volunteering, etc).
Yeah, my guess is that someone retiring early to pursue their hobbies and interests is going to be much better off than a blue collar worker made redundant or disabled in his 50's. I always see these sort of studies used to slam the idea of FIRE, but I very much have my doubts that these findings apply equally to everyone.
Retiring TO something is important, but ideally it needs to involve a lot of in-person socializing, which many hobbies do not have. Golfing, for example, is pretty much the platonic ideal of a hobby that involves both socialization and old-person-friendly exercise.
my mother's dementia diagnosis this year started as severe ADHD symptoms 4 years ago. but many years before that she enjoyed her retirement and pension as her last boss was abusive, and she was a bit traumatized by this that merely suggesting the idea of working again would make her anxious. the symptoms started from the stress of taking care of my dad, who suddenly found his workplace extremely stressful due to an incident with his boss snapping at him. this led to fainting incidents where he had to be rushed to ER and a after an extended disability leave he was let go. he has never been so relieved. however this just worsened my mom's condition, and the need to move out of their home of 20 years escalated it (moving stress syndrome as confounding catalyst). after only 1 year she forgot about this home and that she ever lived in it. She thinks she still lives in an earlier house. my father is much much happier, even when taking care of mom and they still get to travel. mom simply forgets what happened an hour ago, but my dad's happy just getting to travel the world with her while she can. So.. more of sample size of 2 abusive bosses in the workplace leading to significant mental and physical health improvements upon leaving such bosses. mom enjoyed kdramas, dad enjoyed reading more of world history, they regularly do everything together everywhere. they love the same music that my mom remembers every word and dance to.
> But in his 80s he was working at Menards as a greeter and stocker.
> He had to stop to help take more care of my mom, and quickly, he just fell out of all these things. Cognitively. Health. Ability to do anything decision wise or to better himself just tanked.
It's a nice "just so" story, but when you're in your 80s, you are already in multiple stages of decline across the board. One small injury can cause a cascading failure of systems.
> The poor health came after being forced to quit.
I don't know how you can so authoritatively state this about a man in his 80s. (e.g. - past the average life expectancy). 80 is just really really old. How fast the decline gets you at that point is really mostly a genetic lottery.
But if the anecdote helps you be more active personally - more power to you.
"online live reloading apps" => trying to get my head around this workflow. so the disk is shared across these? so do you still have the problem of say running a "main" version of an app, and it's weird experimental version of that same app? because they still have to live in different folders/worktrees? that's where I get stuck a little trying to enable things like this for others. right now, I've got people a system we can spin up N "vms". but it's not persistent storage if the vm goes away. it's whatever version exists in their GitHub branch. hopefully if they hack the vm app they commit and push back to the repo.
For many apps the weird experimental version is all there is. Call it vibe coding or experiments or non-critical tools. These may not even have a GitHub repo. I trust local git and the exe.dev disks.
Then for serious apps the above is the same shape for development branches. Spin up a VM in a few seconds with the code checked out and running online and editable over an SSH mount is the magic.
Then that turns into a PR on GitHub and a normal review then CI/CD to staging and prod takes over.
I only recently realized how much I like using Cloudflare more than AWS :) R2 (their version of S3) is no exception. Much more pleasant figuring out how to use and configure it in Cloudflare than the craziness inside AWS.
Do you guys geek out like me about EDC/multitools? Pretty happy with this new mini flagship. Wish Victorinox would iterate/innovate on their stuff like NextTool does. SAK innovation is "removing a blade". NextTool is fooling with inventing better tiny scissors.
Taught myself to use a sewing machine. Then I made my own EDC wallet thing. Basically a zipper pouch that can fit a lot of things while keep them as spread out in my front pocket.
I've got a version of this now in my front pocket for like 9 months: https://share.zight.com/wbu487ew Yes, it's big, but it's the most comfortable from of a big wallet.
It's funny though. I can't help feel the pull to try and make the hobby a business. But then it probably becomes unfun. But my brain just can't not think that way.
Did the same two years ago, it's such an underrated skill. There's a good amount of complexity that goes into making an item without just following a pattern.
I recommend going through the basics (Tock Custom has a nice energy [0]), then picking up a fairly complex pattern for a common piece of clothing. Of course there's also r/myog.
Yeah, it's funny how many times I basically made the same damn thing just fine tuning a half inch wider, or seam allowance.
I also can't believe how tedious cutting fabric is. Even for a tiny project like this it was such a pain in the ass. Even with nice circular cutters and mats and rulers. I'm now tempted to get a cricut 4 to make the cutting easier.
Ah. That makes sense. Is this something where you do it once and you are done? Or is it something you re-finetune based on performance or reviews you get back from the client. i.e. Client doesn't like something so you go back for another cycle of
Also, is this something that's a pain in the ass to manage multiple versions of the model? One (maybe more in draft mode) for each client?
We do one finetune on the base model to iron out a few of its problems, like plastic skin and its poor understanding of visual terms and reproduction. It also really helps it understand the normal maps we use for perspective templating.
What we are mostly producing are LoRAs, and we put them through a staged training process. The first stage is all about the textures, the second stage focuses on the product itself, and the last stage dials in the exact perspectives we need.
Despite what the research out there says, we actually get better results sticking with LoRAs instead of LoKRs. The pain is generating the dataset because you have to adapt it for every product. The actual training is basically just fire and forget.
the morning after the launch i just randomly went onto their livestream and one of the astronauts was asking mission control for help on also using the gopros and iPhone cameras. i guess they have some. and he was struggling at getting a properly exposed photo with those. he said they were coming out super over exposed. but the D5 was working nominally. mission control said they'd get back to them about ideas on adjusting the gopros and iPhones. but it was funny to hear they're trying "new" tech and struggling with it up in space, and that 2005 D5 is still the champ :)
The SLR-like cameras have a bunch of manual modes so you can 'force' them to get something captured, and you can then perhaps 'fix it in post'.
Modern tech allows more people to capture more things more easily, but when the automation fails there aren't really many manual modes to fall back on.
he was struggling at getting a properly exposed photo with those. he said they were coming out super over exposed.
This is exactly what newbies experience when trying to photograph the moon from Earth. It's not intuitively obvious, but the light coming off the moon is essentially full-daylight bright. But the moon is small against a very black background, and depending on how the auto-exposure is operating, this often leads to guessing that the scene as a whole needs a lot more exposure.
I imagine that trying to photograph the Earth when a significant part of what's in view is experiencing daytime, is very much the same thing.
You have to wonder how unserious this can get. Given the unimaginable cost of this mission, they are faffing around as your typical aunt with Windows Home laptops and iPhones? Seriously?
I'll echo that "sheesh" in the other comment, too. They're so unserious compared to those super serious Apollo guys[1], right? After all, the Apollo folk never would've smuggled contraband for fun on the Moon[2]!
Similarly, I feel like book publishers are about to become a thriving business soon again. With any book being most likely just a bot creation, trusting "Random House" sounds like a thing more of us will start paying attention to to make sure we're buying a human made thing.
Are you asking about the 3 body problem version of this? Spoiler alert: The folks doing the eradicating aren't spending much time/energy/anything on eradicating. It's one large missile through space.
I think the gist is: sure, we humans can't conceive of getting to anyone else in the universe in any timescale, but if we can keep ourselves from destroying ourselves, we'll eventually figure it out. And we'll spread. And we'll kill everything that isn't us in the process as we've done as explorers on this planet.
So really in 3BP: it's inexpensive to eradicate. But insanely expensive to possibly get the intention wrong of any other civilization you encounter. They might kill you.
(again, this is just my interpretation of what 3BP said)
i am absolutely on the fence here. I do like the ai cleanup of my rambling can do. but yes, i'm tempted to just leave it rambly, misspelled, etc. i find myself swearing more in my writing, just to give it more signal that: yeah, this probably aint an ai talking (writing) like this to you :) and yes, caps, barely.
He had to stop to help take more care of my mom, and quickly, he just fell out of all these things. Cognitively. Health. Ability to do anything decision wise or to better himself just tanked.
Sample size of 1. A ton of confounding variables. But definitely wasn't his choice to stop working at a place because of health. The poor health came after being forced to quit.
Does make me worry about "taking it easy" when I get older whatever that means :)
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