I've got ~5k+ tabs, and I've also seen basically zero crashes in the last decade. I'm on Macos, not very many extensions though one of them is Sidebery (and before that Tree Style Tabs) which seems to slow things down quite a lot.
I likely don't need all the tabs. Some were opened only because they might be useful or interesting. Others get opened because they cover something I want to dig into further later on, but in this case it's the buildup of multiple crash>restore cycles. Eventually I'll get to each tab and close it or save the URL separately until it's back to 0, but even in that process new tabs/windows get opened so it can take time.
There are no leaders. Every other month a new LLM model comes out and it outperforms the previous ones by a small margin, the benchmarks always look good (probably because the models are trained on the answers) but then in practice they are basically indistinguishable from the previous ones (take GPT4 vs 5). We've been in this loop since around the release of ChatGPT 4 where all the main players started this cycle.
The biggest strides in the last 6-8 months have been in generative AIs, specifically for animation.
Does the USA even have enough money to rescue the tech giants at this point? We could be talking multiple trillion dollars at worst. And the AI only companies like OpenAI and Anthropic would be the most vulnerable in comparison to say Google or Microsoft, because they have no fallback and no sustainability without investor money.
And Nvidia would be left in a weird place where the vast majority of their profits are coming from AI cards and demand would potentially dry up entirely.
There is talk about bailout, but is it first possible. Second how long will it post pone issue. Massive increase in government debt used in bailout likely leads to more inflation, which leads to higher interest rates, making that debt much more expensive. And at some point credibility of that debt and dollar in general will be gone.
Ofc, this does lead to ever increasing paper valuations. So maybe that is the win they are after.
They're all easily disabled in the GUI itself. The article is exaggerating, the closest argument is that it enables itself by default when it first updated which is fair, but they're easy to disable within the menu itself.
> Anything enabled by default without prompting in an update is usually against the user.
I believe that, of browser features released, the overwhelming majority are enabled by default (if they even can be disabled). Including TLS/https warnings, tabs, automatic page unloading, support for new HTML/JS capabilities, and so on.
Those don't generate an outcry--they're usually celebrated, in fact--so either browser updates are "usually" fine, or you have an extremely un-usual threshold for wanting things not to change.
I find it a tough sell to add another 20 years to life expectancy, considering that by the time you reach 70, most people are already in decline (some worse than others), and the drop from 70 to 80 tends to be steep for many. Those who make it past 80 into their 90s or even 100s often aren’t living particularly fulfilling lives, if you can even call it living at that point.
Losing your vision, your hearing, your mobility, and worst of all, your mind, doesn’t sound very appealing to me.
So unless we find a way to both live longer and to decliner slower, I just don't see the point for the majority of people who will unfortunately live lonely worse lives.
My own observation is that a lot of decline happens because people stop living and start coasting to the grave, and that can happen decades earlier than 70.
My great-grandfather was physically very active into his 90s, still running his businesses, working in his orchards, and generally being surprisingly productive. He was mentally sharp too; I remember him teaching me about the physics of vacuum energy at length. Seemed like he could go on indefinitely. Then his wife died and he died less than a year later.
I always have him as my model for what I want to be like when I am old. He was still in the game until he wasn’t.
I think this is a huge misconception and I don't think it works this way. have you heard people say 50 is the new 40, etc.? The same thing would work at older ages. Sure the last 10 years are a decline, but you are pushing those years out not adding more of them.
This. Expecting a "150 years lifespan" to look like "90 years of aging normally and then staying at 90 for another 60 years" is simply unrealistic.
The very reason you're expected to die in your 90s is that your body has decayed into a complete mess where nothing works properly anymore and every single capability reserve is at depletion. You die in old age because if you spend long enough at "one sliver away from the breaking point", statistics make going over it inevitable. Even a flu is a mild inconvenience to the young, but often lethal to the elderly.
To make it to the age of 150, you'd pretty much have to spend a lot more time as a healthy, well functioning adult.
It really depends on how you live your life. My grandfather on my dad's side never drank or smoked, got a ton of exercise, avoided candy etc. he's in his 80s and still lives in a detached house and walks his two very large dogs daily. My grandmother on my mom's side smoked multiple packs of cigarettes a day, drank a ton of sugary soda, rarely got any real exercise, and died in her 50s after a number of very rough years.
Everyone keeps talking about health care but IMO it's really downstream of you attending yourself. It's almost a spiritual thing really. American health is so bad because Americans don't feel like they themselves are worth taking care of. The contrast between the people who disagree here gets extreme as they age.
Exactly. I'm the youngest in my family many aunts and uncles are already dead. those who still live are in a huge decline or completely lonely (sometimes both). Mom is in her late 70s and is in good shape, but she complains a lot about loneliness (even though I and my brothers visit her almost daily for a coffee or lunch). I think the joy of living ends with people around you dying.
We still don't have any 80+ year olds who have been striving for longevity since their 20s. Nutrition labels and ingredient lists on food didn't even exist the 90s. An 80 year old was born into a world of nonstop cigarettes, drinking while pregnant, etc.
So our current obsession with longevity through fitness and nutrition is new and we can't really tell what someone like Bryan Johnson will be like at 80. If he is significantly declined in 20 years despite his rigorous longevity routine then we will know.
I don’t care at all about the pope; they’re meaningless entities.
The President, however, especially when Congress is forced to toe their line, is. No president should be permitted to be more than 20 years older than the median age of the general population when they’re done leading the country. In this case, they shouldn’t be more than 58y old when their 8y term is up. This way, they and their progeny need to live with the decisions made for at least ~20y after they’re out of office.
There’s a reason there is forced retirement in some industries and government groups. Why the fuck we don’t enforce similar rules on the president I’ll never know.
> There’s a reason there is forced retirement in some industries and government groups. Why the fuck we don’t enforce similar rules on the president I’ll never know.
Yep, I am not a big fan of our military policy, but I have a friend who recently retired as an Army LTC.
At his level there are standard procedures - at each rank you have a timeframe, and the rule is "promote or retire". Precisely to ensure you don't break the assembly line.
Even in software. "We don't hire mid level/junior/associate engineers, only senior/staff". No pipeline can hurt. Yeah, you can hire for all that, but there's value of having junior staff within, when you promote those staff level folks to EMs and Directors.
Politics & World Leaders
• Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) – Former President of South Africa, died at 95.
• George H. W. Bush (1924–2018) – 41st U.S. President, died at 94.
• Jimmy Carter (1924– ) – 39th U.S. President, currently 100 (as of 2024).
• Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother (1900–2002) – Died at 101.
• Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1921–2021) – Died at 99.
Arts & Entertainment
• Kirk Douglas (1916–2020) – Actor, died at 103.
• Olivia de Havilland (1916–2020) – Actress, died at 104.
• Betty White (1922–2021) – Actress/comedian, died at 99.
• Norman Lear (1922–2023) – Television writer/producer, died at 101.
• Tony Bennett (1926–2023) – Singer, died at 96.
Science & Literature
• Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) – Philosopher, died at 97.
• Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909–2012) – Nobel Prize–winning neurologist, died at 103.
• Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) – Architect, lived to 91.
• Maya Angelou (1928–2014) – Poet and author, died at 86 (not 90s, but close).
• Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) – Science fiction author, died at 72 (not 90s).
Business & Other Notables
• David Rockefeller (1915–2017) – Banker/philanthropist, died at 101.
• John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) – Oil magnate, died at 97.
• Iris Apfel (1921–2024) – Fashion icon, died at 102.
People thought the President had died just yesterday because of how rapidly his health has declined since taking office in January. Bernie Sanders, for example, has had multiple health emergencies over the past few years.
Using a few famous people as examples is hardly a reliable metric. My aunt is still alive at 103 and will likely make it to 104 if nothing changes. She has fewer health problems than other family members in their 60s if you discount the fact that she’s basically blind, can't hear well, is stuck in a bed 24/7, and has severe dementia that prevents her from recalling things seconds after being told, aside from some specific memories from her youth. Meanwhile, almost all of her children died under very poor health conditions in their 70s and 80s. Her oldest daughter looked like she was a corpse at 80.
Some people just get lucky with their genes, and it doesn’t always pass on to their children or grand-children.
PS: For reference, she had 11 children, almost all dead now while she's alive and can't recall their names or ever having children.
ROMs, both modded and unmodded. For years, the most reliable way to get Fire Red (U) (Squirrels), which is one of the most used base Pokemon ROMs for modding is the Archive. Luckily it's still there with 1,574,966 views.
"You ever notice how self-checkout machines are just training us to be employees? Like, I don’t remember applying to work at Walmart. I’m scanning groceries, bagging stuff, looking around like, do I also get dental? The machine yells 'Unexpected item in bagging area'—yeah, it’s my pride." -GPT5
Absolutely, it's an old joke. But the fact that the thing even knew it was a joke and told it reasonably well... the bar is on the floor. (the one the guy in the joke walked into)
It's one of several canned jokes you get with a very high likelihood. Try a couple of times and be dismayed - you'll be getting the same three jokes over and over again. I'm fairly certain they were specifically tuned to return that. It takes special prompting to get it to write a new joke, and the results are typically disastrous / surreal.
>Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
Over the last hundred years, violent crime has droped sharply worldwide.
Over the last twenty years, it has fallen alot in developed countries such as Western Europe, North America, Japan and South Korea.
In the United Kingdom, both violent and property crime have gone down in the past two decades. The main exception is fraud, scams and cybercrime, which have increased.
Overall, crime, especially violent crime, is far lower now than it used to be.
So why does it not feel that way? Mostly because we are floded with news about every incident. It sticks in our heads and makes us beleive things are worse than they are. It is like air travel: whenever there is a major crash, the headlines fill up with every minor incident, even though flying has never been safer than it is today.
This is less about criminality and more about control.
There's definitely an argument to be made that things have gotten safer because we have more surveillance, but that argument also has many valid counter-arguments, and giving away your freedom for absolute law and order isn't the way to go in my opinion, especially when you use narratives like "crime in DC is at an all time high" like we've seen in the USA lately which is false. https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-...
A balance of surveillance and freedom is necessary for a healthy society. (By surveillance in this context, I mean simple things like CCTVs, police patrols, not necessarily drag-nets, face rec, whatever mind you).
Yeah, I mean if the UK is covering up and not counting 1000's of underaged girls being raped (with some police literally participating in the rape) the statistics are bound to look better than they are in reality.
Having said that, I don't think the surveillance state they're setting up even has the intent to change any of that.
Thanks for posting the link, can't believe it was happening in 2016
> The police collected bags of clothes the girl had saved as evidence, but lost them two days later. The family was sent £140 compensation for the clothes and advised to drop the case.
"I wouldn’t believe everything you read in the BBC or that comes out of Starmer or Blair's mouth."
How about instead of attacking credentials we attack the arguments, you know, with evidence? Or, if your best defence is saying "your ideas/evidence come from unsavoury sources (to me)" maybe your positions are more reflective of your own biases than reality.
The poster implied there is an active cover up whereas the case went to court, was prosecuted and became the subject of a judge led enquiry
The accusation that immigrant men from Muslim backgrounds are sex offenders is a well worn trope pushed by the far right and people like Farage and Yaxley-Lennon
If you actually look at crime statistics in the UK sex offenders, including grooming gangs are overwhelming white men — if you look closer you often find that a reasonable proportion of people on the far-right have convictions for sex offences
It doesnt take a lot for people to feel less safe in their environment. So for example violent muggings on the subway may be down, but if the subway is grimy, degraded, and there are young men hanging around, people get antsy. And then selling surveillance etc is an easy push to the voters.
I don't think its fair for someone to say, "well, its all scare mongering by the Daily Mail". They certainly have an interest in making the world seem scary, but the perception of danger is very strong regardless of what a tabloid rag says.
"Broken windows" policing, as tried under Mike Bloomberg in New York, is unfashionable in the US and the UK, and has led to abuses, but there's a kernel of truth in there somewhere.
I often think about how much of an effect things like "see it, say it, sort it" and "we do not tolerate abuse to our staff" and "you are being watched, cctv" and "thieves will be prosecuted" and "smartwater in operation" and "cash not left in tills overnight" in otherwise wealthy and low crime areas contributes to a feeling of unsafety and dog-eat-dog world
It's possible that these kinds of signs actually have the reverse deterrent effect.
Criminals might be deterred by knowing that people definitely get arrested in a certain location, because, say, they've seen it themselves, or because they see a presence of law enforcement, or because they innately sense its a high status environment where law enforcement response is to be expected.
A criminal seeing a sign might conclude that the sign is actually telling them that no immediate law enforcement response is likely.
For example, in London, you dont see CCTV signs in the shops along Sloane Street (super high end retail) but you definitely see them in Primark (very ordinary store, like US Kohls).
All the more reason to block all JS by default with add-ons like NoScript or uBO and manage a whitelist.
It's a bit annoying the first few days, but then the usual sites you frequent will all be whitelisted and all that's left are random sites you come across infrequently.
This used to be the case many years ago. But these days practically every site pulls in content from several other sites, sometimes dozens. Fine tuning noscript to get such a site to work without obscure breakage will take a long time of trial & error, reloading again & again. Now consider that you've to do this for every one of your regular sites.
Noscript is just too painful for people who want to just browse the web. Its the gentoo of browser extensions. People with massive time & patience can do it yes, but the rest of us are best served by uBlock & standard browser protections.
> But these days practically every site pulls in content from several other sites, sometimes dozens.
They do, but as a long-time NoScript user I can tell you from personal experience that this content rarely does anything important, and leaving it out often improves your UX. Problems like you describe pop up... from time to time, for individual sites, maybe a few times a year, and definitely not on "regular sites".
I have an entirely separate browser profile for when I absolutely need to use a site and just don't have the time to tinker around with script permissions.
> Fine tuning noscript to get such a site to work without obscure breakage will take a long time of trial & error, reloading again & again. Now consider that you've to do this for every one of your regular sites.
No, not really. Usually just the top-level domain is enough. Very occasionally a site will have some other domain they serve from, and it's usually obvious which one to allowlist. It takes like, ten seconds, and you only need to do it once per domain if you make the allowlisting permanent. If you get really impatient, you can just allow all scripts for that tab and you're done.
It is some extra work, and I won't disagree if you think it's too much, but you're really overselling how much extra work it is.
I've used script blocker modules for many years and consistently only white list a few widely used package repos. This means I notice when a web site I frequent adds a new script source.
This ought to be the default in every common web browser, just as you should have to look at the data sharing "partners" and decide whether they're benign enough for your taste.
>It's a bit annoying the first few days, but then the usual sites you frequent will all be whitelisted and all that's left are random sites you come across infrequently.
How does this work in reality? Do you just whitelist every site you come across if it's broken? What's the security advantage here? Or do you bail if it requires javascript? What about the proliferation of sites that don't really need javascript, but you need to enable it anyways because the site's security provider needs it to verify you're not a bot?
> Do you just whitelist every site you come across if it's broken?
I look at the breakage, consider how the site was promoted to me, and make a decision.
> What's the security advantage here?
Most of the bad stuff comes from third parties and doesn't provide essential functionality. A whitelist means you're unblocking one domain at a time, starting with the first party. If there's still an issue, it's usually clear what needs unblocking (e.g. a popular CDN, or one with a name that matches the primary domain) and what's a junk ad server or third-party tracking etc. You can even selectively enable various Google domains for example so that GMail still works but various third-party Google annoyances are suppressed.
> What about the proliferation of sites that don't really need javascript, but you need to enable it anyways because the site's security provider needs it to verify you're not a bot?
Depends on trust levels of course, but there's at least some investigation that can be done to see that it actually is coming from Anubis or Cloudflare.
First, I use both uBO + NoScript + ClearURLs (removes tracking from URLs) + FastForward (Circumvents sites like adfly) + A pop-up blocker of your choice (stronger blocking than default also whitelist only in my case). They're all popular add-ons on Firefox and should also be available on Chrome, or variants of them. You don't need them all, uBO is more than fine for most use cases, I've just gotten used to it for a few years.
>Do you just whitelist every site you come across if it's broken?
Mostly, yes, often temporarily for that session, unless I do not trust a website, then I leave. How I deem what is trustworthy or not is just based on my own browsing experience I guess.
>What's the security advantage here?
You can block scripts, frames, media, webgl... Meaning no ads, no JS... Which helps minimize the more common ways to spread malware, or certain dark patterns, as well as just making browsing certain sites more pleasant without all the annoying stuff around.
>Or do you bail if it requires javascript?
If I don't trust a website, yes.
>What about the proliferation of sites that don't really need javascript, but you need to enable it anyways because the site's security provider needs it to verify you're not a bot?
Not all sites require JS to work, or when they do, they do not require every single JS domain on a website to work. An example of this would be something like many of the popular news sites which try to load sometimes JS from 10 different domains or more and only really require one or none to be usable. Take CNN, I do not need to whitelist it's main domain via NoScript to read articles or navigate, but the moment I whitelist CNN.com, i see a flood of other domains to whitelist which are definitely not needed, like CNN.io, cookielaw.org, optimizely.com, etc...
Take Hacker News. It's viable without JS, I can read, navigate and comment, but if I want to use the search function, I need to whitelist algolia.com (which powers the search) or else I just see "This page will only work with JavaScript enabled". The search function not working is the most common issue you'll find if you block all JS by default.
>You can block scripts, frames, media, webgl... Meaning no ads, no JS... Which helps minimize the more common ways to spread malware, or certain dark patterns, as well as just making browsing certain sites more pleasant without all the annoying stuff around.
>Not all sites require JS to work, or when they do, they do not require every single JS domain on a website to work. An example of this would be something like many of the popular news sites which try to load sometimes JS from 10 different domains or more and only really require one or none to be usable. Take CNN, I do not need to whitelist it's main domain via NoScript to read articles or navigate, but the moment I whitelist CNN.com, i see a flood of other domains to whitelist which are definitely not needed, like CNN.io, cookielaw.org, optimizely.com, etc...
Doesn't the default ublock filter lists, plus maybe an extension for auto-closing cookie banners get most of those?
uBO has a different purpose. It's essentially a blacklist with sophisticated measures in place to fix breakage it causes. In many cases it selectively filters content that is otherwise allowed through. IIRC youtube is an example of an extensive such cat and mouse game.
A whitelist approach is less nuanced but far more extensive. It defaults to defending you against unknown vulnerabilities.
uBO can also block JS, yes, and I use both add-ons, but I find NoScript's UI to be more intuitive to use to manage JS, and I've been using it for years now.
It depends, but frequently, yes. e.g. If I were about to read a tech blog, and see it's from someone that can't make a couple paragraphs work without scripting, then that raises the chance that whatever they had to say was not going to be valuable since they evidently don't know the basics.
It's the frontend version of people writing about distributed clusters to handle a load that a single minipc could comfortably handle.
>It depends, but frequently, yes. e.g. If I were about to read a tech blog, and see it's from someone that can't make a couple paragraphs work without scripting, then that raises the chance that whatever they had to say was not going to be valuable since they evidently don't know the basics.
Seems only narrowly applicable. I can see how you can use this logic to discount articles like "how to make a good blog" or whatever, but that's presumably only a tiny minority of article you'd read. If the topic is literally anything else it doesn't really hold. It doesn't seem fair to discount whatever an AI engineer or DBA has to say because they don't share the same fanaticism of lightweight sites as you. On the flip side I see plenty of AI generated slop that works fine with javascript disabled, because they're using some sort of SaaS (think medium) or static site generator.
Generally speaking, getting good performance out of a database mostly comes down to understanding how the thing works and then not making it do a stupid amount of unnecessary work. I expect someone who understands that would also not e.g. fetch a script that then fetches the actual text instead of just sending the text. For example Markus Winand's sites work just fine with javascript off.
For ML stuff I'd let e.g. mathjax fly, but I expect the surrounding prose to show up first to get me interested enough to enable scripts.
It's not an exact filter, but it gives some signal to feed into the "is this worth my time" model.
It's also odd to characterize it as fanaticism: scriptless sites are the default. If you just type words, it will work. You have to go out of your way to make a Rube Goldberg machine. I'm not interested in Rube Goldberg machines or the insights of the people that enjoy making them. Like if you own a restaurant and make your menu so that it's only available on a phone, I'll just leave. I don't appreciate the gimmick. Likewise for things that want me to install an app or use a cloud. Not happening.
Rather then fanaticism I'm going to second that I find it to be a useful signal. The people that I find worthwhile to read generally have an interest in tinkering and exhibit curiosity about what's under the hood. Same reason HN lends itself to better discussions than other venues.
Very approximately: there's a group that took the time to understand and attempt to build something robust, a group that has no interest in web except as a means to an end so threw it at a well reviewed static site generator, and a group that spent time futzing around with a rube goldberg machine yet didn't bother to seek deeper understanding.
> Do you just whitelist every site you come across if it's broken? What's the security advantage here?
Most websites load their required scripts from their own domain. So you allowlist the domain you are visiting, and things just work. However, many websites also load JS from like 20 other domains for crap like tracking, ads, 3rd party logins, showing cookie popups, autoplaying videos, blah blah blah. Those stay blocked.
Try it out: Visit your local news website, open your uBlock Origin panel, and take a look at all the domains in the left half. There will probably be dozens of domains it's loading JS from. 90% of the time, the only one you actually need is the top one. The rest is 3rd party crap you can leave disabled.
And yeah, if a website doesn't work after allowlisting two or three domains, I usually just give up and leave. Tons of 3rd party JS is a strong indicator that the website is trying to show you ads or exploit you, so it's a good signal that it's not worth your time.
For me, if the site is broken and I'm interested in the content, I sometimes enable JavaScript temporarily without adding it to my whitelist. Deciding what to do when I encounter a broken site is the easy part.
The challenge is sites like StackOverflow which don't completely break, but have annoying formatting issues. Fortunately, uBlock lets you block specific elements easily with a few clicks, and I think you can even sync it to your phone.
>For me, if the site is broken and I'm interested in the content, I sometimes enable JavaScript temporarily without adding it to my whitelist. Deciding what to do when I encounter a broken site is the easy part.
But that basically negates all security benefits, because all it takes to get a 0day payload to run is to make the content sufficiently enticing and make javascript "required" for viewing the site. You might save some battery/data usage, but if you value your time at all I suspect any benefits is going to be eaten by you having to constantly whitelist sites.
I don't block javascript for security reasons, I block it for performance, privacy, and UX reasons. If there's a 0day that can be exploited by random javascript in the browser, UBlock won't save us.
> if you value your time at all I suspect any benefits is going to be eaten by you having to constantly whitelist sites.
I don't constantly whitelist sites, only the ones I use regularly (like my email provider). Temporarily enabling JS on a broken site doesn't add it to my whitelist and only takes three clicks (which is muscle memory at this point):
1. Click to open UBlock window
2. Click to allow javascript temporarily
3. Click to refresh the page
Personally, if some random link I click doesn't work without scripts at all, chances are that it's not worth the effort and potential security/privacy compromise anyway. But in many cases, the content is readable, with perhaps some layout breakage. Might even get around paywalls by blocking JS.
Even if other users do indeed whitelist everything needed in order to make sites work, they will still end up with many/most of the third-party scripts blocked.
Investing in NoScript can actually make pages faster, even if you end up enabling a bunch of javascript for functionality. For example, I remember having to whitelist only about half the resources used by homedepot.com. The rest was just shameless surveillance bloat, continually backhauling gobs of data as you were merely viewing the page. The site loaded and scrolled much quicker without it.
FYI, uBlock Origin has javascript blocking features just like NoScript, so if you're already using it as your ad blocker, you don't need a separate extension to block javascript too
This is absolutely true. But personally I find NoScript's UI more intuitive to use for JS domain blocking (mostly because I've been using it for years now). I also used to use uMatrix by the same author as uBO before it was deprecated on Chromium browsers.
Ultra-processed doesn't automatically mean unhealthy. It's what it's made of and how it's processed, and the quantities you ingest that can make it unhealthy, just like some unprocessed foods can still be unhealthy depending on what they are.
Whole grain cereal with low sugar contents fall under ultra-processed, and it could still be more nutritious and less sugary than freshly squeezed OJ.
Whole grain cereal with sugar would be classed as 'processed' food as I understand it.
Examples of processed food:
> Canned or bottled vegetables and legumes in
brine; salted or sugared nuts and seeds; salted,
dried, cured, or smoked meats and fish; canned
fish (with or without added preservatives); fruit
in syrup (with or without added anti-oxidants);
freshly made unpackaged breads and cheeses.
It doesn’t necessarily mean unhealthy but in reality there is a very strong correlation between food being processed and having too much sugar, salt , fat or other stuff. A lot of these foods are designed for addictiveness .
It depends on the classification system, but yes, whole grain cereal with added sugar and preservatives for shelf-life is often classified as ultra-processed.
That said, I think framing all UPFs or processed foods as "bad" misses the point. What really matters is the nutritional value of the food itself. A food being ultra-processed doesn’t automatically make it less healthy than a minimally processed one.
We should focus more on what’s actually in the food: the sugar content, fiber, protein, fat, micro-nutrients, rather than just whether it’s been processed or not.
TLDR: It's the label telling what is in the food that matters, not the processes it underwent, although that can be VERY helpful for certain people who value how their food is made for moral/ethical/health reasons.
"That said, I think framing all UPFs or processed foods as "bad" misses the point. What really matters is the nutritional value of the food itself. A food being ultra-processed doesn’t automatically make it less healthy than a minimally processed one."
Figuring out which ultra processed foods are ok and which ones aren't is very difficult and can be manipulated. I think it's much easier to avoid that stuff and cook from scratch.
This podcast had an excellent discussion of how “ultraprocessed” means whatever authors want. It seems like people who pay for expensive maple syrup, oils, tallow and butter are put on some pedestal and everyone else lives under the cloud of “ultra” something.
I've not listened to the podcast, but please note that processed/ultraprocessed have formal definitions that are followed by many studies.
These are the NOVA classifications, where processed and ultraprocessed are groups 3-4 respectively. These definitions have evolved over time [1], which means that it can be confusing to read different studies, when the formal definitions have changed after publication. So the best thing is to ignore the "ultraprocessed" category as a general term and instead read what the methodology was in any given study.
What researchers mostly don't do is lump all sorts of things into an undefined bucket of whatever processes and ingredients they think are unhealthy that day. This is what pop-sci media does, and may be what the podcast is railing does. But studies on ultraprocessed foods tend not to do this.
I'd recommend "Ultra processed people" be van Tulleken. He references the relevant studies, doesn't try to convince you to change your diet but gives enough food for thought. ;)
