Just drink protein shakes? There are soy protein ones that are completely inoffensive and pea protein which isn’t tasty but much cheaper. Do professional athletes actually eat only meat to meet their protein requirements? Because even if you’re not a vegan I imagine that amount of meat every day gets pretty gross.

those do not digest well for me.

Yes, many athletes with large metabolic demands do eat mostly meat. Gross or not, it is functional. I eat for function. Choking down chicken breasts is not fun, but it works very well for results.

So far, I have not been impressed to say the least. First there is the problem that they often use sucralose or another weird sweetener that my digestive system does not like at all (very annoying reflux) and then of course they often taste weird at best and mostly not good at all. It's also very hard to incorporate properly into other stuff because being protein, it fluffs up and creates strong structure that takes volumes; good luck cooking/baking it.

But yes, I could try some more references to see if there is something decent. I very much doubt so because the fundamentals are not aligned for this.

Luckily, I am relatively small and I do triathlon training, not weight training so I don't care as much for volume and mass. Yet the need is still there though and it is very noticeable when I fail at balancing the diet (it is extremely easy to indulge in the pleasurable carbs, that are systematically cheaper as well). I need at least 80g of protein per (training) day and it's more challenging than it may look.

So, I try to balance things with various sources but animal meat is by far the easiest to work with. For example, I like nuts a lot but they carry a shit ton of fat with their protein, so it becomes hard to get enough carbs in the caloric budget. Of course, at this rate meat becomes just another thing you have to eat and is not really special or a pleasure. But the thing is that it's much less terrible than a protein shake, there are also plenty of things that you get from animals' meat that I doubt are truly replaceable with today's limited knowledge. I already have to pay close attention to what I eat and cannot indulge too much in some things, I'm not really keen on making my food experience completely miserable; I wish I could because it would be much cheaper/easier this way.

But I think people presenting meat as a pleasure are ideologically motivated. I dont think killing/eating animals is something humans ever did for "pleasure", it was done out of necessity and not much else. I was never a big meat eater, particularly in my youth I was very addicted to sugar and would rather avoid eating meat as much as possible. It contributed to a small frame/build. Now that I'm older and training hard I eat meat not because I like it that much but because I have to.

If you ask me, I would be stoked if I could survive just on chips, candy, nuts, or even just flavored pasta. Those things I can eat unlimited amount with no problem at all. Turns out it's not really what's needed...

MyProtein manufactures raw protein powders without artificial flavours: soya, pea and hemp. That way you can add your own preferred/safer sweetener to the shake, or just drink them quickly raw (you can gulp down 30g of protein in under 10 seconds, it’s not a big deal). Or you can use them in certain food preparation (e.g combine with oat flour, peanut butter, water and a sweetener; make small balls that you can eat as a snack). Soy protein in particular has a creamy, silky, luxurious texture when mixed with water, very pleasant and can be a perfect substitute for custard-type desserts when sweetened, or can be used as a sauce/soup thickener.

If the craving for bullshit food (chips, candy, pasta etc) doesn’t stop, that’s either a signal for nutritional deficiency of some kind (your body is still searching for something), OR a signal that you’re not hungry enough, to eat the healthy options. I spend regularly months-long periods eating the exact same ultra-basic food every day: steamed vegetables (not even salt) and home made biscuits from grains, nuts and seeds. I don’t struggle with cravings for other foods, because all my nutrients are in there and it satiates me. If I don’t feel like eating my food, then I wait until I’m hungry enough to want it. My diet is extreme, but it proves a point.

I don’t really get the Pinterest hate, but from what I understand it’s because their walled garden content came up in web search results. Anyway I’ve been using their app for over a decade. It’s the best place on the internet to explore visual art. The content is manually curated by users and the feed/recommendation algorithms are super good. It’s got very few and inoffensive ads too. The only issue with it is now the occasional AI content.

There’s Chinese analytical labs which identify the fragrance molecules in a perfume. You just have to send them a sample. The caveat is if the perfume used natural oils or captive materials; then the lab won’t be able to identify everything. There are also leaks of formulas that are circulated in perfumery circles; many famous perfumes are already known. Anyway you can then purchase the individual materials and recreate the perfume.

It’s so strange to me that I’m now using Google maybe a couple times a month (and then only through a proxy like Mullvad’s leta). This would have been inconceivable 15, even 10 years ago. I don’t want to get too philosophical, but wow, how times change.

That doesn’t mean DDG is anything special, only that Google has become incredibly bad.

I’d call this performative news consumption. Information overload is mainly a result of legitimate complexities in the world. It took only a little while to find in today’s item about Hamas a timeline describing October 7th as “the beginning of the current conflict”. A very neat and comfortable summarisation, that also happens to be vehemently rejected by many people. It’s very silly.

Except Apple has a country’s worth of users, whose livelihoods are reliant on them. The “state democracy” is right now more subordinated to tech oligarchies, than vice versa.

Vim existed before Jetbrains IDEs. It’s also much more general. I use Vim to write literary works and manage my knowledge base. There was also a guy who was using Vim as his IRC client. Vim can be the only program you need for editing text, which turns out is most of what we do on a computer. It’s nice to have a single tool for this, that never resists when you try to adapt it. Vim is actually a great example of the practicality of a good philosophy.

Edit: I doubt there’s any feature in the more specialised editors, which you can’t also get from Vim.

Naomi Klein’s article in the guardian

Exactly, and there’s no wording I can imagine coming from the manager who requested this, which wouldn’t make it sound like the plain abuse that it is. But the guys who obeyed the manager and implemented it didn’t care. The mentality of parasites.