This is really just part of a bigger trend of tech homogenizing the culture and language across the world.
Smaller languages have suffered from the dominance of English long before AI. Most of the content in Reddit, X, or any internet platform really, is in English. All new tech is, at least initially, only in English. English language, and the culture of those who produce the English language content, dominates the world now. Especially when it comes to commercial culture. With government grants, etc. smaller languages can be propped up to some degree, but how about creating a massive block buster movie in Estonian language? Forget about it.
> Most of the content in Reddit, X, or any internet platform really, is in English. All new tech is, at least initially, only in English.
Content advertised into your timeline. Not content in general. Twitter had been like only 35% English, Bluesky is 30% Brazilian or something. Only Reddit is like actually >80% English because those other languages has other dominant platforms.
You don't see stats like "xyz is 99% English" because every Chinese guys speak unaccented American English, it's because WWW statistics are based on and reference counts, rather than by wgeting random IP, and they start from an English URL, so discovery ends where anglosphere ends.
It's not like Chinese contents actually occupy >85% of everything, just that English is not the 99.999%, but still. "American English won the great game, Earth 999.999% English" is just a collective hallucination.
I'm interested in only a handful of stereotypically STEM-adjacent topics. Out of 176 YouTube subscriptions, 2 of these are in my home language. And they are both musicians (= non-verbal content). Content dried up on 2 more that I've already unsubscribed from.
I'm using NewPipe instead of the official UI, so I know for a fact this stuff isn't being advertised at me. I pick my own feeds, and all the best content is English-based.
> Put differently, English-language videos comprised just 17% of the videos that were published by popular channels during the week, but they received 28% of all of the ...
or [1]:
> Of the top 250 YouTube channels, 66% of the content is in English, 15% in Spanish, 7% in Portuguese, ...
There's quite a distance between "all the best content in STEM field and on YouTube is in English" and "all the content is in English" and a lot of qualifiers gets in there.
I use Office software at work daily and I don't understand how that piece of shit can be so fucking slow. It's a serious productivity sink too; I often procrastinate small tasks just because I know half of the time doing it is spent waiting for various part of the office to load and that is somehow very stressful. I realise it is not a huge amount of time per se, but the psychological effect of the piece of crap stopping at any random time to load some bullshit becomes unbearable after some time. A bit like the chinese torture method where they would drop single drops of water on your head and over time it becomes painful.
People question why I use vim and live in the terminal. Well... because everything opens up instantly, and I can run email, spotify, my editor, debugger, pdf reader, file browser (with image previewing), and everything I need while using less than a gig of ram and barely any CPU usage. Not only that, but I get to make the things work in the way I want them to, not have to constantly hunt down random menus. If I'm ever confused I just press ? and 99% of the time find the answer faster than it takes to reach for the mouse. Even a shitty TUI usually is faster and easier to use than many GUIs. Yes, there are times GUIs are better. I don't want a TUI Gimp, but for a lot of stuff, I don't need the bloat.
It's because I don't like the Chinese torture you're referring to. We're programmers, we don't have to live that way.
I always say that there's only one reason to use vim over emacs, and that's that vi is on almost every machine you touch. It's an optional POSIX command[0], but it is as common as `more` or `type`. Though that is a bit of a lie. The other reason is that you're more likely to find vim bindings in random programs than emacs :P
Emacs probably enables more functionality than vscode or any other tool. You can literally browse the web or send emails from emacs - I’m not saying you should, but the potential for performing tasks are infinite.
Vim has by far the better default user interface, though.
Nothing too fancy. I'm not going to dox myself, I like to (pretend to) keep this account anonymous so I'm not going to drop my dotfiles (though I am pretty proud of them). But I don't do anything too fancy. vim, neomutt, spotify-player, yazi, and tdf for pdfs (not still mixed about this one). I'll also maybe play around with a few for random tools but I usually don't use more than these.
Day to day I'm listening to music, reading emails, internet, and writing programs with vim (half my time I'm ssh'd into other machines anyways. I do ML research). So I got pretty much everything covered except Slack and Signal
I'm using spotify_player[0]. It is pretty bare-bones but honestly, what do you need? I got album art, a progress bar, and can search and go to my library
Note that if you google you will probably get spotify-tui[1] which DOES NOT work
side note: man... I really wish I had the time to write or rewrite some TUIs. I'm sure I'm not the only one... Problem with a lot of open source is that they're side projects. I'd imagine there could be state of things could be a lot better if some small org just paid a few engineers to make and maintain a few of them.
not op, The long story short is that a lot of data analysis that would normally require days of development can be done with a few clicks in excel.
Would you get a better result if a team of 7 people spent en entire week working on it? Yes. Can a normal competant accountant get 99% of the way there by spending 2 hours in Excel, also yes.
Excel takes care of a lot of things that are a massive pain in the ass the deal with with any other solutions. It starts witht he ability to import data with a simple ctrl-c + ctrl-v instead of having to write code, but it doesn't end there.
If only slow... it has tons of accepted bugs and nobody seems to care.
Yesterday I was using Outlook 365, there was one URL in one of the emails and I needed to find other emails containing it. Trivial and one of main use cases, right.
Put URL in search box, 0 finds (including email I just copy&pasted it from). Mkay, maybe non-alphanumeric chars are messing with some internal regex or similar, stripped those into bare hostname, still 0 finds (when searching all mailboxes, including body).
Maybe its some exchange settings, who knows, who cares. Pissed off fighting such basic tech instead of doing actual work.
I use Mail.app on macOS as my daily these days, and it’s somehow even worse than this. Especially the search function, which works in even more bizarre ways.
It’s truly amazing that we have seemingly regressed in basic desktop functionality since the early 2000’s.
I think people overestimate 2000s desktop functionality. macOS's mail application is still the good old crap app that it was since its inception. Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, and the Windows 8/8.1/10 mail apps are all terrible in their own ways. Thunderbird looks like a skinned version of a late 2000s mail client and works exactly like it. Search is quirky and unpractical, but in completely different ways Outlook's and Mail.app's are!
Just for fun, try installing an old OS in a virtual machine. Marvel at how fast the old OS runs at modern SSD speeds. Get frustrated at the random hangs, freezes, glitches, and plain bad behavior of the programs you know and love, because the slowness of computers at the time hid it all. 20 cores of unused CPU power, dozens of gigabytes of RAM laying at the ready, disk I/O hitting dozens of megabytes per second, but still loading screens everywhere.
I once tried to go back, for nostalgia's sake, just doing the things I do on an old OS for fun. The grass wasn't much greener back then, I just had lower standards.
I mean, it was common knowledge even back then that Outlook Express etc was far from the best email client. That's why people used alternatives, so much so that some of them were paid and yet had enough people buying them to remain in business - e.g. The Bat!
I am genuinely confused why search is so bad in the major email webapps/clients. Search is a well studied feature, and it seems like it's something that should just work but I can never find the thing I'm searching for in my email (especially O365). Knowing the date and then scrolling often seems to be the most accurate way of finding things...
I think search has been deprecated in general because it gives the user too much control over the output. Through search, people can quickly find what they are looking for, which is bad. The goal has instead become to feed people tiny scraps and hints of what they're looking for, while leading them on a long trip past any number of sponsors to where the thing they're looking for might be.
I have to assume that Outlook email searches have already been set up to have ads injected into them, when/if one day Microsoft decides to flip the switch. Actually, I'm so out of touch with Windows they might already be doing this.
> The goal has instead become to feed people tiny scraps and hints of what they're looking for, while leading them on a long trip past any number of sponsors to where the thing they're looking for might be
Search just seems bad in general in many applications. So many these days do not even support a verbatim (as in, find what I typed, exactly) search. They insist on ignoring certain characters, fuzzy matching, or treating everything as individual words and if it finds one it has done its job and earned a gold star.
I have a feeling it's based on tokenising the input rather than a string scan like we'd do in the old days. Harder to match a literal string if all you have is a tree of tokens or something, I guess.
Opengrok was the first time I ran into this years ago. We had a perl code base, perl syntax is well known as "an explosion in an ASCII factory", so it was a real pain trying to find exact text matches using it.
As I’m professionally working on a niche search engine, let me offer this: it’s a notoriously hard problem that seems simple at first, but requires catering to a bazillion different edge cases; every optimisation you do makes another case worse.
Having said all that: I also hate how shitty search almost everywhere is. It’s hard, but not that hard.
…which is the problem I was referring to: by optimising for that—your—use case, those of other people will invariably suffer.
We only have a single text field as the input; how are we supposed to guess whether you want to find an exact match of the phrase, a fuzzy match, at least one of the words provided, or any other possible variation? Also, are you interested in the content, the subject, the recipient, the sender address you used, a header field, an attachment, what have you? Do you want them ranked by the frequency of the word, or the position from the start of the text? Does it count those occurrences in quoted passages of previous mails downthread multiple times? What if it’s a stop word?
There are of course sensible ranking solutions and heuristics for these questions. I just want to highlight it’s not as trivial as it first sounds. Most mail clients probably don’t ship with a Lucene index—while they should.
I use Thunderbird and it's approximately 100x better at searching for emails than Excel. I just tell it if I'm looking in the subject, in the body, in the sender, whether it's fuzzy, etc, and then it pulls up the emails.
Whereas Excel doesn't ask shit and, in return, doesn't have a working search.
With mu4e (an Emacs package), you can have lightning fast searching across multiple mail accounts. And with a bit of work (https://stuff.sigvaldason.com/email.html) it will happily interoperate with Microsoft Exchange systems that require the OATH2 dance.
Haha, I love your reply because it brings up auth. You can't do the slightest search or action without first pinging a web server with an auth token. Yet another source of wasting milliseconds.
Spotlight search on macOS is in general kinda…spotty. Now that we have super fast SSDs it should be instantaneous very reliable. How hard can this be? BeOS seem to have figured it out 30 years ago. Apple missed a chance to fix this once and for all when APFS was developed, but they are fat and happy, no fire in their guts. Craig Ferengi must go.
On KDE systems, we have baloo which forms a filesystem index for universal (spotlight-like) search. It's very, very fast and the ranking algorithm for krunner is quite good. I think commercial software should have no issue matching this.
Do you really have trouble with Mail.app search? Because I find it STARKLY better than Outlook.
Granted, creating any kind of complex multi-clause query is a pain, but for simple searches it never lets me down whereas Outlook often just fails to find things I know are present.
As an update, I found that some of my issues were due to some bug in FileVault. My Spotlight would seemingly stop working altogether. The only solution was to toggle FileVault off/on.
I am using my mac with an LDAP (AD) user account, so I am possibly in the minority of people here.
I've given on on macos' mail app too, mailspring isn't perfect but I had mail crash and lose my emails and I couldn't have that happen again. never been an issue with mailspring
It's so annoying when I KNOW I sent an email to someone a year ago and I put TO: Their name and it still doesn't come up.
Also: Smart folders still don't exist (e.g. a folder that automatically lists every email with a flag on it or some other condition). At least not in the "New Outlook" which we have to use at work. Apple had this back in 2007.
Same with OneNote by the way and the web version can't even search in whole notebooks, just single folders.
We use Office 365 and their hosted Exchange for email. I manage my mail in the native Mac Mail tool; my boss uses Outlook. For commercial exchanges (ie, dialog about sales with customers), we're almost always both on copy.
SEVERAL TIMES A MONTH he asks me to find a mail for him, because Outlook search is letting him down, often on bone simple searches (e.g., for something like a specific PO number or software serial number).
I find it immediately. Outlook strikes out. How do you break search so badly?
Yeah it's because Mac Mail downloads every single email and indexes it locally. Outlook (especially the new one) is just electron-based webmail. So every search happens in the cloud and it doesn't have a full copy of all your emails.
This would not be a problem for searching of course, if the cloud-based search worked properly. But yeah... About that. :X
The "classic" outlook should do it better but it also doesn't in my experience. Though I can't use it anymore at work lately.
It's just so bad because how can they screw this up? It's not some fluff feature, it's a core feature in an email client.
PS: If you have copilot, it does a lot better at finding stuff somehow, though like every AI it can be a bit hit and miss.
For general searches, I agree. I want those to be highly deterministic. But in that case I need to know exactly what I'm looking for.
There's also the other kind of thing though. "Who was that guy that I emailed with a year or two ago about this issue with MacBook Enrolment?". Yes I can filter by company or other details if I remember those things but sometimes I don't. And that's when AI search can really shine. Or not, it can also totally make up stuff out of its ass. But at least when it comes to emails that's easily verifiable.
It's really a PITA to use standard protocols on M365 now though. They try to make it as difficult as possible. And you need lots of exceptions from your admins. Everything is "legacy", the Microsoft word for Not Invented Here and they make it sound like something super dangerous.
Of course that third party clients don't give them any telemetry, "insights", cross-marketing opportunities like copilot, has nothing to do with it.
How bad the search features in outlook and teams are, is part of the reason I don't bother trying Bing. If you can't get local search right, global search is going to suck too.
Aye, I was being at least a little facetious. The team of indexing global content is quite different to that of searching my local mail and chat logs. The various "English language search" features attempted for SQL Server are different again.
But they are still all search functions, and the Outlook & Teams search functions seem so terrible that you'd think they'd try do something about it to support the pubic view of their other search related efforts.
It's crazy to me how because 1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something we're all stuck on it. LibreOffice is enough for the vast majority of use cases.
> It's crazy to me how because 1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something we're all stuck on it.
Finance and insurance industries are full of Excel powerusers.
> LibreOffice is enough for the vast majority of use cases.
Often (from my job experience I can at least attest this for the finance and insurance sectors), Excel is an integrated part of many large workflows. Changing from Excel to LibreOffice would mean rewriting important parts of central business applications, so you better have a really good reason why you want to do the switch from Excel to LibreOffice.
We are working on backend for life insurance. They have a separate pricing team who creates calculations for different insurance products. The results are usually presented as excel files with heavy scripting inside. Really heavy! Have you seen 100mb excel files? I did!
On the funny note: as powerful excel is, it cannot open two files with the same name from different folders! Or at least my version can't.
I used to work on Excel extensibility. I’ll never forget when we were talking with one of the top 5 insurance companies in the US and they showed us this huge VBA macro and told us they processed the top 10% of their claims using this file. That moment made me realize Excel powers at least 10% of the world economy.
Oh yeah, because references to the book name would conflict. If you open a new instance of Excel (e.g. shift-click the taskbar icon), you can open one file in each, but they can't reference each other.
I have seen 600mb+ geodata based, script bloated, slow as hell, make your MB Air commit sucide type of excel every day for 4 months, working on a project.
Excel is also used and abused. In finance and insurance, often Excel isn't used as a spreadsheet and visualization application. It's used as a database and application engine.
This is really bad for a lot of reasons. Of course it's painfully slow, but it's also incredibly brittle and foot-gunny. Excel IS NOT a competent database engine or application engine. It makes JS and C++ look sane and safe.
Excel shouldn't be switched out to LibreOffice. It should be switched out to a proper application with a proper database. What, finance bros don't know how to navigate a database. Tough fucking luck! In the 70s, secretaries could do that. They better figure it out. Because these existing "systems" are a disaster waiting to happen.
I mean, it's not as if Libreoffice was created yesterday. Its predecessor OpenOffice is now 25 years old. Your question becomes: Why did you choose the expensive version where you never know what it will cost next year in the first place?
Big companies have (sometimes hard negotiated) volume contracts with Microsoft, which makes Excel much cheaper to them than to, say, small companies. Thus Excel is not really expensive for them.
Concerning
> where you never know what it will cost next year in the first place
For open source software there exists a similar risk that you don't know into which direction the product will develop.
In the past, Microsoft has been quite reliable in keeping backwards compatible, and continue selling office for decades.
In my observation, the zigzag course that Microsoft starting doing with Windows (but is now also doing with office), and, relatedly, deviating from the course of being very insanely dependable in delivering the software that companies need from them, is what by now got big companies at least have a look at what possible alternatives to Microsoft products could be.
> For open source software there exists a similar risk that you don't know into which direction the product will develop.
You know what's really interesting to me about this argument point?
It is actually the proprietary solution that is at risk of this, and we feel it daily. The next version of Microsofts own flagship product (Windows) is nearly universally denigrated, but people are forced to upgrade.
With FOSS, there's significantly less risk, if the product changes direction you and your other company friends can just use old versions or in the worst case.. fork it.
Entire departments run on the "pivot table" button. Most companies have at least one person who needs some Excel feature that isn't available in the common alternatives.
I've worked on software that communicated with other software using custom Excel spreadsheets exported by yet different software, modified by humans. Every stage of the process was specs-incompliant and was using edge case features, but this process oversaw transport for goods worth millions every day. I tried my very best not to reach for a Windows VM, but there was nothing that could work on these files.
For the vast majority of times, bikes are good enough for the majority of travels, yet there are cars everywhere.
> "because 1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something"
It's crazy to me how often Open Source pushers have the vibe "I don't use computers, I don't know what anyone does with computers, but I'm still dismissive and superior". I almost made this comment earlier today in reply to [1] which was another "You have problems with Linux? I daily-drive Linux for years and I've never had any problems" comment and the issues were common/well-known things - fractional scaling in Gnome, HDMI, screen sharing in Slack, crashes in Google Meet, crashes in Chrome, KDE unstable, missing desktop software they use, audio too buggy, constant crashes in another program after days of work.
Nothing anyone would be surprised at, except a Linux user who - apparently - never does anything with their computer and is baffled that other people do. I decided my comment was too trolling and didn't finish it, but here you are bringing that vibe again: you don't know what Excel does or why people use it, but you're confident that you know better; prompting me to actually call it out.
The first thing I looked for when I installed LibreOffice most recently, I found a thread[2] asking: "In excel you can create a table simply by using insert->table. Is there a way to create tables in calc, as well?" and the first visible reply is them explaining that they don't want to create a table in Write, they want Excel's "insert table" feature in Calc. Why would they have to explain that again already, their question was two short lines. Presumably the people replying don't know that feature exists. There are some people being helpful and suggesting ways to get similar effects, but of course there's "Why do you want to insert a table into a Calc spreadsheet? It doesn’t seem like a feature that I’d use much" ("I don't know what the feature does but I know I don't want it"), a couple people commenting explanations of what Excel's tables are and why they are useful including a link to a video demonstration ... followed by someone saying "It already works, they are called database ranges" - no, that's different. Someone who doesn't know what they are, didn't read the explanations or watch the video and still thinks they know better. Crazy.
One of the earlier repliers comes back with "LibreOffice has a database component which is by far more powerful than any fake tables on a calculator’s grid." doubling down on "I don't understand it, didn't read the explanations, don't respect you enough to consider that you know anything about what you want or do on a computer, I still know better" and with namecalling it 'fake'. Crazy.
Note, to avoid the obvious tangent, that I'm not demanding people implement features for me in free software. As the thread ends by kerosene5 "Instead of spending so much time poo pooing the feature request, you could explore it. It really is a good feature. I just downloaded and opened my bank transactions and the very FIRST thing I did was look how to convert it to a table. . . . back to Excel."
It's not "1% of Excel users need pivot tables or something" it was the very FIRST thing they wanted, and multiple people in that thread want, and the second thing I wanted. No this is not the only feature Excel has that LibreOffice hasn't; if you want to know why people aren't using Open Source software? Try actually looking and listening instead of whatever that is you are doing.
My god the amount of projection in your comment. It seems you've mistaken me for everyone who ever commented in favor of migrating off of Excel.
I"m aware that there are things I'm unaware of. Perhaps I don't know how to use Excel, I'm "no true Excel user" if you will, and therefore my opinion is invalid. Like you I'm baffled not by the technical side of things but by our reaction to it. People say "it powers 10% of the world's economy" but not "and it's a problem".
It's a problem. My point is not that LO is better, it's that we should work to remove our dependency on closed-source software for universal office work. Governments should be doing that. But no, let's just say "the other one sucks" and continue to act like depending on a single for-profit company for all our economies is a good thing.
Not sure how my other comment relates to this. Is it arrogant to have preferences?
Lots of documents have to be styled in a very particular way. These rules aren’t laws of physics, they’re made by humans to make other people’s lives more miserable than it’s necessary
Absolute most of the time what is offered by markdown is enough.
When doing my thesis I was asking myself “is it really that important to use 16pt font or 14pt one or this is a made up rule because someone said so many years ago”
There are tons of alternatives, you just need to accept that its missing 1 or 2 features you like, because if the app supported the 1 or 2 features for everyone, it turns into jira/office
I’ve never had a problem working with CSVs in Excel, but I’ll take your word for it. For text operations, I frequently find myself using Notepad++ anyway.
> It's so shitty and slow because it's a bloatware
Bloatware is unwanted software, usually pre-installed or otherwise not installed by the user, that slows down your computer and takes up space.
So if a user wants Office, it is, by definition, not bloatware.
Even if we do consider it bloatware -- pre-installed, unwanted by the user, and using up system resources -- that isn't an explanation of why Office itself is slow.
They switched to hardware acceleration in the last few years and they removed the toggle to disable it. It still sucks (perf & rendering issues, eg. scrollbar not updating when scrolling) and there's no way to go back to the old rendering engine unless you disable hardware acceleration on Windows as a whole. Lmao.
what kills me about things like this is if you load a 1-2 decade old version of office on a computer today, things are fast.
all they had to do was keep up with whatever features are different in excel between now and then and implement those. leaving the menus and UX mostly alone, only improving things as time went on. update the engine to do the new features, and update the UI only enough to expose the new features and make them accessible.
but no... UX people don't have jobs if they can't redesign shit for no obvious reason. PMs don't have jobs if they can't force nonsense features no one ever asked for. Developers don't have jobs if they don't aggressively chase every new fad and tool and be in a constant state of learning (and thus unlearning).
> Despite the name, it is not a Chinese invention and it is not traditional anywhere in Asia. Its earliest known version was first documented by Hippolytus de Marsiliis in Bologna (now in Italy) in the late 15th or early 16th century, and it was widely used in Western countries before being popularized by Harry Houdini in the early 20th century.
> Let’s be real: improving load times doesn’t directly impact the bottom line. Selling Shark Cards (GTA’s virtual currency) does. Companies optimize for metrics that show up on quarterly earnings calls, not for goodwill or user experience, until it’s too late.
I don't know... I quit playing GTA V once because of the horrendous load times. After I built a new computer, I finally finished the single player, even though the load times were still horrible. I also had a bug that randomly when I started the game, fps would be really slow and some of the textures didn't load.
The game was great, and maybe I would have gotten back to it to also play the multiplayer, but the fucking load times made starting up the game feel like a chore. I mostly play games when I have a little spare time in the middle of my work day, and I don't want to waste that spare time staring at loading screens or rebooting the game because of random bugs.
I've fixed old electronics myself sometimes and quite often it's doable and the spare parts usually cost approximately nothing. However, paying someone 50 euros for half an hour worth of work to fix a thirty euro Christmas decoration doesn't feel like a good deal. Maybe for 10 or even 15 euros it would be.
> * Total fantasy to think you wouldn't fall afoul of free speech, both legally (in the US) and morally.
Some limits exist on advertising exist in most countries. Do they respect free speech?
> * Absolutely zero thought has been given to how to police the boundaries. Giving a paid speech? Free gifts for influencers? Rewards for signing up a friend?
Absolutely zero thought is never given on policing boundaries on anything. That's not how the legal system operates. All laws are approximations at best and grey areas get decided by courts on a case-by-case basis.
> * Products need marketing. You don't just magically know what to buy. Advertising fulfils an important social role. Yes, I know it can be annoying/intrusive/creepy. "In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.
In my country, advertising alcohol is forbidden. Somehow I still manage to find interesting new beers to try year after year
> In my country, advertising alcohol is forbidden. Somehow I still manage to find interesting new beers to try year after year
This is interesting. Alcohol companies a well known to bypass this prohibition by all possible means (product placement, influencers,...) and yet I find real benefits in it. It would possibly be similar if advertising was forbidden for everything
They probably do some sort of promotion targeted to the retailers. I don't know and don't really even care. All I know is that I don't see any beer ads on TV, outside, or anywhere else really, and I wouldn't mind if the same was true for everything.
I don't know what it looks like from the perspective of someone in the field, but just as someone who is interested in this sort of stuff, it seems more and more plausible that quite many of diseases that have grown more prevalent in the last century, especially autoimmune diseases, are cause by viruses.
It makes sense: the viral pressure has increase by a lot due to both increase in population density and increased travel across the world. At the same time there has been an increase in many autoimmune diseases, many types of cancer, Alzheimer's disease, etc. Also, from some proven cases, we know that viruses can trigger serious diseases (MS disease, type 1 diabetes).
I have both T1D and MS. For MS, one leading idea is that getting exposed to Mono later in life can trigger the disease. There’s solid evidence for this.
For T1D, it’s similar - there’s a notion that you’re genetically predisposed to it and certain types of infections during adolescence can cause it to manifest.
I’ve had discussions with researchers in the space and apparently certain autoimmune diseases happen less often in “grubbier” parts of the world (their words, not mine) even when the population density is high, and an inference here is that >early exposure< to certain infections might not trigger some of these problematic autoimmune reactions.
Side note: these diseases aren’t fun, especially when working in tech. I’m appreciative of those dedicating their lives to researching autoimmune disease.
For MS in particular there's several EBV mRNA vaccines in clinical trials - not just to prevent mono itself, but also to prevent long term complications (theoretically including MS) for people who already had it.
Has viral pressure really increased? It seems stuff spread globally a few generations ago with things like the flu in the early 1900s. Even in the middle ages you had stuff like the plague.
What has changed is the sterility of our environment. Better bathing, more hand washing, food safety rules, etc. There have been theories that autoimmune diseases might be increasing because we aren't exposed to enough "normal" pathogens.
I'm highly suspicious that higher viral pressures are the cause of increasing dementia rates, as it seems we're exposed to less today.
Bacterial, fungal and parasitic load has lessened, for sure, due to sterility of the environment, because many of those come from exposure to animals and plants. But viral load from viruses that spread from human-to-human and live exclusively in humans has increased because there are more humans and they spread the diseases around the world more effectively than before.
Yes, we probably get way less pathogens overall than we used to, but at the same time we get more pathogens that live exclusively on humans (such as respiratory viruses).
> But viral load from viruses that spread from human-to-human and live exclusively in humans has increased because there are more humans and they spread the diseases around the world more effectively than before.
This seems like pure conjecture to me, and without any actual evidence to support it, I'm disinclined to believe it. My guess is that the number of people any one individual interacts with has gone down considerably since the beginning of the century, and earlier. Before the advent of the car, shared forms of travel were much more common. People do much less forms of basic shopping than they used to given the rise of the Internet. Air travel, while much faster, is much less crowded that the ship travel of earlier generations.
> Before the advent of the car, shared forms of travel were much more common. Air travel, while much faster, is much less crowded that the ship travel of earlier generations.
Maybe in the US. Definitely not in most of the world. For my grandparent 70 years or so ago, the way to travel long distances was riding a donkey. Now travel by bus, train, subway, etc. is really common and something that most people experience often. 100 years ago of course there were trains, stagecoaches, boats, etc. but they were for a tiny minority of society or for special occasions (like to migrate a different continent to not return in decades, etc.). I'm also pretty sure air travel has a much higher penetration than ship travel would have 100 years ago.
As further anec-data points, there are much more massive gatherings now (concerts, sports, etc. - church used to be the major gathering, but churches tend to be ample and ventilated). And every parent knows that daycare and kindergarten are a major vector for pathogens. I used to get like a cold a year with 2 days mild congestion, and since my kid started kindergarten (he didn't go to daycare) we all started getting sick like monthly or so, for a couple of years. Putting dozens of kids in a closed space for hours is something that just wasn't a thing in previous generations either.
So personally, yes, I would bet that chances for pathogen spread have increased greatly.
There are significantly fewer humans living in close contact with livestock in which a zoonotic virus could be transmitted. I'm skeptical that there has been a net increase. It's possible but I haven't seen any reliable evidence one way or the other.
But there are significantly more amounts of livestock in contact with those fewer humans.
Think of it this way: more total numbers = more opportunities for viruses to grow or mutate = more chances for runaway or novel infections. Runaway infections are dealt with fairly well by government entities. Novel infections... might be harder to discover because they're, well, novel.
Agreed. We've had this immune system battling stuff non-stop throughout evolution and now we're living in these clinical environments and it's going haywire.
Not to mention we're poisoning ourselves with all sorts of novel stuff, especially poor hi-carb nutrition, ultra processed food and pollution from various sources that act as endocrine disruptors and God knows what else.
Time scale. Viral load has increased dramatically over what it was like 1000 years ago. The change over the past 100 years is all lifespan due to antibiotics and the sterility another comment is pointing the finger at. It’s possible that viral load + lifespan = cancer, dementia, autoimmune stuff, etc.
My girlfriend has Crohn's disease that can be directly correlated to food poisoning while on vacation. Now years later I can't even count the times I've read and heard exactly the same story from other people with Crohn's disease. A simple search for "Crohn's food poisoning" turns up hundreds of results. I can't believe this is not being investigated with higher priority
Another comment in this post mentions reactive arthritis and HLA-B27; there's some evidence suggesting "permanent" autoimmune conditions in HLA-B27+ people also might come from viral triggers.
Can we take it as proven that the rate of these diseases has increased? I wonder if in the past some conditions we now classify as particular diseases were considered a normal part of aging, perhaps at most getting a blanket classification of “senility”.
The frequently cited "stress" thing of modern lives is just eyebrows-raising. Do anyone actually believe that lives of people 100 or 200 years ago have been less stressful?
Physical activity gives an outlet to stress, and people used to get way more of it. Stress and physical effort are supposed to go hand-in-hand; you feel stressed, which gives you a boost of adrenaline, which you need to physically fight back whatever caused the stress. When the physical component is missing, the stress just lingers and wreaks havoc on your body.
Average "healthy" body temperature is down more than half degree exactly because of reduction in inflammation. People used to have very unsanitary lives and were fighting infections nonstop. 37.0C was the "normal" body temperature when the "norm" was first discovered in the early XIX century, now it's considered to be a sickness already.
also not-an-expert opinion, but an average higher body temperature would reduce immune system workload by virtue of killing a lot of stuff dead via inhospitable environment before an immune reaction could ever muster..
Work is not the same as stress. People today (especially near the bottom of the ladder) are not in control of their own destiny like they used to be. It's a different kind of stress.
I think there’s something to this. Life in those times was difficult and stressful, yes, but most hardships then were entirely beyond any individual’s control. To a large extent, good times and bad times would come and go regardless of what you did.
Contrast this to the modern day where more often than not, hardships are attributed to personal failings (“You should’ve worked harder if you didn’t want to be stuck working abusive under-compensated jobs!”) and people perpetually teeter on the edge of a knife suspended over a bottomless pit. If anything goes wrong, it’s treated as nobody’s fault but your own, regardless of the reality of the situation. It’s almost a type of psychological torture.
And they used to be more in control? Epidemics wiping out whole families? Gulags, concentration camps? Religious violence? Persistent threat of starvation death that was just the norm of life? One year of crop failures, and your kids are dead. Two years, and you are dead yourself. And it doesn't depend on you at all, just bad luck (if there was too much luck - like a generation without crop failures - population doubled, then just one year of crop failures meant you were dead). And yeah, the Church that keeps telling people that they were all sinners and will burn in hell, very comforting. Tell me about "control of one's own destiny".
Literally every time in the history of the universe when someone has structured a sentence like this, in this context, whoever they're talking about ends up being a giant crackpot. I'm not saying this person is a crackpot, just that the pattern recognition systems are throwing off some alarms.
If you end up dealing with a chronic disease that medical doctors completely fail in dealing with, you naturally get driven to look at “alternatives”. There’s a lot of nonsense out there - but some of it works. As a former skeptic I’m now much less dismissive of these things due to my own circumstances. Particularly when I can see that poor medical treatment over the years actually exacerbated my condition and being less skeptical could have improved my quality of life significantly sooner.
Now that you mention that pattern, I can’t say I disagree with your comment. However, the information I can find about Means seems to be fairly…non-controversial. Or at least I don’t understand the controversy (which is very likely).
Means withdrew from her medical residency at age 30. She has attributed this decision to the lack of training she received about nutrition and the underlying causes of chronic disease. Means dedicated her practice to functional medicine, which focuses on the root causes of disease.
that's cute but how much alternative medicine eventually finds a way into real medicine?
in other words : someone telling someone to practice yoga to relax and reduce their heart rate 200 years ago was a quack right up until the point that modern doctors decided to include it in their repertoire?
it's a cute joke but it skips over the fact that there seems to be an 'alternative medicine -> real medicine' pipeline, even if a lot of it turns out badly.
Breath exercises, and physical therapy for relaxation were mainstream in 1960-s.
> it's a cute joke but it skips over the fact that there seems to be an 'alternative medicine -> real medicine' pipeline
Not really. Most of the non-medicine (I refuse to call it "alternative") stays non-medicine: acupuncture, homeopathy, all the "energy meridians" nonsense, ayurveda, alkaline foods, etc.
And even with activities like yoga, it's not more effective than other types of similar physical activity. There is some very weak evidence that yoga _with_ physiotherapy might be more effective than just increased levels of physiotherapy.
The actual quote (from memory, but I just listened to the monologue a minute ago): "Do you know what they call alternative medicine that's been scientifically proven to work? Medicine!"
In other words, the quote is exactly referring to your "pipeline."
Well that red flag versus the immediately-preceding passage listing a Doctor of Medicine degree at Stanford Medical School.
I looked into one of the links and apparently she pushes fairly mainstream preventive medicine stuff, diet, exercise, and screening tests. The only questionable thing I saw was the continuous glucose monitoring thing which the jury may still be out on when it comes to non-diabetics.
I haven't tried a continuous glucose monitor myself but those non-diabetics who have generally claim that it gave them interesting insights into how their blood glucose level reacted to different foodstuffs and timing of meals. There is a lot of individual variation there due to genetics, lifestyle, gut microbiome, etc. We'll probably never see a large-scale, long-term randomized controlled trial to show that CGM use improves health outcomes for non-diabetics. But for healthy people who already have the basics dialed in, a CGM can probably help them eke out some additional marginal gains.
A license is needed to be a beaver in England. Beavers not carrying license cards will be considered illegal aliens and returned to their country of citizenship.
> If you read a few books on mathematics you think you're easily going to become one of the top mathematicians? Many ambitious people try to study math and decades later are disappointed by how they are still mediocre in their field or simply fail to make it into an academic career. Many PhDs in general, actually.
I don't know about being one of the top mathematicians, but I'd argue that actually, fully reading a few graduate level technical books is more than even most PhDs do.
I was once a PhD student in theoretical physics myself and I'd say that we mostly skim over the books or read only the sections that are immediately and obviously relevant to us.
I once did read one of the shorter known-to-be-difficult books of my field fully from cover to cover, and worked out most of the exercises in the book. After this exercise, I realized that I immediately had much better understanding of the somewhat foundational things described in the book than many of the more senior researchers had. And this was a book that everyone in my field knows, but apparently no-one actually reads it.
The reason why no-one reads actually the difficult books, even when half of their job is reading them, is because it's harsh, gruelling work.
So yeah, maybe you won't become the next Terence Tao by reading three or four graduate level mathematics books, but you can get pretty good if you actually seriously do it without any cheating or skimming.
While what you said may be true simply by the virtue of graduate level textbooks being so dense, I think GP wanted to imply that "just reading a moderate amount of mathematics" isn't sufficient to get anywhere. I would say that 3-4 entire graduate level textbooks (which you wouldn't understand anyway without having done the undergraduate stuff beforehand) is much more than "a moderate amount".
It's weird that I've never been overweight and you describe basically how I normally feel.
I've never felt hungry in the morning. I've never eaten a lot. When I was younger, I often forced myself to eat more, because I felt bad about how I wasn't "big enough" (which feels silly now as a proper adult).
Impulse buying food and snacking is something I only do if I haven't eaten for a long time, i.e. if I'm actually very hungry.
If I go out drinking, I also make a point not to eat very much before or during the drinking, because otherwise I just feel sick after like one beer.
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