Not to be pedantic, but the fact that you are literally assigning percentage blames to entities means you do not, in fact, violently agree with me. Read the article I posted and you'll see why it is so important not to assign blame at all.
5,454 karma · joined August 11, 2009
Engineering Manager at Gemini, formerly at Sana, Justworks, Etsy
will . dewind at gmail.com
> Over the course of a programming career, there will be times when you're operating directly on a production environment, and one misstep can spell disaster
These times should be extremely rare, and even in this case, they should've had backups that worked. The idea is to reduce the ability of anyone to destroy the system, not to "just be extra careful when doing something that could destroy the system."
> Although firing this guy seems really harsh, especially as he had just moved and everything, the thought process of the company was probably not so much that he messed up the database that day, but that they'd never be able to trust him with actual production work down the line.
Which tells me that this company will have issues again. Look at any high functioning high risk environment and look at the way they handle accidents, especially in manufacturing. You need to look at the overarching system than enabled this behavior, not isolate it down to the single person who happened to be the guy to make the mistake today. If someone has a long track record of constantly fucking up, yeah sure, maybe it's time for them to move on, but it's very easy to see how anyone could make this mistake and so the solution needs to be to fix the system not the individual.
In fact I'd even thank the individual in this case for pointing out a disastrous flaw in the processes today rather than tomorrow, when it's one more day's worth of expensiveness to fix.
Take a look at this: https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/
Please expand on this.
> A highly performant data layer is going to interact with the database in ways that ORMs generally cannot.
This is not true, unless using the data layer instead of ORM allows you to structure your data differently. In which case, sure.
I'm not sure I agree with this. There is a massive benefit to having not just your entire engineering org thinking in an object oriented fashion, but also your entire product org. Designers and PMs having a deep understanding of the data model is extremely useful, and to the extent that everyone is already speaking in OO terms (ie: your records are already going to be structured in this fashion), an ORM makes a ton of sense.
Not only does it give you abstracted and simplified syntax for common access patterns, it gives you a shim to add in all kinds of stuff like caching, analytics etc., that would be extremely difficult without an ORM.
Of course there are pitfalls, mostly poorly constructed queries that don't perform well, but any ORM will let you write raw SQL when you need to.
If your models map 1:1 to database tables it's hard to see why you wouldn't want an ORM, and I think there are a lot of great arguments for structuring your data like that (and of course some against it as well).
Can you expand on what exactly that means?
It does not suggest there's something more complicated than calories in < calories burned, it suggests there's something that is causing him to burn fewer calories. My explanation is that Cahill had an inactive lifestyle, poor body composition and was overweight, even after the massive cut. On top of this, no one is claiming he stuck to the diet, so it makes sense he regained the weight.
I'm not disputing that your metabolism can down regulate. I am absolutely disputing that it's a mystery and unfixable. For Cahill he needed to stay on the diet longer, and he needed to build muscle mass.
https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/2012/01/07/we-really-can-make...
I honestly don't know enough about it to know if this makes sense, but it seems like it is significantly more complicated than "lipids cannot turn into glucose."
The meta point is: yes you will feel like shit for a little bit on a diet, your body has to adjust. If you feel like shit longer term, you may have an actual issue a doctor can diagnose and treat.
Temporarily increased hunger is natural. Temporarily increased fatigue is natural. What you were describing, being significantly mentally impaired over a long period of time, is not.
This article says a lot of things about exercise, some of them good some of them bad. Unfortunately it basically only takes into account cardio, which yes, is not the ideal form of exercise for losing weight. The reason is contained in the article: it helps train your body to do more with less. If that's the case, then how would we do the opposite? By training our bodies to be inefficient machines, rather than efficient ones. The best way to do that is to put on muscle mass. The best way to do that is to lift heavy things.
> Why is that? 71 Morbidly obese patients that maintain 50%+ loss of their excess weight for over 9 years? No other diet and/or treatment rivals that.
> > Some 9 % of the patients suffered from internal herniation, despite the closure of potential hernia sites
> > LRYGB was effective for diabetes control in 85.7 % of the affected patients, but, surprisingly, 27.9 % developed new-onset diabetes
> > four patients [5%] required hospitalization for hypoglycemic syndrome...two [2.5%] patients underwent reversal of their bypass for problems linked to glucose metabolism
> Talk to us in 10 years (seriously).
Get your squat up to 315, and then come talk to me about how hard it is to keep weight off. Seriously, it will make a huge difference in your life.
> Something always happens; the diet becomes mundane, physical and/or mental issues, stress, you have a family that wants to eat something other than eggs and salad, simply not giving a shit anymore or just general aging & slowly of metabolism.
All of this is in my control with the exception of slowing metabolism and while aging metabolism can account for some amount of weight gain we are absolutely not talking healthy weight -> obesity levels. I definitely don't subsist on eggs and salad. Today I had a few glasses of whole milk for breakfast, a steak burrito for lunch and a bacon cheeseburger for dinner, and I'll probably have one more square meal before passing out in a few hours. I weigh about 185lbs at 6ft. I'm lifting shit in the gym 3x a week and I rock climb a 4th day most weeks. Re: stress and mental issues, meditation and mindfulness are awesome and free, and if you can afford it I highly recommend talk therapy.
> 10 years is a long time to stick to the straight and narrow and keep the diet in check. Best of luck, maybe you have the mentality of a Navy Seal and will make it but most others do not.
I look forward to our check in :)
Right now there is not reason to think obesity happens outside of a caloric surplus, and there is a fair amount of basic science that supports that view. If that view were not true, it would invalidate many things that we think are true about the physical world.
That being said, while calories-in/calories-out is basically inarguable, there are many things going on that can effect calories-out even if calories-in remain the same. Body composition is one thing. I could definitely imagine medications that are catabolic leading to decreased muscle mass and increased fat storage. But I still don't think this would account for a massive change in bodyweight, not one that would make the difference between obese and not obese.
Step 2: Lose a bunch of weight
Step 3: Go off diet
Step 4: Regain a bunch of weight.
I'm not trying to be a dick, but I don't think there's a lot going on here that doesn't make sense. None of the contestants were particularly thin at the end of the study. Danny Cahill still weighed 191, which is actually pretty significantly overweight for someone not carrying a lot of muscle mass, which he wouldn't be at the end of a 7 month crash diet. If you get your body very very good at using its fat stores you will lower your BMR. The data doesn't suggest this is permanent or significantly impacted Danny's weight gain, the data suggests that Danny Cahill did not stick to the diet.
The Biggest Loser is frequently held up as the gold standard for how not to do things. The weight change is too fast, there is absolutely no support after its over and they frequently optimize for cardio and fat burning over muscle building, which in the short term is effective but in the long term contributes to lowering BMR and making the weight hard to keep off.
But ultimately you have to consider that Danny Cahill was still pretty unhealthy at the end of the show. None of this is starvation mode, in which major parts of your life are hugely effected (ie: you would not have the energy to leave the house).
> However, I am not sure there is no gain to be had from a change in digestive bacteria in terms of caloric intake, because chemical changes in the digestive process could conceivably alter the efficiency of energy extraction.
The reason I react negatively so strongly to stuff like this is that I fear it overcomplicates an issue that is relatively simple. It gives people an idea that there is probably something really out of their control that's causing them to gain weight. We can argue about the specifics, but at the end of the day for the vast majority of people it is within their control, and it certainly isn't within anyone else's control so...
> was placed on a medically supervised liquid diet and exercise program, and still kept gaining
> She had never been obese prior
> Also strange: her weight gain closely tracked the weight gain experienced over the same time by the fecal donor, despite dietary and exercise differences between the two
> It was enough of an effect that the researchers who presented the case study have since ensured they only use fecal donations from healthy-weight donors.
There is enough wacky shit going on in this study that it warrants taking it with a heavy grain of salt. I'd argue the results give compelling evidence that the fecal transplant was not in fact related to the weight gain at all, and it seems odd that the conclusion taken was to stop taking fecal transplants from obese people when a sample from a non-obese (at the time) person might've caused someone to become obese.
All of this stuff would be interesting to study more, but without further science really doesn't mean a lot.
> That all being said, I do think you're right that psychology of obesity is a very important aspect to consider, especially that of food addiction. I hope this is solved in our lifetimes, because it will be interesting to discover just how much gut influences brain and vice versa.
Definitely. Meditation (among other things) seems to have had a significant positive impact on my digestive system, so I am certainly super interested in this connection.
The deal is whenever you lose weight you lose muscle and fat. All you can do is shift the ratio. Resistance exercise helps shift that ratio. Proper diet (ie: enough protein) helps shift that ratio.
For about two weeks, maybe. This is all the result of low blood sugar. Your body gets better at using fat to keep blood sugar high, and these symptoms subside.
> Exercise leads to an amplification of these symptoms.
I have literally never heard anyone else claim this, and what little science there is suggests the opposite.
> It's not so easy as to "just put down the fork" or journal your feelings. The body doesn't want to change.
Right, I'm not suggesting it is easy, I'm suggesting it is simple.
> And it's not like the body stops these signals after a while. I have dropped 30+ pounds, always to gain it back.
If you are still having the symptoms of low blood sugar that lasts for a significant period of time (> 2 weeks), this is absolutely something your doctor should look into.
Regardless: the meta point here is that the body is not literally starving, it just feels like it is. Which sounds a lot like addiction: the body doesn't literally need those drugs, but brain chemistry makes it feel like it does.
The study you linked to does not seem like a glowing endorsement for gastric bypass to me.
Also, not that it matters, but you're talking to someone who has lost 35lbs more than a year ago, so I do have direct experience.
But the point is that there is evidence that suggests certain factors cause you to eat more, but there is not really evidence to suggest that similar people do significantly different things with similar caloric loads and that it's just a matter of tweaking biology to make people process the same caloric load differently.
The problem with this study is that it's suggesting inflammation as a cause to obesity, but we know that the only long term cause for obesity is caloric surplus. Inflammation definitionally is not causing caloric surplus (in fact it's using more calories than one otherwise would) so it doesn't seem like a useful thing to be studying, and the fat gains from it don't immediately appear to be permanent. The most important thing to study is why people eat more than they should, not necessarily what happens in the body after they eat it (though, again, I agree with your larger point that those two could be connected).
There are no full scale fecal transplant studies looking into obesity to my knowledge.
> Source? Let's not criticize others for their sources and then make unsupported drive-by claims.
You're right, but upon digging deeper into the study it's even worse: neither her, nor the person she took the fecal sample from, were obese at the time of transplant. Both became obese after the treatment. The source of the transplant was her daughter, so I can imagine a lot of environmental factors effecting both of them. It's hard to imagine the donor becoming obese because of the transplant...
The point here is there are a TON of other obvious variables to examine, and gut flora may really play a role, but there is really not substantial evidence to think that's true.
Regardless of if it is true, it doesn't change much for outcomes: you still have to eat less, you still have to workout more.
If you are eating 2000 calories a day and consistently maintaining weight, and inflammation causes you to store some more of your energy intake as fat at some point, you will also burn that fat off at some point. There's no reason to think that small temporary metabolic shifts within a calorically consistent environment cause long term fat gain.
If we could somehow get them to simply eat less, the condition would go away. There are arguments to be made about the mind body connection, and I think they are real, but the issues here are not that obese people are eating the same amount of food as non-obese people and that inflammation is causing some of that energy to be stored as fat. It's ridiculous and misleading for people who are genuinely trying to change their lives to suggest that small effects like this are the cause.
Also:
> No, if you are eating within caloric balance, the fat will not be burned for energy.
Fat is constantly being stored and burned as energy even within a caloric balance. You cannot store fat longterm without at some point eating at a caloric surplus.
It's frustrating to read all this research into the mechanism of what causes fat to be stored short term, because we already know what really causes fat to be stored long term: eating too much.
We need to be researching the reward systems associated with eating, and we need to start treating obesity as the mental health issue it is. It's a food addiction, and what we don't need to understand more deeply is how fat is stored. What we do need to understand more deeply is why people eat too much and how to get them to comply to healthier lifestyles. The answers are going to look a lot like drug addiction (ie: people are self-medicating depression, anxiety, etc. with food).
2. You would only really be lethargic for a small amount of time as your body adjusts to blood sugar levels. It's important to note that people who are losing weight are not low on energy because they are lacking calories. They have a ton of calories, they just aren't very good at using the fat to maintain blood sugar (yet). This should be roughly a 1-4 week transition, and again exercise will help a lot with it.
And for 2) this is really not true at all. Yes, you might store fat temporarily etc., but if you are eating a caloric balance, guess what: that fat has to be used at some point.
Taubes is not wrong, but he really overemphasizes a lot of things. People who are obese are not eating just a little over caloric balance but eating the wrong things. They are eating massively over caloric balance. Cutting sugar out might be a good way to get them to comply to a diet that requires them to eat fewer calories, but ultimately for the obese it's really just the calories that are an issue. Imo this warrants more research into the psychological aspects of obesity (the food dopamine reward system etc.)
Put simply: obesity is a food addiction. There are a ton of things that go into it, like depression, the reward system etc. We aren't likely to find the solution to obesity in small dietary tweaks, or fecal transplants.