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Ozempic? Or just eating less?

Probably the latter, but "just eating less" is next to impossible for a non-trivial minority of people much the way "just stopping heroin" would be for someone battling addiction.

An aid to help clear the noise in the brain seems to be unsurprisingly useful, then, in achieving these outcomes.


Sure, but Ozempic is not the only drug that suppresses appetite. So if the underlying benefits are from “just eating less,” then the study should also examine the effects of other pharmaceutical interventions that suppress appetite.

It's not the only drug that suppresses appetite, but GLP-1 agonists (Ozempic, Zepbound, etc) appear to work for a larger percentage of the population, and significantly outperform previous appetite suppressants.

There's also findings that suggest that it goes beyond simply suppressing appetite, but also manipulates the "reward" center in the brain. Individuals who take it to lose weight find that they have reduced desire to drink or smoke, suggesting it's less that they struggle with appetite and more the medicine helps overcome addictive behavior.


Nicotine suppresses appetite as well and that has been used by humans for thousands of years.

Sure, it's just not as good as Ozempic at doing that particular job.

That’s so silly, these drugs aren’t even anywhere near the same league of effectiveness. There’s plenty of fat people who take nicotine all day.

Hmmm...if as many people consumed semeglutide you would have examples of fat people in that population as well.

You certainly would, because not every case of obesity results from the same mechanisms. But just as with all the other what-about comments, this comment misses the point: this class of drug is wildly successful, and it's the most specific drug for this problem that's been developed so far

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/ozempic-glp-1-drugs-m...

Here's a good piece running through the failure modes in lay terms.


> Ozempic is not the only drug that suppresses appetite

If there were a drug that is equally as effective with the same or fewer downsides, then it would've been just as popular for that use case already.

Someone else mentioned nicotine. There are still a lot of "unsuccessful" nicotine users compared to Ozempic.


Funding tends to be a constraint with larger studies, and it's best to keep studies focused anyway — less confounding variables.

Here, I'll pontificate a bit. For instance, study 1 finds that Ozempic is associated with a reduced risk of X. Study 2 is now funded to see if the association can be experimentally reproduced to establish a causative relationship. Competing institution gets Study 3 funded to test competing drug Mounjaro, reaches same conclusion. Study 4 by another institution finds same conclusion with a drug that acts in an entirely different manner, Buproprion. Study 5 by yet another institution finds similar results with amphetamines. Study 6 is funded on the premise that there's an underlying mechanism that needs to be explored, gets funding to study caloric restriction, gets similar results. Meanwhile, study 2 finds a causative relationship between Ozempic and X, concluding experimentally that Ozempic achieves X by inducing calorie restriction, which concurs with study 6.

I'm oversimplifying. But you see where I'm going with this. Much easier to both control and fund the smaller studies than a giant one, and you develop more knowledge in the process.

---

Also, I'm not an academic, so I could be wildly off base. Would appreciate a gut check by someone who actually does this for a living.


"Just eating less" may be very difficult, psychologically, in the context of an otherwise stressful and distracting life. However, I find that if you are able to eliminate those issues and focus on your own health and diet -- a big "if", I will grant -- then it's actually not that hard, on its own. You get used to it.

That GLP-1 agonists are as successful as they are and appear to modulate the reward center of the brain (per the latest research on the same class of drugs and smoking/alcohol cessation) suggests that it's certainly not just a psychological matter.

That's why I made the heroin comparison. People underappreciate the addictive properties of refined sugars.

Edit: people also looked at the opiate angle too, apparently. https://pennstatehealthnews.org/2024/04/qa-can-weight-loss-d...


Just to hammer the point home, imagine suggesting a cure for heroin addiction is to amputate the arms so they can't shoot up. Then look up what gastric bypass surgery is.

For some reason we don't take food addiction seriously at all. You can't walk anywhere without seeing a picture of a Big Muck or something. Heroin addicts don't have to see their vice everywhere they go. Even cigarette addicts don't.


My wife takes full dose. Shes lost 60 pounds in six months. I have been taking the smallest dose.

Normally i can eat a full meal, and be hungrier at the end of it, then when i started.

For a couple of days after taking the small dose. I get full after a small amount. Then feel full for most of the day. I need to go up to a higher dose as this effect fades before next dose.


> Normally i can eat a full meal, and be hungrier at the end of it, then when i started.

how?! what exactly are you eating that's making you feel hungrier, not full?



[flagged]


Doesn't ozempic just make you feel full more easily and help you eat less?

Tbh, it changes your whole digestion and relationship with food.

‘Just’ is doing a lot here.

That’s my experience. Eating one slice of pizza feels like eating the entire pizza normally would.

It would be interesting to see a comparative study of glp1 agitators to intermittent fasting. It surprises me that people will spend huge amounts on a drug which makes them feel less full, rather than have the tiny amount of willpower it takes to just not eat.

Don't be so fast to assume that your willpower isn't just from genetic luck. You might as well be surprised some people are short. I mean, look how much better your life is as someone tall.

We humans are very quick to assume our positive traits and outcomes come from conscious decisions to make things that way. It's why every successful person has a book about how they chose to become successful. They just worked hard. It's something we want to believe rather than admit anything came down to luck of the draw.


And not just genetic luck, but luck of childhood circumstances. Lots of people were given a deranged relationship to food as a child by their parents, leading in many cases to actual metabolic derangement as well.

You’re right in your argument about “just do this” suggestions without considering how hard it can be based on intrinsic factors.

I feel there is a point in the thread you’re commenting on though. It would be scientifically interesting to know whether the desired(positive) outcomes of this drug can be replicated by consciously controlling the quantity or quality of food without the use of the drug(by those who can). Still, presenting the result in a useful way rather than stating the drug is useless.

If you had a way to get the same results without any pharmaceutical intervention, and you’re a lucky one that _can_ do it, wouldn’t you want to know how?


It has been tested, Ozempic wins. These drugs are usually tested specifically on people who have tried and failed dieting and exercise interventions. I doubt any doctor is prescribing this without first asking, “have you tried diet and exercise?” The side effects can be pretty gnarly for some people and it’s very expensive and hard to obtain.

The common theme in normal weight individuals is their comparative lack of food drive, not an outsized capacity for willpower.

When you talk to "skinny" people you'll hear things like they just forgot to eat or I just had a couple bites of cake then felt full/had enough.

Alternatively when you speak with heavier people you'll realize that they're white knuckling their entire lives (because calories are so abundant). On average they're actually exerting more willpower around food than skinnier people.

Not everyone of course, there are folks in either camp, but at population scale lack of food drive is what keeps people skinny in a calorie rich, low activity environment.


That may be the end product from all of this which is quite scary because trillions of dollars moving into this.

Think it’s worth mentioning that their Qualcomm exclusive windows laptop deal ends soon and this should allow AMD and NVIDIA to ramp up (arm) windows laptop cpus soon within the next few years.

Too small to see, but too small for damage?

What’s the largest smallest object we won’t be able to see that can be devastating?


Aren’t these things supposed to do automatic feature detection? Wouldn’t these models figure out consciousness as some hidden layer over time?

Something is wrong with Sam Altman. You can’t find a single interview of him discussing technical details of anything.

He may really be a tech version of George Santos. A grifter like that should be nowhere near in charge of tech like this.


Mind fuck time, he doesn’t have a conception of the world. His conception is entirely defined by his immediate memory (effectively the most recent prompt). The first tattoo or photograph he sees in the morning is the first prompt every morning, and it overwhelms his context length.

Lack of … useful memory (what’s useful? We consider big memory useful right now) is what handicaps Leonard. It’s the first thing Gemini looked to solve.

Anyways. It’s his system prompt that’s in the cmos that can’t be overridden. He wakes up every morning with the same plan. People are overly concerned about sentience, but in reality it’s the dogmatic machine code that can’t be changed that makes a robot scary.

Ask Leonard, he can’t forget his system prompt.


They say you have to be lucky to get cancer statistically because you actually have to live a long time to even get it.

I guess if you are several hundred year old empire you will have run into just about everything. The plague was just the last thing they saw, not the ultimate thing that ended them.

We’d be lucky if all this crap lasts long enough to watch a plague run through it.


You sound just like a Roman.

American, close enough. Our empire hopes at least.

I almost wish we had actual imperial ambition instead of all the cloak and daggers garbage the CIA gets up to. At least there would be economic stability and decent education and infra in annexed countries.

There prob would be a lot of popular support. And there is an election coming up.

Personally, I was thinking we could privatize the entire military in one fell swoop. And then let them sell their services to various foreign nations. Turn that one big cost center into a revenue opp.

No way that could possibly go wrong…

But if America does get dragged into any more conflicts, can we make it a home game this time? You know… ‘fight em over here so we dont have to fight em over there’. Sucks always being the away team.


>Personally, I was thinking we could privatize the entire military in one fell swoop. And then let them sell their services to various foreign nations. Turn that one big cost center into a revenue opp.

The USA gets a whooole lot of soft power from its military hegemony, it's already paying for itself in the form of better trade deals - for instance, Taiwan basically only exists because of US hegemony, and they have better chips than the US does, and they don't sell their best outside of NATO.

The US is doomed to always be the away-team - they can't stay neutral because wars involve blocking the trade of their trading partner, which includes US merchant ships. They won't have a war on the home front, because they have the two biggest oceans in the world to make such an invasion a logistical impossibility (and the US navy is giant to enforce that).


Military hegemony is basically the definition of hard power

> The USA gets a whooole lot of soft power from its military hegemony

Definition of soft-power: Soft power is the ability to co-opt rather than coerce (in contrast with hard power).

* looks up list of foreign intervention by the US over the last 60 years *

I think you might want to rethink your argument.


> They won't have a war on the home front

Yup. Enormous geographical advantages + a population armed to the teeth (relatively speaking) means the US is as close to impenetrable as is possible


You want like a sadistic marshal plan?

So, we take your shit. Then we define your morality, then set the benchmarks and culture, and your ass better meet all that.

And if you don’t, well

we don’t wanna hear you say nigga no more

Imperial means we run you for a couple hundred years. I guess some people don’t get it. You pray to our god, for the foreseeable feature.

Behold South America, what god do they pray to? The fuck we said to pray to.

That’s imperial shit.

No magical mother in the sky. I just don’t like being polite no more, where this war at.


I can't tell if these are the ravings of a madman or the intro to an Immortal Technique album.

Ur just racist lol

Your two options are caricatures


Aquila Non Capit Muscas

kids can get cancer though

Anyone can at any time; just statistically unlikely for most young people.

I said you have to be lucky

Read carefully :)


Child mortality rates were over 40% in 1800, so yeah, even a child had to be lucky to get cancer in the past.

I suspect the numbers were quite high far more recently than that. From a Reddit post, noting the inflection point occurs at 1900 rather than 1800:

<https://www.reddit.com/r/rootsofprogress/comments/esgqsv/inf...>

Chart is sourced from:

<https://www.jstor.org/stable/2173395?seq=1>

The other thought that I've had is that we're exerting far less selective pressure on huamn infants now than a century or so ago, at least in modernised countries. By which I mean both rich and middle-income countries, as well as quite a few poorer ones which do have basic sanitation, hygiene, and healthcare availability. It's the first increment which matters far more than the last.


It’s interesting this tech is for disabled people when Nintendo just assumed their players were disabled to begin with. They always played their games with their left hand to simulate it.

Software developers are pretty terrible in applying this kind of empathy in our UX.

Assume your app is unusable and the user doesn’t know how to read or have hands. Hah.


>It’s interesting this tech is for disabled people when Nintendo just assumed their players were disabled to begin with.

oh, that's why the N64 controller was designed that way, to accommodate those of us with three hands -- I get it now.


I think games are fundamentally different from other software in many ways. For example, games tend to revel in selectively sharing information (Tunic for example) in a way that regular software doesn't. It's hard to apply lessons from one to the other.

I can't recall which standup comedian it was, but he had a bit about games where they're the only form of entertainment that tests you. A song doesn't make you dance along to continue. A book doesn't quiz you on its themes and slam shut if you're wrong. For some games, being hard to play is their point. That's why accessibility is great to make games where that isn't their point more, uh, accessible. And maybe even those hard games should have accessibility, I haven't given that front enough thought yet.

Left-handedness is a disability? What?

That isn't what they said, and it's probably not what they meant.

What they probably meant was that Nintendo testers use their non-dominant hands to simulate someone who has no prior experience with video game controls. (Though I'm not sure exactly what that would mean. Maybe OP meant they use "backwards" controllers with all the buttons swapped?)


It could be a reminder to developers that they should not assume that they should develop for one kind of player.

I remember watching an episode of MKBHD where he played a racing game, and the hands on the wheel were white male hands (he is black). He just looked at the camera and said nothing, but sighed. I thought it was well done.

personally I hate PC games that assume WASD, or don't let you remap keys, or make other asumptions that are pretty easy to figure out you shouldn't do.


>I remember watching an episode of MKBHD where he played a racing game, and the hands on the wheel were white male hands (he is black).

Is this actually a problem? Should every character you play be the same race and gender as you? Personally, I would not care.


It depends how far they go. There are games where they insist I must play as a big titted whore even though I don’t identify as a woman and even if I was a woman, I’d opt for more subtle whoreness not the full whoreness some of these games insist I must role play.

Some examples of games where you have to play as a "big titted whore"?

Sure, Black Desert Online.

They insist you play a big titted whore.

With magic and shit, for clarity’s sake.


I've never seen this game before, but looking into it, they don't seem to insist on you playing as a "big titted whore", and to be honest, I wouldn't really care to play as a voluptuous woman ahah, I hope you don't call women whores just because of that.

I mean, they desensitized it to me too. I play the girl class if there’s no option. The arc of justice doesn’t bend toward truth, it bends toward revenge. It’s zero sum.

I guess the bitches were tired of playing bulky men that they don’t identify with and now force the men to play whores we don’t identify with.

I’m just saying

But if I had to get really meta:

I personally don’t believe there are enough women to force that macro change in gaming. It’s self flagellation of hyper aware males.

If I had to get double meta:

It’s self flagellation by guys that don’t even get laid.

Tricky business


I'm pretty sure the girls in skimpy outfits thing in BDO is because that's how Korea and Japan rolls with their character designs, and men want to play skimpy dressed lady characters. I don't think it's a DEI thing for women that want to play big tiddy women lol.

That's like arguing that you can't drive a beat-up pickup truck in a F1 racing sim, or a Cessna in a combat flight sim.

The character design is part of the game that you chose to play.


Is it ok that some people do care?

should not assume that they should develop for one kind of player.

Or even better, if they accommodate the lowest common denominator, you actually can end up with better experiences for even experienced players.

I’m looking at this tech in reverse. Sure it’s going to help the disabled, but it’s also going to enable entire new things in games. I fly around a helicopter a lot in Arma, and I’d love some simple solutions for head and eye tracking just with my web cam and it looks like most of this r&d is happening in the accessibility space, not in the game design space.


I stand corrected. He just said "not exactly what my hands would look like, but (laugh)"

youtu.be/kFz9afj8lu0 ~ 7:00


As a lefty who has written on whiteboards and blackboards I'd say yes in possibly the smallest way possible.

If you’re right handed, then yeah, playing with your left simulates a handicap. They designed a lot of their games around such handicaps.

They just had to swap out their tester every 6 weeks when they became ambidextrous

This is how a feature like this worked on my iPhone.

1.iPhone detects I’m in an unusual location (I’m not, vpn). It just decided this all of a sudden, and I’ve used vpns in the past without issue.

2. Goes into lockdown mode

3. You need Face ID to disable lockdown mode

4. Face ID cannot be used in lockdown mode. Go back to step 3

Step wtf: We’re now trapped out.

5. I have to reset my phone. I forgot that I have eSIM, so resetting deletes my phone number too.

Step holy shit: Apple let me delete my entire sim card in about a one click warning lol.

——-

These people don’t dog food their own shit at all. Had to disable Face ID after an event like that.


Big tech companies locking you out of your own stuff is an underrated threat vector.

I recently had a similar debacle with my Google account when I was travelling out of state and lost my phone. I needed to access my account quickly and fortunately knew my password and had added my partner's phone number as a 2fa method for exactly this kind of scenario.

Well when I went to log in Google took it upon themselves to disable that 2fa method, because it thought there were more secure options available. Except there weren't because I was far from home and all of my other devices!

I was pretty shocked that Google would change my security settings without any notice to me and confirmation on my part.


I've lost 2 different gmail accounts, apparently due to Google deciding to change or not respect my security settings. It's hard to say for sure. Meanwhile I still have a Hotmail email address. (This isn't me saying Microsoft couldn't cause similar issues, but I've at least been able to get things fixed through support in the past.)

I'm of the same mind that providers can be underrated risks, because it doesn't always cross people's minds that the provider could be that seemingly incompetent. It's certainly a potential situation to consider when dealing with companies that have poor support. And unfortunately, not all of them have great support or self-service tools like account recovery codes.


I’ve opted for a backup phone on a $10 line to always have SMS if necessary for 2fa. I don’t take it outside.

Quite frankly I need to make a stronger commitment to memorizing three passwords for life.

But to your point, yes I have critical apps where the main threat vector is being accidentally locked out.


Lockdown mode is used to protect journalists or other people against malware like Pegasus. It doesn't get activated by being in an unusual location, it has to be manually activated in settings.

I wasn't aware lockdown mode can be enabled without you explicitly doing so.

It can't. This user seems to be confused about what lockdown mode is.

I figured ;)

It's basically required by the internet gods that you must make up total nonsense when complaining about Apple.

> resetting deletes my phone number too

There's an option during reset to keep the eSIM, https://allthings.how/how-to-factory-reset-iphone-without-er...


Do you have advanced data protection turned on?

Maybe? Does it excuse this oversight by the iOS team?

> You need Face ID to disable lockdown mode

It's impossible to use the apple ID password or lockscreen password/PIN for this?


If you have FaceID enabled, it will require that to disable lockdown mode (and I already explained the loop about how lockdown mode disables biometric auth like Face ID). I can get into the phone with my pin just fine, but the phone is still locked down. When lockdown mode disables biometric auth, I couldn’t get into bank, brokerage or any app requiring that auth.

Maybe I’m just crazy because it seems like a ridiculous oversight.


> I can get into the phone with my pin just fine, but the phone is still locked down. When lockdown mode disables biometric auth, I couldn’t get into bank, brokerage or any app requiring that auth.

Never heard of this behavior, but it's not associated with the Apple feature called "Lockdown Mode", which does not constrain use of secure enclaves for Touch ID or Face ID authentication, https://support.apple.com/en-us/105120


> iPhone detects I’m in an unusual location (I’m not, vpn)

VPN literally moves your phone to an unusual location, for all intents and purposes.


no, it doesn't? It changes your publicly visible IP. Your GPS data still shows you in the original location. Your wifi localisation and 5g antennas would still be in the original location. It'd also be _trivially easy_ for the OS to know that the user is behind a VPN, given the only way to do so is through APIs dedicated to VPN use.

That's not true at all. Phones geolocate themselves using satellites, cell towers, and WiFi access points.

So I’m supposed to go into lockdown every single time? Fine, but don’t lock me out with FaceID so I can override it at least.

Apple needs to revisit that feature because that lockout could have happened at a critical time.


What were the visible indicators that the phone had entered lockdown mode? It usually requires user consent, followed by reboot.

iOS Lockdown Mode does not usually constrain the method of unlocking the phone.


Maybe I’m crazy? If you have an iPhone, enable faceid and put it into lockdown mode manually (I just remember it happening automatically).

Tell me how you get out of lockdown mode.


My iOS devices are in lockdown mode 99% of the time. To disable lockdown mode, go into Settings > Privacy > Lockdown Mode, it offers the option to "Turn Off and Restart", then asks for a passcode.

The behavior being described sounds a bit like malware. If it happens again, the best option is to Force Restart (VolUp, VolDown, hold side button until the device reboots), which cannot be intercepted by any apps which might be trying to simulate iOS system prompts.


It moves your IP address to an unusual location. I highly doubt that it changes your GPS coordinates, nearby wifi, cell towers, etc that can be used in location detection.

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