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I think if it's stressing you out then it's fair to step back from reading the news for a bit. It's still worth at least trying to form an understanding and an opinion on various issues - whether local, regional or international - if you're going to be voting or even just talking about them with friends and family.

Apple Watch is pretty poor at estimating VO2 max and it seems to be more correlated with how often you record exercises with said watch than with your actual health. For example I watched mine climb slowly as I prepared for my football season (beyond 50), then after the season started I I ended up playing and training just as frequently but without wearing the watch. After a few weeks (of me training and playing hard) during my next run it recorded me having a sharp decline in VO2 max (43-44ish iirc). When I started wearing it during training - you're not permitted during matches - it recorded me having a slow return to condition, without any changes to my routine.

That said if it's showing someone as having 30 I don't imagine they're going to be in spectacular condition


I really don’t know whether to trust that specific measurement. When I was a very active runner and doing intervals to improve per-km time, my VO2max went from 38 to 42. I decided to do a professional VO2max test and got a 46.

Now, 2 years later, I don’t run due to injury and a kid, and it’s resting at 34. For reference, when I went to the gym almost everyday and ran once or twice a week, the value was 32.

I don’t get much utility out of it, even looking at the trends. Not sure what Apple is doing behind the scenes to get the score.


Yeah so I know it's meant to be an estimate, but my experience of it is kinda fucky. I would really love to swap watches with an Olympic athlete (idk if they'd bother with an Apple Watch but bear with me!) and run 10k to see what the VO2 max reading for that exercise was. As I said, I think to me it's some estimate that heavily involves some "average of last N readings from the Apple VO2 max calc" function so even if you time travelled and gave it to Eilish McColgan or Mo Farah they'd be like "ehhh you had quite a good run, fatty - you jumped from 44.3 to 45"

I'm not that bothered of course. For me it's just a fun metric I can attempt to optimise when training.


This is really more of an "utdoor run while wearing the watch" proxy than a true fitness measure

This was my experience too - they're visibly angry at you for following the rules

Flying through JFK once, security lines had different rules: Line one, laptop in, shoes out. Line two, laptop out, shoes stayed. Line 3, nothing out. It was hilarious, because TSA agents would talk over each other, confusing the hell out of everyone.

Heathrow is a fucking miserable place with spiteful staff and it would not surprise me one bit if someone decided to fuck with a traveller this way. I saw a girl running to catch a bus to another terminal for a connecting flight, and the guy controller her made an enormous stink about her "breathing on me". She was polite and apologetic but she got pulled aside and made to wait for everyone else to get through, got sternly chastised before being allowed to continue (whereupon she missed the connecting bus and presumably her flight). Same trip I saw them them shouting and swearing at disabled travellers who needed wheelchairs. Every other member of staff in the airport was stood around fucking with their phones and seemed furious whenever they had to do their job.

Horrible airport, avoid at all costs.


The "fracture" being referred to is a weld that somehow failed. The gap you are seeing is because an enormous, heavy train travelling at 200km/h hit that fracture and the rear half of the train derailed, tearing up sleepers and kicking all manner of debris around including ballast and, in this case, parts of newly-fractured (and therefore weakened) track.

The mention of FSB is downvoted is because it was near-immediately clear that this was not the cause. It's total amateurs doing wild speculation for who knows what reason - some stupid upvotes on a website or because it makes their life more exciting to feel like they're whistle-blowing some international conspiracy?

This is roughly on par with every celebrity death over the last 4-5 years being followed by idiots commenting "vaxxed?!"


Anyone serious about rail engineering or safety isn't excitedly dashing off comments pointing fingers before the dust has even settled. Those who are doing that - such as the comment I am replying to - should be ignored

I am not even clear how Whatsapp "paid off" for Facebook in any sense other than them being able to nip a potential competitor in the bud. I use Whatsapp but do not see a single advert there nor do I pay a single penny for it, and I suspect my situation is pretty typical. Presumably some people see ads or pay for some services but I've not, and I don't imagine there's that much money to be made in being the #1 platform for sharing "Good Morning" GIFs


Uber are doing something entirely different though - they took a market which was proven to exist, created a product which worked then spent a decade being horribly unprofitable until they were the dominant player in that market. And even at their very worst they weren't losing as much money as OpenAI are. There's far too much hand-waving and dismissive "ah it'll be ok because Uber exist" going on among those who have bought into the AI hype cycle


While many people thought Facebook/Google paid too much for these companies, you're making an apples-to-oranges comparison. That part about there being "no path to making money" is wrong - online advertising was a huge industry and only getting stronger and while YT/Insta/Whatsapp may have struggled as standalone companies it was clear they'd unlock an enormous amount of value as part of a bigger company that already had a strong foothold in advertising online.

It is not clear who, other than maybe someone like Microsoft, could actually acquire companies like OpenAI or Anthropic. They are orders of magnitude larger than the companies you mentioned in terms of what they are "worth" (haha) and even how much money they need just to keep the lights on, let alone turn any kind of profit.

Not to mention the logical fallacy at the core of your point - people said "the exact same[sic] thing" about YouTube, Instagram and Whatsapp ... therefore, what, it necessarily means these companies are the same? You realise that many of us talked like this about "the blockchain", and "the Metaverse" and about those stupid ape JPEGS and we were absolutely correct to do so.


> Not to mention the logical fallacy at the core of your point

Yes, it's a logical fallacy. Another one is saying "I don't see any viable business model, therefore there is no viable business model".

Blast from the past:

> YouTube is a content paradise though. There's tons of value there and you can sell ads against it or even charge for premium services.

> Where's the money in Instagram? The content is practically worthless and their only real value is in their userbase. Even though I use the Instagram client, most of the time I see photos, they come through Twitter. So that also reinforces for me that any value is in the users and not the actual content, which is mostly crap.

> I'm more convinced that we're in a 2nd bubble now more than ever.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3818037

Another one:

> Does anyone else think this valuation is insane? It's like $300/registered user. The company doesn't have a business model. No way the handful of employees are worth $1B. My mind is blown.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817930


It sounds like you're really into this and I hope for all of our sakes that you are correct to be all hyped up about AI. Because if you're not and that this is a horrific bubble that is going to burst then we're all in big trouble


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