- molave ( @mo_lave@reddthat.com ) 110•14 days ago
Majority of the “AI inside” software and solutions. It’s in a bubble and everyone is throwing crap to a wall hoping it sticks.
notice how all of those crypto features were quietly removed from platforms after people realised they were paying millions for some numbers, i think that will happen with Ai
- Nomecks ( @Nomecks@lemmy.ca ) 7•14 days ago
It’s even better than that. A lot of companies are taking NVIDIA’s pre-built workflows, running their data through them and selling the results as their own AI. “We build proprietary RAG AI!”
- TheOubliette ( @TheOubliette@lemmy.ml ) 2•13 days ago
I can’t wait to get a Smart AI refrigerator that tells me I have a bunch of food that isn’t really in there even when I didn’t ask it to.
- Default_Defect ( @Default_Defect@midwest.social ) English2•12 days ago
Watched a bit of a video of a guy that went to Computex and asked any vendor with AI plastered somewhere what they were doing with it. Most spouted some meaningless word salad and a few literally shrugged.
- ianovic69 ( @ianovic69@feddit.uk ) English80•14 days ago
Chiropractic.
Everything in Holland and Barrett.
- Otter ( @otter@lemmy.ca ) English18•14 days ago
I sometimes come across influencers pushing chrio “treatments” on pets or newborns, saying it makes them “breathe better” or be “more energetic”
It’s infuriating
its a bit more than infuriating, thats straight up dangerous.
I used to see a lot of threads on reddit about people who got injuries from cheap chiropractors.
- aleph ( @aleph@lemm.ee ) English66•13 days ago
Hi-resolution audio, especially for streaming. The general idea is that listening to digital audio files that have a greater bit depth and sample rate than CD (24-bit/192Khz vs 16-bit/44.1 KHz) translates to better-sounding audio, but in practice that isn’t the case.
For a detailed breakdown as to why, there’s a great explanation here. But in summary, the format for CDs was so chosen because it covers enough depth and range to cover the full spectrum of human hearing.
So while “hi-res” audio does contain a lot more information (which, incidentally, means it uses up significantly more data/storage space and costs more money), our ears aren’t capable of hearing it in the first place. Certain people may try to argue otherwise based on their own subjective experience, but to that I say “the placebo effect is a helluva drug.”
- FalseMyrmidon ( @FalseMyrmidon@kbin.run ) 33•14 days ago
Conversely low res audio clearly sounds like trash.
- aleph ( @aleph@lemm.ee ) English24•14 days ago
Up to a certain point, yes. >192k AAC / OGG / Opus sounds just as good as FLAC in a blind test, though. Even with good equipment.
- FalseMyrmidon ( @FalseMyrmidon@kbin.run ) 17•14 days ago
Yeah, I’m thinking of circa 2000 MP3s. 128k was the good stuff and lower was still common.
- bob_lemon ( @bob_lemon@feddit.de ) 12•13 days ago
Back when a 4 minute song was like 1.5MB so you could fit more music on your 256MB mp3 player because you could not afford an iPod.
- aleph ( @aleph@lemm.ee ) English10•13 days ago
Oh yeah. 128k rips from back then were rough. MP3 has gotten somewhat better since then, to be fair. V0/V1 VBR is still perfectly fine to listen to; it’s just not as efficient as the newer codecs.
- Snot Flickerman ( @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) English13•14 days ago
which, incidentally, means they use up significantly more data/storage space and cost more money
All of this is very true, but this is the only issue I really disagree with here.
I am in an era where a good quality rip of a movie can be almost 50 gigabytes by itself. That means for every terabyte of storage, I can store just 20 of movies of this size.
Don’t even get my started on television series and how big those can balloon to with the same kind of encoding.
An entire collection of FLACs, thousands of albums worth, is still less than 500 gigabytes total, in other words half a terabyte. (My personal collection anyway)
I mean, the average size of one of my FLAC albums is around 200-300 megabytes. Even with the larger “hi-res” FLAC files you’re still not getting as obscenely big as movie and television files.
Sure, it takes up more space than an MP3 or a FLAC properly encoded to CD standards (my preferred choice, for the reasons outlined above), but realistically, the amount of space it takes up compared to those is negligible when compared to other types of media.
Storage and energy to operate storage has become incredibly cheap, especially when you’re dealing with smaller files like this.
- aleph ( @aleph@lemm.ee ) English8•14 days ago
This is true, especially if you are storing files locally. However, even compared to “CD quality” FLAC, a 24/192 album is still going to be around three times larger (around 1GB per album) to download. If everyone switched over to streaming hi-res audio tomorrow, there would be a noticeable jump in worldwide Internet traffic.
I’m personally not ok with the idea of bandwidth usage jumping up over 3x (and even more compared to lossy streaming) for no discernable benefit.
- Snot Flickerman ( @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) English6•14 days ago
I’m personally not ok with the idea of bandwidth usage jumping tenfold for no discernable benefit.
An extremely reasonable position to take! Because even if the increase in energy usage is negligible locally, when widespread, those small chunks of energy use add up into a much larger chunk of energy use. Especially when including transferring that over an endless number of networks.
I always talk about this in regards to automobiles and manual roll-up/down windows versus automatic windows. Sure, it’s an extremely small amount of energy to use for automatic windows on a car, but when you add up the energy used on every cars automatic windows through the life of each and every car with automatic windows and suddenly it’s no longer a small number. Very wasteful, imho.
- notfromhere ( @notfromhere@lemmy.ml ) 2•13 days ago
50 GB for a BRD rip is one that is not re-encoded, that’s a straight rip from the disk.
- greenskye ( @greenskye@lemm.ee ) English9•13 days ago
I’ve always kinda wondered about this. I’m not an audio guy and really can’t tell the difference between most of the standards. That said, I definitely remember tons and tons ‘experts’ telling me that no one can tell the difference between 720p and 1080p TV at typical distance to your couch. And I absolutely could and many of the people I know could. I can also tell the difference between 1080 and 4k, at the same distances.
So I’m curious if there’s just a natural variance in an individual’s ability to hear and audiophiles just have a better than average range that does exceed CD quality?
Similar to this, I can tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps, but not 60 to 120, yet some people swear they can. Which I believe, I just know that I can’t. Seems like these guidelines are probably more averages, rather than hard biological limits.
- aleph ( @aleph@lemm.ee ) English6•13 days ago
It’s a fair question. Human hearing ability is a spectrum like anything else, however when it comes to discerning the difference in audio quality, the vast, vast majority of people cannot reliably tell the difference between high-bitrate lossy and lossless when they do a double blinded test. And that includes audiophiles with equipment worth thousands of dollars.
Of that tiny minority who can consistently distinguish between the two, they generally can only tell by listening very closely for the very particular characteristics of the encoder format, which takes a highly trained ear and a lot of practice.
The blind aspect is important because side-by-side comparisons (be they different audio formats, or 60fps vs 120fps video) are highly unreliable because people will generally subconsciously prefer the one they know is supposed to be better.
- DjMeas ( @DjMeas@lemm.ee ) 3•13 days ago
I think this is the case where certain people simply can’t see it here the difference.
I collect video game and movie soundtracks and the main difference I can hear between a 320kbps VS a FLAC that’s in the 1000kbps range is not straight up “clarity” in the sense that something like an instrument is “clearer” but rather the spacing and the ability to discern the difference where instruments come from is much better in a Hi-Res file with some decent wired headphones (my pair is $200). All this likey doesn’t matter much though when most users stream via Spotify which sounds worse than my 320kbps locally and people are using Bluetooth headphones at lower bitrates since they don’t have better codec compatibility like aptX and LDAC.
- oo1 ( @oo1@lemmings.world ) English2•13 days ago
i think hi res is for professional work. If you’re going to process, modify, mix, distort the audio in a studio, you probably want the higher bit depth or rate to start with, in case you amplify or distort something and end up with an unintended artefact that is human audible. But the output sound can be down rated back to human levels before final broadcast.
O couse if a marketing person finds out there is a such a thing as “professional quality”. . . See also “military spec”, “aerospace grade”
- interolivary ( @interolivary@beehaw.org ) 2•12 days ago
Yeah to expand on this, in professional settings you’ll want a higher sampling frequency so you don’t end up with eg. aliasing, but for consumer use ≥44–48kHz sampling rate is pretty much pointless
- Domi ( @domi@lemmy.secnd.me ) 5•13 days ago
Right you are, but don’t start telling everyone so I can’t silently download my lossless albums from Tidal, Deezer and Qobuz anymore.
- HelixDab2 ( @HelixDab2@lemm.ee ) 3•13 days ago
A lot of it will depend on your output device; cheap headphones will wreck audio quality.
I remember the bad old days when .mp3 files for streaming were often 128kbps (or less!); I could absolutely hear audio artifacts on those, and it got significantly worse with lower bitrates. 320kbps though seems to be both fairly small, and I can’t personally tell the difference between that and any lossless formats.
- Umbrias ( @Umbrias@beehaw.org ) 2•12 days ago
All you really need is the Nyquist frequency of human hearing to know. That’s a good breakdown for audiophiles I’m sure but it is broadly as simple as the Nyquist frequency.
- IncognitoMosquito ( @IncognitoMosquito@beehaw.org ) 58•13 days ago
The Mayers Briggs Type Indicator test. It was developed with the same rigor as horoscopes, yet I still hear people I know are smart proudly tell me their four letter personality code.
- PapaStevesy ( @PapaStevesy@midwest.social ) English6•13 days ago
Yeah, it’s corporate astrology
- DeltaTangoLima ( @DeltaTangoLima@reddrefuge.com ) English4•13 days ago
I’ve always felt that the Myers-Briggs shit was utter nonsense, having been forced many times to go through it at several employers over the years.
Any chance you’ve got a decent source that debunks it? I’d love to have it in my pocket for next time…
- IncognitoMosquito ( @IncognitoMosquito@beehaw.org ) 12•13 days ago
The Wikipedia entry for it is pretty scathing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers–Briggs_Type_Indicator
If you look into it further, neither of the people who designed it has any background in psychology except having read a book by Jung once.
- DeltaTangoLima ( @DeltaTangoLima@reddrefuge.com ) English4•13 days ago
Nice one. This statement in particular sums it up nicely:
Jung did not see the type preferences (such as introversion and extraversion) as dualistic, but rather as tendencies: both are innate and have the potential to balance.
I remember reading elsewhere that it’d be like drawing a line down the middle of a table of people’s heights, so that those who were 5 feet 10 inches and under would be the “shorts” and those 5 feet 11 inches and taller would be the “talls”.
- oo1 ( @oo1@lemmings.world ) English2•13 days ago
Typical ITPS comment! /s
- Björn Tantau ( @bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de ) 47•14 days ago
Anti virus software. To protect your computer let’s constantly run this software with root privileges!
I remember mcAffee webadvisor came preinstalled with a crappy asus vivobook i got when i was younger, i could not delete it, i had to manually remove the files from the programfiles folder but it reinstalled itself every time it updated, the laptop bricked itself recently anyway so it doesn’t matter.
- photonic_sorcerer ( @photonic_sorcerer@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English12•14 days ago
That’s when you wipe the os and install linux
I run linux on my main pc, but some other people used the laptop.
- AeroLemming ( @AeroLemming@lemm.ee ) English1•12 days ago
You can bet your ass they paid a lot of money to get their malware on your computer. It should be illegal to load consumer hardware with 3rd party bloatware that can’t be removed.
- queermunist she/her ( @queermunist@lemmy.ml ) 47•14 days ago
Shampoo and conditioner with vitamins in it.
Your hair is dead. It can’t metabolize anything.
- Altima NEO ( @altima_neo@lemmy.zip ) English17•14 days ago
Yeah but you gotta remember “vitamins” is just a dumbed down term to refer to fats and compounds. It’s not actually like food or anything nourishing for the hair. Like a lot of haircare stuff has vitamin e in it, which is supposed to help protect hair from hot blow drying damage and also make it shiny. A lot of the stuff is also moisturizers for your scalp.
- Skull giver ( @skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl ) 10•14 days ago
I always thought the point was for the vitamins to be absorbed by your skin. Human skin absorbs all kinds of stuff so as long as the vitamins make contact it sort of makes sense?
Though I suppose for most people it won’t have much of an impact unless you have a severe vitamin deficiency.
I didn’t know that. I am definitely going to keep this in mind now.
- Melatonin ( @Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) 2•12 days ago
PH numbers in any hair washing/conditioning product that gets rinsed out.
You end up with the PH of the water, people.
Vitamins yeah that’s no good.
Things like fruit, honey, or flowers must be good though right?
I mean, my wife’s honey pomegranate and hybiscus body scrub must be amazing with all that fruity yummy stuff.
- Umbrias ( @Umbrias@beehaw.org ) 1•12 days ago
They just smell nice, your skin is dead and you’re not retrieving anything from it. Just eat the fruits and veggies.
- finn_der_mensch ( @finn_der_mensch@discuss.tchncs.de ) 40•13 days ago
VPNs for internet access, at least the way they are advertised
- arefx ( @arefx@lemmy.ml ) 16•13 days ago
I’m sure plenty of them have nice little deals with the NSA lol
- dan ( @dan@upvote.au ) 2•12 days ago
I hate that these commercial providers are the first thing people think of when they hear “VPN” these days, rather than the actual main use case for a VPN (connecting to a remote network, like a work network, from another location).
- Lettuce eat lettuce ( @Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml ) 35•14 days ago
Any “quick fix/all-in-one” fitness or nutrition solutions. While there are minute optimizations for elite athletes, 99.99% of the population can adhere to the general consensus of nutrition and health science.
- Do something that gets your heart rate up for at least 30 minutes a day. Speed walk, bike, row, shoot hoops, jump rope, doesn’t matter, just get your heart pumping hard for at least half an hour a day.
- Roughly a third of your food should be fresh leafy greens & veggies. A third should be whole grains and unprocessed starches and sugars like sweet potato and fresh fruit. The final third should be a protein. Lean meat like fish or chicken, or if you’re veg/vegan, beans, tofu, seeds, peas, etc.
- To build strength, general bodyweight exercises combined with stretching is fine for most people. If you wanna get really strong, get a few kettle bells or adjustable dumbells on the used market for $50-$100. You don’t need an expensive fitness club membership or one of those all-in-one $2,000+ fancy machines that mounts on your wall.
- Don’t drink often, don’t smoke, don’t pound stimulants like caffeine or nicotine.
- Brush your teeth well.
- Get 6-8 hours a night of good quality sleep.
- Keep your brain engaged, read, play music, play games, learn a language, etc.
I’m speaking from experience, because I have fallen for stuff over the years that promised fast results and optimal methods with minimal effort. Fact is, unless you’re training for the Olympics or you have very specific heath conditions, those basic bullet points will cover the vast majority if general health and fitness.
- boonhet ( @boonhet@lemm.ee ) 1•12 days ago
If you want to get really strong, you might want protein and creatine supplements to speed up your progress, but even that’s not necessary and they only speed things up a little.
- HelixDab2 ( @HelixDab2@lemm.ee ) 1•13 days ago
one of those all-in-one $2,000+ fancy machines that mounts on your wall.
Actually about $4000 to start, plus the cost of the weight plates, bars (I prefer Ivanko), Iron Grip dumbbell sets, and so on.
In almost all cases, it’s cheaper to have a gym membership at a decent hardcore gym.
There are a lot of things you simply can’t do with bodyweight alone. And you can’t do it with just a couple kettlebells and adjustable dumbbells either. Having a lot of strength and muscle mass when you’re young is a very strong predictor of health in old age, since past the age of about 40, people just start losing mass and strength; the more you have before that, the better off you are.
- Lettuce eat lettuce ( @Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml ) 1•13 days ago
I said $2,000+ to encompass even more expensive machines/setups.
I never said bodyweight or a kettlebell set could provide exercises for every possible movement or strength vector.
I said that the vast majority of people don’t need anything more than those to build a healthy level of fitness. And given that the average cost of a gym membership in the US is around $50 per month, after a few months, their used kettle bells or simple dumbell set has already paid for itself.
And weights last basically forever unless they are severely damaged, so zero maintenance cost.
Nothing wrong with going more hardcore if that’s your thing, but that’s not at all necessary to build a solid base of strength and general fitness.
- Umbrias ( @Umbrias@beehaw.org ) 1•12 days ago
Body weight exercises can build plenty of muscle. You only need specialized muscle targeting once you’re body building. For health body weight exercises are ideal, targeting individual muscles is not as useful to fitness as training many muscles in tandem for common movements.
- ssm ( @ssm@lemmy.sdf.org ) 32•13 days ago
Not “snakeoil” per say; employers will care about your history of education: but as an aspiring computer engineer currently in CC looking to move to a university, I’ve learned exactly 0 useful things at community college. Outside of the piece of paper you get at the end, it’s all useless busywork, testing how much bullshit you can put up with. Everything useful I’ve learned in life has been for free, provided kindly by passionate communities. Hopefully this changes in university.
I think the value employers place in modern education in the United States is snakeoil, however.
- biribiri11 ( @biribiri11@lemmy.ml ) 7•13 days ago
I’ve learned exactly 0 useful things at community college.
Funnily enough, this is why I left my university and went to a CC. The opportunities for me at a CC have been much greater (especially when it comes to part-time employment positions). The smaller course sizes in my digital design classes in Quartus Prime (which were not present in the lower division curriculum at my original university) allowed me to excel so much that I ended up as a TA for my class. In addition, because I wasn’t asphyxiating myself in a tiny auditorium of 400 people, I found it much easier to approach my professors 1 on 1 to talk about physics outside my course curriculum, which has helped me network and prepare to line up REUs next year. I feel as though the people at my CC are also more down to earth and hardworking than those at my university. The student leadership there didn’t feel as daunting, and felt action-oriented (as opposed to being a pure popularity contest), so I was able to join student government. What I have been achieving over the course of 6 months at a CC is infinitely better than what I was getting at a full university, and I am no longer depressed.
Everyone’s experience is different. In my case, my original university was highly hyped, and very expensive, but left me sorely disappointed, and I was not happy with what I’d be learning according to my course roadmap.
- Squirrel ( @Squirrel@thelemmy.club ) English5•13 days ago
I definitely learned useful things in community college – at least in so far as general education courses can be considered useful. There were some duds, of course. However, I don’t feel like I got much more out of university classes of the same level.
With that being said, you may just have the misfortune of attending a lackluster school.
- mexicancartel ( @mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English3•13 days ago
Classic computer science thingy. You learn nothing at all there if you already passionately learn programming
- UpperBroccoli ( @UpperBroccoli@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 30•13 days ago
Anything sold by Gwyneth Paltrow in her online shop, which I will not name here so as not to promote it. In the best case, goods sold there will be harmless and entirely useless. In the worst case, they will cause serious harm.
- Margot Robbie ( @MargotRobbie@lemm.ee ) 3•12 days ago
Well. There goes my business plan of selling body part flavored candles and butt coffee.
- limelight79 ( @limelight79@lemm.ee ) 2•12 days ago
She did a bit on Colbert that was a joint venture between her business and his spoof of her business. Either she’s extremely clueless and didn’t realize his fake store is mocking her real store, or she knows it’s snake oil and is continuing to sell it.
- interolivary ( @interolivary@beehaw.org ) 2•12 days ago
Probably the latter. Seems like a cynical marketing ploy, really
- protist ( @protist@mander.xyz ) English26•14 days ago
Vitamin and mineral supplements. You only need supplementation if you have a specific deficiency, and deficiencies are not extremely common. Most people who take supplements do not need them and are just peeing out all the extra things they’re putting in their bodies while shelling out ridiculous prices to “natural remedy” companies.
If you think you have a deficiency, explain why to a doctor. A blood test to know for sure is simple. A doctor will know what kind of supplementation would best serve you, and there may be an underlying reason that can be treated to fix it. Also eat some god damn vegetables you fat little piggy
- finn_der_mensch ( @finn_der_mensch@discuss.tchncs.de ) 23•13 days ago
- Except vitamin D, deficiency is very widespread
- And iron for most women
- And sometimes magnesium for sports (which we should all do)
- HelixDab2 ( @HelixDab2@lemm.ee ) 1•13 days ago
I’m D deficient. I took D supplements for a long time; m D levels never significantly increased.
- JustEnoughDucks ( @JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl ) 1•12 days ago
n=1, best study ever.
- HelixDab2 ( @HelixDab2@lemm.ee ) 1•12 days ago
When you look at large-scale studies of OTC vitamins, you quickly realize that the absorption on most of them is very poor; they don’t really move the needle very much. In most cases, you will be better off if you address vitamin and micronutrient deficiencies through diet rather than attempting supplementation.
- Elise ( @xilliah@beehaw.org ) 6•14 days ago
Perhaps you can help me with a question? I don’t see any way to meet the daily recommend amount of vitamins. Iirc to get enough vitamin k I’d have to eat 200g of spinach every day or some such. Then we haven’t covered the other stuff yet.
So what am I not getting here?
- protist ( @protist@mander.xyz ) English5•13 days ago
Are you finding yourself deficient in vitamin K based on some symptom you’re experiencing? Vitamin K is in soybeans, cashews, broccoli, chicken, grapes, blueberries, and a bunch of oils, including soybean, olive, and canola oils, and the list goes on and on. Vitamin K deficiency in adults is extremely rare.
Like every other vitamin and mineral, eating average healthy (and even lots of unhealthy) foods will meet your RDA.
- No1 ( @No1@aussie.zone ) 1•13 days ago
If you want a rabbit hole to go down, look into how RDIs/RDAs are arrived at…
- howrar ( @howrar@lemmy.ca ) 1•11 days ago
200g of spinach sounds like a very reasonable amount for a single meal. I don’t see the problem here.
- Elise ( @xilliah@beehaw.org ) 1•10 days ago
Every single day. And then there’s still other vitamins to cover.
- howrar ( @howrar@lemmy.ca ) 1•10 days ago
Spinach has a lot more than just vitamin k, and so does everything else you eat. It would do you some good to actually record what you eat on an average day and take a look at their total nutritional content. A varied diet consisting of mostly whole foods will almost guarantee that you meet your daily needs. If your particular diet doesn’t, this exercise would reveal where the holes are. I’m willing to bet it’s a lot easier to patch up then you think.
Also, it seems that you only need 25g of spinach to reach your daily needs. That’s a ridiculously tiny amount of spinach. Considering that vitamin K is fat-soluble and can be stored, a single 200g meal of spinach will satisfy your vitamin k needs for over a week.
Sources: USDA says spinach has 483µg of vitamin K per 100g spinach. Health Canada recommends 120µg of vitamin K per day for an adult male. FDA also uses 120µg for the purposes of nutrition labels.
- Elise ( @xilliah@beehaw.org ) 2•10 days ago
Thanks for the tip I might definitely do that. That being said vitamin k and spinach are just examples, I can’t recall exactly what it was. But I do know I’ve looked it up many times over the years, and every time came to the conclusion that I should ignore whatever the values said, because it made no sense at all. Like who knows perhaps it was kale or sum.
- dotslashme ( @dotslashme@infosec.pub ) English4•13 days ago
Agreed, but just FYI, if you want minerals and vitamins, eat innards, more specifically liver.
What about that protein powder? my brother is mad into it.
- protist ( @protist@mander.xyz ) English7•13 days ago
Protein powder is a calorically dense food supplement, not a vitamin or mineral supplement
- Snot Flickerman ( @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) English6•14 days ago
Unless you’re vegan, you’re probably already getting more protein than you need.
Protein is needed for building muscles but most meatheads in the USA just eat all the protein and don’t do enough of the exercise.
Only about 24% of people in the US aren’t “overweight” to “obese.”
Literally almost nobody needs this fucking protein because almost fuck-nobody is exercising.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States
For the following statistics, “adult” is defined as age 20 and over. The overweight + obese percentages for the overall US population are higher reaching 39.4% in 1997, 44.5% in 2004, 56.6% in 2007, 63.8% (adults) and 17% (children) in 2008,in 2010 65.7% of American adults and 17% of American children are overweight or obese, and 63% of teenage girls become overweight by age 11. In 2013 the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that 57.6% of all American citizens were overweight or obese. The organization estimated that 3/4 of the American population would likely be overweight or obese by 2020. According to research done by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, it is estimated that around 40% of Americans are considered obese, and 18% are considered severely obese as of 2019. Severe obesity is defined as a BMI over 35 in the study. Their projections say that about half of the US population (48.9%) will be considered obese and nearly 1 in 4 (24.2%) will be considered severely obese by 2030.
What many US citizens need is portion control and regular exercise.
- Buttermilk ( @Buttermilk@lemmy.ml ) 6•14 days ago
Seems like you just have an axe to grind about fat people. Protein is not the deciding factor in weight gain, calories are, so I don’t know why you think a link to the wiki page about obesity would be convincing that protein powder is snake oil.
Even when you coincide that it is relevant you dismiss with little justification. Also BMI is not a great metric for individuals, many that have a lot of muscle are measured as overweight because there is a lot more to bodies that height and mass.
Can you justify why protein powder is snake oil in line with the other things in the thread? I will grant that most people have more than enough protein in a regular diet, but stats about obesity says literally nothing about if powder can help your workouts give the results you’re hoping for.
- limitedduck ( @limitedduck@awful.systems ) 6•14 days ago
While the obesity part is kind of a digression, I think they were pretty clear: protein powder is a waste if you have a typical American diet and are not exercising, which is apparently most Americans. While protein powder on its own isn’t snake oil, it effectively is for most people.
- Snot Flickerman ( @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) English5•14 days ago
My point was that people who are likely obese are busy trying to suck down protein shakes when they probably already have enough protein. Like I said, if you’re in the USA and not explicitly vegan, you probably already get enough protein from your daily diet to build muscle.
When less than 25% of the country is a healthy weight, people don’t need to build muscle, they need to lose weight.
I am fucking fat myself, maybe that’s why I feel so strongly about this. America has a massive obesity problem and it’s tied to our eating habits (especially overly processed foods… like protein shakes) and we’re not going to find out way out of it by buying protein shakes.
The protein supplement industry alone is currently a $6.57 billion industry. Are you really going to tell me the only people buying them are that sliver of people with healthy weights?
If you’re overweight and want to lose weight, you don’t need a protein supplement. Yes, it’s more complicated than calories in/calories out but the reality is and has been 1. portion sizes in USA are out of control, 2. the vast majority of the country have weight issues not muscle issues, and 3. Excess protein doesn’t help you lose weight.
The less than 25% of the country that has a normal weight is not the source of the $6.57 billion dollar market cap of the protein supplement industry.
But sure, it’s not that fatasses are focusing on the wrong fucking things, like protein. The vast majority of Americans like to think they would pump iron but most fucking don’t and the evidence is that over 75% of us are overweight, obese, and morbidly obese.
Gyms would cease to function if all the people who paid for them actually tried to use them.
Finally, the men who suck these down are trying to look like men who suck down tons of steroids. Those results are not achievable with protein and exercise alone, thus making protein a snake oil to cover for steroid abuse. Steroid abuse is real and hiding behind this “you just need more protein” bullshit is a farce. The number of men who claimed to be gaining insane muscles while only “exercising and eating healthy” to only have it come out that they abuse the fuck out of steroids is too damn high.
See: Elon Musk’s distended gut and man-boobs from sucking down steroids but not actually putting in the work of lifting. Joe Rogan’s distended stomach is looking pretty rough these days, too.
- Jeroen ( @Jeroen@lemmings.world ) 1•13 days ago
You seem quite invested so I have a question. I have learned that protein fills more and therefore reduces appetite. Won’t a protein shake be a relatively healthy option which reduces snacking and overeating of less healthy meals? This has also anecdotally been my experience but I haven’t done it very much.
- howrar ( @howrar@lemmy.ca ) 1•11 days ago
I’ve had the opposite experience myself. Protein shakes keep me full for about as long as water. Protein rich whole foods are much more satiating for the same quantity of protein.
- Revan343 ( @Revan343@lemmy.ca ) 1•13 days ago
Is your brother also mad into lifting weights? If not, they have no need for protein powder
yes.
- retrieval4558 ( @retrieval4558@mander.xyz ) 26•13 days ago
Homeopathic remedies
- HobbitFoot ( @HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club ) English5•13 days ago
At least you’ll never have to worry about overdosing on it.
- Trebuchet ( @Trebuchet@lemm.ee ) 25•13 days ago
AI, particularly in how the likes of microsoft are marketing it to businesses.
- Liam Mayfair ( @LiamMayfair@lemmy.sdf.org ) 5•12 days ago
ML/LLMs applied sensibly is definitely not snake oil.
Peddling ML/LLMs as AI and saying it will be the biggest paradigm shift ever seen is definitely snake oil and a lot of people just looking to capitalise on the latest fad, just like blockchain, “Big Data” or the metaverse.
Tech companies were struggling to raise funds in the bearish market that followed the pandemic tech boom. They were desperately looking for something big and shiny to use to persuade investors into loosening their wallets, and they’ve struck gold with “AI” because it sounds so cool and it can “basically do anything”, including replacing loads of staff with bots. Investors are being very easily bamboozled by this. Of course FOMO plays a big role here too.
I think “AI” is close to its peak of inflated expectations on the Gartner hype cycle curve below and it will take a while for people to wake up to the realisation that the “Bright AI-fuelled Future” they had been sold is nothing more than a thin wrapper around a ChatGPT API with a pretty bow on top.
- Snot Flickerman ( @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) English22•14 days ago
Full Self-Driving: For sure next year… maybe.
“Artificial Intelligence”: CEO’s create a copy of themselves in a computer, creating an expert bullshitter program.
Customer Service: Most pre-recorded phone loops are actually built to try to frustrate people into giving up and not getting their issue resolved. Further, they record calls not because they care about your experience, but so they can collate tons of data to further exploit you and their workers. CEOs have purposefully insulated themselves from ever directly having to deal with a customer and hide behind “well we didn’t tell employees to break the law!” while demanding employees hit numbers that… aren’t… possibe… without… breaking… the… law.
If it’s from a corporation and the PR says its to “benefit consumers” it’s fucking Snake Oil, by default.
- zout ( @zout@fedia.io ) 21•13 days ago
CBD oil. It doesn’t matter which exotic ailment you’re talking about, someone will ask you if you’ve tried it and that they think it might help.
- Snot Flickerman ( @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) English14•13 days ago
Also, CBD honestly needs the same warnings as Grapefruit since it works on the same metabolic pathways and can decrease effectiveness of certain drugs.
…like my cancer drugs.
If your drugs say to avoid grapefruit… You should probably consider skipping CBD as well.
- Chuymatt ( @Chuymatt@beehaw.org ) 7•13 days ago
Had a patient with a really bad reaction to a topical chemotherapy agent because he was moisturizing with CBD oil and wasn’t telling anyone about it. In trying to understand what was going on, it turns out that CBD specifically slows the metabolism of this particular chemotherapy, so it was building up in his skin.
- Snot Flickerman ( @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) English2•13 days ago
Oi vey tell me about it.
I’ve gotten way more wary about the stuff I put in my body since I got on these cancer drugs.
Increased depression is actually a symptom of my cancer, and I had a lot of hallucinogenic mushroom caps I had stored away for a rainy day, and a friend suggested maybe that would help. Recent studies as well as our own personal experiences spoke to the idea that a good “trip” can help alleviate depression.
But my immediate reaction was… there’s basically been no studies done on the interactions between psilocybin and the drug I am taking. Literally, who the fuck knows what could happen? The reminder that I had them actually lead me to give them away because, fuck me, I’m not risking it.
- Chuymatt ( @Chuymatt@beehaw.org ) 2•13 days ago
Yeah, a lot of the chemicals in mushrooms tend to metabolize through the liver, and so do so many other drugs. Good job, taking care of yourself. Best of luck.
- Snot Flickerman ( @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) English2•13 days ago
Thanks for the kind words. Cheers.
- Default_Defect ( @Default_Defect@midwest.social ) English2•12 days ago
And pomegranate too, at least for my anti-rejection meds.
- flamingo_pinyata ( @flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz ) 3•13 days ago
CBD does … something. It makes me sleepy. So at least for some people it can serve as a sleep aid.
Not to me though I just tried it out of curiosity, I have no desire to be even more sleepy
- dotslashme ( @dotslashme@infosec.pub ) English2•13 days ago
It gave me massive munchies and not much else.
- cor ( @cor@slrpnk.net ) 2•13 days ago
this is the first thing that came to my mind too….
there is some medicinal value to it, but usually not what they claim it to be, and usually not in the form that it’s in…. - Elise ( @xilliah@beehaw.org ) 1•14 days ago
I’ve seen one of those fake bottles. It seemed too cheap to me so I looked up the ingredient dosage and it was near nothing. Real cbd oil is quite expensive.
Personally I can recommend cbd pills. It’s easy and you can dose it very precisely to your liking. In the nl you can get them over the counter, as is the case in many other places I imagine.