I respect the work of Scott Adams as one of the greatest cartoonists of my lifetime, and I wish his family and friends the strength to move forward and to keep the good memories of him in their hearts and thoughts until they hopefully meet again. Everyone we lose to cancer is a tragedy.
My very limited personal memories of him are not the one of a kind person, though.
He might have had just a very bad day, but I had to endure this guy on a six-hour flight in the early 2000s, and after he insulted basically everyone from Hispanic people to people of colour and even shushed the lady behind us when she said she can’t listen to his bullshit anymore, I took a deep breath, looked him in the eyes, and told him I fought in two wars, and the only thing that happens if you keep hate for your "enemies" in your heart is that it will eat you from the inside. Let it go.
I wished him the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other.
He laughed right in my face and told me I don’t get it and that he is going to die of old age. He was for sure a fighter and stubborn of his own views.
But in the end, he died at a young age, with hate-fuelled cancer inside his prostate and bones suffering from the same mental condition millions of people on the Internet do day by day.
People are disturbed not by things but by their view of things.
And People already knew 1846 years ago it is how it is.
Marcus Aurelius started each day telling himself: ‘I shall meet with meddling, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, and unsociable people.’
Nothing has changed but the Theater.
People now decide to be disturbed by their view of things over the internet, things that will not matter in their whole lifetime for them personally in real life, and Scott Adams is unfortunately the perfect example.
He was disturbed by his view, that half of people of colour in the US were ungrateful and "anti-white", tho he lived to the age of 68 without ever being harmed by a single black person in his life, as far as I know.
The death of Scott Adams is many things at once. A tragedy, a warning, and a foreshadowing of what happens if you cannot accept the world as it is and just be happy with what you got.
Life is precious. Don’t throw it away keeping hate in your heart and enemies in your head, trying to change how the world works or what our species is, a bunch of assholes all sharing the same fate.
Deal with it or die miserably like Scott. You have a choice here.
Choose your friends, enemies and fights wisely is all the advise I can give anyone.
Someone in the Pentagon should quickly get the presidential crayon kit and send the Secretary of War a pretty hand-drawn picture why this is bad on the PC Venezuela Signal Group.
I am not sure the Secretary knows the difference between Warrior Spirit and Warrior Spirits, which is, probably to his surprise no hard liquor brand,but the soul that leaves the body after your soldiers starved to death or died from embarrassment, having to fight over scraps with Ukrainian refugees and poor and/or old German people at a local food bank.
For the old KGB Russians like Putin, this must be amazingly joyful to see. American Soldiers are advised to go to Food Banks, while the Commander-in-Chief could easily feed the whole army steak dinner for two months straight, flown in in his newly gifted private 747, with what he made in Crypto only during the first half of 2025.
Some of the broader claims like offering "many health benefits of longer workouts" or significant "strength" gains might be a bit ahead of what the current research consistently shows for these short bouts, especially when compared to traditional, longer exercise programs where, for instance, evidence for maximal strength gains is stronger , or where studies on snacks show more "modest" effects for some outcomes.
Regulators in the EU and Apple's App Review team are increasingly focused on the accuracy of health and wellness claims. To build more trust and avoid potential flags, it could be beneficial for you to refine the messaging to be more specific about the well-supported benefits, like convenience, breaking up sitting , and improvements in certain cardiometabolic markers for inactive folks, while being more nuanced about direct comparisons to comprehensive, longer workouts.
Highlighting the time efficiency and accessibility without overpromising on the extent of all health outcomes should be a more solid path for long-term success and credibility.
You will also likely run into legal problems, if you offer the same kind of exercises without taking age, chronic, and pre-existing conditions into the equation of what exercises to offer and do not offer a clear warning for these kind of users, that they should consult a doctor before using the app, what exercises might be appropriate for them and which are not.
Thanks for the thought provoking comment! Yes I totally agree. I need to fix the marketing a bit to highlight what the app is good at and not exaggerate what it can do. In reality one cannot compare a proper workout with this. Its for different people and different aims. My aim is just to get people moving and let them see the benefits of exercise. Anyway, thanks I will update.
I mean, the US President basically lives on a Golf Course when he is not on vacation, signing EOs in the white house in his free time.
And we don't see any signs of PD with him, like repeating the same words over and over in a constant slur of nonsense, lecturing journalists about MS-13 Tattoos that are clearly not photo-shopped and totally do exist and clearly his overall sense of reality is impeccable, as his AI generated Gaza Strip promo video and a picture of him as being the Pope proves.
I don't see any validity in this study at all. FAKE NEWS.
In my life, I have battled two severe and life-threatening illnesses. Despite emerging victorious and preserving my life, the relentless pursuit of medical interventions and treatments had a profound and detrimental impact on my cognitive abilities.
I take a lot of photos and videos. I get looked at funny. It’s ok.
Frequently, people inquire about my motivations for taking photographs, wearing meta glasses, and consistently capturing whatever interests me.
They don’t know at some point in the foreseeable future, viewing these photographs and videos becomes the sole source of emotions and memories from the past that I am unable to access voluntarily in the quantities and durations I desire with the damage to my brain that comes with surviving, and I think in that context what I do and enjoy is not unreasonable. I’m not a glasshole.
So the next time you see someone making excessive use of their phone camera or even a more traditional one keep in mind you know nothing about them and their lives.
They could have a perfectly fine reason for what they are doing and your only job is to get out the way or smile if you get asked if you want to be in the photo.
I’m probably in a million photos of Japanese tourists and I enjoy the thought that someone in Japan shows the photo I took of them to friends and family and says I remember this guy, he was friendly and took this photo of us I really like and then we made one together. Germans are good people.
Photography doesn’t need words or translations, it speaks for itself and therefore is able to build bridges between cultures. I find that beautiful.
Also nobody can watch my memories when I’m dead when they are on meat storage only.
If my nieces ever want to find out who their uncle was when they get older they will have an endless stream of material to access and a portal to my view of the past as it was the present, and hopefully make better decisions than we do currently.
Looking this unfold and watching in real-time is how I imagine the German people pretended it wasn’t going to be that bad until they came to deport your Jewish neighbors you liked and who were good people and not criminals, and if you complained you got put on the same train, realising you should have grabbed a gun and killed the whole nazi leadership when they openly started to dismantle press freedom and threatening openly to execute the opposition on national tv.
By the time the us military shoots your protesting mother dead in front of you there will not be anyone left to report on it.
Go outside start protesting or be complicit by keep ignoring what’s happening, you have a choice. Just don’t pretend you didn’t know or realize what happens.
Interesting piece, but the narrative of Musk personally hitting a "suppress Loomer" button feels a bit too simplistic, though maybe not entirely wrong.
On one hand, you absolutely have plausible deniability via standard X operations:
"Freedom of Speech, Not Reach": This is literally their stated policy. Content deemed "awful but lawful" gets visibility filtered. Given Loomer's history across platforms , hitting policy thresholds isn't surprising.
Algorithmic Blowback: Musk himself cited high block/mute rates from "credible" (verified) users tanking reach and triggering spam filters. Loomer complained about spam labels , which fits this. Provocative accounts likely attract negative signals.
Technical Glitches: X is notoriously buggy. Verification/Premium features breaking, especially around affiliate links (like the speculated "ConservativeOG" issue ), isn't out of character. Automated account locks/restrictions happen constantly due to generic "unusual activity" flags.
However, dismissing the NYT's core claim entirely ignores:
Musk's Track Record: He does intervene directly and target critics. His control is absolute. The "Evil Housekeeper Problem" applies. He has the keys.
The Timing/Cluster: The H-1B spat immediately followed by specific, similar issues (verification, monetization, reach) for Loomer and ~13 other conservative critics is... convenient timing for purely random glitches or standard enforcement suddenly kicking in for all of them simultaneously.
Targeted Automation: Direct manual suppression is inefficient. But could Musk have ordered tweaks to the algorithm or enforcement rules targeting patterns associated with his critics? E.g., changing spam filter sensitivity, adjusting criteria for verification removal based on certain speech, weighting blocks from certain user groups differently. That's still intervention, just automated.
Opacity: We simply don't know what happens internally at X. Musk's "spam" explanation is unfalsifiable without internal data.
My personal conclusion. Direct, manual suppression by Musk seems less likely than a combination of standard algorithmic/policy effects and maybe some technical debt hitting at an opportune time. But the possibility of indirect intervention (Musk ordering system changes to target critics) fueled by the public spat can't be ruled out, especially given the timing and Musk's history. The NYT might be connecting dots without a smoking gun, but the pattern is suspicious enough that just blaming "the algorithm" feels incomplete.
The purple you saw in those onions is literally a neurological glitch. Your brain inventing a color that doesn’t exist in the spectrum. When red (long) and blue (short) wavelengths hit without green (mid), your visual cortex makes up purple as a placeholder. Your avoidance wasn’t caused by the color itself (a mental construct), but by the brain using this imaginary hue as a proxy for past onion trauma.
This mirrors how we treat UI error messages. A "404" doesn’t cause missing data, it’s just the system’s way of flagging underlying issues. The real causal chain was anthocyanins → wavelength reflection → neural pattern-matching → memory recall. Purple was the middleware, not the root process.
Fun twist. Those fried onions’ brown does have causal ties to flavor. Maillard reaction products directly interact with taste receptors. The universe trolls us with color semantics, but chemistry always wins.
It might not exist in the spectrum, does that mean it doesn't exist? You're arguing and conflating two different things here. On the one hand, you're implicitly arguing that a colour can't exist unless it corresponds to a singular frequency of light, which I've already argued against. This is no more meaningful than arguing that tables and chairs are mental constructs because it's all quarks and electrons at the end of the day. Emergent properties exist and can have causal effects, most philosophers and scientists are in agreement about this.
The other is that a qualia or the mental experience of seeing purple is the same thing as perceiving purple as distinct from other colours in a physical object. I'm not talking about the qualia. In fact, I hate the concept of qualia, because whenever it's introduced into philosophical discussions, the discussion devolves into epicycles of meaningsless discussion of definitions and nomenclature and ends up going nowhere.
No, the purple was there. You say all that was there was some chemicals that only reflects certain wavelengths. I say this is what defines the emergent physical property we call the colour purple. You say electrons and quarks, I say tables and chairs. Both are accurate, and certainly not in conflict.
You might say, so how is this distinct from qualia? Well, for the qualia of seeing purple, there is no way even in principle to decide whether my qualia is the same as your qualia. But I can still look at a red onion and tell you it's purple, and you likely would agree unless you're colour blind. So this property of purple is, unlike a qualia, objective, not subjective.
Your critique reveals a crucial conflation between structural emergence and perceptual categorization, a distinction that clarifies why "purple" (as a color category) lacks the causal efficacy you ascribe to it. If you gift me some of your valuable reading time, let's dissect this.
1. Two Types of Emergence
- Structural emergence (tables/chairs): Arises from physical interactions between components. A table's causal power (holding objects) derives from its atomic structure creating macroscopic rigidity. These properties are observer-independent. A laser would detect the table's structural integrity even with no humans present.
- Perceptual categorization (color): Emerges from evolved neurobiology + cultural reinforcement. The "purple" label applied to red onions is a compression algorithm for "reflects 400-450nm + 600-700nm with minimal 500-600nm". This categorization has no causal power beyond its role as an information tag.
2. The "Objective" Color Fallacy
Your intersubjective agreement about purple stems from:
- Shared cone cell biology: 94% of humans have L/M/S photopsins with peak sensitivities at ~560nm (red), ~530nm (green), ~420nm (blue)
- Cultural conditioning: Modern color lexicons standardized via Pantone systems and CIE charts
Yet this consensus doesn't make purple an emergent physical property.
Consider this.
The Himba tribe uses "zoozu" for dark colors (blue/purple/black) and doesn't distinguish purple as a category
Industrial paint manufacturers recognize 12,000+ color terms, far beyond basic spectral labels
Your "purple" onion would register as #6A1B9A in HEX, 17.3° hue in CIELAB, arbitrary numerical tags, not causal agents
Contains zero causal nodes requiring "purple" as an explanatory variable. Replace "purple" with "wavelength combo X" and the physics/neurology remains identical. Contrast with a table's causal power. Replace "table" with "carbon lattice configuration Y" and you lose the explanatory utility.
4. The Qualia Dodge
You're right to reject qualia-centric debates, but the alternative isn't reifying color categories. Instead, recognize that:
a) The onion's surface selectively reflects wavelengths
b) Your visual system detects this pattern
c) Your brain applies a culturally-learned label
d) The label activates memory associations
The causal oomph lives in the biochemical aversion pathways, not the color label. Change the label (call it "ploobalooba") while keeping wavelength data and aversion remains. Change the wavelengths while keeping the label, and behavior shifts.
5. The Real Emergent Culprit
What does have causal power here is pattern recognition heuristics. Your brain evolved to:
- Create color categories as survival shortcuts ("red" = blood/danger)
- Link these to outcomes via associative learning
These heuristics are genuine emergent properties with causal effects, but they're neural algorithms, not spectral properties. The purple label is their UI, not their codebase.
TL;DR
You're mistaking the map (color categories) for the territory (wavelength interactions). Tables derive causal power from structural emergence, "purple" derives consensus from neuro-cultural emergence. One explains why plates don't fall through surfaces, the other why we argue about onions at barbecues.
The majority of American (voters) choose Trump. The statement is still true.
You understood what I meant tho, as you instantly provided stats relating to the vote and not in the context of all Americans which would also include the people who are not eglible to vote but can still be Americans.
I have no idea what the will of all Americans is, but I can confidently and truthfully state the Americans that voted chose Trump by majority.
Not good at math but pretty sure 49.8% is more than 48.3%.
Example:
The most votes cast went to Trump so the majority voted for him.
Super interesting that English and German speaking populations have such a different interpretation on such an important topic of our democracies, that this caused an argument between us, when it really shouldn't because I need to respect your interpretation because it's true and vice versa.
Had worse starts into my Friday. Thanks for taking time out of your day for this exchange.
Please, if you (not you specifically) rely on checkmarks that in some cases have been given as personal favor or to amplify specific voices despite their extremist views, to verify legitimate sources of information, that’s a general educational problem in understanding how to identify legitimate sources in the first place. This should actually be taught in school, because it’s really Fkin important, but isn’t.
The floodgates of disinformation on Twitter were already open and actively abused before the new system. The old checkmark system was beyond flawed and the new one is as well. Just that this version fills the pockets of the man who is desperately trying to destroy the platform he didn’t want to buy in the first place to minimize losses on his way out.
I don’t mind people wanting to support Twitter or Elon. And they should not be ridiculed for doing so.
But I think as a society the deciding factor if your valuable contribution is heard or seen should not be a monthly subscription. Twitter blue is inaccessible for a large part of the population of this planet. Poor people completely loose the ability to make valuable submissions on the platform and participate if they are drowned under people paying 8 bucks to better troll others or push their views that wouldn’t get traction without the checkmark.
The solution is not to change Twitter. It’s getting away from relying on this specific platform as its algorithm manipulates you into a worse, less critically thinking version of yourself.
My very limited personal memories of him are not the one of a kind person, though.
He might have had just a very bad day, but I had to endure this guy on a six-hour flight in the early 2000s, and after he insulted basically everyone from Hispanic people to people of colour and even shushed the lady behind us when she said she can’t listen to his bullshit anymore, I took a deep breath, looked him in the eyes, and told him I fought in two wars, and the only thing that happens if you keep hate for your "enemies" in your heart is that it will eat you from the inside. Let it go.
I wished him the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other.
He laughed right in my face and told me I don’t get it and that he is going to die of old age. He was for sure a fighter and stubborn of his own views.
But in the end, he died at a young age, with hate-fuelled cancer inside his prostate and bones suffering from the same mental condition millions of people on the Internet do day by day.
People are disturbed not by things but by their view of things. And People already knew 1846 years ago it is how it is.
Marcus Aurelius started each day telling himself: ‘I shall meet with meddling, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, and unsociable people.’
Nothing has changed but the Theater.
People now decide to be disturbed by their view of things over the internet, things that will not matter in their whole lifetime for them personally in real life, and Scott Adams is unfortunately the perfect example.
He was disturbed by his view, that half of people of colour in the US were ungrateful and "anti-white", tho he lived to the age of 68 without ever being harmed by a single black person in his life, as far as I know.
The death of Scott Adams is many things at once. A tragedy, a warning, and a foreshadowing of what happens if you cannot accept the world as it is and just be happy with what you got.
Life is precious. Don’t throw it away keeping hate in your heart and enemies in your head, trying to change how the world works or what our species is, a bunch of assholes all sharing the same fate.
Deal with it or die miserably like Scott. You have a choice here. Choose your friends, enemies and fights wisely is all the advise I can give anyone.
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