Lilycount 62
I think this matches the highest lilycount previously recorded.
I think this matches the highest lilycount previously recorded.
Jackie is drinking a birthday old fashioned, while I have a Rhinegeist Truth Bomb.
There’s unadvertised live music in the plaza!
A whole bunch of lovely lilies today.
I was tempted to just announce the lilycount as “too many to count,” but Jackie counted 36, and then I got the same number when I counted, so I figure it’s probably accurate.
Things are starting to get serious, lily-bloom-wise speaking.
Two ways I celebrated my birthday:
I got my Sword Master stickers from Lucania Arts!
https://www.etsy.com/shop/LucaniaArts
We study primarily Meyer in our group, so I put the Joachim Meyer sticker on the water bottle that I bring to practice:
But because I’m not particularly good at all the fancy stuff that Meyer teaches, I have a sneaking admiration for Johannes Liechtenauer, whose sword fighting instruction is accessible to any random peasant who happens to pick up a sword, so I put his sticker on my laptop:
Today there are 2 lilies!
Aren’t those glisteny water droplets pretty?
Jackie is working on a tapestry, the title of which is a reference to the effect of the Canadian wildfires on our sunrises and sunsets. With that in mind, here’s a picture of this morning’s sunrise.
The first lily of the summer.
This is rather typical. My activity score is down for two reasons: Too much inactivity today, and too little recovery after yesterday’s workout. :-/
Loch Duart salmon fillets, cooking in coconut oil. Seasoning is equal parts cumin, sage, and hot smoked paprika. I’m expecting great things.
My run was already supposed to be pretty short—about 2.5 miles, across Dohme Park, up First Street to Windsor and then back—but it ended up being even shorter than that, because Ashley wasn’t up to running even that far in the heat of the day.
According to my weather app it was already 75℉ when I got home, and I’ve noticed previously that starting at about 72℉ the dog starts to suffer.
You can see on the map a short spur off to the west just after I started north on First Street. That was where we saw a groundhog, and Ashley really wanted to chase it. I indulged her for a minute, hoping the groundhog would quickly find a place to hide, but it wasn’t to be, and I eventually had to drag Ashley back to the First Street path very much against her will.
Anyway, 1.3 miles is a very short run indeed, but I still spent most of 20 minutes with my heart rate up (average was 141, peak was 169). So, a good workout.
I listened to an unintentionally amusing fitness video a few weeks ago. It was by a body-building guy, and was specifically on cutting weight after a bulk. (Topics that I’m not very interested in, but something to watch while I did my morning exercises.)
What was amusing was the discussion of what macronutrients to cut, when you need to reduce your calories.
Of course you can’t cut protein. That (along with resistance training) is key for keeping your muscle when you’re in a calorie deficit.
You can cut carbs—but not much! That’s what provides the energy you need to do your workouts! And your carbs were probably already low, if you were doing the low-carb thing.
You can cut fat—but not much! You need to get in your essential fatty acids! And your fats were probably already low, for general health reasons.
Now, I’ve gained a bit of weight over these past few years, and would be pleased to get back down to what I weighed in 2016–2021. But I’ve been hesitating to maintain any significant calorie deficit: I’ve reached an age where it’s pretty tough to put on more muscle, so any muscle I lose while dieting might well end up being a permanent loss—which is why I was interested enough to watch this video on the first place.
So, I was a bit daunted. If I can’t cut protein, carbs, or fat, how I am supposed to produce this calorie deficit anyway?
And then I remembered that there is a fourth macronutrient.
So, for a few days now, I’ve been both back on the low-carb thing (not so much for weight as because my nasal congestion has gotten bad again) and avoiding alcohol.
It’s very sad.
Along with avoiding alcohol for the calories, I’ve been keeping an eye on my sleep metrics. Nearly everybody with an Oura ring reports that drinking alcohol messes up their sleep, so I’ve been expecting to see a notable improvement, but so far not. Sleep score isn’t better. Sleep duration isn’t better. HRV isn’t better. My resting heart rate is down, but just because it had been elevated earlier—first when I had a cold, then when I had a guest.
I’ll give it another few days before drawing a conclusion, but I suspect the alcohol had not been negatively impacting my sleep because I never drank very much, and because I tended to finish drinking by fairly early in the evening, so I was pretty much sober by bedtime.
The good news is that the reduced carbs seem to be helping my nasal congestion already (although maybe it’s that the rain has washed a lot of the allergens out of the air).
My brother sent a selfie he’d taken in the coffee shop where he’s staying for the SFWA board meeting and Nebula Awards conference. I wanted to reply, but I was out walking the dog, so I quick captured this image.
After a very congenial week visiting us, my brother and nephew departed for Kansas City and the SFWA Nebula Awards. Today I am back to my usual routine, with multiple dog walks and a workout. Now I’m sitting on the window seat and reading Asimov’s Foundation for the first time since I was a boy.
I came upon a handsome Great Blue Heron at the edge of the pond.
My brother Steven and his son Daniel are visiting, so we’re taking them out for lunch to celebrate our 33rd wedding anniversary.
What if—and hear me out here—instead of trying to bribe women with weird tax credits to try to get them to have more children, we just made it much cheaper and easier to raise a child? Free health care, free education, free day care, mandatory time off to deal with medical or family issues… Stuff like that.
In my experience cats are much better than dogs at realizing when you’re sick and need some rest and comfort. So I’m a bit surprised that Ashley is doing such a good job of it today.
(I just have a cold. No big deal.)
The NYT article linked below talks to several people with anxiety or OCD, and somewhat reasonably comes to the conclusion that the Oura ring and similar devices are not for them.
I have a different perspective.
I wear an Oura ring and check it daily, and I’ve had none of these problems. I take what it tells me seriously, but I never let it override my own opinion on how I’m doing.
One fairly new feature is a warning when your metrics (temperature and resting heart rate in particular) suggest that you might be coming down with something. Even though I’m somewhat prone to hypochondria myself, it hasn’t been a problem for me.
Wednesday this week it warned me that I might be coming down with something. I felt fine, so I was inclined to ignore it. By evening I’d realized that I was coming down with a cold. (I felt pretty crappy all day Thursday. Today I feel nearly all better.) Although I was inclined to ignore it, I did take it seriously enough to skip my workout that day, which was probably a good idea.
I did react rather strongly the first time I got that warning, but only because I was visiting my 92-year-old mother, and didn’t want to risk passing something on to her. So I took the warning seriously enough to get and take a Covid-test and to wear a mask around my mom. Maybe that was an over-reaction—I wasn’t sick—but I am sure happier over-reacting than I would have been under-reacting and passing Covid on to my mom.
My brother teases me constantly for wearing such a thing, but I fall very much in the category of people who think, “Why not have as much information as possible?”
“They were like, ‘This is just not necessary information for a healthy, able-bodied person to have.’”
Source: Do You Have ‘Oura Paranoia’ From Having Too Much Information About Your Body? – The New York Times
As an annoying privacy/security nerd of longstanding, I’m very pleased to hear this:
Plenty of annoying nerds have been ringing alarm bells since the 90s, going on about code and privacy and open source software and FREEDOM, mostly in annoying ways. And it is genuinely annoying, even to me, to say this, but they were right all along.
“Ashley! You have your chin on my clean sweats!”
“I do not!”
Me, to our dog Ashley: “You’re such a good dog! I don’t know a dog that’s good gooder!”
Jackie: “Good better.”
Me: “Man, English is hard even for native speakers.”
I’m pretty down on AI. I view Large Language Models as a very expensive way to generate strings of words. Other things that were called AI when they were purely speculative (for example, chess-playing computers), quit being called AI once the thing actually existed.
I know there are other people who find AI useful as a way to minimize the amount of work they need to do, although again I’m very dubious—as soon as you let AI do something for you without double-checking everything it does, it’s going to screw up badly. (That is, you are going to to use an expensive, environmentally destructive, copyright-thieving tool to screw yourself up badly.)
It’s from that perspective that I can see this odd, narrow use of an LLM perhaps useful. (I actually got this idea from a fitness YouTuber, but he said he was going to delete his video, so I don’t see much value in linking to it.)
His suggestion was to use an LLM as a journaling tool. Each day, in the morning or in the evening, dictate a journal entry to an LLM. Do a kind of a brain dump of all the things that are worrying you or exciting you. List the things you need to do and the things you’re expecting other people to do. List your good ideas. List your long-term plans and your progress on your long-term plans. List your successes, your failures, your anxieties, interesting facts you came upon during the day, and so on. Then, once you’ve finished your brain dump, ask the LLM to organize those lists: Give me a list of things to do today. Give me a list of blind spots I haven’t been thinking of. Suggest a plan of action for addressing my issues. Tell me if there’s any easy way to solve multiple problems with a single action.
Now, I think it’s very unlikely that an LLM is going to come up with anything genuinely insightful in response to these prompts. But here’s the thing: Your journal isn’t going to either. The value of journaling is that you’re regularly thinking about this stuff, and you’re giving yourself a chance to deal with your stresses in a compartmented way that makes them less likely to spill over into areas of your life where they’re more likely to be harmful.
The things LLMs do—like generating summaries, making lists, expanding on ideas, suggesting alternatives—are really risky in any use case where getting it right matters. We all know the stories of people who used an LLM to write a legal brief, and the LLM hallucinated citations to cases, complete with footnotes, that were all lies. But I think in this case, none of those things matter much.
You aren’t required to have footnotes in your journal, or even to tell the truth. If you ask your LLM-supported journal to suggest blind spots that you’ve missed, and its suggestions are all either obvious or completely off-point, it costs you nothing but the 10 seconds you waste reading the list. If you say, “What are the top five things I need to get done today?” and it gives you a list that doesn’t include the very most important thing, you’re probably going to notice and get that thing done anyway.
Without having tried it, I can imagine that this might be a useful tool, or at least a harmless one. If all having the LLM in the background does is provide a bit of novelty that gets you started journaling again, even just that seems worthwhile.
One risk to keep in mind: If you’re telling an LLM things that are confidential—business secrets, personal secrets, other people’s secrets—you can’t have any confidence that the LLM isn’t going to feed all that info right into its training data and spit it out to some other LLM user. But pretty soon we’ll all be able to train up our own personal journaling LLM that doesn’t share its info with others, so I don’t think that’s a long-term problem.
Of course, I’m eliding the ethical problem of LLMs having been trained on stolen texts, but I don’t think that’s something the users are obliged to try to fix on their own. Rather, the creators of LLMs should be forced to turn their revenues over to the copyright holders of the people whose texts were stolen.
If you’ve been journaling with an LLM, I’d be interested to hear about it. And if you know of an adequately powered LLM that can be run on a personal computer without sharing any data off the machine, I’d be interested in hearing about that too.