I hear you on this, but I have come to appreciate that my dreams are not always limited like my real world is. When I had cancer, it got really bad. I could not speak for months. I could barely walk. The constant pain, even on a hefty dose of opioids, was all consuming. Just watching TV took too much energy, so I stared blankly at the wall while my family tried to carry on around me.

But in my dreams? In my dreams I was still me. Once I fell asleep, I could talk, laugh, run, and have the freedom I had lost in life. I could play with my kids. I could spend time with my friends. I could exist without pain.

None of it was real, and in the beginning I cried when I woke up, but the dreams kept coming. It didn’t matter if my real life was not worth living - my dream life carried me. Waking up stopped being a sad thing and instead became what falling asleep used to be. It was a transition to the less interesting part of my life.

I am better now, but I am not the man I was before I got sick. In my dreams, though? The pain is still gone. My energy has returned. My waking life is worth living again, but my dream life is freedom from the shackles of my body.

I am sorry your dreams hurt you. Maybe the day will come that the pain they bring you now becomes a blessing. I hope in time you and your dream life make peace.

Good documentation should, in part, tell people where to click. I have designed software documentation for high performing individuals at leading global companies, and I have designed software and hardware documentation for minimum wage fast food workers with limited English proficiency. In both extremes, I showed them exactly where to click on the screen at each step.

You might not need that level of help, but many people do. Others do not strictly need it, but they prefer the simple instruction set. “Click here then here,” instructions ease the transition into a new system one needs to learn, or it removes the need entirely to learn a system one uses infrequently.

The problem is that making good documentation is difficult and time consuming. It relies on a fundamentally different skill set than coding or even UI design.

I agree that the ideal is for software to not need any documentation. In my experience, I have yet to see software that rises to that task and is used across a variety of experience levels and societal cross sections.

This is where AI could legit change the world for the better in the future. Use fewer pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides as the problems can be fixed mechanically on a highly localized level.

This could even help fix problems with invasive species - imagine a drone fleet that could kill kudzu just as it erupts from the soil.

Those would be X-tremeists. It’s an easy mistake to make.

I would mildly disagree. Knowing your numbers for a lift can help you estimate where you should be on related lifts. It can also help you very roughly gauge your progress compared to others. The mechanical advantage, friction, and other physical aspects of any given machine play a huge role for sure, but one can broadly make comparisons.

That is some ingenuity! Smart move.

I am lucky that I have been working with a trainer for a couple years, and she knows this info for every piece of equipment in my gym. It will get harder as I taper off working with her.

First, I am sorry for everyone just dismissing this question. There are many valid reasons for wanting to know the unloaded weight of machines, including just being curious. If you want to change up your routine or compare results between machines, you absolutely want this info.

Some machines will have this information in fine print on the main instruction panel or some small label on the machine. You have to search for it.

The most reliable way to know would be to ask the staff at your gym. A gym-employed trainer would be a great resource if they are off without a client. At my gym, I just put in a request that they label all of the machines with this info. It seems like a big quality of life increase for the cost of some printer paper and packing tape.

Keep lifting heavy and pushing for the details you want. I know on my leg press sled, I absolutely want credit for the 105 lb. sled in addition to the plates I put on it.

Nancy has gotten really good in the past few years. It is a wildly different comic than it used to be while reading fundamentally the same.

Oh, this is great. There may have been more results since I was working on a field project studying them, but to my knowledge we have absolutely no idea! They are not particularly well adapted to the cold, but their range keeps extending northward. This well predates the rapid climate change caused by humans, so we cannot use that as a reason. They are a bit of a mystery.

My guess would be that they are occupying a niche where limited brain and limb development (problems all marsupials face) are not limiting factors on success. Maybe their lack of a close genetic relation when surrounded by placental mammals gives them some pathogen resistance when scavenging? Those are just mildly educated guesses. When I was working with them we had no idea, and our field results were not at all enlightening.

I do not mean to be pedantic, but this is topic I love.

Marsupials do not fill a niche by virtue of their lack of placement. Instead, they have survived so long by virtue of their isolation.

It turns out that the adaptions required for marsupials to birth and raise young without a placenta make them inferior to placental mammals in almost every scenario. They get out competed and die off in almost every instance. South America had marsupials, not placentals, until it formed a land bridge with North America. What happened then? All the marsupials died off with the weird exception of the American possum. The placentals straight up out competed them across the board.

Australia has kept marsupials only because of its extreme isolation. When any type of placental mammal has been introduced to Australia, it has ruined the ecosystem and taken over the niche it fills.

Independent of humans, marsupials are a dying design. We just happen to live at a time when we can see that extinction in process. Yes, humans have sped it up by more rapidly introducing placental species, but we can see how it happened without human intervention as well.

She rolled her eyes and said, "Well, I’m glad that our contract is only for [a limited period of time].”

It was not a vote against the whole shift, but instead a comment on the volatility of this space. The tech and the associated market is changing so fast that there are no real experts, proven business models, or established long term use cases. Everyone is experimenting, and nothing is set in stone. This change means the dust is not yet settling.

“We keep thinking like OpenAI is a company that has a clue what it is doing because they have this amazing product that is getting used everywhere in business. In reality, they are a startup, and startups are going to have startup problems. We cannot treat them or their product like they are established and stable.”

-my wife, who leads work at another company with OpenAI tech

I know the above quote is from someone “unimportant” in the industry, but to me it encapsulates exactly what we have seen from OpenAI in the past couple weeks. She became simultaneously reassured and more worried when Satya Nadella, the highly respected CEO of Microsoft, became directly involved. I wonder what she will think of this development when she wakes up.

Thank you! I was going to make this exact point. Autocatalytic reactions are assumed with good reason to be a necessary step on the way from non-life chemicals to life, but they are only one step. Carbon is the only element that can form the basis of the huge variety of chemicals needed for the simplest of life to evolve.

When I was an undergrad, I had professors who made completing arguments that live on other planets would not only be carbon-based, but that it likely would closely resemble life on Earth on molecular, microscopic, and macroscopic levels. Survival of the fit certainly depends upon the environment, but it also must comply with chemistry and physics. I am no expert in theoretical xenobiology, but it provides a strong and fact-based counter to the idea that alien life would by default be wildly different from life on Earth.