Truth be told, none of either prescription or OTC stuff has any solid research backing it. Some people, especially on HN are obsessed with living long and are always prompt to try the weirdest experimental stuff. Reasonable people should remember what the COVID period was on this website, and act accordingly...
Ibuprofen ? That's really not something I'd have expected to end up in someone's 'healthy stuff' list. Ibuprofen increases the risk of cardiac event and is a common precipiting factor in renal failure. Most antibiotics also do not do only good things. The list is too long to write here. Side effects profiles change with research and marketing developments, but thinking these drugs are only beneficial is a bit over the top.
Edit: I forgot. Ibuprofen also causes (non trivial) stomach bleeding and increases blood pressure. And many other things too.
I said "reasonable side effects". I was _not_ trying to suggest that drugs have no side effects or need no consideration when taking them. Tylenol can give you a pretty horrifying death if you misuse it.
But this reinforces my main point - if we ended up comparing ozempic with ibuprofen, we definitely lucked out. Considering the benefits it offers it might be worth taken by some people even if it was on the level of chemotherapy.
Ozempic is very recent. Given the volume of prescription, the probability of problematic side-effect in the short-to-medium term indeed seems low. But it sill is too early to say whether ozempic really isn't problematic. Let's hope so.
I really don't understand this skepticism around semaglutide and long-term effects.
One, GLP-1s are not a new class of drug. We have had them in various forms for about two decades now.
Two, the clinical trials have followed the standard sort of schedule as any other medication we release. I don't hear or see all the hand-wringing that these have received over every other medication we develop.
Three, they are analogs to hormones our bodies already produce. They're not some totally alien substance that we have zero understanding of. We modify them to have longer half-lives, bind more strongly/weakly to certain receptors, etc., but it's not like these are significant departures from things our body already handles day in and day out.
Yes, maybe there is something specific to semaglutide or tirzepatide or the newer generations of GLP-1 medications that we don't understand that has some sort of long term effect. But what is the foundation for that worry? Exenatide has not shown any of those concerns in two decades of use. Basically every single health marker that changes when on these drugs changes in (often profoundly!) positive ways. It makes significant positive impact on the cause of the single largest increased in all-cause mortality for the Western world. Newer generations are even more promising - retatutride has shown significant anti-cancer impacts on rodent studies, and mechanistically the pathways it is acting on there work very similarly in humans, so there is strong reason to believe that will carry over. Even the modern generations have a huge list of benefits that take place basically immediately upon beginning to take them, even without significant weight loss, including protection against CVD-related incidents such as heart attacks, strokes, and deaths related to them.
What we know today about all of the positive impact they have, mechanistically how they are doing it, and the data we have on this class of medication being used in general... the side-effects would have to be hugely detrimental and in a way that just doesn't make much sense based on our current understanding.
It's not impossible, of course, but worrying about it seems silly unless your general stance is that you won't take any medication until that specific formulation has been on the market for decades.
I think some viewpoints just sound wise, and get repeated a lot. Being skeptical about medication is one of them.
A legitimate worry, one Taleb might be bringing up, is that we should hold Ozempic to a higher standard because it's being taken by many people, and any problems it has down the line will have a much larger impact. But that 1. is happening anyways and 2. is not influencing an individual decision to take it or not, it's a society thing.
> Ibuprofen ? That's really not something I'd have expected to end up in someone's 'healthy stuff' list.
Never knew about the potential stomach bleeds until I took my mother to the hospital earlier this year. Ironically, she was taking Motrin given to her in the same hospital a week earlier.
If this was written in jest, it's always fun to learn new words. If not, if you've been taking your doctor's advice for years and had no problems, your words are out of context for most of us.
Data structure types. In standard CL and Scheme, data structures are implemented at their base using cons cells, and their interpretation as tables, trees, queues, etc. is up to library functions. Unless I have somehow misinterpreted the selling points of classic Lisps, because Clojure and Janet data structures sell themselves as being not built this way. Clojure makes a different trade-off by building all its data structures off of hash array-mapped tries. But Janet goes out of its way to use efficient and closely-mapped base stores, even if the contained elements are dynamic Janet objects.
> In standard CL and Scheme, data structures are implemented at their base using cons cells
That's not true. Both CL and Scheme have other data structures besides cons cells, and that's been true for the Lisp family of languages for nearly 70 years now.
This bizarre belief that everything is a cons cell in Lisp and Scheme needs to go away.
For someone who initiated hostility, you're a dismal failure at supporting your arguments. I'm not reading two entire manuals to find the citations you're referring to and should've cited yourself.
> I'm not reading two entire manuals to find the citations you're referring to and should've cited yourself.
C-f that PDF for "array". For the other manual, I linked the TOC. It's right there on the page (arrays and hash tables, and you can follow up with structures and objects) and there's no reason to read the entire manual. I figured most people knew how to use a table of contents, I apologize if I expected too much from you.
Ok, so I am sorry but this is an extremely uninformed take. Please have a look around in Racket's documentation before going any further: https://docs.racket-lang.org/
> efficient distinct data structure types backed by efficient bases
...do not require abandoning CAR and CDR, I think. See all other lisps having vectors, hashmaps, etc. Perhaps you're talking for code representation ? But I don't think that true for all 'traditional' lisps either. Also, there's been some innovation regarding lists: https://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/treelist.html
This type of syntax allows rapid iteration when looking at different implementations and experimenting with array problems. It should be thought of more as math notation than general programming.
There's no ideal solution: either you check the file in front of the patient and many find this impolite or a sign of failure to know everything, or you don't check and many find you're sometimes over assertive and likely wrong... As in many jobs, you can't please everyone.
