HIPAA is one of the few that makes clear the types of data (PHI and PII) that come under the frameworks purview during development which makes masking mandatory for non-production environments. Other frameworks families, NIST RMF, FedRAMP and CMMC very much care about software development practices in depth.
I have yet to see anyone, my family included, that actually seemed to enjoy parenting. I know for a fact my father was ready to run to the middle east shortly after I was born, my brother was a total accident and not terribly wanted either. As a result we’ve never been close my parents and I…why would I want to be a parent after that? I have no desire to live a life a child would require either.
While we are in the minority, Zenni and many online optical shops recently decided they will not make you glasses if your prescription is over a certain power. In 2025 I broke $800 on frames+lenses and contacts.
I would silly things to hold onto a steady supply of pentadeca arginate. It has completely eliminated lingering effects of joint and ligament injury and has enabled me to exercise like a normal person. If you have the money it is very easy to acquire a year or twos worth from multiple sources.
Just posting for general awareness - people search this stuff up and then find nothing but research chem sites singing the benefits and providing no info on the risks.
I've had great success with BPC-157 and tendon issues, but I try to use it sparingly - no history of cancer, but everyone has no history of cancer until they do - and try to rehab any injuries with slow heavy eccentrics, etc., and only go for the BPC when that isn't making any improvement.
Ironically, Reddit and my doc were the only ones saying anything about risks. Shes got me on a strict blood panel eval for trt and bpc to monitor for any issues. I got really lucky with her, MANY clinics will just sell and ask questions later.
It was infuriating trying to get Wegovy via insurance. My doctor made three appeals, all denied. Out of pocket it wouldve been $1600/mo. Ive been getting semaglutide from compounding pharmacies for the last year and half for $149-$200. I have lost 97lbs, come back to running 30 miles a week after several major knee injuries made even a mile jog a multiday recovery effort. I absolutely get the regulatory stance but the name brands are absolutely unaffordable.
They’re down to hundreds a month, now, with a coupon.
I can’t say I disagree with insurance not being willing to pay those costs (apart from diabetes patients etc.). I bet a large part of the reason you can get the name brands cheaper now is because they did the math they’d make more that way than they could squeeze out of insurance companies.
Also, on a personal level it rubs me the wrong way to have my insurance premiums go towards something that people could just do themselves, from something they did to themselves. I know many will disagree, of course, and there are other examples (say, lung cancer treatments) that are similar.
> Also, on a personal level it rubs me the wrong way to have my insurance premiums go towards something that people could just do themselves, from something they did to themselves. I know many will disagree, of course, and there are other examples (say, lung cancer treatments) that are similar.
A fairly large portion of lung cancer patients didn't "do it to themselves" (about 20% and rising).
It remains to be seen how vaping impacts lung cancer,
I don't like the idea of finding reasons to penalize people for predicable life decisions that lead to treatment needs. Insurance companies have a lot of resources to make those predictions and if unshackled they aren't afraid of using them. Making construction workers, miners, or truck drivers pay more (or be denied outright) for insurance because their job has negative health effects would be bad for society.
I personally think that overeating is an addiction, not a moral failing, and is often the side effect of other mental illnesses.
I don't do this as much as others, but as someone who has suffered from Major Depressive Disorder [1], it can be really easy to eat your feelings away. When I've had really bad depressive episodes, I don't want to cook, I don't want a fucking salad, I mostly just want to feel bad about myself and I end up getting a huge meal at Taco Bell and sadly eating that. Doing that one day isn't that bad. Even doing that two days isn't that bad, but when you have a long extended depressive episode, it can easily become a pattern of weeks where you're getting unhealthy fast food every day.
I know a lot of people act like depression is a moral failing as well [2], but I personally don't think that, and it feels like obesity can be a symptom of major depression. If you ever watch "My 600lb Life", you'll see that a lot of the people on there are really going through serious mental disorders and/or dealing from PTSD from sexual abuse, and the overeating can come as a result from that.
I guess I just feel like it's reductive to say "they did this to themselves". The human brain and human psychology are complicated and irritating.
[1] Fortunately my current set of meds has really helped...medical science is pretty cool sometimes!
If losing the weight is good for them, isn’t it possible that it’s not just the humanitarian thing (which I know is a useless argument to make to the soulless ghouls who run insurance companies anyway) but also the economically right choice for them, to avoid paying for their worse health problems later?
> Also, on a personal level it rubs me the wrong way to have my insurance premiums go towards something that people could just do themselves, from something they did to themselves.
The usual note for this is your insurance premiums were already going towards that, just indirectly by way of paying for heart disease treatments, diabetes management and other secondary effect of obesity.
But I'd also like to propose that "could just do themselves" is carrying a lot of assumptions that may not hold for any individual. A few years back now I started a medication with the side effect of appetite suppression, and I learned something about myself. To the best of my ability to recall, I had never before starting that medication not been hungry. "Full" to me was a physical sensation of being unable to fit more food physically in my stomach, but even when I was "full" I was hungry. Luckily for myself as a teen and young adult I had an incredibly high metabolism. I could eat 3 meals a day, 3-4 bowls of cereal and milk as an "afternoon snack" after school and some late evening snacks while watching TV and I still was in the "almost underweight" category. It was in this context, a time when I could go to a fast food restaurant and order two meals just for myself and stay well inside a healthy weight range that I learned to eat as an adult. Eventually though, the metabolism slowed down, and I started packing on weight but the hunger never subsided. Oh sure, as I got older the idea of and ability to eat an entire pizza by myself slowly went away, but hungry was always there, so I was still always eating and always eating more than I should have.
And I did manage to lose weight on my own many times. Through extremely strict self control and portion control, multiple times I managed to lose 25, 30 even 50lbs, one painstaking week at a time. Every day was strict tracking and weighing of everything I ate, and many days were hard battles of "I know I'm hungry, but I've already hit my limit for the day, so I can't eat more", and going to bed extremely hungry with the hope that when I woke the next morning that feeling would have subsided a little. And it worked each time, until inevitably something happened to disrupt the routines and habits built over the months. Maybe it was a set of family emergencies that had me eating on the run, unable to properly monitor everything and adding some "stress eating" on top of it. Maybe it was running into "the holidays" where calories are cheap and abundant even if you are still keeping track. And sometimes it was just being unable to sustain the high degree of willpower it required to keep myself on the schedule. And what takes month of carefully losing 1lb a week to do only takes a month or two to almost completely undo.
Hunger is probably the closest thing I've ever experienced to an addiction. I've thankfully never had to battle an addiction for anything else, but when it comes to hunger that eternal gnawing was ever present and the more weight I lost by sheer force of will, ever distracting. If the idea popped into my head after lunch that "I'd like a snack", it was an idea that would not leave my head until either I'd given in and gotten a snack or forced myself to not give in and waited until dinner. But that forcing meant dedicating ever larger parts of my mental energy away from my work and tasks at hand to just convincing myself to not go get the snack. And worse, when the time for dinner finally came, I was already feeling "hungry" on top of my normal hunger state, so often not eating the snack just meant delaying the excess consumption to dinner or having to continue that fight at dinner. If it sounds exhausting, in a lot of ways it was. But of course, like you said I can "just do" this. It's simple CI < CO math. And yet it never stuck, in part because unlike a lot of other unhealthy habits you can pick up in your life, you cant just not eat. Yes you can eat different things, or eat healthier, both of which can help with weight problems, but you can't stop eating. You have to eat, the hunger is always there and the same thing the hunger wants is the same thing you NEED to literally survive.
But that medication with its appetite suppressant effect was a game changer for me. For the first time in over 30 years, I actually felt full. Not physically stuffed, but "done eating". I could eat a small lunch and think to myself "that was good, and I feel satisfied". For the first time, when the idea of an afternoon snack popped into my head, I could remind myself that dinner was in 2 hours and I needed to make sure I had room to eat that so the snack could wait, and that would be the end of it, no fight necessary because the hunger wasn't gnawing at me the whole time. When I first started, I was concerned that the medication was giving me anxiety attacks because about 6PM every day, I'd start getting this feeling of my stomach tying itself in knots, and this sensation of "needing something". And after a week or so it occurred to me that what I was feeling for the first time in my life was the feeling of transitioning from having been full and satiated to being hungry again. I'd never not been hungry before. And I know that sounds insane, because it sounded insane to me then. Before taking the medication if you'd asked me if I know what it felt like to be full or to not be hungry I would tell you that I did. But apparently I didn't, and I didn't know that until I started that medication. And for the first time since the weight started coming on, the weight I've lost is staying lost.
So yes, you can "just" eat better and less and control your portions and not eat so much. But from personal experience, it's a hell of a lot easier to have that will power when your body is giving you the right signals and isn't constantly pushing you over the limits.
At the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024, I lost about 60lbs, and it was a basic calorie counting thing. For me, it wasn't too hard; I was able to get used to the hunger and after about a month the feeling of wanting to eat all the time was somewhat tolerable.
In May of 2024, I started taking Pristiq, and one of the side effects is a huge increase in appetite. Like you said, I would feel "full" in the sense that my stomach wouldn't fit anymore matter, but I was always hungry and pretty much perpetually craving sweets. I would get a whole large pizza for lunch, a large meal at Popeyes for dinner, and chase it down with snack cakes, and I would still be "hungry" the entire time.
I managed to undo all the progress I had made with my dieting and a bit extra, and it was kind of weird. It's not really "hard" to know what to do. Obviously everyone knows to eat less processed food, focus more on protein and fiber, etc, but despite me "knowing" this, it was strangely hard to actually do it.
I'm very thankful that I found out about Metformin. I'm not diabetic and never have been, but it's prescribed off-label for weight loss, and according to my doctor it can be useful in the particular case of "canceling out the appetite-increase from medication", and to my surprise it worked shockingly well. I'm still not quite down to my diet weight yet, but I'm down about 30lbs in the four months I've been taking it, and I don't really feel hungry all the time. I still enjoy eating unhealthy food, but food is considerably more transactional now: I eat food because I need energy to survive. I budget about 200 calories lower than what my smartwatch says I burn during the day. It's much easier to treat food as a more utilitarian necessity.
If anyone here is in the unfortunately situation of not having their insurance covering GLP-1 medication, I highly recommend seeing if you can get your doctor to prescribe metformin. It's been out of patent for decades and cost on the order of ~$5 a month [2] and there are very few side effects [2], so it's a relatively low-risk experiment.
I was receiving compounded Semaglutide (Wegovy generic) from Victory Pharmacy, a brick & mortar compounding pharmacy, in Austin for $150/mo, then $200/mo, and finally I stopped when it reached $250/mo. I have SSDI and Medicare but it wasn't covered and it's still not covered for pharmacologically-induced obesity or weight gain. If I developed diabetes, then it would be covered as Ozempic (lower dose). I'm having to go without because of bureaucratic gatekeeping and discrimination and because of opportunists cash grabs by pharmaceutical companies' price gouging.
Why is obesity not considered a necessitating condition? It often carries the comorbidities you just mentioned. Should not exclude people just because they haven’t had these specific health problems (yet) but will eventually have them.
The problem is that if it's just about obesity, you have to prove that cheaper treatments such as diet and exercise didn't work. That's not impossible to do, but it's hard and annoying even for people who really were trying. My doctor told me that you basically have to keep a detailed journal of your weight loss efforts for months on end.
Are GLP-1s so much more effective that we should make an exception to the general principle, maximizing healthcare resources by providing the cheapest effective treatment? I kinda think so, but I have a conflict of interest, and I can understand why others might think that money is better spent elsewhere.
While I tend to agree, insurance companies don't see it that way. They need a doctor to indicate a necessity to treat a condition, as opposed to it being the easiest way to treat it.
For example, I have to take digestive enzymes to digest my food (pancreatic insufficiency). For someone with an unusually high metabolism, they would also give them a leg up on gaining weight, even though there are other approaches to gaining that weight. However in many cases, the insurance company wouldn't cover their prescription when they will mine.
As always it’s insurance nonsense. If incentives were aligned insurance companies would be lining up out the door to give this to obese people because they (the insurance companies) would eventually be on the hook for paying for the care of the conditions you just mentioned. It is very well demonstrated in literature that obese people have a much higher occurrence of these conditions than non obese people.
But the system is not set up with aligned incentives
I think you would be hard-pressed to find any human who has been 100 pounds overweight for any amount of time that doesn't have an obesity-related comorbidity.
Hypertension, sleep apnea, high cholesterol, etc are all common in the general population and exacerbated or even caused by the physical and lifestyle conditions that beget obesity.
I was 347lbs at the time. Wasnt a diabetic (nor pre-diabetic) no heart disease, blood pressure or really anything other than my weight. Prior to then Id had two massive bouts of weight loss at 50-100lbs so I know what it takes. Id tried but this last time without meds was extremely hard. You cant do much in the way of productive exercise when both your shoulders need replacement at 30 and between two knees have an ACL tear and two MCL tears. To top it off I had wildly out of whack hormones.
I dont know if youre referring to his music as "his work" - quite the opposite, we have a lot!
His family recently began releasing many albums on Bandcamp. Ive been a fan for awhile and this is likely the best collection youll find online : https://felakuti.bandcamp.com/
The Best of the Black President is a good place to start. Dive in! Fela is the godfather of Afrobeat and highlife.
I find myself a bit overwhelmed with hardware options during recent explorations. Seemingly everything can handle what I want a local copy of my Bandcamp archive to stream via jellyfin. Good times we’re in but even having good sysadmin skills, I wish someone would just tell me exactly what to buy.
> I wish someone would just tell me exactly what to buy.
I’ll bite.
You can save a lot of money by buying used hardware. I recommend looking for old Dell OptiPlex towers on Facebook Marketplace or from local used computer stores. Lenovo ThinkCentres (e.g., m700 tiny) are also a great option if you prefer something with a smaller form factor.
I’d recommend disregarding advice from non-technical folks recommending brand new, expensive hardware, because it’s usually overkill.
I spent so long trying to make Raspberry Pis work but they just kind of suck and everything is harder on them. I only just discovered that there are an infinite supply of these micro desktops second hand from offices/government. I was able to pick up a 9th gen intel with 16gb ram for less than the cost of a Pi 5, and it's massively more powerful.
Yeah, they’re amazing value. I paid $125 CAD for a 4th gen i7 with 16GB of RAM about 5 years ago. It’s been running almost 24/7 ever since with no issues.
You also don't have to deal with the usual annoyance of second hand gear like facebook marketplace and no delivery. These companies / governments have contracts with reseller companies who will buy the entire stock and sell them online just like buying new.
I just found their proprietary hardware and being ARM too limiting. I wanted to set up full disk encryption to set up nextcloud on, and found that on the pi this is an incredibly complex process. While on an x86 PC it's just a checkbox on install.
And then you can only use distros which have a raspberry pi specific build. Generic ARM ones won't work.
Yeah the complaints are fair. I stick to RPi OS for maximum compatibility. People have been crying for a Google Drive client for Linux for over a decade, but still have to set it up in rclone.
I build out my server in Docker and I’ve been surprised that every image I’ve ever wanted to download has an ARM image.
Way too expensive for their moderate performance. All serious self-hosters (not Youtube home-labbers) use x86 machines, often retired desktop/gaming rigs or used datacenter hardware.
I'm not familiar with Dell product names specifically but 'tower' sounds like it'll sit there burning 200W idle. Old laptops (sliding out the battery) is what I've been opting for, which use barely anything more than the router it sits next to. Especially if you just want to serve static files as GP seems to be looking for, an old smartphone will be enough but there you can't remove the battery (since it won't run off of just the charger)
Old optiplex’es sff or not idled between 15w and 30w. Id aim for sff’s specifically. I have run an ftp server for lab iso’s on a very old android phone - not fun.
Get started a corporate surplus mini pc on ebay. They super cheap - search for micro pc - if you get a recent CPU from Dell or Lenovo should be under $200, you can install Fedora or other Linux distribution. Ask Claude for everything else.
That's twice what I'd spend on a first server when you're still figuring out what you need!
My first "server" was a 65€ second-hand laptop including shipping iirc, in ~2010 euros so say maybe 100€ now when taking inflation into account. I used that for a number of years and had a good idea of what I wanted from my next setup (which wasn't much heavier, but a little newer cpu wasn't amiss after 3 years). Don't think one needs to even go so far as 200$ for a "local Bandcamp archive" (static file storage) and serving that via some streaming webserver
Jellyfin docs do mention "Not having a GPU is NOT recommended for Jellyfin, as video transcoding on the CPU is very performance demanding" but that's for on-the-fly video transcoding. If you transcode your videos to the desired format(s) upon import, or don't have any videos at all yet as in GP's case, it doesn't matter if the hardware is 20x slower. Worst case, you just watch that movie in source material quality: on a LAN you won't have network speed bottlenecks anyway, and transcoding on GPU is much more expensive (purchase + ongoing power costs) than the gigabit ethernet that you can already find by default on every laptop and router
Ive seen MM instances across defense dev teams for quite a while specifically to avoid Teams bs in the air force, gov teams does not like mixing with other orgs. Now it seems they’re actually going for contracts and Ill bet great money are mostly funded by USAF. Im very, very surprised.
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