Daniel Barca

Blog

  • Gasolina: el Síndrome de Estocolmo

    Nos encontramos en un período de transición hacia la movilidad eléctrica. A día de hoy, es evidente para cualquiera que tenga ganas de verlo: pronto nuestro mundo va a estar movido por baterías.

    Sin embargo estamos tan acostumbrados a la vida con nuestros coches de gasolina, que se vuelve muy difícil entender las formas en las que cambia la vida con un coche eléctrico. Es habitual leer comentarios tremendistas en Internet: ¿Qué pasa cuando se te gaste la batería? ¡Tendrás que esperar 6 horas a que se cargue el coche! Con mi gasolina lleno el tanque en 5 minutos. ¿Y si quiero hacer un viaje largo? ¿Y la degradación de la batería?

    Un comentario habitual entre los que se han pasado a un vehículo eléctrico que leo mucho es: la primera semana sufrí ansiedad por la autonomía, después me olvidé del tema.

    Cuando estamos tan acostumbrados a vivir con un coche de gasolina, es muy difícil entender que la vida con un coche eléctrico simplemente es distinta: todas las cosas que damos por sentadas son distintas. Sería igualmente difícil explicar como se maneja uno con un coche de gasolina, a alguien que está acostumbrado a un coche eléctrico. ¿Cómo? ¿Que no puedo cargar mi coche por las noches en mi casa, sino que tengo que dejar lo que esté haciendo e ir expresamente a un sitio especial para poder cargarlo pagando un dineral?

    Lo cierto es que cuando tienes un coche eléctrico no cargas nunca más tu coche, porque cuando el coche se carga tu estás haciendo otra cosa, normalmente durmiendo. Y lo hace a un precio irrisorio en comparación con la gasolina. El mayor miedo, la autonomía, se disipa cuando te das cuenta de que todas las mañanas amaneces con más kilómetros disponibles de los que haces a diario. La ironía: un coche que tarda muchísimo más en cargar, exige mucho menos tiempo a su usuario para ello. De pasar 5 minutos echando gasolina a apenas unos pocos segundos enchufándolo y olvidándose del tema. A esto hay que sumarle que según avance la infraestructura, cada vez va a ser más común y accesible cargar fuera de casa: en el trabajo, en el supermercado, en un restaurante, en un centro comercial, incluso en la calle. Cuando crezca el número de vehículos eléctricos en las calles será cada vez más común ver enchufes en cada sitio al que vamos. Igual que cargas tu teléfono en el trabajo también puedes cargar tu coche. Cargar ya no es algo que haces una vez del tirón sino muchas veces en pequeñas dosis.

    ¿Y los viajes? Con la aplicación ABRP (A Better Route Planner) puedo ver las paradas que tendría que hacer para un Barcelona-Pontevedra en una ID. Buzz con 445km de autonomía: 5 paradas en un viaje de 1135km, 13 horas en total de las cuales 2h se pasan cargando la furgoneta. La realidad es que en un viaje como este voy a pasar muchas más horas parado. Tendré que comer, tendré que estirar las piernas, y echar alguna que otra meada. Por no mencionar que tengo niños y que no es aconsejable que pasen más de 2 horas en su silla sin salir del vehículo.

    Los petrolheads, en su fantasía, hacen 20 horas del tirón (meando en una botella, supongo), cargan sus coches en 30 segundos y tienen 1000km de autonomía. Todas esas cosas pueden ser ciertas sobre el papel pero nadie puede ponerlas en práctica de manera consistente, y aunque se pudiera seguiría quedando el asunto del coste y, por qué no, el impacto ecológico. La defensa del coche de gasolina se convierte en el Síndrome de Estocolmo: todas esas supuestas ventajas para convencernos de algo que en realidad es peor a todas luces, solo que es lo que conocemos desde siempre.

    Y en cuanto a la degradación, otro gran miedo que se está demostrando injustificado puesto estudio tras estudio se comprueba como las baterías superan las expectativas de durabilidad: en el peor de los casos superior a la vida útil que les damos a los vehículos. Es decir que en la mayoría de los casos es probable que hayas cambiado de coche antes de que la batería se haya degradado significativamente. Rara vez una batería de coche se degrada más allá del 80% de la capacidad original, y en general un cambio de batería sería comparable a un cambio de motor en un ICE: algo que técnicamente ocurre, pero que en la práctica no es algo que deba preocuparnos especialmente.

    Quizá otro día podemos hablar sobre los bulos que rodean la cuestión ecológica, tema en el que no me apetece explayarme ahora mismo porque no era el punto central del artículo, pero sobre el que podéis imaginar mi opinión.

  • BTW I’m writing in Spanish too, now

    I started writing in English because this language was a large part of my life, I wanted to improve my writing and I liked the idea of being seen as someone who communicates in English. I have a feeling that lots of people reach my blog through my LinkedIn profile, so it’s also a bit of a competitive advantage in Spain, where most people have big difficulties to speak English. Or at least it shows that it’s not my case.

    But right now I think I’m in the process of reshaping what this blog means for me, I want to think less about what I write and I want to take it closer home. I want to open more parts of my life to it, look for topics that are maybe not as carefully chosen as they used to be, but on the other hand more personal. I realized choosing topics takes a lot of energy in the process of writing here, because I am afraid of how I may be seen by someone who stumbles across this and maybe knows me personally. I would like to be more impulsive.

    So as someone who feels both languages as part of myself, it makes sense to write in both languages too. To be honest it’s very likely that I start to write mostly in Spanish from now on, but even though I don’t have that big of an audience, I don’t want to alienate any of those who subscribed in the last few months and expect English written articles.

    At the top header you will now find a link to Kagi translate, which in my experience provides really decent AI-powered translations. I will look for even fancier ways to allow switching languages in the future, but for now that’s straightforward enough.

    Anyway, I hope this new approach brings more life and purpose to this blog.

  • No compres para cumplir objetivos

    En la vorágine consumista en la que nos encontramos, es muy habitual que se nos presenten productos o servicios como una solución a una carencia personal.

    Nos autoexigimos: no conseguimos leer un libro por semana, o entrenar 4 veces por semana, o estudiar tanto como deberíamos, tomar notas, escribir un diario, llevar una dieta equilibrada…

    Para todas estas cosas el mercado nos promete soluciones rápidas y efectivas. Cuando uno es de mente dispersa, se siente la urgencia ante una solución atractiva. ¡Claro! Con una tablet de tinta electrónica y un lápiz que imita a la perfección la textura del papel, por fin prestaré atención y revisaré mis notas con frecuencia. O quizá con un reloj inteligente por fin tendré suficiente información sobre mis entrenos y eso me animará a entrenar todas las semanas.

    Podría seguir así un buen rato. Al final el producto no es un objeto, sino nosotros mismos. Una versión de nosotros que ha conseguido sobreponerse a unos defectos que, por cualquier motivo, nos atormentan. Los ebooks, relojes inteligentes, y sets de pesas son estupendos, pero no convierten a alguien que no lee en alguien que sí, ni a alguien sedentario en un deportista.

    Conviven dos realidades acerca de cómo encaramos nuestros defectos: la primera, que no podemos definir quiénes queremos ser a través de la culpa y la autoexigencia. Debemos conectar con nuestros propios valores para determinar qué cosas importan de verdad como para luchar con ellas. La segunda, que si de verdad hemos decidido cuál es el objetivo, no podemos alcanzarlo simplemente a golpe de cartera.

    Por eso creo que es mejor empezar simplificando. Da igual qué gadget te compres, si partes de una vida sedentaria no vas a convertirte en un atleta en semanas, ni en meses, ni siquiera en años. He descubierto que es preferible concentrarse en disfrutar de dicha actividad, y eliminar por completo el autojuicio. Si tienes que arrastrarte a regañadientes para empezar, ¿acaso de verdad quieres hacerlo? Si no puedes conseguir que “te guste” aunque sea un poco, la verdad, quizá sea mejor dejarlo para otro momento, u otra vida.

    Incluso objetivos en teoría “necesarios” como estar en forma, pueden simplificarse limitando los excesos en la dieta y dando paseos. Si no puedes disfrutar del deporte, es imposible ser constante, el abandono es solo cuestión de semanas.

    Y con la pesada carga de la culpabilidad: normal que busquemos atajos. Solo nos queda la billetera en un desesperado intento de que la “sunken cost fallacy” nos obligue a seguir adelante. No es una forma saludable de invertir nuestra energía.

    Una vez has encontrado la manera de disfrutar de algo (lo cual requiere eliminar la culpa y el sentimiento de obligación), flaquear se convierte en irrelevante. ¿Has dejado de leer durante tres días por cualquier motivo? No importa, sabes que leer es una actividad que disfrutas y puedes permitirte volver a agarrar un libro el viernes sin sentir culpa. ¿Acaso cuando dejas de jugar videojuegos un día te preocupa perder el hábito?

    Y cuando ya has conseguido crear un hábito y no imaginas tu vida sin él, ese es el momento de invertir: para *mejorar* sobre lo que ya has construido, no con la ansiedad de que sin ello te sea imposible hacerlo.

    No escribo esto para culpabilizarte si lo que quieres es comprarte ese cachivache brillante que tienes en mente, pero sí creo que es importante pararse a pensar si de verdad esa es la persona que queremos ser, o si se trata de un conjunto de presiones externas sobre lo que “se supone” que tenemos que querer ser. Y, de ser así, si estamos de verdad comprometidos: ¿lo conseguiríamos aunque no tuviéramos el “cachivache”?

    Para los que sean como yo y sientan esa “urgencia” semanal, hay dos trucos que me resultan de ayuda. El primero es imaginar cómo serán las cosas cuando se haya pasado el entusiasmo inicial de comprar algo nuevo. ¿Qué pasará cuando ya no sea especial, incluso aburrido, cuando nos demos cuenta de que no ha resuelto nuestros problemas sino que, en el mejor de los casos, será una herramienta útil para cuando ya estén solucionados?

    El segundo es simplemente dejar pasar algo de tiempo. Una vez se diluye la urgencia obsesiva, ¿sigue estando ahí el deseo de hacer esa compra? Un par de semanas suelen dar mucha perspectiva cuando quieres hacer un gasto importante, es mejor no hacerlo en medio de un subidón. También es un buen momento para “ir probando” y acercarse a esos objetivos. Podemos ir probando versiones clásicas: tomar notas en papel y ver qué tal se siente, buscar libros que tengamos sin leer, salir a correr un rato.

    Dejar pasar el tiempo también ayuda para los que saltamos de una obsesión a la siguiente. Dejando pasar algunas semanas puedo seleccionar y priorizar los gastos que quiero llevar a cabo. Además, retrasar la gratificación es en sí mismo un ejercicio muy sano para los que somos así.

  • Dyson: you’re next

    During the last decade, iRobot watched as Chinese companies took away the business they had led for a long time.

    iRobot was not just a leader in their sector, they were years ahead of the competition in technology and enjoyed the benefits of being embedded in the public’s mind as a synonym with home vacuum robots.

    Amongst other things, we can point at a lack of focus from iRobot as the main reason of their downfall. Despite LIDAR being the best system for indoor navigation and mapping, iRobot focused their R&D efforts on a camera system that lets the robot recognize its position using computer vision algorithms. The reasoning behind this decision is not that they believed that their products would work better this way, but that it would allow them to recognize the items in their user’s home for data analysis to be used for ads. That would be very interesting for a company like Amazon, which was looking to buy iRobot but ultimately failed to do so.

    Sadly, this approach was not very interesting for users concerned about their privacy. They also decided to pursue side businesses like air purifiers, while they were already losing ground to Chinese companies at the moment.

    LIDAR offers excellent results for in-home navigation, and is able to perfectly map the environment. While iRobot was spending their efforts on dead ends, their competition was investing heavily in what is nowadays the state of the art in the industry.

    I’ve spent the last year using a Dyson V15 that is Dyson’s top-tier vacuum, and seeing it now, I cannot avoid thinking about iRobot. I think Dyson can do a lot better.

    Yeah, the device itself works really well, but its build quality leaves much to be desired. Now that it’s lost its original shine, it feels pretty much like a flimsy bunch of plastic. There are just too many potential failing points and it feels designed to break. I had to make a warranty claim for a small plastic button in the Submarine accessory module. Mind, it’s a 250€ accessory that doesn’t really do that much. For a top-tier product like this, why did they decide to go for such fragile tiny components with complex mechanisms instead of, for example, a metallic button?

    Dyson is supposed to be the best of the best, but their products lack premium feel (except maybe, right after the unboxing) and transmit a worrying sense of planned obsolescence. Yes, they are technologically advanced but not unreachable anymore by the competition, and find themselves a bit in the middle of nowhere: not cheap enough to compete by price, not expensive enough to be able to improve their build quality to a more premium approach.

    Considering the value for money, they can also improve quality without increasing their prices, or go for an even higher tier of products (+1k€ robot vacuums are not uncommon).

    I think it would be a wise move because, doing a bit of research around some of the main Chinese companies that are taking over the robot market (Dreame, Roborock, Eufy…), I see that all of them are already offering really interesting alternatives to Dyson Vacuums. And I also see their products are already more feature-rich than what Dyson has to offer: automatic emptying bins, robot+cordless integrated systems, special accessories. And they are a lot, a lot cheaper.

    Dyson enjoys being synonym with cordless vacuum cleaners just like iRobot enjoyed being equivalent to home robots, but how long will it take for the competition to switch the narrative?

    It only takes one of them to offer something that really clicks with the public, and it will be very hard for Dyson to revert the momentum.

    Take that, along with the fact that Dyson seems to be more focused on weird endeavors like headphones (and even weirder, some headphones with an integrated air-purifier mask), lighting lamps and hair dryers; and it takes me back to iRobot’s focus on side businesses while they lose track of their main source of income and reputation. Yeah, some of those investments can be an opportunity (afaik hair products are a big success) but they would do well not getting too comfortable in their privileged position.

  • Google Photos Takeout uselessness can only be attributed to malice

    Yesterday I was reminded of how impressively useless Google Photos is. During the last few years I’ve become increasingly aware of the importance of choosing services that take their own disappearance into account, or the fact that I may want to stop using them.

    For software services, I try to go for open source alternatives, regardless of wether they are free or not. For example, I’ve chosen Bitwarden as my password manager because it’s built on an open source core, but I pay the premium subscription because of the advantages it provides. I like the peace of mind of knowing I can choose to export all my information and go to another service at any time.

    A few years ago I decided to choose Google Photos as my photo storage service. I happily uploaded decades of photographs into it and was very happy with the result. Google Photos has a great user experience and a very nice UI… unless you want to leave.

    As my photo library grew larger, I started reaching the 200GB limit that I was subscribed to. The price of increasing the storage on Google’s cloud services was just unacceptable for me, as I realized the system wouldn’t scale properly if my library grew even more.

    So I decided to get a NAS system and leave. But leaving Google Photos is not so easy. Due to some European laws, Google is basically obligated to provide some sort of download system so users can download their own data. If we decide to download all our pictures through this system, we get a bunch of compressed files with all our pictures. Next to each picture, Google includes an additional JSON file containing the metadata information for that picture.

    If we want the library to be usable, we need to process the whole thing through custom scripting programs that are found online, and are extremely complex and unsafe for non-programmers.

    There is not a single good reason not to include the metadata information within the picture itself. The only reason for Google to include a file type that only programmers understand is malice: they know a user is trying to exit their platform and are trying to obfuscate the process. I’m sure Google has a thousand excuses for something like this, but a massive company like this spares no resources on the dumbest imaginable details. There is just no way this can be attributed to incompetence or lack of resources, it is a business decision.

    To further make my point, there’s another step in the transition that Google intentionally tries to make not hard, just impossible unless you have a tiny library. Now that we downloaded all our pictures, how do we liberate our existing Google Cloud storage so we can stop our subscription?

    If we decide to stop our data subscription we must delete all our pictures, because if the standard 15GB of storage are full, we risk Google’s most important service to stop working: Gmail. Gmail is often not just important for people, it’s essential. It grants access to every other online service and it’s where we receive all kinds of information like government notifications or bank movements confirmation details.

    Since Gmail is omnipresent we’re pretty much Google’s hostage and they know it. They will use this to force us to keep a subscription fee that we don’t want or need, and thus they make the deletion of the photos library impossible.

    The only way of automatically deleting our photo library is by inserting a very specific piece of code while the Google Photos library is open. Again, just like happens with library processing programs, this is an extremely complex and unsafe procedure for non-programmers, leaving them the only alternative of deleting the pictures selecting them one by one.

    This kind of behavior from Google is why I decided to entirely ditch their whole ecosystem, swapping GMail for Fastmail and my own email domain, and their search engine for Kagi search, and Google Photos and Drive with my own NAS system.

    I’m convinced that Google is engaging in anticompetitive behavior with this, and I’m surprised that no government entity has decided yet to step in and force Google to make this process usable.

    The kind of modifications that need to be made to make the system reasonable are extremely easy to make for a company like Google, and I bet that they actually already have them somewhere in their codebase, just disabled for end users.

    I’m ok with companies making it inconvenient to leave their ecosystem, but it has to be done by the sheer quality of the service itself, not by adding artificial barriers around it. Photo libraries are an extremely sensitive and personal matter, and companies shouldn’t be playing with people’s lives like this.

  • I still want to do this

    My grandmother was absolutely ahead of her time. Unlike most older people in Spain, she was able to remain current with the latest technologies.

    When I was approximately 12, around 2004, blogging was still a long way off from becoming mainstream, at least in Spain. My grandmother, who had barely learnt to use a computer through a course for senior citizens, showed me something that would completely change the way I saw the Internet: she didn’t just consume it, she had her own place there. She had opened an online blog through Microsoft Live Spaces, one of the main competing platforms in the blogging space at the time.

    Microsoft Live Spaces was at the time superior to other online platforms, and it probably was one of the early social network precursors. It was later discontinued, because someone at Microsoft didn’t find a way to make money out of it. I guess someone pulled their hair out when they realized how close they were to nailing social networks.

    Anyway, the idea of having my own online space immediately caught my attention, and I soon had my own space. I might’ve been the only 12-year-old within a few kilometers engaging in voluntary writing. Now I wish I had saved some of it because I did write a bunch of hilarious posts.

    As things stabilized, the original “glamour” of blogging slowly faded away, and the remaining platforms became less innovative and more stable. Some features caught on while others drowned as the gimmicks they were. I opened my first WordPress account when I was 14 or 15, and I recall spending quite some time writing stuff. I was really into computer science at the time so I basically tried to write things that could be interesting to someone and rank better in Google’s algorithm. Stats and views were really important to me at that moment.

    My focus on blogging has changed entirely since then. I guess I wanted to be seen and grow, now on the other hand I see this more like an introspective thing, dare I say, therapeutic. But obviously it’s still about being seen, about exposing myself. But most importantly it’s about me, for me, not about what I’m paying attention to or about the newest viral bullshit going on. If someone (even myself) ends up reading these lines, they’re making a serious time investment in it and clearly resonating with it in a way that I could not possibly achieve through other media.

    Something about this blog makes it a lot more real than all the other social networks around. I’ve tried to engage on Twitter, Instagram, and other networks a thousand times, but it just doesn’t last. It gets exhausting really quickly.

    No matter how hard it has always been, blogging stays in the back of my mind as something I want to do. I still want to do this. I think I should fight for this because it requires commitment, focus, and allocating time only to one thing, and that’s something I struggle with. Most of the things that I feel I’m failing in my life require the same things. Maybe getting blogging right takes me a step closer to other good things too.

    Since I know I want to keep doing this, I’ve been thinking about different ways to engage with it. It’s become clear to me that perfectionism will move me away: I’m just spitting words right now, and that’s how I think it should be. If I start going back and forth between paragraphs and trying to make this post make sense, it’s just never going to be good enough. It will take me 4 hours to make a post that I can feel good with, and next week I will completely forget about my blog because who the hell has 4 hours to spare on this.

    This year my grandmother left me with a lesson about memory: we must take control of our time and not give up our attention to important things. I am hoping that by following her steps and focusing more on this blog I can start a wave that resonates with other aspects of my life.

  • Callbacks vs async code for events

    I’ve never been totally convinced about callbacks. They are extremely powerful but kinda mess everything up. Whenever I deal with code that uses them, it never feels like the “right” thing to use for the task.

    Once you’ve set up a callback, the class that contains the callback method loses control of when it is called. Yes, we’ve supposedly configured an event that is called once something specific happens, but we rely on some other piece of code to properly understand and handle when that’s supposed to happen.

    Also, there is no visual connection in the code between what triggers the call and the call itself. We subscribe to an event and somewhere else define the callback itself. Whoever comes after us needs to go back and forth around the code and make the proper mental connections to understand what’s going on.

    On the other hand, I find asynchronous code a lot more idiomatic. Let’s take a look at the following example that I’m just making up as I write:

    // Using event callbacks
public void Setup(){
    NetworkManager.Instance.OnChatMessageSent += OnChatMessageSent;
}

private void OnDestroy(){
    NetworkManager.Instance.OnChatMessageSent -= OnChatMessageSent;
}

………

private void OnChatMessageSent(MessageData message){
    … // Handle chat UI
}

//-------------------------
//-------------------------

// Using UniTask
public void Setup(){
    HandleChatEvents().Forget();
}

…

public async UniTaskVoid HandleChatEvents(){
    while(this != null && NetworkManager.Instance != null){
        MessageData message = await NetworkManager.Instance.OnChatMessageSentTCS;

        … // Handle chat UI
    }
}

    Although the 2 approaches are very close, I think it’s immediately clear for anyone familiar with async code, what the 2nd implementation is doing. I like how explicitly we declare to be waiting for something to happen.

    The two ideas at play here are very different mental models:

    • I set up a method and someone, at some moment, will call it. I send a token (a callback) and expect someone to properly handle it.
    • I “await” for something specific to happen, halting the execution until that condition is met. It’s perfectly clear what I am waiting for and the before-during-after sequence is easy to follow because it’s perfectly sequential in the code itself. In this case I retrieve (instead of sending) a token (a task) and I am in charge of what to do with it.

    As an added benefit, here NetworkManager doesn’t need to care at all about who’s subscribed to the event, and we don’t need to care about unsubscribing at all. NetworkManager will just resolve its TaskCompletionSource without caring about who’s listening.

    I believe this approach makes code easier to follow and mistakes much more unlikely. I know some developers will be hesitant to use asyncronous code like this, but I have yet to find a good reason not to use it.

    The only downside I found versus a callback is memory allocation, since a task will need to be realocated after every resolution. Its memory impact is low, though, so it should not be a problem unless the events are happening extremely often.

    For those who might not be familiar with TaskCompletionSource: it allows us to create a sort of “token” that can be awaited from asyncronous code, but remains inert until some other piece of code “resolves” it. The most common use-case for TaskCompletionSource is actually to make callback legacy code awaitable, for example:

    // Before - classic (basic) example of callback hell
public void Setup(){
    Login(success => {
       …… // Handle login status in a nested lambda function
    });
}

private void Login(Action<bool> callback)
{
    NetworkManager.Instance.Login(result => {
        switch(result)
        {
            case NetworkManager.LoginStatus.Success:
                callback?.Invoke(true);
                break;
            case NetworkManager.LoginStatus.Canceled:
            case NetworkManager.LoginStatus.Failed:
                Debug.LogError($"Login failed with status {result}");
                callback?.Invoke(false);
                break;
        }
    });
}

// After - we can't change NetworkManager's API but we can break callback hell using a TCS
public async UniTaskVoid Setup(){
    var success = await Login();
    …… // Handle login status in a subsequent line after awaiting
}

// Note Login does not need to be async itself because it's not awaiting anything
private UniTask<bool> Login()
{
    UniTaskCompletionSource<bool> tcs = new UniTaskCompletionSource<bool>();
    NetworkManager.Instance.Login(result => {
        switch(result)
        {
            case NetworkManager.LoginStatus.Success:
                tcs.TrySetResult(true);
                break;
            case NetworkManager.LoginStatus.Canceled:
            case NetworkManager.LoginStatus.Failed:
                Debug.LogError($"Login failed with status {result}");
                tcs.TrySetResult(false);
                break;
        }
    });

    return tcs.Task;
}

    Here, NetworkManager is supposed to be out of reach, either because we don’t want to mess with it or because its API is out of our jurisdiction. TaskCompletionSource, though, allows us to handle it like a task and thus stop nesting callbacks.

    Unlocking asyncronous thinking as a programmer can make our code a lot cleaner and easier to understand, specially in interactive applications like videogames.

  • How internet search is changing forever

    Google used to be great. At any time, you were just a few taps away from the answer to any question you can imagine.

    For the last few years, though, Google has become increasingly enshittified. Trying to solve a problem using Google leads to a collection of bullshit articles written automatically by bots and AI.

    When I started interacting with those sites, I thought Google would very shortly bury them in the search results. But for some incomprehensible reason that’s not happened. Only Google knows why they have decided to let their primary product in a state of slow decay. For the last couple years searching has become useless. I find myself appending “Reddit” (or any other specific reputable site) to all my searches if I had any hopes of finding useful information.

    So the solution to a technology that fills the internet with bullshit is another technology capable of filtering it out. In that context I discovered Perplexity.

    Perplexity is what happens when you let ChatGPT search on the internet. Instead of spitting random words that may or may not be true, Perplexity analyzes the question you give them and bases the answer on search results coming from that question.

    The result is an answer that includes references and links to the information it’s based on. It’s able to give reasoned answers like the ones you’d get from ChatGPT, but also give you some confidence on the credibility of its answers, or at least the opportunity to contrast them.

    After a few weeks, I found myself slowly replacing the “thought” of searching something on Google with the one of looking it up on Perplexity. And as a tech-avid user that’s been using Google daily for decades, that’s saying a lot.

    After failing to find what I’m looking for from Google, getting it in a few seconds from Perplexity is mind-bending. And at some point I will just not bother trying with Google anymore.

  • A month on Semaglutide (Wegovy)

    NOTE for readers: I am not a health professional. Everything I write here are the experiences of a normal human being, and shouldn’t be taken seriously as suggestions or diagnostics without consulting with your doctor.

    Being overweight has always been one of my main life struggles. I’ve never been severely obese, but its shadow has followed me since my teenage years. For a few years during the late 2010’s I was able to overcome it, but I slowly crawled back to being overweight until now.

    I’m really tall, at 194 cm, so at least I don’t get a lot of the shame of overweight. Most people are surprised to learn that I’m actually slightly obese (at ~114kg) because my height kind of compensates for it.

    Also, weight used to be a big deal during my 20s, but now that I’m married and have a kid, I don’t feel the need to impress anyone. My only reasons for wanting to lose weight are purely health and, maybe, feeling better with myself.

    Since I know many others are in this same journey or trying to learn more about it, I wanted to share some thoughts and experiences about this.

    Is taking a med to lose weight ok?

    So my first concern about this is, should I want this? Is this the right way to lose weight, or am I cheating? I think first of all you should ask yourself if you need it.

    I believe that if you go to your doctor just to ask them if they can give you Wegovy you’re starting with the wrong mindset. You know perfectly why you want to talk directly about a med: it’s not the first suggestion your doctor will give you after learning about your problems.

    You can’t just go to your doctor and give them a diagnostic and a treatment. That’s not how it works: you go to your doctor to talk about your issues, and then you get a set of suggestions that, normally, you don’t like at all. You already suspect most of what the doctor will tell you. You will have to do all of that EVEN IF YOU TAKE MEDS, and specially AFTER you achieve your objectives, so you don’t immediately throw your progress away. Those lifestyle changes are forever and if you’re going to medicate yourself you better not waste this shot.

    After some years of back and forth with my doctor, she suggested me to try meds. The health motives behind this suggestion were a metabolism that had a serious risk of becoming diabetes in the long run, and a liver that was fatty and would also pose a risk in the long run. So weight is actually not the main reason for me to get serious with health, but it’s heavily linked to it.

    All the serious health issues I have are completely reversible, and I can undo the damage with a change in lifestyle and some lost weight. So if I’m serious about it, why take the meds at all? I think it’s like an insurance, or a warranty. I don’t have the best track record in losing weight and getting serious with my health, so I’m not going to bet all of it onto my sheer willpower if I have an alternative. Wegovy provides me a much higher chance of success: if I failed, the next time I might not have the opportunity to fully revert my situation.

    It’s also a medicine that interacts with the liver in ways that I don’t understand at all, so it’s not just about the weight, there are other medical reasons to take it.

    I know it’s not the socially acceptable and “pretty” way to fix all of my problems, but I have the rest of my life to do all the right things, my priority right now is to get out of risk and I’ll use any tool available for it (as long as it’s prescribed and recommended by a doctor, of course)

    How does Wegovy feel?

    After getting my first shot I was kinda expecting to feel something, but I just didn’t. Besides the slight discomfort of the needle, there’s no immediate feeling.

    During the first 24h I felt nothing at all. After that time, I started feeling slight nauseous. I actually had a family gathering that day, so I would have usually eaten heavily that day, but found myself unable to eat more than a standard serving. I was full.

    So that’s it, that’s how Wegovy feels: you’re full. All the time. The following days the sensation became stronger and at some moments I was almost unable to eat even after many hours of fasting. On the worst days it’s like trying to eat something after a Christmas meal: you try to eat but feel the food going up your throat. Even though there’s no food at all in this case.

    Your body adapts quickly to it and soon it becomes more like a regulator. You start eating normal sized meals and feeling full after it.

    That’s why I think this med actually helps with habit forming. The first weeks, whenever I saw a massive plate my head said “I can eat this” because I would usually be completely able to take it all in and then go for another round. Now, I feel like my mind is slowly having to re-learn what’s a normal sized meal, and not desiring to keep eating even if there’s more food available.

    I don’t know what will happen when I drop the medicine but I’m sure food is not going to look the same as it did before. At that moment, I will have to be careful not to do the same mistakes again, but I will have somewhere to start from.

    Did it have side-effects?

    Besides some nausea for the first days, I’m not sure if I can call my other “effects” a direct side-effect of Wegovy.

    Apparently, amongst many other things semaglutide does two important things: decreases your body’s secretion of glucose, and increases your body’s secretion of insulin. Take that, and also lack and of hunger (i.e. you don’t eat as much as before), and you get hypoglycemia.

    When you have a large meal your body compensates producing lots of insulin to lower your blood sugar. If the meal is REALLY large, your body overcompensates for it and causes what’s commonly known as a “sugar crash”, causing hypoglycemia.

    I had two different issues that lead to the same situation. I’m used to eat whenever I feel like it, which is just often enough for me to replenish all the nutrients needed in my body. But now I can spend full days almost not eating.

    So I started feeling very tired without an explanation. It was progressive and not bad enough to worry about it, but I was getting consistently tired. I didn’t really know where it came from.

    And then I went on vacation for a weekend and had a big breakfast one day. It wasn’t even big for what I used to eat, but it was huge for my new “standards”. Two hours later I was absolutely wasted. That same feeling from the previous days but much much worse, and with new symptoms like headache, heart palpitations, and slight cold and tremors.

    To make matters worse, I was completely full from such a big breakfast, so eating was not in my top-40 priorities. After a visit to the ER everything made sense. It was something that never happened to me before: I had low blood sugar.

    I learned two important things that day: how low blood sugar feels, and that I can’t just eat mindlessly whenever I feel like it. I need to consciously mind what I eat and what I don’t eat.

    Takeaways

    My takeaway is that Wegovy is not only helping change my mind about how much I can eat, it’s also forcing me deeply think about it. And this would have been much harder to learn without this med. After this experience I realised what I eat has a direct impact on how I feel for the next few hours, or even days.

    I found myself taking care of my carbs and iron intakes in a way that I had never before, and now I think I feel even better (less tired) than before starting, when I ate as much as I wanted. That’s something I will forever be taking an eye on: even if I fail miserably in my journey, whenever I feel tired this experience will come to my mind.

    I’ve lost 4kg during this month, and my doctor has decided to stay on the same dosage for the 2nd month, mainly because we want to keep an eye on those sugar levels and make sure I am stable before going up, and also because you don’t take the dose up unnecessarily if it’s giving the desired effect as is.

    Losing weight consistently is also extremely helpful to implement all the lifestyle changes that are needed. If you’re reading this, you probably know how it feels to do “all the right things” for a month just to find you weight more than when you started.

    I think providing a consistent sense of progress is really helpful, and the fact that going “wrong” has consequences (like in my bad breakfast example) also helps equalize temptations out. Now I know I can indulge, but indulging big is just not an option, and it’s important for me to learn that. Without the consequences it would have taken me much longer to realize this.

  • SJD