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.
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.
Today is my 31st birthday. I thought it might be a good time to reflect on what’s basically the craziest year of my life, and the one with the most changes.
During 2022, at age 29, I made a decision that would resonate a year and a half later and make my 2023 a lot more exciting. I asked the woman of my life, Carla, to marry me. This decision made lots of sense to me since she was not only the woman who had decided to tolerate my quirks, she’s also the most caring and incredible woman that I could ever dream of, and a life without her would be a void life. Those who have the luck of deserving her love know that there is not much more valuable than that.
Despite all the wedding planning, 2022 was a pretty quiet year in retrospective. The few months before the wedding have been the most intense of my life. Organizing a wedding is no joke, and certainly something I would never go through for a second time, but thanks to Carla’s insane event planning skills, it was 100% worth it and a wedding that none of guests will ever forget.
The first few months of 2023 have been crazy for a second reason: in May 2023 I was able to publish my first game ever. It’s a project I’m extremely proud of, and represents a milestone in my career. I feel like it’s the first really sensible project in my curriculum, and the first that I helped build from the ground up.
Of course the few weeks before a release date are really intense, and seeing the users react and enjoy the game (and also shit on it from time to time) is pretty surreal.
This last few months of 2023 hint at 2024 being even crazier: Carla and I are expecting a child. It’s a boy and he’ll come to our lifes around April. We’re getting ready for what’s probably the greatest event in our lifes and it feels quite surreal. We even got a car, not just any car but a «daddy car», bought with a family in mind and getting us officially in the adult world.
My wife and I took the chance to upgrade our old Chevrolet Spark to a newer Volkswagen T-Roc. This is a huge bump up for us. We needed a bigger car now that we’re heading into adulthood and starting a family. Technology and safety features were also a big factor in our decision making. We didn’t plan to get such a good car, but turns out my 194cm of height can’t really get comfortable in any car, not even models we thought were big.
As a tech enthusiast, this is not quite the high-tech jump I would’ve dreamt of (I’m really looking forward to trying EVs and self-driving capabilities) but nonetheless we found ourselves light years from where we started.
Our new car is much safer than our previous one, full of features like lane detection, adaptive cruise control (which is almost like magic), automated parking assistant, fatigue detection… It has automatic gear switching (which is not a common feature in Spain), and it’s also comforting to drive a newer and up-to-date car (I was worrying our luck with the previous one could run out at any moment).
In hindsight, I feel like a bigger jump could have made me feel a bit overwhelmed. This setup has already taking lots of getting used to as it is. Watching the wheel turn itself automatically (for the park assist) can be very stressful at first, so I can only imagine what it’s like to see it while going 120km/h in the highway.
I’m really looking forward for the next step in a few years, but I’m pretty sure this is the appropriate one at the current moment and context, the one that feels «right». The next move will be much easier now that we’re already on a higher tier of quality and tech.
In the recent craze about the discovery of a new superconductor, there’s a bunch of tweets that stood out around that story (yeah, I refuse to call them x’s for now). Those were tweets about some site called Manifold Markets.
At first I thought it was some kind of crypto bullshit so didn’t pay much attention to it. I’m actually interested in crypto, but I’m really wary of anything that smells like it, because of all the shady stuff that orbits around it.
Turns out Manifold Markets has nothing to do with that. This site is more like some sort of game. You get fake money (called Mana), and are supposed to bet it by answering all kinds of questions suggested by other users.
There is no way to redeem or get any goods for that money, so ultimately it’s not about the money at all. The idea is that by playing the game users will try to optimize their answers to make as much mana as possible. You get to test your prediction skills against reality itself.
Every question in the app behaves like a market, and in the end the answers are supposed to converge to the actual chances of that question answer being «yes» or «no». By betting more mana you increase your risk, and by doing so the market updates to reflect your decision. By observing how the markets evolve you can either increase your stakes or get out of it and search another question in which to bet.
I’ve become absolutely addicted to the site. It’s extremely rewarding to get right the answer of a question that many people got wrong, and also humbling to realize that my vision in many questions was not as precise as I thought. Observing the convergence of answers and how they update when new information appears is a great way to get informed and have a glimpse into potential futures.
According some random definition found on Google, a Black Swan event is: an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences.
Classic examples of Black Swan events are inventions or discoveries like computers and the Internet, Steam machines, electricity or fire. Each of these changed the course of history forever, and no one could have ever predicted them.
Black Swan events are a beautiful paradox: you can’t reasonably expect them, but they need to be accounted for if one wants to make precise predictions about the future. You can’t really know what will be the one thing that changes everything, but you’ll be a fool to think that nothing will change everything at some point.
I think this is an interesting thought because Black Swan events are often overlooked by most people. Whenever we try to predict how things will be in the future, people have a tendency to focus in the current state of things and ignore any kind of technological development that could potentially happen in the future. To some people, any kind of tech improvement is a Black Swan event: that’s the reason why people fail to see the innovation in developments like the smartphone (when they came out) or electric vehicles.
It’s really hard to envision a world where everybody drives an electric vehicle if you do so in the current context. There’s no way to charge an electric vehicle nowadays in 5 minutes, just like we do with petrol cars, and we don’t have the necessary infrastructure to feed our whole current vehicle pool only from our current electric grid, let alone energy sources. But it’s foolish to think that this is how we’re supposed to do such a transition.
To envision the future we need to acknowledge how society, habits, and technology are going to reshape in the following years. We’re going to change how we get energy, distribute it and spend it. Energy generation and storage, at the current rate (we don’t even need a Black Swan event here) is going to get progressively cheaper in the following years. Electric vehicles, an obscene luxury only with lots of inconvenients a few years ago, are nowadays already commonly seen in the streets, and are only subjectively more expensive than a combustion model with similar characteristics. This will only get better in the following years.
A Black Swan event, like the potential discovery of a room temperature superconductor material, could accelerate all of it exponentially. If the current studies on superconductor materials are fruitful, we could see a similar or bigger reshape of our reality than the one caused by the Internet or television. We could see electric vehicles that charge almost instantly or electric infrastructure that generates no heat or resistance at all. For now this is just speculation, of course, but we could
Another, more realistic, example of a Black Swan event is the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs). They’ve actually been around for a few years already. I had the chance to experiment with the precursor of ChatGPT a few years ago, and now use LLMs everyday for all sorts of daily tasks.
Before, if you wanted to communicate with a computer, first you needed certain knowledge about computer science. You needed to know the extremely specific way of telling the computer what you wanted. Otherwise, you needed someone who could develop an interface that was easier to understand, and then you still needed to learn how to use such an interface.
Now, with Natural Language Processing, you can just tell what you need and expect your computer to just understand it and act accordingly. The ability of not only understanding commands, but also context, is going to (and already is) change dramatically the way we interact with computers during the next decade.
We’re going to witness a race to integrate this technology into all kinds of applications. It really is so good, that any existing application could see potential benefits in implementing it. Even if it means the market gets saturated for some time, as we’re also seeing lately.
It’s for sure an exciting time to be alive. The current context is the prefect breeding ground for all sorts of developments that could reshape our life in the following years.
Daniel Barca 