I love Cachy, but please don't recommend it as a reasonable first step into Linux.
It's a lot more polished than Arch, but it's not for someone who hasn't used Linux before and wants a reliably rock solid and predictable experience 365 days a year, with no fiddling.
It's rolling release, and there are inevitably bugs when updating immediately to every minor version of every part of the OS stack. Arch/Cachy/Endeavour are for experts, and those who enjoy tinkering. (If you want to recommend something Arch-flavored, just recommend Manjaro, and don't listen to the memers who parrot some youtuber's list of ancient and silly engagement-bait grievances.)
Yeah, the body-wide mucous thinning properties of NAC are one of the reasons it has racked up papers showing its efficacy in a truly staggering number of illnesses and conditions. (Including neurodegenerative diseases.)
Highly recommend reading the actual literature on its effects in regard to cystic fibrosis, pancreatitis, COPD, neurodegenerative disorders, high blood pressure, ulcers, IBD, liver and kidney problems, OCD...
The list goes on at a pretty extreme length, and it sounds too good to be true, but the papers are out there.
NAC is in the category of supplements that sound unbelievably amazing on paper, but are frequently discontinued by people trying to take it long term. Some people seem to like it, but it’s common for people to take it for a while and realize it’s causing side effects like anhedonia, apathy, minor sleep disruptions, or other subtle negative effects. Not everyone, but it’s a common outcome.
It also doesn’t quite live up to a lot of the incredible sounding papers for many conditions. It’s really common to find papers or even small trials purporting to find amazing effects from supplements that fail to replicate at scale. NAC does have some legitimate applications and is even used medically for certain conditions. I’m a little more skeptical that all of the amazing positives for every condition under the sun will hold up.
When considering NAC's mechanisms, it seems that it's efficacy is likely dependent on an individuals's glutathione status.
I doubt that folks with a solid diet, high in sulfur would find much benefit from NAC.
However, as someone who's gotten to use it first hand and have dealt with lifelong, mild inflammation (puffy fingers, clogged nose here and there), it's definitely been a huge quality of life enhancer.
> When considering NAC's mechanisms, it seems that it's efficacy is likely dependent on an individuals's glutathione status.
NAC interacts with a lot of things. Not just glutathione.
It modulates glutamate activity in the brain. That’s a key neurotransmitter. It’s why it can be helpful in some specific psychiatric conditions, but also why many people discovering it to be cognitively dulling or to induce blunt effect.
It also interacts with trace minerals in your body. Taking it for a long time can reduce these levels, creating multiple secondary problems.
The list of things it does goes on and on. It’s not a simple supplement for glutathione.
Would also like to ask for a starting point in this. Googling has not really gotten me anywhere credible. Specifically related to stroke or high blood pressure (both family traits).
TLDR: NAC is a derivative of an amino acid called cysteine, as such it is a precursor for one of the most important antioxidants in the body and it can modulate key metabolic pathways associated with good health across a variety of organs, notably for decades it has been a universally successful antidote for acetaminophen (Tylenol) overdose, it’s available over the counter but NAC is not naturally found in foods, eating cysteine-rich foods like chicken turkey yogurt etc is the next best bet.
> By contrast, post-treatment with NAC aggravated ethanol-induced hepatic lipid peroxidation and worsened acute ethanol-induced liver damage in a dose-dependent manner.
The article is about improving the flow of lymph in the brain, and NAC thins mucous, lymph, and various other bodily fluids, which leads to improved flow and general clearance.
It sounds like a hero story – it's not, it's more an existential nightmare and funny story? – but I kind of accidentally came to start reading all kinds of papers. Then fiancée was diagnosed with a severe condition. And just by having read stuff I found myself needing to interject doctors during her treatment, quite pointedly, to avoid risk of harm to her and unborn child – with my view being confirmed every single time by another doctor's second opinion.
It's mostly about reading fast enough, not actually requiring a feeling of comprehension. Skimming and going fast through lots of stuff. With extreme humility!! And then bit by bit an intuition kind of grows and you cut through the jargon and get a feeling for the core things. The mights and maybes and relationships in things. And then sort of learning to trust and not trust that intuition and have it guide your reading. It mostly shows up as doubt – an active doubt? – rather than an opaque sense of not having any feeling for things. Then that sometimes refines away from doubt into a sense of clarity towards some mechanism that's probably at play. Keeping absolutely humble towards it is suuuuuuper important, and it's always necessary to retain the perspective of oneself as limited and fallible.
It's also very hard to get this stuff into words. Seems more nebulous and "cosmic" than it is. It's just how our minds and reading comprehension work. It's about feeding the pattern detection systems with... substrate? A handle on things?
There are a few reasons why it works. "Works" as in is beneficial and useful to read, beyond just trusting doctors. (Do trust doctors!, –Jusr... help them help you. That's the thing.) One reason is that doctors do not have time to read, even if they'd very much want to. This is sort of force-multiplied?... with the personalization aspect: It is immensely valuable to read molecular biology from the personal perspective of operating and being inside a specific instance of that molecular biology machinery. The doctor's view is always more general (and is always a guardrail of safety, in part because of that). Then another reason is that there is SO MUCH actionable science out there. Just eminently safe and very, very actionable. It's so hard to get it across how it might be so, how it could possibly be, but it is. It really is.
Good question; It's also hard to get this into words.
Basically I'm fine but I shouldn't be, people are fine who wouldn't have been, lost one unborn child and the next one not; Got a pretty good handle on some significant sleep issues, pulmonary issues, one of the real autoimmune diseases, autonomic nervous system issues, recovery from a life-threatening endocrine issue, pregnancy and placental viability with same issue. All completely opaque to healthcare, all surprisingly mechanistic and actionable by just... reading. Very unbelievable but this is just how it's been.
It's not about me being special or a hero or anything. The gap between really truly actionable knowledge and medical practice is so big and generally so unseen that it's hard to talk across it. Classically maddening. So easy to get there though, by just... reading.
OK, I just read the abstract and conclusion of the NAC paper posted above. But then I saw a comment from Aurornis saying it’s not that good. Not sure who I should listen to.
Which ones? This one in particular is special? See the problem? I still need to trust some authority on which ones to spend time on.
I think the parent was implying that we should try to avoid bias by reading it ourselves, but I still need to trust someone, so still getting biased feedback. "reading the paper" does not remove the bias, because I still need to narrow it down to read only specific ones.
None of the numbers I've seen on web usage, platform usage, etc. indicate people are significantly pulling away from online lives. Though, there has been a slight dip in daily social media browsing time in the last couple of years (of course, it also follows the end of the pandemic, and it hasn't ceded back to where it was prior).
That does sound like a rather charmed life though. Could also be a sign that people are reverting to using the social internet apart from their irl acquaintances as well.
Linking up with all of our irl acquaintances through the public web was a terrible mistake imo. Seeking privacy can mean many different things.
I think the platforms have changed. FB used to be 100% posts by people you know. I opened it today, and maybe 1 out of 50 posts were by someone i know, the rest was "trending" content.
Its essentially an entirely different website now.
For what it is worth, here is my experience with Facebook, [a platform that I have learnt to love after my Twitter ban]: I go to the main page, I immediately click the magnifying lens, so I get the list of unread posts of the 10to20 groups I follow. I read them quickly. Then leave.
I do that, on a daily basis.
Time spent: usually 20 minutes.
Reddit is 99% search only. I go there only on a purpose. [might be replaced by Gemini, eventually]
HN and Alterslash are probably the only source of random info that I still consume.
May be that information containment is a reaction to my 15+ years of addiction to [the good old] Twitter. Or because I have reached age 50.
But the consequence is that I get the news late, and usually because of a search I did. Not because of a proactive algorithm.
Additional thought: in the end I suppose my information un-déluge is the proof that algorithms eventually failed to deliver [i.e point me at things meaningful to me]. The biggest example is Spotify proposals. That is 1% of my music discovery, whereas traditional non-commercial radios and dedicated podcasts are [human curated and] much more diverse.
Would it show up in the numbers on web usage, platform usage, etc? People who do this drop out of the sample - they don't show up in the numbers. As far as your stat gathering is concerned, they don't exist.
If you're actually doing a census of people and asking about their web usage and social habits, it'd show up. So maybe Google or Facebook has the data if they were to do say cohort analysis on Google Analytics or Chrome History or Facebook beacon logs, counting specifically the number of total unique Internet users that used to visit social media but no longer do. But such an analysis would require SVP-level privacy approval (because it joins together personal, non-anonymized data across multiple products), and why would an executive commission a study that potentially tells them that their job is in danger and their employer is making a mistake by employing them? And if they did, why would they ever publicize the results?
AFAIK, most of the major public-facing analytics platforms work by sampling their users. If their users are voluntarily choosing not to engage with the platform that their sampling runs on, they by definition cannot measure that change. They just become a biased sample that excludes specifically the population they're trying to measure.
But they still READ. So, if you 'interact' (and by that I mean do any write-like action, like commenting, posting, liking, whatever) less, that's gonna show up.
They don't, at least not necessarily. I look at my HN history and it's 13 hours ago, 6 days ago, 8 days ago, 13 days ago. Fifteen years ago I was #2 on the leaderboard (itself now gone, it listed users by total comment karma) and would post about 4-5 times a day. Now when I'm not posting, I'm actually not on the site and not reading replies. I just don't have time.
I think a decent-sized subset of Millennials have basically aged out of the time-surplus years of the early 20s and are now busy with kids and careers and families. And they aren't being replaced by the new 20-somethings, at least not on social media of the same form. The kids are still on text messages and Whatsapp and Discord and Roblox and Google Docs (!!), but they aren't interested in getting on the public Internet, and if they are, their parents won't let them.
That reinforces OP’s point that it isn’t clear from their wording. I initially thought it was a speech model, then I saw Python, etc., and it took me a bit more reading to understand what it actually is
HA! I almost added a disclaimer to the original message that I wasn't certain in my identification, hence the request/complaint that they didn't make it clear. But I figured the message would be more effective if I "confidently got it wrong" rather than asking, so I went with it.
I'm not sure what you mean, what sounds dangerous to me is not caring about what services are listening to on a server.
The firewall is there as a safeguard in case a service is temporarily misconfigured, it should certainly not be the only thing standing between your services and the internet.
If you're at a point where you are exposing services to the internet but you don't know what you're doing you need to stop. Choosing what interface to listen on is one of the first configuration options in pretty much everything, if you're putting in 0.0.0.0 because that's what you read on some random blogspam "tutorial" then you are nowhere near qualified to have a machine exposed to the internet.
> "No more exposed PostgreSQL ports, no more RabbitMQ ports open to the internet."
Yikes. I would still recommend a server rebuild. That is _not_ a safe configuration in 2025, whatsoever. You are very likely to have a much better engineered persistent infection on that system.
Also, apparently they run an IoT platform for other users on the same host that cannot only visualize sensors, but also trigger (mains-powered) devices.
The right thing to do is to roll out a new server (you have a declarative configuration right?), migrate pure data (or better, get it from the latest backup), remove the attacked machine off the internet to do a full audit. Both to learn about what compromises there are for the future and to inform users of the IoT platform if their data has been breached. In some countries, you are even required by law to report breaches. IANAL of course.
Memorizing things, like place names, creates places in the brain to hang new information. New unknowns to pick at. Things other than how to get better at fortnite.
It's a lot more polished than Arch, but it's not for someone who hasn't used Linux before and wants a reliably rock solid and predictable experience 365 days a year, with no fiddling.
It's rolling release, and there are inevitably bugs when updating immediately to every minor version of every part of the OS stack. Arch/Cachy/Endeavour are for experts, and those who enjoy tinkering. (If you want to recommend something Arch-flavored, just recommend Manjaro, and don't listen to the memers who parrot some youtuber's list of ancient and silly engagement-bait grievances.)