Yeah muscle loss hasn't been a problem for me. I can do more pull-ups, push-ups and hike longer and faster than when I started. Progress was really slow with a significant calorie deficit.

I'm trying a much lower dose now to see if I can build muscle without rapidly regaining the weight.

Separately, I'm just really bad at dealing with the complexity of weights. I'm going to see if Crossfit helps this week.

I got to approximately my goal weight (18% body fat) and wanted to start gaining muscle^[1] instead, so I stopped taking retatrutide to see what would happen. Nothing changed for about two weeks and then suddenly I was completely ravenous and ended up just wanting snack food. It's weird because I definitely used to always feel that way, and it was just "normal". I mostly kept the weight gain at bay with constant willpower.

I'm going to try taking around a quarter of my previous dose and see if it makes it easier to stay at approximately this weight and not constantly think about rice crispies.

1. ^{^}

   I didn't notice any muscle loss with retatrutide, I just started out less strong than I want to be and find it hard to gain muscle on a calorie deficit.

The Phoenix by Julia Ecklar is also really good. It makes me sad that there's no good recordings of it and I can't find any covers.

I'm skeptical that this would be good with tallow. Last time I tried it, it smelled bad, tasted bad, and had the texture of a slightly melted candle. I'd imagine bear fat would have a much better texture and plausibly a better taste. Or did I just try a particularly gross brand of tallow and it's normally good?

I've volunteered during an election before and some of the things they do with ballots are:

• Never interact with ballots without the presence of a member of both parties.
• Transport ballots in locked boxes where the transporters don't have keys (and it would be obvious if the lock was cut).
• Record everything on video.
• Keep track of every ballot given out and every ballot that didn't come back.
• Hand-count some or all of the machine-counted ballots to make sure the results match.
• Notify everyone whose vote was counted (in case they didn't actually vote).

For voting machines, I think there are audits involving paper print outs + chain of custody rules, but I don't know the details. I've only ever lived in states with paper ballots.

I think the load-bearing part is "always have a member of both parties present", which is sort-of similar to what I'm suggesting in the post. If you don't have a single party you trust to count ballots, then make both of them do it (and record everything so you can prove it if one of them complains).

Thanks for reminding me that I actually need to read this. It's frustrating that there's no audio version though. I like to switch back and forth so I can listen to books while I do chores. I wonder if AI-read audiobooks still aren't good enough?

Yeah, the problem is that we don't have a (provably) fair source of randomness.

I guess I only really touch on this in the intro, but the context was for elections where there's high stakes and potentially state-level hacking. How certain are you that the RNG you're using wasn't tampered with in the factory by the Chinese government, and that no one has tampered with it since then?

There's similar problems with voting machines, where even though there's intense chain-of-custody rules (and I think voting machines in the US are fair), a lot of people don't trust them and think the manufacturers and/or political parties are tampering with them.

Thanks! I think it's correct now.

The risk I'm worried about isn't insufficient randomness (I think this is what's alleged in the lottery story). I'm worried that the hat-picker could collude with one of the candidates to increase their chance of winning.

This is sort-of a "the AI is smarter than you" situation where I don't know exactly how they'd do it, but I imagine if you gave Penn & Teller a hat, a pen, and a stack of paper, they could convincingly select the same "random" piece of paper over and over again. And even if they couldn't actually do it, if some voters are convinced that they did, then your election still has a legitimacy problem.

Yeah, my friends who knew about the exceptions didn't care at all. The only case where I think it would be a problem is hiding your exceptions from someone you're trying to convert. If you don't actually eat a fully vegan diet, convincing other people to do that based on your example is misleading. But that's presumably a less common thing where explaining the details and why is worth it (and will likely help you convince people since it shows you've actually thought it through).