Source? There have been many articles on HN showing the RDA to be ~10x too low (something like 5,000 IU) and that the daily safety limit to be significantly higher than that (something like 30,000 IU).
Edit: for clarity I am not saying it is impossible to overdose on oral tablets, but rather that with most tablets 400 IU to 1000 IU and the safe limit so much higher than these, it seems like it would be extremely unlikely for someone to be taking 30+ tablets daily. Not impossible, but not easy either.
> Source? There have been many articles on HN showing the RDA to be ~10x too low (something like 5,000 IU) and that the daily safety limit to be significantly higher than that (something like 30,000 IU).
First: the RDA and the safety limit are not the same, and an RDA in a country being too low does not mean that the maximum safe dose is wrong.
And it certainly does not mean that there is a higher risk in under-dosing than overdosing when taking the RDA (which already includes recommendations for supplementing if you spend most of your time indoors).
I'm not a scientist, so I only know what physicians told me and what's explained in news publications or by consumer advocacy non-profits.
Here are a study (which I didn't read) and the NHS's advise on Vitamin D toxicity:
> Most cases of vitamin D toxicity resolve without serious complications or sequelae. However, in some instances, severe hypercalcemia can lead to acute renal failure requiring hemodialysis. Cases of permanent renal damage due to vitamin D toxicity are rare.
Which sounds good, but I don't think it supports that there is no risk of oral Vitamin D overdose.
The first link makes the problem sound like it can happen to anyone, but then when you tease out the details;
* Toxicity resulting from lack of monitoring is frequently seen in patients requiring high doses to treat ailments like osteoporosis, renal osteodystrophy, psoriasis, gastric bypass surgery, celiac, or inflammatory bowel disease.
* Patients who are on high doses of Vitamin D and taking inadvertently increased amounts of highly fortified milk are also at increased risk for vitamin D toxicity.
* According to the latest report from America's Poison Centers (APC), there were 11,718 cases of vitamin D exposure recorded in the National Poison Data System. More than half of these cases were in children younger than 5 years.
* The clinical signs and symptoms of vitamin D toxicity manifest from hypercalcemia's effects.
* Clinical management of vitamin D toxicity is mainly supportive and focuses on lowering calcium levels.
* Isotonic saline should be used to correct dehydration and increase renal calcium clearance.
A lot of those point to people drinking too much milk! (enriched milk)
* People with osteoporosis thinking "I better drink more milk for strong bones" when they are already on supplements/medicine.
* Kids drinking lots of milk and presumably not drinking any water - hence the dehydration.
PS: There are a lot of people out there that don't drink any water, and stick to juice or milk or soda, etc. They are not always fat, but that doesn't mean they don't have issues.
I've read the article by now and I like it. It's balanced, more so than the comment section made me think.
And my takeaway is not that everyone should be taking 10k IE, but it's a great reminder to be more consistent in taking my Vitamin capsules in winter.
I'm still standing by my point that it's "easy" to overdose on Vitamin D. Like the article already mentions, one should remember possible kidney issues and not take insane doses of it.
What the recommended daily intake should be, I don't know.
The whole reason I'm commenting on this is I used to take one of the "top" antidepressants on this list.
And I am a skeptic of antidepressants, that doesn't mean I deny all positive effects in people who are prescribed them, of course.
For what it's worth, it's also easy to overdose on Venlafaxine. It's still considered safe.
Just an example to make clear that my comment was not a critique of taking Vitamin D in general.
I don't find the article's main point surprising though. That's the reason I'm taking Vitamin D, too. Doesn't mean that it's impossible to overdose, and this point is also important, because many people still think that it would be impossible to take too much of an vitamin or mineral. Thankfully, high-dose Vitamin A / retinol supplements are not as widespread.
"There are people out there doing just fine on 5000 units of Vitamin D daily. I only see the ones who develop high calcium levels. But I see enough of them to know that this is not an exceptionally rare occurrence. I have been to lectures in which physicians have claimed that Vitamin D toxicity almost never occurs. In my experience, this is false. I have seen many cases of Vitamin D toxicity in people who were taking the recommended dose from an over-the-counter bottle.
Unfortunately, none of those patients were warned about the potential for Vitamin D to cause high calcium. They all believed that they were taking a supplement to improve health and that there was very little risk. Supplements don’t require prescriptions, and most do not have the warning labels that accompany medications. For Vitamin D, a steroid hormone, that may need to change."
Why would you not be able to overdose orally? It's not like it stops absorbing past a certain dose, and there is such a thing as too much (especially if vitamin k2 is lacking)
That's a bit of a non-sequitur, isn't it? The debated point is how oral intake as a delivery method can pan out specifically (and its limits), not the dosage limits of Vitamin D in general. Think consuming a drug vs injecting it.
It may not be that crazy in fact, unless it's prolonged. Don't take 30k/day for several months without supervision, but doing that for a single month is unlikely to harm you if you start from deficiency. Some people may need even more than that.
In any case, keep your blood levels in check. It's cheap and easy. There are even services you can order to have your blood sample taken at your home.
Nvidia follows the same strategy because having a large end-to-end model is how you get your customers to buy GPUs with their AI slush fund (and I don't think they limit themselves to vision).
His rationale at this point seems to be mostly stubbornness, coupled with a healthy dose of anxiety when he considers how much money he'll have to spend to deliver FSD to the people who bought it 10 years ago.
I switched to Fastmail and I desperately want to integrate ChatGPT to intelligently schedule meetings. I spend a tremendous amount of time going back and forth with people manually inputting when I am free. I’d pay more for this integration!
I also use ChatGPT (copy and paste) to rewrite long emails for clarity. I’d love if it had pre-written drafts that I could approve or edit and send…
I love Fastmail otherwise though. I don’t want to switch away, and I don’t want them to force it down anyone’s throat. I just want an option to integrate or a feature I could turn on (even a paid premium tier). My response to another person explains what the problem is - I think it is a pretty common issue.
im sure you could get procmail to do this, have fastmail forward to a self-hosted mail server with procmail and then have it go nuts. You can send mail from your own server using fastmail's servers with an API key.
I get 3-5 email requests a day for meetings. Those meetings are at various locations (so options like Calendly which are more focused on people doing meetings from a single location don’t work). I need to reply with times that I am available. Often they get back to me and say they aren’t available at those times so how about these times. We iterate until we find a time that works.
All of this is manual right now. I’ve spoken to a lot of colleagues in my industry who have the same pain points. A lot of time is wasted on this.
Something intelligent could take into account where I am going to be right before the time I offer and make sure there is enough time for transit in between. It could warn me if I have a few meetings back to back and might need a break.
I love Fastmail and don’t regret ditching the Gmail backend at all, but I do wish I could have something intelligent like this integrated.
Maybe I'm not understanding what you mean but isn't this just... a shared calendar? You have a work calendar which is public and other people can open to view your availability, and propose meeting times. And vice-versa you can see their calendar.
Modulo your problem with travel times (but calendars have location info, so hacking something where the travel time between two consecutive locations is accounted for should not be too difficult). So I don't quite understand where "AI" fits into this.
There is a persistent and perhaps fundamental problem of balancing self optimization and social optimization.
A group of people are trudging through the desert with limited water arduously pumped from scattered wells. Do you ration water such that everyone gets equal amounts or such that those sweating the most get the most.
Solve this dilemma accounting for the fractal parameters that go into it, and you'll have a utopia.
> balancing self optimization and social optimization
A person in a society has a right to the minimum of essential ordinary resources (food, shelter, clothing) to function as a general matter. (We have a right to pursue other goods, and in some cases a right to them once had, but we cannot say we have a right to them per se and before the fact. We have to be careful to distinguish between the two, as undisciplined and entitled people consumed by appetite tend to be unprincipled and like to inflate the list of “essentials” in self-serving ways. There’s certainly a pathology of envy at work as well, and we should in no way naturalize envy.)
In a situation of scarcity where there isn’t enough for everyone (which does not apply to the developed world), there is no solution that could satisfy that right universally. There is therefore no injustice committed when such basic resources are not distributed accordingly. Whoever gets their share gets it; whoever doesn’t simply doesn’t. You would expect competition here. Now, you could be charitable and self-sacrificial and give up your own share for another, but you have no such obligation to do so, and thus no one has the right to your share. Such charity would be an extraordinary act that transcends mere justice. It is entirely voluntary, even if heroic.
> and you'll have a utopia
Well no, you wouldn’t. This is the fallacy of consumerism and homo economicus. Even if everyone were rich, you would still have plenty of misery. The idea that human well-being is rooted in mere consumption - full stop - is at the root of so many ills. There is no well-being without virtue.
More like most people are dragging a cruise ship through a desert while being baited with the possible opportunity to belong to those enjoying the endless buffets and on-board water park.
This whole "should we ration so everybody gets some" is complete BS. There is an abundance of resources that are concentrated to a few and the rest made to suffer. We don't have to ration, we have to prevent the greedy from hogging it all. It's quite the opposite.
Funny how the choice of an analogy can set bounds to the set of accepted solutions.
Instead of trudging through the desert, or escaping a sinking ship, or surviving in a dog eat dog jungle, I prefer to compare modern society with a large boarding house, where every one has to cooperate a bit to make it work reasonably well.
A poltical philosopher from the XXth century once wrote: "At the end of the day, all we are trying to achieve is a basic level of decency, for which all that's required from citizens is the simple politeness commonly found in any boarding house."
Anyone who makes like 100 million dollars and thinks to themselves "this isn't enough money to stop working and just enjoy life" has something seriously wrong with them. The billionaire class will never be happy, and it's time for society to stop letting these loonies ruin society to satisfy their insanity.
I think it is far to keep working if you love what you are doing. To filter, there should be an absolute cap on wealth at a few hundred million dollars. This would eliminate the incentive to manipulate politics in favour of yourself, but if you want to keep working you should be doing it for society via charity or taxes on anything additional that is earned.
Have a nice ceremony and present a medal for winning capitalism.
>To filter, there should be an absolute cap on wealth at a few hundred million dollars.
One million dollars and not a penny more. Enough for most people to live comfortably, but not enough to buy governments, or for the upper classes to never need to work again to maintain their lifestyle and privilege.
No human being needs or deserves a hundred million dollars.
I agree with you in principle here, but to play devils advocate, $1,000,000 isn't a whole lot of money. A worker will make around that much at $25,000 a year over 40 years. If we have to keep money/capitalism, the limit should probably be around 10-15 million. That's still pretty high, but not egregious. Give or take ~40yrs on a high FAANG salary ($375k/yr). Still firmly upper middle class IMO.
I don't mean earnings over a lifetime or career, but currently. A worker making $25,000 a year will still probably never see a million dollars regardless of the limit. Maybe everything above that is taxed 100%. I don't know.
But the point is kind of to eliminate the upper classes and scale the economy back into the reach of most people. So there would be no FAANG salaries. The cost of everything (healthcare, education, housing) would go down. It would place a hard limit on political influence that isn't too far out of reach of current Congressional salaries and would probably limit pork barrel politics and insider trading as well. It would end inherited wealth and maybe even limit the length of copyright.
That's an admittedly naive and utopian view and I'll admit there are bound to be complexities and externalities I'm not taking into account because I'm not an economist. But it's either that or we seize the means of production and put the rich to the guillotines until the sewers choke on their blood. And then something something luxury space communism.
That's the crazy part. The people at the top seem to think they're better off if they can get another billion in the bank, regardless of the impact on the rest of society. But they, too, live in that same society that they are destroying.
They seem to think it's better to be a king in the Middle Ages than just a regular rich person in modern society. They forget that the lives of kings in the Middle Ages were absolutely terrible.
The purpose of capitalism is the flourishing of the capitalist classes.
The labor classes only need to be maintained like machines or draft animals, kept just alive and well enough to afford the rent on their lives so they can continue to create value.
The collective reactions to this aren't mental illness, they're trauma responses. Capitalism is accelerating towards its final form and the shock is giving people PTSD.
Billionaires are a convenient distraction for the upper middle class.
The wealthiest group of people (on the whole) is the 70-95th percentile.
If we were to have the toppling of "the rich" that brought about meaningful change to the "poor", it would necessarily include the toppling of the ~$200k income households.
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