I’ve used Windows for as long as I’ve been alive. At 6 years old, my first com­puter was a Windows 98 ma­chine, with an Athlon XP 1900+ (Palomino core) and a GeForce 440 MX, blessed with a gen­er­ous 256 megabytes of RAM.

Looking back, I kinda got scammed with that graph­ics card, but what could I do? I was a silly kid. (The miss­ing shader sup­port came back to bite me in the ass)

Also, is it weird that I still re­mem­ber the specs of my first com­puter, 22 years later?

Anyway, Windows has been fa­mil­iar and com­fort­able. I knew all the workarounds and how to ex­tract max­i­mum ef­fi­ciency from it.

I was a happy user, for over 20 years, and Windows has been my go-to for every­thing com­puter-re­lated.

Even af­ter be­com­ing a soft­ware de­vel­oper and us­ing a mac­book, I’d still find my­self reach­ing for Windows at times.

That is, un­til Microsoft de­cided to turn it into some­thing com­pletely un­rec­og­niz­able and un­us­able.

I think it started with the Windows 10 full-screen ads.

You know, those friendly sug­ges­tions telling you to try OneDrive or to “use the rec­om­mended browser set­tings” (reads as “please try Edge and OneDrive, we’re des­per­ate”).

Actually, scratch that, I think it re­ally started with the non-con­sen­sual up­dates:

Oh you’re do­ing work? That’s so cute… we’re gonna close what­ever apps you had open, be­cause we’re up­dat­ing now. We own your com­puter.

You had un­saved work? Too bad, it’s gone, get bent.

At first I ig­nored it, and car­ried on as nor­mal. Sure, I’d get mad from time to time and I’d com­plain.

But hey, noth­ing beats the con­ve­nience of be­ing able to have all of your ap­pli­ca­tions in one place

My break­ing point came with the 24H2 up­date. It in­stalled on my sys­tem with­out my con­sent, like any other ma­jor up­date. I knew there were prob­lems with it, peo­ple were al­ready com­plain­ing on Reddit, so I just post­poned it, and kept post­pon­ing it.

All it took was for me to leave my com­puter on and un­at­tended for a while, and BOOM, just like that - the ma­jor OS up­date that no­body wanted, it was on my com­puter.

As soon as 24H2 landed on my ma­chine, I en­coun­tered a bug so bizarre I thought I was los­ing my mar­bles.

If Chrome was po­si­tioned un­der any other win­dow, it would start hav­ing what I can only de­scribe as a vi­sual seizure.

Here’s Ableton Live with Chrome (Reddit) un­der it:

Worse, there was a de­cent chance this would trig­ger a full sys­tem lock, leav­ing me smash­ing my desk in im­po­tent rage. I shit you not.

I tried to roll­back. The roll­back failed with an er­ror. I re­in­stalled Windows. The bug per­sisted.

Like dig­i­tal her­pes, I just could­n’t get rid of it.

The so­lu­tion? Installing an Insider build. Yes, the so­lu­tion to Microsoft’s bro­ken sta­ble re­lease was to use their un­sta­ble re­lease.

For the Windows Defenders (see what I did there?), I tried unin­stalling the dis­play dri­vers with DDU, and test­ing other ver­sions. It did­n’t help.

Either I stayed for­ever on the older build, or I’d have to deal with this. And don’t tell me to for­ever dis­able up­dates, I’ll com­pletely lose it.

The Insider build worked…sort of. But now I had a new bug: Chrome would ran­domly lock up for about 30 sec­onds when a video was play­ing. My op­tions were to wait it out or press Ctrl+Alt+Delete and Esc to force my way back to a work­ing browser. After some dig­ging, I dis­cov­ered this was caused by an NVIDIA-Microsoft dri­ver in­com­pat­i­bil­ity.

I’ve found out that the flick­ers and the chrome lock-up is­sues are likely caused by the Multiplane Overlay (MPO) pipeline. Microsoft blamed NVIDIA for not cor­rectly im­ple­ment­ing it in their dri­vers. NVIDIA blamed Microsoft. What’s clear is that if you were fac­ing this is­sue, you were es­sen­tially screwed be­cause these 2 com­pa­nies would just pass the hot potato to each other.

I should men­tion that this bug per­sisted even af­ter I went off the Insider build and on 25H2. And when I posted on r/​Mi­crosoft, they just deleted it.

The lat­est and great­est OS surely can­not be bro­ken be­yond re­pair, surely I’m us­ing my PC wrong.

So there I was, fi­nally grasp­ing the re­al­ity of what you’re up against, as a Windows user:

* Updates that in­stall with­out per­mis­sion and brick my sys­tem

* Copilot and OneDrive ads ap­pear­ing in every cor­ner of the OS

* Copilot but­tons every­where, com­ing for every ap­pli­ca­tion

* Can’t even make a lo­cal ac­count with­out hack­ing the setup with Rufus (they even re­moved the ter­mi­nal workaround)

* Zero ac­tion­able fixes or even an aknowl­edg­ment of their fuck­ups

People of­ten say Linux is “too much work.”.

And I agree. They’re com­pletely jus­ti­fied to com­plain. There’s the doc­u­men­ta­tion page div­ing, the fo­rums, the red­dit threads. And, most im­por­tantly, you have to ba­si­cally rewire your brain and stop ex­pect­ing it to be­have like Windows used to.

But I looked at the list above and re­al­ized: Windows is now also too much work.

And the dif­fer­ence with Windows is that you’re go­ing to do all that work while ac­tively fight­ing your com­puter only for it to be un­done when the next sur­prise up­date comes and ru­ins every­thing.

You might be think­ing “just dis­able up­dates, man” or “just in­stall LTSC”, or “just run some ran­dom de­bloat script off of GitHub”.

Why? Why would I jump through all these hoops? I’d rather put in the ef­fort for an OS that knows what con­sent is and re­spects me as a user.

To set the stage: I’m a soft­ware de­vel­oper and a mu­si­cian.

As you can imag­ine, I was le­git­i­mately wor­ried about app sup­port on Linux, and how it would dis­trupt my work­flow.

But af­ter Chrome crash­ing for the 10000th time, I said “enough is enough”, and de­cided to go big. I in­stalled CachyOS, a per­for­mance-fo­cused Arch-based dis­tri­b­u­tion, on my main ma­chine (9800X3D, RTX 5080).

It was­n’t a pain­less process. In fact, sleep mode was bro­ken from the start, and my sys­tem would fail to de­tect the mon­i­tor af­ter wak­ing up.

What’s more, Ableton Live does not have a na­tive Linux build, only Windows and ma­cOS. So I could­n’t use it any­more, at least not with­out fuck­ing around with Wine (which does­n’t fully sup­port it), or with­out keep­ing a Windows VM and tak­ing an L on au­dio la­tency.

But un­like Windows, on CachyOS I could ac­tu­ally fix my NVIDIA woes by fol­low­ing this thread on their fo­rum.

All I had to do was add the NVIDIA mod­ules to mkinitc­pio. One con­fig change, a com­mand to re­build the initramfs, and prob­lem solved.

I also found a good na­tive al­ter­na­tive to Ableton Live - Bitwig Studio, which both­ered to re­lease a na­tive Linux Build.

Thanks to the con­stant progress that was made with Pipewire, I’m get­ting au­dio la­tency on par with Mac OS, and lower than Windows. And my work­flow did­n’t even change that much, since Bitwig is made by ex-Able­ton de­vel­op­ers that seem to give a shit.

As for my de­vel­op­ment tools, on Windows you al­ready ac­cept the fact that you WILL use WSL or docker, so re­al­is­ti­cally I just cut the bro­ken mid­dle­man.

Now com­pare that to the Windows fuck­ery above.

If 3 years ago you would have told me that Microsoft would sin­gle­hand­edly sab­o­tage their own OS, do­ing more Linux mar­ket­ing than the most neck­bearded Linux fan­boy (or the most fem­boy Thinkpad en­joyer), I’d have laughed in your face, called you delu­sional, and then hurled some more in­sults your way.

Yet here we are, I’ve been dual-boot­ing CachyOS for over a year, and in the last month I’ve been us­ing it ex­clu­sively.

If you’re think­ing about mak­ing the switch, I’d rec­om­mend you do a lit­tle re­search first.

Look up the trade­offs be­tween a rolling re­lease dis­tro and a sta­ble re­lease, it might just save you a headache.

For me, the fast up­dates of Cachy/Arch are a good thing, but you can imag­ine that you are ef­fec­tively trad­ing sta­bil­ity for new fea­tures.

So what is the ac­tual state of Linux in 2026, from my hon­est per­spec­tive?

All ma­jor browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave) have na­tive Linux builds. Full sup­port. No com­pro­mises.

Video play­back works flaw­lessly, with hard­ware ac­cel­er­a­tion even. On AMD, on NVidia and yes, on Intel too.

Linux is the pre­ferred plat­form for de­vel­op­ment.

Better ter­mi­nal sup­port, na­tive pack­age man­agers, Docker runs na­tively with­out the WSL over­head, and your pro­duc­tion servers are prob­a­bly run­ning Linux any­way.

Hell, even Microsoft has their own Linux dis­tro, Azure Linux (Formerly CBL-Mariner).

This is where peo­ple as­sume Linux falls short. And they’re right, but not com­pletely:

* Adobe Suite: Runs via Winboat. Far from per­fect (no video ac­cel­er­a­tion, laggy at times), but func­tional

So while con­tent cre­ation is vi­able, the com­pro­mises might be deal­break­ers.

* Audio la­tency: Thanks to PipeWire, Linux au­dio la­tency is ac­tu­ally lower than Windows

Here’s where things get in­ter­est­ing. The per­cep­tion is that gam­ing on Linux is a no-go. In 2026, that’s in­creas­ingly un­true:

* Proton/Wine: Pretty much all games with­out ker­nel-level anti-cheat work out of the box through Steam’s Proton com­pat­i­bil­ity layer

* Performance: For AMD GPUs, gam­ing per­for­mance is on par with Windows, on av­er­age

* NVIDIA: There was a 10-30% per­for­mance penalty on Intel/NVIDIA GPU se­tups, but re­cent Vulkan ex­ten­sions are tak­ing care of that.

NVIDIA has re­leased beta dri­vers mak­ing use of these im­prove­ments, and once Wine/DXVK/Proton are up­dated to make use of the ex­ten­sions, the per­for­mance delta should be es­sen­tially gone

The only real lim­i­ta­tion is that some games with anti-cheat like Valorant, Call of Duty or League of Legends won’t run. But hon­estly I think not be­ing able to launch League of Legends is ac­tu­ally a fea­ture - one fi­nal rea­son to in­stall Linux.

It’s not all bad, though. Arc Raiders makes use of Easy Anti-Cheat, yet runs flaw­lessly. In fact, I’ve been play­ing it like a mad­man. It goes to show that if the de­vel­op­ers want to, it’s pos­si­ble.

Still falls short com­pared to Windows and Mac OS (Autodesk, I’m look­ing at you).

The sil­ver lin­ing is that Blender has a na­tive build. So if it’s your main ap­pli­ca­tion, you’re good to go.

Basic op­er­a­tions are so much faster on Linux. Opening di­rec­to­ries, launch­ing ap­pli­ca­tions, sys­tem re­spon­sive­ness. It’s like your com­puter took a line of coke, and is now ready to work.

No more wait­ing for the Start menu to de­cide it wants to open. No more File Explorer hang­ing when you need it the most.

Since we’re on the topic of Linux im­prove­ments, I want to ad­dress the ele­phant in the room - peo­ple who keep say­ing “I want to switch”, but keep mov­ing the goal­posts:

“Okay, but what about Y?”

If you’re al­ways find­ing the next rea­son not to switch, you’re not look­ing for so­lu­tions, you’re look­ing for ex­cuses to stay com­pla­cent.

I was that per­son, so I would know.

At the same time, I want to take it down a notch and say that there are still plenty of use cases (Especially cre­ative work, and like stated pre­vi­ously, 3D mod­el­ling and also Game Dev) where it sim­ply does­n’t make sense to switch.

So if you’re in that sce­nario, don’t feel pres­sured, just wait for things to im­prove.

And if you don’t plan on ever switch­ing, more power to you.

I’m not here to judge, just here to vent my Microsoft frus­tra­tions.

And I did­n’t re­ally want to switch ei­ther, be­cause who wants to re-learn how their com­puter should be op­er­ated from scratch? What I re­ally wanted was for Windows to work, but Microsoft did­n’t.

While I’m en­joy­ing my new Linux setup, Windows 11 is hav­ing a mis­er­able year, and we’re only a month in!

According to Windows Latest, there were over 20 ma­jor up­date prob­lems in 2025 alone, and 2026 is start­ing off strong, with the January up­date caus­ing black screens and Outlook crashes.

Here’s a quick 2025 Spotify Wrapped of the bugs Windows users dealt with:

* The Copilot app ac­ci­den­tally get­ting deleted (okay, this is ac­tu­ally a good change for once)

And the com­pa­ny’s re­sponse? Crickets. They’re busy boast­ing that 30% of their code is cur­rently be­ing writ­ten by AI. Don’t worry, Microsoft, we can def­i­nitely tell.

For the re­main­der of 2026, Microsoft is cook­ing up a big one: re­plac­ing more and more na­tive apps with React Native. But don’t let the name fool you, it’s never go­ing to be as close to na­tive as the real thing. These are pro­jects de­signed to be eas­ily ported across any ma­chine and ar­chi­tec­ture by mak­ing use of JavaScript.

And each one spawns its own Chromium process, gob­bling up your RAM so you can en­joy the priv­i­lege of open­ing the Settings app. And each one of these apps cre­ates an in­stance of V8 or Hermes per app, which adds ad­di­tional over­head (RAM + CPU). I’d ar­gue you do not need that over­head just to open a Settings app.

I could maybe un­der­stand this for a weather wid­get. But when it’s com­ing for core sys­tem apps, I think it’s just lazy.

I’m gonna go full con­spir­acy nut here, but I bet it’s be­cause it’s eas­ier for LLMs to write JavaScript, and Microsoft can’t be asked to pay ac­tual hu­mans to write (and test) proper na­tive code.

Meanwhile, en­tire gov­ern­ments are aban­don­ing Windows for Linux, the term “Microslop” is trend­ing on so­cial me­dia, and Windows 11′s rep­u­ta­tion is at its low­est point ever.

So here I am. Fully switched to Linux.

Not be­cause I’m some open-source ide­al­ist or com­mand-line war­rior (I’m just some guy), but be­cause Microsoft turned into Microslop.

Recently, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote a blog post ask­ing peo­ple to stop call­ing AI-generated con­tent “slop” and to think of AI as “bicycles for the mind.”

Be the first to know what’s com­ing next

TermsPrivacy*with some hu­man help from @mattprd

EFF last sum­mer asked a fed­eral judge to block the fed­eral gov­ern­ment from us­ing Med­ic­aid data to iden­tify and de­port im­mi­grants.

We also warned about the dan­ger of the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion con­sol­i­dat­ing all of the gov­ern­men­t’s in­for­ma­tion into a sin­gle search­able, AI-driven in­ter­face with help from Palantir, a com­pany that has a shaky-at-best record on pri­vacy and hu­man rights.

Now we have the first ev­i­dence that our con­cerns have be­come re­al­ity.

“Palantir is work­ing on a tool for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that pop­u­lates a map with po­ten­tial de­por­ta­tion tar­gets, brings up a dossier on each per­son, and pro­vides a “confidence score” on the per­son’s cur­rent ad­dress,” 404 Media re­ports to­day. “ICE is us­ing it to find lo­ca­tions where lots of peo­ple it might de­tain could be based.”

The tool — dubbed Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) — re­ceives peo­ples’ ad­dresses from the Department of Health and Human Services (which in­cludes Medicaid) and other sources, 404 Media re­ports based on court tes­ti­mony in Oregon by law en­force­ment agents, among other sources.

This rev­e­la­tion comes as ICE — which has gone on a sur­veil­lance tech­nol­ogy shop­ping spree — floods Minneapolis with agents, vi­o­lently run­ning roughshod over the civil rights of im­mi­grants and U. S. cit­i­zens alike; President Trump has threat­ened to use the Insurrection Act of 1807 to de­ploy mil­i­tary troops against pro­tes­tors there. Other lo­cal­i­ties are prepar­ing for the pos­si­bil­ity of sim­i­lar surges.

Different gov­ern­ment agen­cies nec­es­sar­ily col­lect in­for­ma­tion to pro­vide es­sen­tial ser­vices or col­lect taxes, but the dan­ger comes when the gov­ern­ment be­gins pool­ing that data and us­ing it for rea­sons un­re­lated to the pur­pose it was col­lected.

This kind of con­sol­i­da­tion of gov­ern­ment records pro­vides enor­mous gov­ern­ment power that can be abused. Different gov­ern­ment agen­cies nec­es­sar­ily col­lect in­for­ma­tion to pro­vide es­sen­tial ser­vices or col­lect taxes, but the dan­ger comes when the gov­ern­ment be­gins pool­ing that data and us­ing it for rea­sons un­re­lated to the pur­pose it was col­lected.

As EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn wrote in a Mercury News op-ed last August, “While couched in the be­nign lan­guage of elim­i­nat­ing gov­ern­ment ‘data si­los,’ this plan runs roughshod over your pri­vacy and se­cu­rity. It’s a throw­back to the rightly mocked ‘Total Information Awareness’ plans of the early 2000s that were, at least pub­licly, stopped af­ter mas­sive out­cry from the pub­lic and from key mem­bers of Congress. It’s time to cry out again.”

In ad­di­tion to the am­i­cus brief we co-au­thored chal­leng­ing ICE’s grab for Medicaid data, EFF has suc­cess­fully sued over DOGE agents grab­bing per­sonal data from the U. S. Office of Personnel Management, filed an am­i­cus brief in a suit chal­leng­ing ICE’s grab for tax­payer data, and sued the de­part­ments of State and Homeland Security to halt a mass sur­veil­lance pro­gram to mon­i­tor con­sti­tu­tion­ally pro­tected speech by nonci­t­i­zens law­fully pre­sent in the U.S.

But lit­i­ga­tion is­n’t enough. People need to keep rais­ing con­cerns via pub­lic dis­course and Congress should act im­me­di­ately to put brakes on this run­away train that threat­ens to crush the pri­vacy and se­cu­rity of each and every per­son in America.

Apple has set a new dead­line of November 1, 2026 for all Patreon cre­ators to switch from Patreon’s legacy billing sys­tem to the App Store’s in-app pur­chase sys­tem in the Patreon app on the iPhone and iPad, as re­ported by TechCrunch.

Note: This im­age has been edited to in­clude a pile of cash.

Patreon is a plat­form where cre­ators such as YouTubers can re­ceive pay­ments from fans, which can be a valu­able rev­enue stream along­side ads and spon­sor­ships.

Apple ini­tially told Patreon that its cre­ators must move to the App Store’s in-app pur­chase sys­tem by November 2025, or else Patreon would risk re­moval from the App Store, but the dead­line was pushed back. Apple con­sid­ers pay­ments from sup­port­ers to cre­ators on Patreon to be dig­i­tal goods that it is en­ti­tled to re­ceive a com­mis­sion on.

Apple re­ceives a 30% com­mis­sion on in-app pur­chases and sub­scrip­tions, but this drops to 15% for a sub­scrip­tion that has been on­go­ing for more than a year.

Patreon gives cre­ators the op­tion to ei­ther in­crease their prices in the iOS app only, or ab­sorb the fee them­selves, keep­ing prices the same across plat­forms.

On the iPhone and iPad, Patreon users who wish to sup­port a cre­ator can side­step the App Store’s com­mis­sion by com­plet­ing their pay­ment via Patreon’s web­site.

Patreon said it is dis­ap­pointed with how Apple has nav­i­gated this pol­icy.

According to TechCrunch, only 4% of Patreon cre­ators are still us­ing the plat­for­m’s legacy billing sys­tem, with the rest hav­ing al­ready switched over.

Patreon has shared a FAQ with more de­tails for cre­ators.

FBI Director Kash Patel said Monday that he had opened an in­ves­ti­ga­tion into the Signal group text chats that Minnesota res­i­dents are us­ing to share in­for­ma­tion about fed­eral im­mi­gra­tion agents’ move­ments, launch­ing a new front in the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion’s con­flict there with po­ten­tial free speech im­pli­ca­tions.

Patel said in an in­ter­view with con­ser­v­a­tive pod­caster Benny Johnson that he wanted to know whether any Minnesota res­i­dents had put fed­eral agents “in har­m’s way” with ac­tiv­i­ties such as shar­ing agents’ li­cense plate num­bers and lo­ca­tions.

“You can­not cre­ate a sce­nario that il­le­gally en­traps and puts law en­force­ment in har­m’s way,” he said in the in­ter­view, which was posted to YouTube.

The in­ves­ti­ga­tion quickly drew skep­ti­cism from free speech ad­vo­cates who said the First Amendment pro­tects mem­bers of the pub­lic who share legally ob­tained in­for­ma­tion, such as the names of fed­eral agents or where they are con­duct­ing en­force­ment op­er­a­tions.

“There are le­git­i­mate rea­sons to share such in­for­ma­tion, in­clud­ing en­abling mem­bers of the pub­lic to ob­serve and doc­u­ment law en­force­ment ac­tiv­ity and to hold of­fi­cials ac­count­able for mis­con­duct,” Aaron Terr, di­rec­tor of pub­lic ad­vo­cacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said in an email.

“Given this ad­min­is­tra­tion’s poor track record of dis­tin­guish­ing pro­tected speech from crim­i­nal con­duct, any in­ves­ti­ga­tion like this de­serves very close scrutiny,” he said.

For months, dig­i­tal tools have been at the cen­ter of how peo­ple have pushed back against im­mi­gra­tion en­force­ment ef­forts in Minnesota and across the coun­try. The ad­min­is­tra­tion’s op­po­nents have used group text chats to track Immigration and Customs Enforcement op­er­a­tions, share pho­tos of sus­pected ICE ve­hi­cles and raise aware­ness for neigh­bors. In June, ad­min­is­tra­tion of­fi­cials crit­i­cized ICEBlock, an app de­signed to share in­for­ma­tion about ICE sight­ings. Apple re­moved the app from its app store in October, prompt­ing a law­suit from the ap­p’s de­vel­oper al­leg­ing the ad­min­is­tra­tion un­law­fully pres­sured Apple to re­move it.

In the past few days, the group text chats — es­pe­cially those on the en­crypted mes­sag­ing app Signal — have drawn at­ten­tion from right-wing me­dia. On Saturday, Cam Higby, a con­ser­v­a­tive jour­nal­ist based near Seattle, said in a thread on X that he had “infiltrated” Signal groups from around Minneapolis that he al­leged were ob­struct­ing law en­force­ment. His thread, which got 20 mil­lion views, fo­cused on how the groups share such in­for­ma­tion as the li­cense plate num­bers of sus­pected fed­eral ve­hi­cles. NBC News has not ver­i­fied Higby’s claims.

Patel said he got the idea for the in­ves­ti­ga­tion from Higby.

“As soon as Higby put that post out, I opened an in­ves­ti­ga­tion on it,” he said. “We im­me­di­ately opened up that in­ves­ti­ga­tion, be­cause that sort of Signal chat — be­ing co­or­di­nated with in­di­vid­u­als not just lo­cally in Minnesota, but maybe even around the coun­try — if that leads to a break in the fed­eral statute or a vi­o­la­tion of some law, then we are go­ing to ar­rest peo­ple.”

The Signal Foundation, the non­profit or­ga­ni­za­tion that op­er­ates the Signal app, did not im­me­di­ately re­spond to a re­quest for com­ment.

Signal, which is con­sid­ered one of the most se­cure chat apps, is a go-to re­source for peo­ple con­cerned about pri­vacy. It is per­haps best known as the app Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used to share sen­si­tive mil­i­tary in­for­ma­tion last year in a group chat that ac­ci­den­tally in­cluded a jour­nal­ist.

In the Twin Cities, Signal group chats have been a stan­dard part of toolk­its — along with walkie-talkies and whis­tles — used by ac­tivists, par­ents and neigh­bor­hood-watch mem­bers who have or­ga­nized as vol­un­teers to warn fam­i­lies about im­mi­gra­tion en­force­ment ac­tiv­i­ties by re­lay­ing real-time in­for­ma­tion, es­pe­cially near schools. Patrol vol­un­teers have said that, with more than 3,000 fed­eral im­mi­gra­tion agents in Minnesota, they are mo­ti­vated by a de­sire to pro­tect par­ents, chil­dren and school staff mem­bers who are not U. S. cit­i­zens.

Patel did not say which laws he thought Minnesota res­i­dents may have vi­o­lated. An FBI spokesper­son said the bu­reau had no fur­ther in­for­ma­tion to pro­vide.

The an­nounce­ment seemed likely to have im­pli­ca­tions for the First Amendment’s guar­an­tee of free speech. Alex Abdo, lit­i­ga­tion di­rec­tor at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said the First Amendment pro­tects the right to record law en­force­ment of­fi­cers as they carry out their of­fi­cial re­spon­si­bil­i­ties.

“The abil­ity of every­day cit­i­zens to hold gov­ern­ment agents to ac­count, by ob­serv­ing them and ad­vo­cat­ing for change, is what has dis­tin­guished the American ex­per­i­ment with democ­racy from au­thor­i­tar­ian regimes around the world,” Abdo said in an email.

“Unless the FBI has ev­i­dence of a crime, and not just ev­i­dence of ac­tiv­ity the Constitution pro­tects, it should stand down,” he said.

Patel ac­knowl­edged in the in­ter­view with Johnson that an in­ves­ti­ga­tion into group text chats would raise free speech con­cerns and said the FBI would “balance” the rights guar­an­teed by the First and Second amend­ments with what he said were po­ten­tial vi­o­la­tions of fed­eral law.

“Now, we will bal­ance the First and Second amend­ment con­stantly, but we have to let the com­mu­nity know that we will not tol­er­ate acts of vi­o­lence and an es­ca­la­tion and a vi­o­la­tion of the fed­eral code,” he said. The Second Amendment could be at is­sue be­cause Alex Pretti, the nurse shot and killed by a fed­eral agent Saturday in Minneapolis, was per­mit­ted to carry a gun in pub­lic and had one with him.

Terr, of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said the gov­ern­ment does not get to “balance” the First Amendment against its other in­ter­ests.

“The Constitution takes prece­dence over any con­flict­ing state or fed­eral law, and over any of­fi­cial’s de­sire to sup­press speech they dis­like,” he said in his email.

He added: “There is a First Amendment ex­cep­tion for speech in­tended and likely to pro­voke im­mi­nent un­law­ful ac­tion, but that does­n’t ap­ply to just any speech the gov­ern­ment claims puts of­fi­cials in har­m’s way. By con­trast, if in­di­vid­u­als are threat­en­ing fed­eral agents or con­spir­ing to phys­i­cally harm them, that is il­le­gal. But con­spir­acy re­quires an agree­ment to com­mit a spe­cific crime and a sub­stan­tial step to­ward car­ry­ing it out.”

Patel also said the FBI had made “substantial progress” in an in­ves­ti­ga­tion into groups and peo­ple re­spon­si­ble for fund­ing re­sis­tance to im­mi­gra­tion en­force­ment. He al­leged that the protests and neigh­bor­hood mon­i­tor­ing are “not hap­pen­ing or­gan­i­cally” but did not im­me­di­ately pro­vide ev­i­dence.

If you’d like to make a trans­la­tion of this post, check out the in­struc­tions of how to do that here. Thank you so much for mak­ing this thing ac­ces­si­ble to more folks!

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Vitamin D & Omega-3 have a larger ef­fect on de­pres­sion than an­ti­de­pres­sants

⏱ This post is over years old.

Proceed at own risk.

The “effect size” of the best an­ti­de­pres­sants on de­pres­sion, vs placebo, is around 0.4. (On av­er­age; some peo­ple re­spond much bet­ter or much worse.) This is like go­ing from a C to a C+.

In con­trast: the ef­fect size of 1500 mg/​day of “≥60% EPA” Omega-3 sup­ple­ments is a bit higher, around 0.6. This is like go­ing from a C to a B–. (With un­cer­tainty; at worst, Omega-3′s “only” on par with an­ti­de­pres­sants.)

But, much bet­ter: the ef­fect size of 4000 IU/day of Vitamin D is twice as high as an­ti­de­pres­sants’, around 1.0. This is like go­ing from a C to an B! (With un­cer­tainty; at worst, Vitamin D’s “only” on par with an­ti­de­pres­sants.) This works even for peo­ple who don’t have a Vitamin D in­suf­fi­ciency — but around half of American adults do.

Even if you’re al­ready tak­ing Vitamin D & Omega-3, dou­ble check your dose: it may still not be enough! The of­fi­cial rec­om­men­da­tions are all too low, and re­cent re­search sug­gests even the of­fi­cial max­i­mum safe dose for Vitamin D is too low.

I know the “yay sup­ple­ments” genre of writ­ing is full of sloppy re­search & grifters, and you should be skep­ti­cal of my claim of easy wins, of “$100 bills lay­ing on the side­walk”. But there is good sci­ence among the trash, and pol­icy is of­ten decades be­hind sci­ence in any field, not just health.

So, Vitamin D & Omega-3: pos­si­bly high re­ward, for low risk. That’s a pos­i­tive “expected value” bet! These sup­ple­ments are safe, cheap, over-the-counter, and have pos­i­tive side-ef­fects (on Covid & cog­ni­tion). As al­ways, “ask your doc­tor”, show them the peer-re­viewed pa­pers cited in this post.

Unless you have spe­cific rea­sons to not take Vitamin D & Omega-3 — kid­ney stones, blood thin­ners, etc — please try them, for at least a month! They could save your men­tal health. Maybe even your life.

In Alicetown, the av­er­age per­son has 4 younger cousins.

In Bobtown, the av­er­age per­son has 3 younger cousins.

Alright, not so sur­pris­ing. You may not even no­tice a dif­fer­ence.

In Alicetown, the av­er­age per­son has 4 limbs.

In Bobtown, the av­er­age per­son has 3 limbs.

It’s the same ab­solute dif­fer­ence (4 vs 3) and rel­a­tive dif­fer­ence (3/4). So what makes limbs more sur­pris­ing than cousins? Well, partly it’s more dra­matic & vis­i­ble, but also be­cause: we ex­pect high vari­a­tion in the num­ber of some­one’s younger cousins, but not their num­ber of limbs.

This is why sci­en­tists cal­cu­late an “effect size” or “standardized mean dif­fer­ence” (“mean” = av­er­age). We take the dif­fer­ence be­tween two groups, then di­vide by the to­tal amount of vari­a­tion, to ac­count for how sur­pris­ing a dif­fer­ence is.

Unfortunately for laypeo­ple, the ef­fect size is usu­ally just re­ported as a num­ber, like “+0.74” for spac­ing out your study­ing vs cram­ming, or “–0.776″ for sleep de­pri­va­tion on at­ten­tion.

But what’s that mean? How can we make these num­bers in­tu­itive?

Well, a com­mon way for data to be is a bell-shaped curve (also called a “normal dis­tri­b­u­tion”). And most of us are, alas, well-ac­quainted with the bell curve in school grades. (“grading on a curve”)

So: school grades give us a use­ful way to think about stan­dard­ized ef­fect sizes! We can now con­vert that num­ber into an ac­tual let­ter grade:

For ex­am­ple: spac­ing out your study­ing, rel­a­tive to cram­ming, will on av­er­age lift your test scores from a C to a B–. (effect size = +0.74) And short-term sleep de­pri­va­tion, rel­a­tive to healthy sleep, will on av­er­age tank your abil­ity to pay at­ten­tion from a C to a D+. (effect size: –0.776)

But it’s not lim­ited to just grades & aca­d­e­mic per­for­mance. Effect sizes can also help us un­der­stand any kind of dif­fer­ence be­tween groups, in ob­ser­va­tion or in ex­per­i­ments!

Let’s use our school grade anal­ogy, to in­ter­pret ef­fect sizes on men­tal health:

What’s an “F in men­tal health”? By de­f­i­n­i­tion of a bell curve, ~2.3% of peo­ple are be­low –2 sigma (an “F”). (See: this bell curve cal­cu­la­tor.) In Canada, ~2.6% of peo­ple had sui­ci­dal ideation in 2022, while in the US, it was ~4.9% in 2019. So, it’s not too far off to say: “F in men­tal health = lit­er­ally sui­ci­dal”. (Also, re­minder that ~4% is 1-in-25 peo­ple. You likely know some­one, or are some­one, who will feel sui­ci­dal this year. Please reach out to your friends & loved ones!)

What’s a “D in men­tal health”? ~16% of peo­ple are be­low –1 sigma (a “D”) on a bell curve. The Keyes 2002 study es­ti­mated that ~14.1% of adults meet the DSM-III cri­te­ria for a ma­jor de­pres­sive episode. So, D = Depressed.

What’s an av­er­age “C in men­tal health”? ~68% of peo­ple are within a sigma of av­er­age (a “C”) on a bell curve. Same above study found that 56.6 per­cent had mod­er­ate men­tal health. They were nei­ther “languishing” nor “flourishing”. I guess C = Could Be Worse.

What’s a “B in men­tal health”? ~16% of peo­ple are above +1 sigma (a “B”) on a bell curve. Same above study found that 17.2% of adults are “flourishing”. Good for them! B = Flourishing, life is good.

What’s an “A in men­tal health”? I don’t know who these freaks are. I ac­tu­ally could not find any sci­en­tific stud­ies on “the +2 sigma in well-be­ing”. In con­trast, there’s lots of re­search on sui­ci­dal ideation, the –2 sigma in well-be­ing. In the ab­sence of any ac­tual data, I’ll just say: A = AWESOME

So, if an in­ter­ven­tion is found to have an ef­fect size of +1.0, that’s like go­ing up a let­ter grade. If some­thing’s found to have an ef­fect size of -2.0, that’s like go­ing down two let­ter grades. And so on.

Okay, so how do we get peo­ples’ “mental health grades” up?

Let’s look at an­ti­de­pres­sants, Omega-3, and Vitamin D, in turn:

The good news is they work. The bad news is they don’t work as well as you’d think they may work.

Cipriani et al 2018 is a meta-analy­sis: a study that col­lects & com­bines lots of pre­vi­ous stud­ies (that pass some ba­sic cri­te­ria, to min­i­mize a garbage-in-garbage-out sit­u­a­tion). While meta-analy­ses aren’t per­fect, it’s usu­ally bet­ter for “science com­mu­ni­ca­tors” like me to cite meta-analy­ses over in­di­vid­ual stud­ies, to re­duce the chance I’m cherry-pick­ing.

Anyway: this meta-analy­sis an­a­lyzes 522 tri­als with 116,477 par­tic­i­pants. All 21 an­ti­de­pres­sants they stud­ied were bet­ter than placebo (a pill that con­tains no ac­tive med­i­cine). The most ef­fec­tive an­ti­de­pres­sant, Amitriptyline, had an “Odds Ratio” of 2.13, which con­verts to an ef­fect size of 0.417, which is “small-medium” ac­cord­ing to Cohen’s rec­om­men­da­tions. Or, by our school-let­ter-grade com­par­i­son: the best an­ti­de­pres­sant would take your men­tal health grade from an F to F+, or C to C+.

From Figure 3 of that pa­per, you can see that Amitriptyline has the high­est es­ti­mated ef­fect size, while the side ef­fects are no worse than placebo:

But hang on, only F to F+ on av­er­age? How does that square with peo­ple’s per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence that an­ti­de­pres­sants have been life­sav­ing?

Well, first: the av­er­age per­son has around 1 tes­ti­cle.

The punch­line be­ing ~50% of peo­ple have 2 tes­ti­cles while ~50% of peo­ple have 0 tes­ti­cles, hence the av­er­age is “around 1”. Likewise, the av­er­age ef­fect for the best an­ti­de­pres­sant is 0.4 — but some peo­ple re­spond much bet­ter than that… and some re­spond much worse. (e.g. dif­fer­ent kinds of an­ti­de­pres­sant, dif­fer­ent kinds of de­pres­sion, dif­fer­ent kinds of peo­ple, etc. Note that this caveat also ap­plies to the Vitamin D & Omega-3 stud­ies, and all med­ical stud­ies.)

And, sec­ond: the be­lief that things will get bet­ter is a pow­er­ful thing. Unfortunately, the power of hope gets a bad name in med­i­cine: “placebo”.

When you take any med­i­cine, you don’t just get (effect of med­i­cine). You get (effect of med­i­cine + ef­fect of placebo + ef­fect of time).

The ef­fect of placebo + time: prob­a­bly around 0.9.

The ef­fect of placebo alone: Amazingly, de­spite re­searchers hav­ing used place­bos for decades, it’s only re­cently that we started test­ing “open-label” place­bos: place­bos where we just tell the pa­tient it’s a placebo. We then com­pare “getting placebo” to “getting noth­ing”. The ef­fect size of open placebo, on stuff rang­ing from pain to de­pres­sion, is around 0.43. (Spille et al 2023)

The ef­fect of time alone: Using the above two num­bers, I’d guessti­mate: 0.9 - 0.43 = 0.47. “Time” in­cludes both nat­ural heal­ing, and “regression to the mean”.

So, the in­di­vid­ual ef­fect of med­ica­tion, psy­cho­log­i­cal placebo, and time, are all around +0.4 each. And com­bined, they give you +1.20, or go­ing from F to D+ or C to B+. That’s why many peo­ple re­port an­ti­de­pres­sants be­ing life­sav­ing! (Again, on av­er­age; some peo­ple re­act much worse.)

“Wait, the im­prove­ment from an­ti­de­pres­sants is mostly placebo + time?” Yes, and this is widely known in psy­chi­a­try. I mean, they’re not yelling it from the rooftops, but it ain’t no se­cret. Decades ago, the in­fa­mous Kirsch & Sapirstein 1998 es­ti­mated that the im­prove­ment from an­ti­de­pres­sants is ~75% placebo + time. Even the most crit­i­cal re­sponse to Kirsch’s work, Fountoulakis & Möller 2011, still finds it’s mostly placebo + time.

But again, I think “placebo” is too dis­mis­sive a word for the power of hope. Hope is­n’t magic, but it’s some­thing, and mea­sur­ably so: around +0.4. I as­sert: the placebo ef­fect is­n’t a bug, it’s a fea­ture! It proves the con­nec­tion be­tween men­tal state & phys­i­cal health.

But any­way, for the rest of this ar­ti­cle, I’ll only be re­port­ing ef­fect sizes ver­sus placebo + time. Just re­mem­ber that the power of hope gives you an ex­tra +0.4 (like C to C+) for all in­ter­ven­tions.

Keep get­ting con­fused on which fat is what? Me too. So, here’s a crash course on var­i­ous fats:

Fatty acids are chains of car­bons & hy­dro­gens + two oxy­gens. They say “OOH” at one end, and “HHH” at the other end:

A sat­u­rated fatty acid is one where all the car­bons’ free spots are filled up with hy­dro­gens. (Hence, “saturated”) This makes the mol­e­cule stick straight out. This is why long sat­u­rated fatty acids — like those found in but­ter — tend to be solid at room tem­per­a­ture.

In con­trast, un­sat­u­rated fatty acids have at least one hy­dro­gen miss­ing. This causes them to have a dou­ble-bond “kink” in the mol­e­cule. This makes them not stick out, which is why un­sat­u­rated fats tend to be liq­uid at room tem­per­a­ture. Mono-unsaturated fatty acids (MUFAs) — like in olive oil — only have one kink. Poly-unsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) — like in fatty fish — have two or more kinks. Let’s be ma­ture adults about this, please.

For com­plete­ness: trans fats are un­sat­u­rated fats whose “kink” is twisted around, caus­ing them to go straight. That is the worst sen­tence I’ve writ­ten all month. The twisted kink is caused by the hy­dro­gens be­ing on op­po­site sides, hence “trans”. (And yes, if they’re on the same side it’s “cis”. Latin was a mis­take.) The mol­e­cule be­ing straight is why trans fats — which mar­garine used to be full of — are solid at room tem­per­a­ture, de­spite be­ing an un­sat­u­rated fat.

It’s neat when­ever you can trace the his­tory of some­thing right down to its atoms! Margarine was first in­vented be­cause it’s cheaper, and is spread­able straight from the fridge, un­like but­ter. Margarine (used to be) made by tak­ing un­sat­u­rated veg­etable oils, which were cheaper than an­i­mal fats, then pump­ing a bunch of hy­dro­gens into it (hence, “hydrogenated oils”). If you com­pletely hy­dro­genate an oil, it be­comes a sat­u­rated fat. But they only par­tially hy­dro­genated those oils, lead­ing to trans fats, which were cheaper & a spread­able semi-solid at fridge tem­per­a­ture.

In the 1970s & 80s, the US Food & Drug Administration con­cluded that trans fats were not harm­ful to hu­mans, and nu­tri­tion­ists pro­moted mar­garine over but­ter, be­cause but­ter had “unhealthy” sat­u­rated fats. But in the early 1990s, sci­en­tists re­al­ized that trans fats were even worse for you than sat­u­rated fats. Only in the 2010′s, did most Western coun­tries start of­fi­cially ban­ning trans fats. Reminder: pol­icy is of­ten decades be­hind sci­ence.

I need to stop go­ing on in­fo­dump tan­gents. Anyway, Omega-3 is any fatty acid with its first kink at the 3rd car­bon from the Omega end (“HHH”), though it can have more kinks later down the chain. (And yes, Omega-6 has its first kink at the 6th car­bon, and Omega-9 has its first kink at the 9th car­bon. There’s noth­ing phys­i­cally pre­vent­ing Omega-4 or Omega-5′s from ex­ist­ing, but due to some quirk of evo­lu­tion, Omega-3, -6, and -9 are the ones bi­o­log­i­cal life uses most. As far as I can tell, there’s no spe­cific rea­son they’re all mul­ti­ples of 3. Probably just a co­in­ci­dence. There is a less com­mon Omega-7.)

Finally, there’s three main types of Omega-3: EPA (Eicosapentaenoic Acid), DHA (Docosahexaenoic Acid), and ALA (Alpha-Linolenic Acid). ALA is mostly found in plants like chia seeds & wal­nuts, while EPA & DHA mostly come from seafood, though there are al­gae-based ve­gan sources.

EPA & DHA are the fo­cus of this sec­tion. For bio-me­chan­i­cal rea­sons I don’t un­der­stand but I as­sume some­one else does: EPA is the one as­so­ci­ated with anti-in­flam­ma­tion, bet­ter brain health, and less de­pres­sion… while DHA is­n’t. (But DHA is still needed for other stuff, like your neu­rons’ cell walls, so don’t cut them out com­pletely!)

All the above info in a Venn (technically Euler) di­a­gram:

Okay, enough yap. Time for the ac­tual data:

Sublette et al 2011 is an older meta-analy­sis (15 tri­als with 916 par­tic­i­pants). It’s the only meta-analy­sis I could find that es­ti­mates the ac­tual “dose-response” curve, which shows: how much ef­fect, for how much treat­ment.

Why is dose-re­sponse im­por­tant? Because one prob­lem with many meta-analy­ses is they’ll do some­thing like: “Study 1 gave pa­tients 1 gram of med­i­cine and saw a +1 im­prove­ment in dis­ease, Study 2 gave 10 grams and saw +4 im­prove­ment, Study 3 gave 100 grams and saw neg­a­tive –5 im­prove­ment… the av­er­age of +1, +4, and –5 is zero… there­fore the med­i­cine’s ef­fect is zero.”

As men­tioned ear­lier, this is a mean­ing­less mean. That’s why we want to know the re­sponse at each dose.

Anyway, the Sublette meta-analy­sis gath­ered ran­dom­ized tri­als study­ing Omega-3 on de­pres­sion (vs placebo, of course) and got the fol­low­ing dose-re­sponse curve.⤵ Note that the hor­i­zon­tal axis is not just amount of to­tal Omega-3, but specif­i­cally the ex­tra amount of “unopposed” EPA, above the amount of DHA. Or in other words, “EPA mi­nus DHA”:

The top ef­fect size is around +0.558, which is like go­ing from an F to D–, or C to B–. You get this max­i­mum ef­fect around 1 to 2 grams of ex­tra EPA, and too much EPA gets worse re­sults. The meta-analy­sis finds that Omega-3 sup­ple­ments that are ~60% EPA (and the rest DHA) are op­ti­mal.

Is this in line with later meta-analy­ses? More or less! Liao et al 2019 also finds that ~1 gram of ≥60% EPA is best, but ac­tu­ally finds a higher ef­fect size: +1.03. Kelaiditis et al 2023 also finds 1 to 2g of ≥60% EPA is best, but found a lower ef­fect size of +0.43… which is still as good as the best an­ti­de­pres­sant! So, I’m tak­ing +0.558 as the me­dian es­ti­mate.

Let’s con­vert this to an ac­tion­able rec­om­men­da­tion: You want around 1 gram of EPA a day. So if your sup­ple­ments are 60% EPA, you need 1 gram ÷ 0.6 ~= 1.667 grams = 1667 mil­ligrams. Let’s round this down for con­ve­nience: get 1500 mg/​day of 60%-EPA Omega-3 sup­ple­ments.

In com­par­i­son, most of­fi­cial health or­ga­ni­za­tions rec­om­mend “250–500 mg com­bined EPA and DHA each day for healthy adults.” That is over three times too low, at least for op­ti­mal ef­fects on de­pres­sion. Which, as we cal­cu­lated above, is prob­a­bly around 1500 mg/​day. (The of­fi­cial safe dose is 5000 mg/​day)

Direct ef­fect on sui­cide: Finally, a (small) study di­rectly in­ves­ti­gat­ing the link be­tween sui­cide & Omega-3. Sublette et al 2006: “Low [DHA] and low Omega-3 pro­por­tions […] pre­dicted risk of sui­ci­dal be­hav­ior among de­pressed pa­tients over the 2-year pe­riod.” Though keep in mind this is a small study, and it’s ob­ser­va­tional not ex­per­i­men­tal. Also, weird that con­trary to the above stud­ies on de­pres­sion, DHA pre­dicted sui­cide but not EPA. Not sure what to make of that.

Bonus: Omega-3 may also boost cog­ni­tion? Shahinfar et al 2025: “Enhancement of global cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties was ob­served with in­creas­ing omega-3 dosage up to 1500 mg/​day. [effect size = 1.00, like go­ing from a grade of C to B!], fol­lowed by down­ward trend at higher doses.”

Ghaemi et al 2024 is a meta-analy­sis on Vitamin D on de­pres­sion (31 tri­als with 24,189 par­tic­i­pants).

Again, it ac­tu­ally es­ti­mates a dose-re­sponse curve! Below is Figure 1 + Table 2, show­ing the ef­fect of Vitamin D dosage on de­pres­sion vs placebo. The solid line is the av­er­age es­ti­mated ef­fect, dashed lines are 95% con­fi­dence in­ter­val. Note the ef­fect size is neg­a­tive in this fig­ure, be­cause they’re mea­sur­ing re­duc­tion in de­pres­sive symp­toms:

The up­per range of un­cer­tainty is low­est at 5000 IU (International Units) of Vitamin D a day, with an es­ti­mated ef­fect size of 1.82, with a 95% un­cer­tainty range, from 0.98 to 2.66. Let’s be pes­simistic, and take the low­est end: 0.98, like tak­ing your men­tal health from an F to D, or C to B.

Is this in line with ear­lier meta-analy­ses? Again, more or less! Mikola et al 2022 found a lower es­ti­mate: the ef­fect for ≥ 2000 IU/day is 0.407. Note that even this is still on par with the best an­ti­de­pres­sant! And Xie et al 2022 found a higher es­ti­mate: the ef­fect of > 2,800 IU/day is 1.23. So, I’ll take the me­dian es­ti­mate: around 0.98. (And I’m rec­om­mend­ing 4,000 IU/day, since that’s the “official” max safe dose. Though as we’ll see later, even the of­fi­cial max dose may be too low.)

Does this still work even if you’re al­ready tak­ing an­ti­de­pres­sants? Yup! Table 1 of the first meta-analy­sis, also shows that Vitamin D helps for both pa­tients us­ing an­ti­de­pres­sant med­ica­tion, and not. This is en­cour­ag­ing: it means you can stack both med­ica­tions & sup­ple­ments!

Does this still work even if you don’t have Vitamin D in­suf­fi­ciency? Yes, but ad­mit­tedly much less. That said, you prob­a­bly do have a Vitamin D in­suf­fi­ciency. Liu et al 2018 finds that a bit un­der half of American adults (41.4%) have in­suf­fi­cient Vitamin D blood lev­els. And Manios et al 2017 finds that over half of kids (52.5%) in Greece — frick­in’ sunny Greece! — are still Vitamin D in­suf­fi­cient.

Also, the “official” rec­om­men­da­tions are all too low:

So, if these three meta-analy­ses are right, then high doses — 2000 IU/day or more, pos­si­bly 4000 (official max dose) or higher — is op­ti­mal. But the of­fi­cial rec­om­men­da­tion for Vitamin D is 400–800 IU/day, sev­eral times too low.

And even the of­fi­cial max dose of 4000 IU/day may be too low! But McCullough et al 2019 gave over thou­sands of par­tic­i­pants 5,000 to 10,000 IU/day, for seven years, and there were zero cases of se­ri­ous side ef­fects. This matches later stud­ies like Billington et al 2020, a 3-year-long trial on hun­dreds of par­tic­i­pants, which found “the safety pro­file of vi­t­a­min D sup­ple­men­ta­tion is sim­i­lar for doses of 400, 4000, and 10,000 IU/day.” (Although 15 par­tic­i­pants got “mild hy­per­cal­cemia”, but “all cases re­solved on re­peat test­ing.” Either way, that’s a small cost for re­duc­ing the risk of ma­jor de­pres­sion & sui­cide.)

And it makes evo­lu­tion­ary sense that 10,000 IU a day should be safe. Your skin, ex­posed to the Sun’s ul­tra­vi­o­let rays, can syn­the­size up to (the equiv­a­lent of) 10,000 IU a day, be­fore plateau­ing out. Source is Vieth 1999: “Because vi­t­a­min D is po­ten­tially toxic, in­take of [1000 IU/day] has been avoided even though the weight of ev­i­dence shows that the cur­rently ac­cepted [limit] of [2000 IU/day] is too low by at least 5-fold.” And Papadimitriou 2017 re­views sev­eral pre­vi­ous stud­ies that find sta­tis­ti­cal er­rors be­hind of­fi­cial rec­om­men­da­tions; cor­rect­ing for these, adults should get 8000 IU/day.

So why are all the of­fi­cial sources still so para­noid about Vitamin D, and low­balling the rec­om­men­da­tions? Well, alas, of­fi­cial pol­icy is al­ways a few decades be­hind the sci­ence in any field. See: trans fats, open-la­bel place­bos, aerosol trans­mis­sion of Covid-19, etc. And be­cause some­thing some­thing in­cen­tives, it’s “rational” for gov­ern­ment/​in­sur­ers to be very risk-averse & slow to change (for bet­ter & worse).

Speaking of the Sun, why take sup­ple­ments in­stead of just get­ting Vitamin D from sun ex­po­sure? Well, skin can­cer. But also: be­cause Sun-Skin D varies greatly de­pend­ing on the sea­son, your lat­i­tude, and your skin type. There’s less ul­tra­vi­o­let rays from the Sun in win­ter/​fall, and at lat­i­tudes fur­ther from the equa­tor. And the darker your skin is, the less Vitamin D your skin makes for the same amount of Sun ex­po­sure. As ex­pected from the bio-physics of skin, Black adults have the high­est preva­lence of Vitamin D de­fi­ciency (82.1%!!), fol­lowed by Hispanic adults (62.9%). (But hey, at least Black adults have the low­est in­ci­dence of skin can­cer. You win some you lose some.) The point is: speak­ing as some­one with Southeast Asian skin, who’s cur­rently in Canada dur­ing win­ter… even if I stood out­side naked for hours, I’d get ap­prox­i­mately zero IU/day of Vitamin D from the Sun. Thus: sup­ple­ments.

Direct ef­fect on sui­cide: Finally, a meta-analy­sis di­rectly mea­sur­ing the ef­fect of Vitamin D on sui­ci­dal be­hav­iour. Yu et al 2025: “Vitamin D in pa­tients with [suicidal be­hav­iours] were sig­nif­i­cantly lower than in con­trols (standardized mean dif­fer­ence: –0.69, or a ‘medium’ dif­fer­ence)”. Reminder that this pa­per by it­self only mea­sures cor­re­la­tion, not cau­sa­tion — but com­bined with the above ex­per­i­ments of Vitamin D on de­pres­sion, I think it’s rea­son­able to guess it’s partly causal.

* Almost half of you have a Vitamin D in­suf­fi­ciency ac­cord­ing to the of­fi­cial rec­om­men­da­tion (800 IU/day).

* And those of­fi­cial rec­om­men­da­tions are way too low. The op­ti­mal amount of Vitamin D for de­pres­sion is prob­a­bly 4000 IU/day, with an ef­fect around twice that of the best an­ti­de­pres­sant.

* Even the of­fi­cial max­i­mum safe dose (4000 IU/day) is be­low what your body can pro­duce from the Sun in op­ti­mal con­di­tions (10,000 IU/day). Recent ran­dom­ized con­trolled tri­als con­firm that 10,000 IU/day is, in­deed, mostly safe.

* Reminder that of­fi­cial pol­icy is of­ten decades be­hind the sci­ence.

* Reminder that I’m not say­ing “take sup­ple­ments in­stead of an­ti­de­pres­sants”; in fact the above meta-analy­sis shows you can ef­fec­tively stack them!

Bonus: Vitamin D sup­ple­men­ta­tion was found in sev­eral ran­dom­ized con­trolled tri­als to re­duce mor­tal­ity from Covid-19, though much less than of­fi­cial treat­ments like Paxlovid. Vitamin D also prob­a­bly helps guard against in­fluenza too, though the ev­i­dence is small & early.

Scurvy is caused by a lack of Vitamin C. It’s a con­di­tion that causes your wounds to re-open up & teeth to fall out. Scurvy used to kill al­most half(!) of all sailors on ma­jor ex­pe­di­tions; it’s es­ti­mated mil­lions died. It can be cured by eat­ing lemons.

Rickets is mostly caused by a lack of Vitamin D. It’s a con­di­tion where kids’ bones go all soft and de­formed. During the Industrial Revolution, up to 80% of kids suf­fered from it. It can be pre­vented with cod liver oil.

Goiters is mostly caused by a lack of Iodine. It’s a con­di­tion where the thy­roid gland in your neck swells up painfully, to the size of an ap­ple. During WWI, a third of adult men had goi­ters. It can be pre­vented with iodized salt.

About 1 in 4 peo­ple are ex­pected to have clin­i­cal de­pres­sion some­time in their life. Depression is the #1 source of the global “burden from dis­ease” in the men­tal health cat­e­gory, and that cat­e­gory is the #6 bur­den of dis­ease in the world, above Alzheimer’s, malaria, and sex­u­ally trans­mit­ted in­fec­tions.

The ef­fec­tive al­tru­ists are all, “woah for just $3000 you can pre­vent a child’s death from malaria” — and that’s great! save them kids! — but where’s the fan­fare for the ac­cu­mu­lat­ing ev­i­dence that, “woah with cheap daily sup­ple­ments we can save mil­lions from sui­cide & de­pressed lives”?

Over and over again through­out his­tory, some hor­rific thing that caused mil­lions to suf­fer, turned out to be “yeah you were miss­ing this one mol­e­cule lol”. To be clear: not every­thing is gonna be that sim­ple, and men­tal health is not “just” chem­istry. Also, all the num­bers on this page have with large er­ror bars & un­cer­tainty, more re­search is needed.

But, as of right now, I feel I can at least con­fi­dently claim the fol­low­ing:

Most peo­ple’s jour­ney with AI cod­ing starts the same: you give it a sim­ple task. You’re im­pressed. So you give it a large task. You’re even more im­pressed.

You open X and draft up a rant on job dis­place­ment.

If you’ve per­sisted past this point: con­grat­u­la­tions, you un­der­stand AI cod­ing bet­ter than 99% of peo­ple.

Serious en­gi­neers us­ing AI to do real work and not just week­end pro­jects largely also fol­low a pre­dictable de­vel­op­ment arc.

Still amazed at the big task you gave it, you won­der if you can keep giv­ing it big­ger and big­ger tasks. Maybe even that haunt­ing refac­tor no one wants to take on?

But here’s where the cur­tain starts to crin­kle.

On the one hand, you’re amazed at how well it seems to un­der­stand you. On the other hand, it makes frus­trat­ing er­rors and de­ci­sions that clearly go against the shared un­der­stand­ing you’ve de­vel­oped.

You quickly learn that be­ing an­gry at the model serves no pur­pose, so you be­gin to in­ter­nal­ize any un­sat­is­fac­tory out­put.

“It’s me. My prompt sucked. It was un­der-spec­i­fied.”

“If I can spec­ify it, it can build it. The sky’s the limit,” you think.

So you open Obsidian and be­gin draft­ing beefy spec docs that de­scribe the fea­ture in your head with im­pres­sive de­tail. Maybe you’ve put to­gether a full page of a prompt, and spent half an hour do­ing so.

But you find that spec-dri­ven de­vel­op­ment does­n’t work ei­ther. In real life, de­sign docs and specs are liv­ing doc­u­ments that evolve in a volatile man­ner through dis­cov­ery and im­ple­men­ta­tion. Imagine if in a real com­pany you wrote a de­sign doc in 1 hour for a com­plex ar­chi­tec­ture, handed it off to a mid-level en­gi­neer (and told him not to dis­cuss the doc with any­one), and took off on va­ca­tion.

Not only does an agent not have the abil­ity to evolve a spec­i­fi­ca­tion over a multi-week pe­riod as it builds out its lower com­po­nents, it also makes de­ci­sions up­front that it later does­n’t de­vi­ate from. And most agents sim­ply sur­ren­der once they feel the prob­lem and so­lu­tion has got­ten away from them (though this rarely hap­pens any­more, since agents will just force them­selves through the walls of the maze.)

What’s worse is code that agents write looks plau­si­ble and im­pres­sive while it’s be­ing writ­ten and pre­sented to you. It even looks good in pull re­quests (as both you and the agent are well trained in what a “good” pull re­quest looks like).

It’s not un­til I opened up the full code­base and read its lat­est state cover to cover that I be­gan to see what we the­o­rized and hoped was only a di­min­ish­ing ar­ti­fact of ear­lier mod­els: slop.

It was pure, unadul­ter­ated slop. I was be­wil­dered. Had I not re­viewed every line of code be­fore ad­mit­ting it? Where did all this…gunk..come from?

In ret­ro­spect, it made sense. Agents write units of changes that look good in iso­la­tion. They are con­sis­tent with them­selves and your prompt. But re­spect for the whole, there is not. Respect for struc­tural in­tegrity there is not. Respect even for neigh­bor­ing pat­terns there was not.

The AI had sim­ply told me a good story. Like vibewrit­ing a novel, the agent showed me a good cou­ple para­graphs that sure enough made sense and were struc­turally and syn­tac­ti­cally cor­rect. Hell, it even picked up on the idio­syn­crasies of the var­i­ous char­ac­ters. But for what­ever rea­son, when you read the whole chap­ter, it’s a mess. It makes no sense in the over­all con­text of the book and the pre­ced­ing and pro­ceed­ing chap­ters.

After read­ing months of cu­mu­la­tive highly-spec­i­fied agen­tic code, I said to my­self: I’m not ship­ping this shit. I’m not gonna charge users for this. And I’m not go­ing to promise users to pro­tect their data with this.

I’m not go­ing to lie to my users with this.

So I’m back to writ­ing by hand for most things. Amazingly, I’m faster, more ac­cu­rate, more cre­ative, more pro­duc­tive, and more ef­fi­cient than AI, when you price every­thing in, and not just code to­kens per hour.

You can fol­low me on X @atmoio, where I post a few times a week about agen­tic cod­ing.

You can watch the video coun­ter­part to this es­say on YouTube:

The goal of this tracker is to de­tect sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant degra­da­tions in Claude Code with Opus 4.5 per­for­mance on SWE tasks. What you see is what you get: We bench­mark in Claude Code CLI with the SOTA model (currently Opus 4.5) di­rectly, no cus­tom har­nesses.

Shows if any time pe­riod has a sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant per­for­mance drop (p < 0.05).

Historical av­er­age pass rate used as ref­er­ence for de­tect­ing per­for­mance changes.

Percentage of bench­mark tasks passed in the most re­cent day’s eval­u­a­tions.

Aggregate pass rate over the last 7 days. Provides a more sta­ble mea­sure than daily re­sults.

Aggregate pass rate over the last 30 days. Best mea­sure of over­all sus­tained per­for­mance.

Daily bench­mark pass rates over the past 30 days. Hover over leg­end items for de­tails on each vi­sual el­e­ment.

Daily bench­mark pass rate show­ing the per­cent­age of tasks solved each day.

Historical av­er­age pass rate (58%) used as ref­er­ence for de­tect­ing per­for­mance changes.

Shaded re­gion around base­line (±14.0%). Changes within this band are not sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant (p ≥ 0.05).

95% con­fi­dence in­ter­val for each data point. Toggle check­box to show/​hide. Wider in­ter­vals in­di­cate more un­cer­tainty (fewer sam­ples).

Historical av­er­age pass rate (58%) used as ref­er­ence for de­tect­ing per­for­mance changes.

Shaded re­gion around base­line (±5.6%). Changes within this band are not sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant (p ≥ 0.05).

95% con­fi­dence in­ter­val for each data point. Toggle check­box to show/​hide. Wider in­ter­vals in­di­cate more un­cer­tainty (fewer sam­ples).

The goal of this tracker is to de­tect sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant degra­da­tions in Claude Code with Opus 4.5 per­for­mance on SWE tasks. We are an in­de­pen­dent third party with no af­fil­i­a­tion to fron­tier model providers.

Context: In September 2025, Anthropic pub­lished a

post­mortem on Claude degra­da­tions. We want to of­fer a re­source to de­tect such degra­da­tions in the fu­ture.

We run a daily eval­u­a­tion of Claude Code CLI on a cu­rated, con­t­a­m­i­na­tion-re­sis­tant sub­set of

SWE-Bench-Pro. We al­ways use the lat­est avail­able Claude Code re­lease and the SOTA model (currently Opus 4.5). Benchmarks run di­rectly in Claude Code with­out cus­tom har­nesses, so re­sults re­flect what ac­tual users can ex­pect. This al­lows us to de­tect degra­da­tion re­lated to both model changes and har­ness changes.

Each daily eval­u­a­tion runs on N=50 test in­stances, so daily vari­abil­ity is ex­pected. Weekly and monthly re­sults are ag­gre­gated for more re­li­able es­ti­mates.

We model tests as Bernoulli ran­dom vari­ables and com­pute 95% con­fi­dence in­ter­vals around daily, weekly, and monthly pass rates. Statistically sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences in any of those time hori­zons are re­ported.

Get no­ti­fied when degra­da­tion is de­tected We’ll email you when we de­tect a sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant per­for­mance drop. Thanks for sub­scrib­ing! Check your email to con­firm. Something went wrong. Please try again.

GOG is plan­ning a Linux-native GOG Galaxy, call­ing Linux the ‘next ma­jor fron­tier.’

GOG is hir­ing a se­nior en­gi­neer to shape Galaxy’s ar­chi­tec­ture for Linux from day one.

Native Galaxy will let Linux users re­live clas­sics with­out the usual headaches.

Gaming on Linux used to be in a nasty catch-22. People would­n’t de­velop games for Linux be­cause gamers did­n’t use it, and gamers did­n’t use Linux be­cause peo­ple would­n’t de­velop games for it. However, with the ad­vance­ment of tech like Proton, we’re be­gin­ning to see peo­ple take Linux se­ri­ously as a gam­ing pow­er­house.

Still, that does­n’t mean that the Linux com­mu­nity won’t wel­come de­vel­op­ers who cre­ate Linux-native ver­sions of their games and re­lated apps. So, when the news broke that GOG was hir­ing a de­vel­oper to help get its li­brary app over into the world of FOSS, it was good news for every­one who wants to bring the clas­sics over to Linux.

GOG’s new owner de­tails how he plans to take on Steam: pub­lish less chaff

In a world of mo­nop­o­lies, GOG wants a niche.

GOG calls Linux “a ma­jor fron­tier” as it aims to make Galaxy Linux-native

It’s the next step in GOG’s plans to ap­peal to Linux users

If you’ve never heard of GOG be­fore, it stands for ‘Good Old Games,’ and its name gives away what kind of ti­tles it sells. It’s not all clas­sic games, though; some­times the com­pany will pub­lish newer ti­tles with a retro feel to them that feel at home on the plat­form. Recently, the orig­i­nal co-founder of GOG bought the store back from its pre­vi­ous owner, CD Projekt Red, and de­clared they would sur­vive un­der Steam’s shadow by vet­ting games pub­lished on the plat­form.

Now, it seems they’re mak­ing ef­forts to bring GOG over to Linux. As spot­ted by VideoCardz, a re­cent job ad­ver­tise­ment on the GOG web­site re­vealed that the com­pany is hir­ing a se­nior en­gi­neer to help with its op­tional li­brary app, GOG Galaxy:

GOG GALAXY is our desk­top client and ecosys­tem hub - the place where play­ers man­age their li­braries, con­nect with the com­mu­nity, and ac­cess fea­tures that go far be­yond a store. Today, it de­liv­ers ex­pe­ri­ence on Windows and ma­cOS, but Linux is the next ma­jor fron­tier.

We’re look­ing for a Senior Engineer who will help shape GOG GALAXY’s ar­chi­tec­ture, tool­ing, and de­vel­op­ment stan­dards with Linux in mind from day one. At the same time, GOG GALAXY is a long-lived prod­uct with a large and com­plex C++ code­base.

While you don’t need GOG Galaxy to play your pur­chased games, it’s still nice to see the com­pany work­ing on mak­ing an app that runs on Linux na­tively. Here’s hop­ing it’s the first of many tweaks GOG is mak­ing to help Linux users re­live the clas­sics with­out any of the headaches.