https://github.com/burke/helix/pull/1

Also, perhaps more often useful, is just "hey, tell me about ___ in the context of whatever I've told you about me" kind of thing".

Sometimes, yeah, the suggestions are very generically applicable and it's just a tool for thought.

It's suggested a few supplements that have helped a lot, helped me figure out dosing and timing, pointed me towards taking gut inflammation more seriously as a part of what's going on (and suggesting various tests and experiments to help prove/disprove that), explained correlations in various bloodwork results, the list goes on.

It's—of course—not perfectly trustworthy but a lot of things are either trivially verifiable or are low-risk experiments.

Set up a "Health & Fitness" project in Claude (or whatever). Feed it:

* Basic data: height, weight, age, sex

* Basic metric snapshots from Apple Health or whatever: HRV range, RHR, typical sleep structure - go through everything and summarize it

* Typical diet (do you track it in MFP or Cronometer? Great, upload a nutrition report)

* Any supplements and medications you take

* Typical exercise habits

* Any health records you have - bloodwork results, interpreted imaging results, etc.

* Family history like you would describe it to a doctor

* Summary of any health complaints

* Anything else that seems relevant.

Then go through a few conversation loops asking it if there's any more information you could provide that would help it be more useful.

Then ask it things like "Given , what should I be doing more of? Less of?"—or "Please speculate about potential causes of ".

Or, even if you don't have any particular health complaints you're working with, just being able to ask it questions like "What's one supplement I should consider starting or stopping today?" (and then obviously do some follow-up research...)

This is life-changing. Anyone skeptical of this has not tried it.

1) What

Anyway, even at that, virtualization isn't really my preferred way to solve any of the problems I have.

In the Apple Silicon migration, obviously emulating x86_64 got slow, but even when we built ARM64 VMs, performance was still miserable: there was (is?) no way -- at least no way we ever figured out -- to get reasonable perf out of virtualization on a macbook.

It's possible that this changed post-M1 and it sounds likely it's set to change with M4.

EDIT: ok, I'm probably hallucinating more problem than there actually turned out to be based on the pain in the first year of the M1 chips.

Interesting, I hadn't heard of this. First impression skimming the docs is that they've gone to significant trouble to make it not generically useful as a FUSE replacement but I could be misreading.

We did use virtualization for a bunch of stuff before the move to Apple Silicon, back when Hypervisor.framework and xhyve actually existed and were plausibly useful.

Those also fell by the wayside in the architecture migration and now virtualization has a massive performance cost.

Apparently the M4 chips are on ARMv9 which is apparently much better at virtualization, but it remains to be seen whether apple provides anything lightweight again.

It's incredible that it's 2024 and I can't cobble together anything vaguely container-like on macOS because:

* bind mounts don't exist (?!)

* clonefile() could maaaybe do the job but doesn't work cross-volume and a lot of the stuff outside of /Users is a different volume

* there's no filesystem namespace.

* chroot doesn't work either because /usr/lib/libsystem.B.dylib is required, but also pretend.

* And it sounds like chroot runs afoul of some SIP rule nowadays even if you can get past the above.

* A lot of this could be worked around with FUSE, but in order to turn that on, we'd have to turn off a lot of SIP.

The closest we can get without virtualization is sandbox-exec, which just allows allowing/denying file reads by path, with no path translation. And also is deprecated.

Nevermind that dtrace exists but you're not allowed to use it either.

Truly, the worst UNIX.

I take the point about the Theravadan rhetorical move here but I still feel like at the very least the original texts deserve to not be written _out_ of the definition of a word if they can be reasonably interpreted to mean something different from what’s practiced in schools working from later turnings and teachings.

That leaves room for determining what is a reasonable interpretation though, and I am extremely far from any kind of authority on that.