as one of those vegetarians who isn't particularly compelled by anything intentionally imitating meat, this is always somewhat funny to me. tofu already has good flavor and mouthfeel if prepared well, and presumably the rest of this alleged market segment is as capable of preparing tofu adequately as i am personally. so even if beyond was to pivot to (also) being beyond tofu, i fail to see how that would capture appreciably more of the market.

i could be wrong, but it's always seemed to me that most of the apparent demand for something better than tofu is not in fact coming from inside the house.

i'm not sure i follow this extrapolation from low-ldl individuals to any direct statement about causes and effects at higher ldl levels.

if there was, for instance, some thought-harmless virus endemic to a large portion of the population which somehow caused plaque buildup but only at sufficiently high ldl levels, people with naturally low levels their entire lives would still have plaque free arteries and we would still, as we do, see a broader range of plaque buildup among people with high levels. how do you propose to distinguish this hypothetical (and admittedly most likely biologically incoherent) explanation from yours by only looking at people with naturally low levels?

your assertion that such individuals are an excellent approximation to an experiment on the arterial health effects of lifetime low ldl seems reasonable enough, but you then appear to draw unfounded conclusions about the nature of potential inverse effects at higher ldl levels.

so now what

i'm not so much imagining an environment per se¹ as describing one i've already written, so i'm not entirely sure where any of this is coming from. if you care to have some additional assurance this isn't somehow an elaborate rhetorical trap, a previous comment about forth tail call elimination with a bit of demonstrative assembly is presumably only a short scroll down my profile. ctrl-f for cmov if you want to find it quickly. as i recall, it came up for similar reasons then because people often make similar incorrect generalizations about lots of things that implicitly sit atop a c runtime in their minds. that said, you're the first one to call me a sovcit before asking any clarifying questions so at least there's some new pizzazz there.

i was clear that i was talking specifically about linux precisely because this isn't something one can do portably for exactly the reasons you're describing (which, yes, makes porting things built like this off of linux before the point you've built up enough to be able to go through libc annoying and ad hoc at the very least).

the fact remains that i can, right now, non-theoretically, on a well supported common unixlike os, and entirely unrelated to whatever weird crusade you seem to have invented to stand in for my side of this discussion, link a pile of assembly with -static -nolibc, fire up the repl, and mmap files into memory as i please with nary a bit of c on the userspace side.

as i originally said, i'm happy to consider linux a weird exception to the point you're making in a wider context since this isn't something you can do portably, but there still are entirely useful things one can do today with mmap that involve zero userspace c code on a widely supported platform.

edit: lol forgot to even get to this part. i'm also somewhat curious what you mean with this bit: "you're running what amounts to an emulator." perhaps i'm not firing on all cylinders today but i fail to see how it's useful to characterize performing bare syscalls from assembly (or something more high-level built out of assembly legos) as an emulator in any way, but i'm open to having missed some interesting nuance there.

¹ unless you mean trivially (seeing as this is code i imagined and then proceeded to write) in which case i suppose i agree

or perhaps mmap is incontrovertibly a c function on platforms where libc wrappers are the sole stable interface to the kernel but something else entirely on linux?