I come back home after yoga supremely tired. In the past few days I've been waking up at night and almost sleep walking to the fridge and will devour until full, wake up two hours later and repeat. I'm unconcerned about this behavior as my body is toning and revving up.
I've passed calorie counting duties to ChatGPT, which is more competent than Claude at it. I still have pending tests to run on each LLMPal to find the best fit, and the experiment is simple: buy a week of groceries, count the calories by looking at the packaging, and if not available, reference a calorie database (count by hand). Then, take a picture of the receipt, and ask your LLMPal to estimate the calorie count, and benchmark against your count. I will do this on my next trip to the grocery store.
This weekend I bought 60% of the food I bought the previous weekend by cost, despite bringing pretty much the same stuff. When I passed the receipt it calculated the same amount of calories as Claude had the previous week. This can't be, I thought, and I tabulated the calories from packaging and saw the estimate was pretty accurate. I'm eating closer to 3,000 calories per day (perhaps around 4,500 in the last few days).
In the morning I passed a community kitchen near my house. I only noticed it very recently, I don't know why. There's always a long queue of people waiting outside, and there's a cinema right next door. I must have thought they were waiting to get into the theater rather than the humble church-like building next to it. Most people appear to be immigrants, people of all ages and appearances. I will pay the kitchen a visit to see if I can volunteer in some way.
The other day I was talking with V, explaining how much complexity is involved in giving tax breaks for certain products for meager savings to consumers. She said food and medicine should not be taxed at all. I said let's take it a step further then: local fresh unprocessed produce and essential generics should be free for final consumers. Now we're talking complexity! I really believe people should never be hungry or sick from lack of money, or even have to choose between smoking and eating (as I did as a teenager). How this is accomplished economically without people abusing the system and respecting their privacy, I have no idea.
My train of thought wants to take me through the hunger I lived as a kid, which was more significant than one might imagine. I was just questioning why do I want to serve in a community kitchen and the answer is: I know how it feels to be very hungry, and I feel compassion for hunger. That which I have suffered is what I understand, I suppose.