u/Canchura

i've noticed a recurring ritual on this sub. someone posts a claim that is obviously exaggerated.

then somebody finds one study, statistic, technicality, definition, or missing decimal point that makes the claim about 23% less dramatic.

and everyone immediately gathers around the corpse yelling bullshit. Case closed. science has spoken.

Except half the time the original claim wasn't completely bullshit. it was just badly phrased, oversimplified, missing context, or inflated for attention. and the debunk isn't completely right either. it's usually another simplification pointing in the opposite direction. And nuance is terrible content.

this appears partly true under these conditions, although the evidence is mixed and depends heavily on what exactly you mean.... gets 12 upvotes and dies alone.

NO. BULLSHIT. HERE'S A LINK. gets 3,000 upvotes because somebody has successfully converted uncertainty into a small dopamine pellet ffs

this is where this sub gets interesting.

Anything that reaches the front page here has already survived several filters designed to make it less accurate. so the original claim usually had to be dramatic enough for somebody to wonder if it was bullshit. the title had to compress the claim into something even more dramatic. the replies then compete to give the cleanest yes/no verdict and the most confident answer rises because nobody enjoys scrolling through six paragraphs of well, technically bla bla bla and bla bla this that..

Soooooo you end up with a subreddit dedicated to critical thinking that structurally rewards one of the oldest failures of critical thinking: premature certainty !!!!!!

the funniest version is when someone posts a complicated scientific or economic claim and within eleven minutes a guy called thebongwizard has read the abstract of one paper and declared the matter closed. then someone replies: this.

thank god. peer review is complete. you know what the weird part is that this isn't even mainly about stupidity. plenty of people here are intelligent , imo it's about incentives because being uncertain feels weak while being nuanced feels boring. finding evidence that agrees with what you already suspected feels fantastic. so debunking gives you an especially nice psychological bonus because now u're the person who wasn't fooled lol.. it's the attitude u see lowkey in people saying woo woo about things they don't understand or use reductionism only to feel better than the plebs. everyone else is a gullible peasant wandering around the internet believing headlines while you, the last functioning prefrontal cortex on earth found the Snopes article lolol

And of course the opposite tribe does exactly the same thing. go to the subs of conspiracy communities they collect evidence that everything is secretly true. debunking communities collect evidence that everything suspicious is secretly stupid. both sides can become extremely sophisticated methods of never having to update your worldview.

Actual skepticism is annoying as it means sometimes discovering that the stupid viral claim contains a real signal and sometimes discovering that the elegant debunk is misleading or noticing that a study technically supports someone's argument while also being far too weak to justify their confidence. which is psychologically disgusting as there's no victory music with no idiot to point at.

How much bullshit is in it, in which direction, produced by whom, and what would i have to learn for me to change my mind? unfortunately that subreddit would probably have 147 members and one moderator who hasn't logged in since 2019.

hi! I’m merely testing K2.6 Instant (Instant on High thinking), so the free version. I can tell you that as a neurochemist who’s used several other llm's from earlier gpt versions up to 5.6 sol (which is alright to a degree) also Gemini, Grok, Google AI Mode, and others western ones... in many medical, nutritional, and deep pharmacology chats, then switched to Kimi, one thing stands out to me and that is it didn’t keep me going in circles.

In a single day of chat it provided insights that took me weeks or months with the Western models, which always miss more of the nuance or the interconnected systems. basically, the coherence of systems is incredibly better in Kimi. It simply denied many marketing claims, crappy claims, or myths by knowing the actual objectivity of how the body works.

I’m not sure if anyone else has noticed this. i am starting to feel conspiracy vibes now about medical stuff in western models.. seems it always presents a limited angle while letting u miss out the big picture and other angles only so it makes u come back and use the llm more but with kimi , hats off

Now I’m thinking of upgrading to Kimi K3 and I wonder if it’s going to blow my mind even more compared to the free version. I’ve been using ai ever since GPT 3.5

i didnt got to test for a spin sol 5.6 Ultra... i don't see it in Work space anymore...

oh no... i have Plus.

hi all, am mostly and strictly referring to the nootropicdepot's saffron extract.

saffron extract is a modulator and its effects are entirely dependent on the chemical environment it finds when it crosses the blood brain barrier. this disclaimer should be obvious that it applies to most of the supplements btw as it's never acting specifically only one way, hence why a herb can make one feel like it's working great whereas for others seems like a scam or making them anxious or that 'tolerance' appeared and so on.

so now i can begin.

the standardized active compounds like crocin and safranal works primarily through four pathways, the first and most important thing about it is the triple Reuptake Inhibitor (DRI, SRI, NRI) basically it prevent your brain from vacuuming up dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine once they are released, so in other words it leaves them hanging around in the synapse longer to keep firing.

Now, as this applies with other sups and including saffron, first of all you need to have a substrate for your dopamine or serotonin from either nutrition or other supplements (think of tyrosine or dlpa for dopamine substrate or tryptophan for serotonin, and tryptophan to work needs the insulin carb trick anyway but that's another story).

once there is a substrate, and considering our dopamine receptors are not currently heavily downregulated due to xyz, we need to release this dopamine. there are good and bad habits to do so, this is up to you anyway as it would be pointless to lecture people on how to release their dopamine if they aren't mindful about that to begin with. now once dopamine is released, now saffron can do its job and make that dopamine hang around for longer, rather than sooner shorter duration.

The other 3 things i discovered on saffrom is that as a sigma1 receptor agonist because it activates this then it acts as an upstread master modulator to enhance release of dopamine by itself and boost neuroplasticity, no need to buy stammets shrooms lol. On top of that, saffron seems to be an nmda antagonist and gaba a modulator, so it takes the edge of glutamate spikes with a gnetle nudge towards gaba, and besides that it is also a pretty decent BDNF booster which helps to repair and build new neuronal pathways and this helps with mood resilience and new habits too btw.

Now, that i FINALLY presented some of these things, i am moving on into the chameleon aspect you see in the title.

The real thread begins below.

Because saffron is primarily a reuptake inhibitor itjust amplifies what is already playing out in your synapse, this is very important to remember if you want to enjoy the money you spent on this supplement. This is why your diet and stack completely rewrite its behavior.

for this i can explain 3 different scenarios in people's lives involving nutrition

First scenario, lets say you have high glycogen your muscle are full from carbs for example, you also took tyrosine or dlpa and you are also a nicotine user. what happens here is the tyrosine from food or supplement floods the system with raw dopamine as substrate, nicotine forces its release (among acetylcholine etc) and then saffron blocks the reuptake of this massivae tidal wave. then, you get the tunnel focus, a blissful productivity and good optimism. but of course you need to take a day or two off in a week from a dopaminergic day to allow receptors to not downregulate so you don't feel just focused and cold.

then we move to the second scenario, let's say you want to do the tryptophan trick for a blissful serotonin day, it won't do much the day you take tryptophan powder say 200-500mg and you also must remember the trick to take it aside without other aminoacid foods and pair it cleanly with a fruit or honey something to spike insulin so it pushes large aminoacids circulating currently in your bloodstream into the muscle while clearing the way for the lil tryptophan to go without competition to pass through blood brain barrier and become substrate. so then it has plenty of time to go from tryptohan to 5htp to serotonin to n acetyl sero' and finally to melatonin and if you also stay in dark 1 hour before sleep the day you take tryptophan, you will wake up next day having the best deep sleep of your life. but dont abuse this.

Now in this second scenario, with a high tryptophan and high serotonin baseline, saffron will block the reuptake of the already dominant serotonin pool, leaving less room for dopaminergic drive, but the result now from taking Saffron extract is a deep relaxation with contentment and an intense morning sweet sticky feeling where you still wanna lay in bed feeling good after waking up and maybe sleep a bit more.

And finally.. the 3rd scenario where we are glycogen depleted on zero carbs (but also not keto adapted since months because here the story changes further), and you are low on glycogen and no stimulants whatsoever.. here we have a relatively empty synapse, very little dopamine or serotonin being synthesized or released due to BCAA competition and low cellular energy. soo... Saffron blocks the reuptake of... almost nothing. hence you see reviews of people 'n0t workin sir this is skam' bla bla.

Saffron is essentially a mirror of your current metabolic and nutritional state. If you feed your body with what it needs or what you want then saffron will mirror back peak performance. If you are fasting or underfed etc or in a highly serotonergic environment, it will lean into a quiet or flat or maybe deeply restorative state. and from my observation saffron also has acetylcholinesterase activity so if you do use nicotine it may work great or may be too much, if you take alpha gpc and what not it may tip you over into a dominant acetylcholinergic brain so to speak, and that could inhibit dopamine over time so be mindful of all these aspects and know that it isn't a honey moon effect that is passing when you dont feel it the same. So saffron + nicotine or saffron + acetylcholine supplements can be a very rewarding and amazing game but if you play this combo wrong, the symptoms of this are typically a sudden depressive crash or irritability or jaw clenching, tight muscles etc... so careful. generally a smoker will do just fine but don't start smoking because of this, alternatively you can microdose patches.

final personal pro tip also, if you eat chicken livers once a week or so, it will make saffron behave as the most impressive supplement ever, as it is the ultimate nutrient dense powerhouse for monoamine synthesis as it floods the body with highly bioavailable b6, active folate, and B12. and b6 or p5p is the absolute bottleneck cofactor for the aromatic L-amino acid decarboxylase enzyme the exact enzyme that converts L-DOPA into Dopamine, and 5-HTP into Serotonin. basically it provides the chemical sparks needed to turn your substrates into usable neurotransmitters. if you cannot eat animal products i am sure you can find a way to match the chicken liver somehow, but that's up to your own time and research.

today i took saffron.

Been way too long on Chrome and I don't understand why.. it's good but is suspicious. Firefox is the same thing.

Now I could move to Brave, was a good candidate, but for me it already destined for some other very occasional use.

I have DuckDuckGo browser which I haven't used and it seems there isn't a problem and similar to Chrome, but I don't know why I am not moving there yet.

Arc seems interesting, something entirely different to me who always used Windows. But I see in reddit of Arc people say it is quite an abandoned project or something.

and then I notice Zen browser, seems alive, just like Arc, and I wonder if this is the chosen one. probably will take me a couple of days or week to get used to it. the browser's url bar is on middle top so it's kind of a bad tickle for my brain, but i guess i will get used to it and like it more maybe?

I wonder if i have no idea yet how much i will like it or if i will simply go with the flow and follow Chrome clones.

gonna copy paste some ai slop below as well

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total distraction—
pop-ups, trackers, noise, endless tabs that devour focus.

I will face the chaos.
I will open Zen Browser.
It will pass over me and through me—
clean, calm, mindful.

And when the clutter has gone past,
I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only clarity will remain.

Zen flows.
Zen simplifies.
Zen restores the mind.

Only peace remains.

even if i asked it, and reading some opinions here and there, imo this is not the same..

again enshitification. even replies are shorter and doesn't feel as good.

makes me think of other models now.