"Hunger and sleep, argues Dan Skovronsky, the firm’s chief scientific officer, are both 'master homeostasis mechanisms'—systems that keep the body in balance. When they misbehave, illness follows. That, he says, helps explain why incretins, the hormone family behind GLP-1, proved so broadly useful. Hence why orexins could be just as important."
Also, orexins are peptides, like semaglutide (Ozempic), although in a different family.
Tiredness is a signal that the body/brain needs rest so the glymphatic system can go to work. You can lose the signal but still need rest. If your brain doesn't flush metabolic waste periodically you develop brain fog, bad memory, and increased risk of Alzheimer's, and you'll eventually die, as sleep deprivation studies have found.
Caffeine doesn't actually do any of the things sleep does to your brain. If you drink coffee during a late night, you won't feel as tired, but your brain performs worse, your reflexes are slower, you're less likely to remember things, etc. It's like painting over a rusted car instead of properly maintaining it, basically.
I think GP was just making a point about the fact that “tired” is a subjective experience, like pain. Arguably, if you’re on pain medication, you’re not in pain, even if your body is sending pain signals that your brain just isn’t receiving or paying attention to.
You have the ability to mentally push through a lot of stuff, but there are a host of signals your body will use to warn you such as: cognitive performance (although this is hard for yourself to actually admit its happening), behavioral indicators like yawning, head bobbing, frequent posture changes, and slowed speech are just a few indicators. Irritability is another big red flag.
I've only had two instances where I ignored all the signs and continue to push on until my body literally shut down on me. Finals week in college as an architecture student trying to finish a final studio project, and study for four finals. 5 days, 3 hours of sleep. That was one of them.
Rails 8's default Active Job backend is solid_queue. It lives in the same single Postgres as everything else (including solid_cache). No Redis or anything to have to wrangle. Recurring scheduling is built in. Another big plus for using Rails for this.
As I understand, it uses Postgres's "FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED" job claim feature. I don't run most jobs concurrently because they need to build on each other. Postgres advisory locks sit on top for mutual exclusion and solid_queue handles queuing. It's akin to good_job which is the pg-native thing from before solid_queue existed, but I just stuck with the easy Rails default and this is the first time I've even thought to remember how it works.
lol Yes enshittification is the thing I want to avoid, so hard decisions need to be made that will not make everybody happy. Still, this is open-source[0], so we can open a discussion (ideally alongside a PR) and evolve it.
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