is quitting smoking np hard?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > is quitting smoking np hard?

distortion park: Apr 25, 2011

shitface posted:

this is horrible advice and won’t work for most people. unless you fix the thinking that drives you to do it there is a very high relapse of, iirc, 90%. the physical addiction part of smoking is relatively easy to kick, it’s all the bullshit “good things” smokers believe about it will drive them back to it.

it doesn’t calm you down, that’s just staving off of the current withdrawals. there’s nothing magic about the after sex or dinner cigarette, it’s just you didn’t smoke for longer than usual. that high feeling you get after you didn’t have one for a while is oxygen deprivation and you can just hold your breath instead if you particularly enjoy it

smoking is the continual, expensive, deadlyl pursuit of feeling normal like people who don’t smoke at all

drat, thought we'd cracked it

# ¿ Aug 17, 2023 11:49

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 10:11

distortion park: Apr 25, 2011

Dijkstracula posted:

just count the depth of your nested loops, bingo bango

this is correct, for example here we can see that multiplying n and m is O(n) (a counterintuitive result, there's no "m", no wonder so many otherwise smart people get it wrong! it's a nice little hack to speed up your code though, make sure the small number goes first):

code:

    let multiply n m = 
        let mutable x = 0
        for i = 1 to n do
            x <- x + m
        x

similarly taking a power of x^y is O(xy) (you loop over multiply x y times, no optimisations available here sadly unlike for multiplication):

code:

    let power x y =
        let mutable temp = 1
        for i = 1 to y do
            temp <- multiply x temp
        temp

# ¿ Aug 17, 2023 16:50

distortion park: Apr 25, 2011

echinopsis posted:

I offer nicotine replacement products (NRT) to people

I like to offer hopefully some encouraging advice :

every cigarette you don’t smoke is good
a 20 a day smoker going to 15 a day is an improvement

failure to totally quit can lead people to a “gently caress it” place, so focusing on progress is a good thing to
do

if you quit and start again, well, that’s better than not quitting because you smoked less cigarettes overall

if you simply can’t escape nicotine dependency and end up on NRT for life that’s ok. less than ideal sure but smoking is just so fuckin bad for that almost anything else is a better alternative. especially vaping, basically a drop in replacement, which has its own issues of course but is still better than smoking

this is the approach I took to giving up meat after reading an interview with Ezra Klein (probably very uncool but w/e) about how he became vegan. It worked great, was much easier more robust to just eat less meat than making being vegetarian part of my identity. Perhaps easier that quitting smoking

# ¿ Aug 17, 2023 21:38

distortion park: Apr 25, 2011

don't watch In The Mood for Love if you wanna give up smoking, it looks Extremely Cool in that

# ¿ Aug 17, 2023 21:40

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > is quitting smoking np hard?