Long time casual wine drinker (and occasional beer), I find myself drinking less and less. Two reasons: first drinking a glass of average wine for the sake of having a drink makes no sense anymore. I prefer to have a drink more seldom but pick a better wine, that I actually enjoy. Second, as I get older I see that even a modest amount of alcohol has negative effect on me: during the day I get groggy, during the night my sleep is worse (I know, counterfactual, but so it is).
It's long known that drinking alcohol disturbs your sleep. You're getting slumbery and probably will fall asleep easily but the sleep will not be as wholesome.
Same here. Perhaps this is something that doesn't happen to people with a robust tolerance, but I'll never test that theory. Maybe before cell phones and Netflix, people just slept a lot more to compensate.
I think different types of alcohol have quite a different effect on me now (40yo) - wine will get me mellow and sleepy, beer would get me to be more social, whiskey will make me more energetic / risk taking.
Knowing that I can tune my level of enjoyment of whatever is happening.
Though there is an old saying from where I grew up - alcohol is stealing happiness from tomorrow to have it today.
And that has always stuck with me - whenever I drink I get a bit happier that instant and feel worse more tired the next day.
And that is ok if I am going to a social event and I want to get the most out of it, and I know next day will be chill anyway - who’ll can make the “chill” time even more chill.
You're just describing normal aging though. People have been experiencing this (particularly #2) since time immemorial. The question is why young people are not arriving to fill the void left by you (and me), as they always have. I agree with other posters, it's some combination of economics, weed, and culture.
> during the day I get groggy, during the night my sleep is worse (I know, counterfactual, but so it is)
Have you tried lighter wines or prosecco? I've had some summer wine from a grape variety called Inzolia in Sicily. Quite light on alcohol, tasted a bit like lime water.
My experience is that grogginess really depends on the wine that you drink, but it always ruins my sleep if I exceed two glasses (150 ml). For instance I would almost never drink high alcohol (>13.5%) or high sugar content Rieslings. They almost always give me headaches.
Interestingly this was basically what started it for me. Empty calories and research showing it literally inhibits muscle gain irregardless of the caloric effect since your body basically switches to "get this shit the fuck out" before continuing to be normal.
Secondary benefit for me was all the other stuff. Now I find that the once or twice in the entire year where I might have one drink it only takes like one drink to already feel it.
The impact on our sleep is one of the main reasons our having a beer or glass of wine with dinner trailed off. Sometimes now we go months in between any sort of alcohol.
se here. i enjoy beer but annoyes me that they all have the same 5% alcohol content. its too much, I just like the taste, I don't want to be sleepy. non alcoholic beers taste terrible
Fortunately, this is not universally true anymore.
There are now beers brewed with extremely low-alc yeasts (which have a trait that makes them unable to digest maltose) that make <0,5% alc beers with good flavours. This combined with sour malts and good hops can give you great flavours. These low-alc yeasts remove the need to maltreat the beer for removing the alc. And it is often OK to have 0,5% alc -- maybe not during pregnancy, but to avoid the annoying 5% alc. It's most probably not the industry cheap shit though.
There's also the possibility to just stop the fermentation with normal yeasts at any point, e.g., at 1% alc. I've had a couple of very good beers like this, too.
There is a new method for 0,0% beer. I sometimes drink a 0,0 mixed with lemonade (called Radler in germany) after sport. There is also Fassbrause which is not a beer at all (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fassbrause ) but tastes a bit malty
The ones in Japan are fantastic. I'm addicted to them. The Asahi 0% alc, 0% calorie beer is 70% as good as their regular beer in my opinion. Unfortunately it's around the same price.
Disclaimer: I lost my sense of smell due to a head injury, so that does muddle my ability to taste things. But I think with beer a sense of smell is less important
I swapped my daily beer for Heaps Normal XPA, which I felt was about 80% as good as regular beer. Then after a few months of that I realised I no-longer craved a beer, so swapped to sparkling water.
Now I only drink maybe once a month. It's great. Happy I kicked the mild habit.
I still enjoy one or two beers at the end of the week, but happens fortnightly ish now - for exactly the same reason. I've also gone to drinking sparkling or soda water at home with a squeeze of lemon, completely replaced the soft drinks at the same time. The amount of sugar in the beer was surprising and the low/no alc options really did help move away from them in excess.
Might be a market issue. I grew up along beer drinkers and over the past few years, so many good alcohol free beers have entered the German market, that a lot of them shifted almost fully to alcohol free beers.
Got any recommendations for good German ones? The market in the UK has been improving a lot but I do still think a lot of them taste like socks, I'd be interested in trying some more high-quality German options if I can find them over here (Aldi/Lidl probably my best bet).
I like Störtebeker Atlantic Ale, IPA style beer. Very drinkable. Available in most super markets and Späti's (late night shops). Here in Berlin there's also the Brlo Nakid which is similar in taste.
If you want a pils style beer, Jever Fun is pretty hoppy. Krombacher has a decent 0.0 beer as well. A bit on the sweet side for me but I have that sometimes. I also recall seeing a beer that was labelled as Feinherb at some point that was pretty tasty. The exact name escapes me.
Several of the Bavarian beer hall style helles beers now also come in alcohol free versions. Very drinkable. They taste very similar. Bayreuther is one that you might find in some shops.
Many of the Hefeweizen varieties also exist in alcohol free versions and are pretty drinkable. Most places will have that available.
Not German but some bars now have Guinness 0.0 in cans. Haven't seen that in the supermarket but it's a near drop in replacement for normal Guinness as far as I'm concerned and I tend to order that when I see it available.
I stopped drinking alcohol a few years ago but I still enjoy going out with friends who do drink. Mostly people barely notice what other people drink. And the lack of a hangover after a good night sleep is a nice bonus. Although you can overdo it. I always joke about all of the downsides of drinking beers without any of the upsides.
Erdinger Alcoholfrei was a low alcohol German "health drink" before it was popular - has been around for about 25 years. It's fairly available in the UK.
I don’t know where you live but here in the UK and in Europe you can find all sorts of beer from 0 to 5% (and more of course), even in local supermarkets or draft in a pub. And yeah the 0% taste bad, but a 0.5 to 3% can be great, I’m sure you could find some online if you’re willing to, search for “table beer”, “small beer” or just low alcohol beer.
And in terms of non alcoholic beer, “lucky saint” tastes great (0.5%) and is very popular in the UK, lots of pub have it on tap.
In the UK it's common to have 3.4% beer/ale (for ABV >= 3.5% the duty is higher) but there are little options between 3.4% and <=0.5% (alcohol free). I find 3.4% to be a good trade-off between the taste and the alcohol content. I do drink Lucky Saint occasionally but find it less pleasant than various 3.4% ales.
One of the things I miss the most (on a daily basis the most) about the UK is the beer. What you're suggesting just doesn't exist in the USA. Really and truly doesn't.
(Though, as others in this thread point out, NA beers are more common, and better, than they used to be. They're not the same thing, though.)
i am in Paris, and I don't see much variety. Obviously there is so much more choice in big hypermarkets, but I don't go there daily, unlike my local, 30sqm store next my apartment
The French beer scene has improved over the last 10 years but yeah, it's still quite limited in terms of selection. When I was first visiting there really wasn't much at all outside of Belgian beers, though I've since had a few very good beers from Paris and other parts of the north of the country. Usually only finding them in larger markets, though, as you say.
The UK's beer scene is wildly different to the rest of Europe, and not something that we've managed to export very well. Hell, we could even export cask ale (rare outside of the UK) to Paris without it spoiling these days, yet nobody really does. Whether it's due to taste or the awkwardness of casks I don't know, but I do think it would meet with success in Paris if someone did it properly. Not all beer has to be refrigerated and fizzy. We have so many varieties that you just don't get with fizzy keg beer, and much of it notably weaker in alcohol content. Some examples:
Mild at ~2.5% (made from reusing the materials used to make Bitter), Session at ~3.5%, Bitter at ~4%, Best Bitter at ~5% etc. IPAs are the hot thing even over here now but we get notably more variations in those than most places too.
I'd be curious to know from anyone in Germany if they have equivalents to these sorts of categories, as what we get from Germany over here tends to all be about the same strength.
Due to ADHD meds I do now have to drink less, and the best non-alcoholic beer I've found so far is Guinness 0%. I'm not a massive Guinness drinker, it's alright but there are other stouts I prefer, but the 0% version is surprisingly close to "real" Guinness and has none of those sock-y flavours that most non-alcoholic beer has.
It is indeed a completely different scene, which is genuinely interested in variety.
It's a bit of a cliche but you really can split Europe into "beer country/wine country/spirits country". France, Italy, Spain and Germany west of the Rhine are wine country. Munich is clearly beer country. And Germany has focused on perfecting a very narrow set of light beers, if you want diversity of taste that's all in the wines. Similarly you're not going to get Parisians interested in beer diversity when they have French wine to argue about.
(It is possible that climate change will shift this; England is starting to produce a few pretty good wines)
Guinness 0% is fantastic. Unlike a lot of brewers the Guinness company were very keen to retain their standards rather than slop out an inferior product to tick a box.
It is. Actually the best candidates for 0% seems to be the IPA beers as the bitterness adds this little "punch" classic zero alcohol beers seems to suffer from.
In the US market, at least, the quality has improved dramatically over the past few years. Several established breweries now produce alcohol-removed versions of existing beers, with varying degrees of success - but in general my experience is that alcohol-free dark beers work better, the increased maltiness does a better job of hiding what's missing. IPAs and lagers can end up tasting somewhat thin compared to the normal version.
There's a few things I miss about the UK, and one of them is easy availability of beer that's less than 5%. Unfortunately that seems to have been creeping upwards - the shift to craft keg (rather than cask) beer seems to have been accompanied by moving more in the direction of US-style stronger beers. Several breweries do still produce milds that are in the <3% range, but it's increasingly hard to find them, even in pubs that used to be reliable suppliers. It's interesting how cultural this is.
Real ale has plenty of lower alcohol percentage options:
My faves are Harvest Pale 3.8% and Our House 3.4%
I also like mild which is often <=3%
0% Guinness is the only beer I would say that matches the taste of alcohol based beer. The others can be ok, but taste too malty, the flavour is off somehow. Also having 2 or more none alcohol beers seems to also make me feel "hungover" in a way, maybe due to additives.
It might be worth it to check out what the market offers. Here in Germany lots of well known brands have started to cater to the non-alc consumers for the last few years. I like eg. Andechser Hell alkoholfrei. The increased competition resulted in some good nonalc beers from reputable wellknown brands
The US market is having a boom of craft NA beers and many are really good. Athletic, Go Brewing, and Sober Carpenter are my main go tos. Guinness 0.0 scratches an itch, but I find it a little sweet. The NA Corona with a lime slice is almost indistinguishable from the original. Strangely I find the Stella NA very good (I don't normally drink the regular Stella).
If you like sour beers my experience is they are nearly identical to their native counterparts.
I generally find the breweries that focus completely on NA beer better than existing players who are adding NA to their line up.
In the twin cities, one big brewery, Bauhaus, went out of business briefly and got bought and reopened by ABV, a company that specializes in NA, alcohol-adjusted, and THC beverages, https://www.bauhausbrewlabs.com/blog/Blog%20Post%20Title%20O... . Now you can get beer in full strength, session, NA, and THC. It seems like a sign of the times, but I'm happy to have more choices and as I get older I don't feel like drinking the strong IPAs like I used to.
I've started drinking malt beer. I think it's basically pre-ferment beer, so it's non alcoholic and a bit sweet. I like to mix it with Sprite Zero, something like 3 parts malt beer to 2 parts sprite. It's also good on its own.
It's delicious and alcohol free, it does have a lot of calories but mixing it with calorie free soda gets you a bit more bang for your calorie buck so to speak.
Guiness Zero is my go to for a sipping beer when I'm actually in a pub. I like a pine needles and lemon IPA when it's very cold but they get a bit much when you're having a few over a long evening.
It used to be true for all non-alcoholic beers in Sweden but it is not true anymore, do it is very possible that all non-alcoholic beers are actually bad where they live. Or they just base their comment on old data.
Others have me ruined that NA beers are pretty decent these days. But I've also taken to literally watering down my beer. I'll pour half a can and fill the other half of the glass with water and ice. Then later do the same with the other half. Still tastes decent, but really cuts down on the alcohol.
I think the trend has been a small (and making shrinking) contingent of alcoholics/"beer enthusiests" that are the backbone of the beer industry, and they always lean towards favoring higher alchohol
I’ve recently been in Spain and the non-alcoholic beer was great. To be fair I can’t remember the last time I’ve had alcoholic beer because of the same reasons many people mentioned already, so maybe it’s just a matter of getting used to it.
Can recommend: Mash Gang, We Can Be Friends, Erdinger 0% and I actually quite enjoy Peroni 0% on a summer day. I’m also told that Guinness 0% is pretty good - but I’m not a big Guinness drinker.
It all depends on what you are doing. I do embedded with strict realtime requirements. CPU pinning would not be an option. I have also done software that should use as little resources as possible (but still be quick) to coexist with other software on the same hardware.
All of these are different, valid, meanings of high performance. You need context. An interactive IDE is yet another thing that needs to be high performance in yet another way.
MCPs are diminishing in value a bit, because AI Agents are getting smarter about using API/CLIs. For example, I use gh cli via Claude instead of their MCP, because I already had cli setup, so no need to use MCP.
MCPs can potentially have great value if they cross multiple sources and combine results. For example at work we use an in-house MCP for log/metrics search across five different (legacy) systems. It finds correlation across events in different system within minutes.
I see benchmarks a lot working on this, and I honestly think there’s too many things to cover in this comment but:
- this article doesn’t enable tool search for starters where tokens start at near zero for MCP too
- even with the above, talks of the raw token count don’t consider that for very long trajectories the prompt cache amortises much of this cost, and a feature of MCP is you can also customise the tools to a select subset, and that’s powerful
- you can add tool confirmations for write/destructive actions trivially
- the old training data on CLIs is good but actually for new features the fact MCP advertises them is also a bonus, but that takes longer to see, MCP isn’t that old
There are many more aspects, but even with GitHub MCP, where the agent has a huge amount of pre-training on the CLI, there are still reasons why people use it extensively - you don’t hear it a lot here but suffice to say usage never stopped growing to this day.
I think if CLIs are working for you then good, I also like our cli and did some work on it too, like adding gh skill subcommand.
Do use what works, and measure and improve - but this article is not doing justice to the MCP server IMHO.
> - this article doesn’t enable tool search for starters where tokens start at near zero for MCP too
Is that why I have to constantly remind Claude and ChatGPT that they do have access to a Github plugin that can access my account, instead of trying and failing to use the gh cli?
Most likely, personally I have thoughts on tool search, I don’t believe it’s the final stop on the road to MCP progressive discovery, but it does have its uses. Especially for very large tool catalogues.
Expect more on this. We are looking at the problem.
0verload.net ... I am the Author if the tool. I cloned grep and hopped it up a with a bunch of globs and stuff only a bot can really use. You can version control directorys ...its not meant to replace git.. I wronte it for my self because I was tired of wishing it hadnt been a week since i checked into github. I have not have regression at all since I started using it ..its a godsend.it increases the effective context size by a huge ammount..if you learn to use it correctly you can have hundreds of megs of context without a problem and share it between agents. Additionally theres an edit monitor that throws every file and the diff for all the things the bots edit and you cvan scroll thru the sessions edits holding alt down and page thru the days code. ITs meant to be a pair programming tool to use with claude code. I have full mcp support but I also have a more powerful scripting language.mcp support is just part of the scripting language..so is rest..the whole thing is bot centric..I have guis for itm all but you can just tell the bots to o stuff ..I made the bot interfaces for everything and then the gui. Oh..it caches all the memory contexts and all the verson controlled filex in ram so grepping stuff in the source controlled folder is considerably faster..anwhere from hundreds to I have seen 6000+ times faster grep results not thru any sort of black magic..its just what happens when a custom written grep has a in ram
The main benefit of MCP today over just giving an agent a CLI is of course that you can be a lot more certain about what the agent can or can't do.
Yes, an agent with CLI access and access to making HTTPS calls is a lot more efficient for most tasks, but also a lot more unpredictable and with much higher blast radius if it starts misbehaving compared to one that only have access to exactly the tools and data sources you want it to use.
there is a number of importance that MCP can provide you outside using API/CLIs. when integrating with external services and you want a deterministic layer for your agent that can scale independently as your agentic layer in complex system while providing functionality like prompts and static read-only resources that can in turn be used for context injection and optimization. you might want to use MCP when it is this but for local services with alot of dependency or you want to write alot of wiring code, you can settle for API/CLIs
I use MCPs all the time, but just like in your case: they're my own MCP servers.
They do exactly what I want and how I want it. They expose just the information and the features I want the LLM to have. And just like in your case, it combines multiple sources of information into 1 response.
I definitely think that's a bridge to gap, but MCP is not the answer. OSes currently lack the tools to do this properly, but I hope they will improve. Agents need more granular sandboxing in all areas.
This is not true by default. There are plenty of poorly implemented MCP servers which do that. The MCP spec supports Oauth and intends to avoid that but it is not enforced.
MCP and RAG feel like the usual pattern of running a daemon 24/7 that balloons infrastructure spend. So uncivilized.
Any given REST API is a small model. A frontier or local model and modern harness can parse the already existing documentation for that REST API and invoke or generate a tool to use it.
UltimaDB, a high performance full-featured MVCC transactional embedded database, with special focus for use on SMR clusters.
UDB has full transactions, selectable persistence (in-memory, eventual, strict) and consistency (SI, SSI). A lot of time was spent on performance.
Written in Rust, with 8k line of code and 15k lines of tests, 96% coverage.
Formal verification with Lean 4 is in progress (see /formal), also consistency checking with elle/jepsen is in progress.
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