Counterpoint: there's plenty of coaches out there that teach/reinforce bad form.
> And if you are a beginner, any attempt to do these exercises will invariably contain so many mistakes that they are not worth doing any more.
I totally disagree. StrongLifts (and the Starting Strength book it derives from) starts you with the empty bar. Unless you have a serious medical condition, putting 20kg on your back / chest is unlikely to result in serious bodily harm or damage to musculature. As you slowly and steadily increase the weight on the bar, you discover places where your form needs improvement. At least, that's how it worked for me (I only made it to ~100kg squats though).
Of course it's great if you can find a good coach. But I think an app like StrongLifts is a viable+reasonable substitute for a coach.
It's not that a beginner cannot put 20kg on their back or chest. It's that a beginner does not know how to safely put that 20kg on their back or chest. Especially the chest.
Also some exercises like the deadlift can't be done with an empty bar. Stronglifts would ask you to start with 95lbs which is too much.
To me your comment is toxic and reeks of a sense of superiority and elitism from your own experience. You labelled everyone who can't put 20kg to be someone having a serious medical condition. That's both untrue and disrespectful.
> As you slowly and steadily increase the weight on the bar, you discover places where your form needs improvement.
Please no. The beginner does not discover places where the form needs improvement. The beginner simply fails to lift after increasing the weight. The beginner injures themselves when they thought they could lift but they did not.
The StrongLifts program starting with an empty bar is not right. They should've started with a PVC pipe with the same dimensions as a bar to practice form.
My advice: find a coach and ask him/her to supervise you if you can afford it. If you can't, still find a coach for your first month doing these exercises and then switch to the app.
> Please no. The beginner does not discover places where the form needs improvement. The beginner simply fails to lift after increasing the weight. The beginner injures themselves when they thought they could lift but they did not.
This assertion is contradicted by the hundreds of thousands of people (myself included) who have progressed beyond the beginner stage after starting out with the 20kg bar and without ever requiring the intervention of a human coach.
That said, I would have benefited from one. I had to completely deload and relearn my squat form because I was consistently leaning forward and de-emphasizing my posterior chain (now it's my best lift).
Speaking from experience, it's really pretty difficult to cause yourself an acute injury (i.e., worse than a nasty bruise) with 20kg if your form even resembles the squat, bench, or deadlift.
Granted, 20kg can be a big starting weight for overhead press, and if you're a petite woman you may initially need an alternative to the Olympic barbell even for the others.
Also, deadlifts are kind of tricky: a bare bar on the floor is a deficit deadlift. But a couple of blocks can solve this issue.
Wow, weight lifting is seriously ‘gate-kept’. GP needs to chill, he’s being elitist, and forgetting PTs are super expensive. I followed Stronglifts to 110kg, and just started again after 4 years. It’s fun. It’s easy. You focus on few, simple exercises, so form is easy to do well if you try.
I wonder why the leaders of our country that profits primarily from large-scale export of coal, natural gas, petroleum, beef and cotton don't want the population worrying that maybe these exports aren't sustainable in the long- (or maybe even mid-) term?
is it really so hard to imagine that perhaps the climate issues that have been "constantly talked about for 20+ years" have been heavily moderated/filtered/co-opted by financial/political interests?
The current party line is "holy shit we gotta do something soon or 2100 is gonna be bad, ya'll!". Thing is, essentially nobody today will be alive by 2100. Humans are not very good at thinking in these kinds of timescales. Corporations are hilariously bad at thinking beyond the next quarterly financial report.
So if it turns out that we're witnessing irreversible and catastophic changes to important natural systems that many of us will witness first-hand in our own lives, don't you think it's entirely plausible that the people in charge don't want us to learn the full scope of how bad things got under their watch? That the people profiting from this carnage don't want the majority to act in a way that impacts their profits?
This take made me cringe. The only one putting emphasis on the fact that this scientist who has visited Antarctica 20 times in their life happens to be female, is you.
Agreed, humanity is unlikely to survive an asteroid of the likes that wiped out the dinosaurs, considering it increased global atmospheric temperatures to several hundred degrees celsius for a few minutes (or several thousand for a few seconds) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFCbJmgeHmA).
It doesn't look like we need the help of celestial bodies intersecting ours, though. We're ushering in our own demise just fine on our own, thank you very much!
When and where are we currently ushering in our demise? None of climate models have us on trajectories close to global extinction - we are roughly on a 2-3 degree warming path at present.
I don't think you understand what that number means at all.
24K years ago New York was under 4 miles of ice, during summer. If that happened today, do you think the government of Canada and United States would survive such a schenario?How many people would be left alive in North America, 30% of the current population?
How big do you think the change in global temperature was during the last ice age? 30 degrees or 20 degrees?
It was only 6 degrees. That's all it takes.
Average yearly temperature for Hong Kong is 23 degrees, for Dubai it's 26 degrees.
3 degrees is the difference between lush tripics and a desert where you will starve because nothing grows.
A global change of 3 degrees means 12 degree change on land because 70% of the planet is an ocean and it's tempersture doesn't change
Literally anyone who studied impact of changing climate on food security. And we will not see a warming of 2 degrees, we are on track for 4 - 6 degrees. The 3 degrees scenario is only projects due to fictitious 'negative emissions' from carbon capture, which will cost many times more than the current revenues of the oil industry. It's pure fantasy.
Humans have not existed on this planet for the 4 billion years. More like 4 million. Sure, an accurately recorded history of 174 is still a pretty small fraction of 4 million.
So if you're going to try to downplay the increasingly obvious Great Filter our idiotic species is hurtling towards at breakneck speed, at least be dignified about it and use the right numbers. Thanks!
In what scenario is climate change removing humans from the planet? If we cannot handle/manage/remove a mere 2-3 degree increase (which is about the current trajectory), sooner or later natural variation will doom us.
The great filter might very well be the unwillingness to consider more than mono-thematic solutions mixed with doomsterism, though.
You might be underestimating the social upheaval that will result from wast regions of the earth becoming uninhabitable and the effect of the population movements from desperate people trying to get away starvation.
You might also be underestimating the consequences of ecosystem collapse. Since 1970 we've already lost about 60% of biomass of insects, birds and mammals. The impact of rapid climate change will put additional pressure on already vulnerable species.
I have little doubt that widespread ecosystem collapse will be the death nail for our global human civilization.
So you are an expert in these things that you don't trust other experts? Catastrophic collapse is not really something generally assumed on the 2-3 degree warming path.
> So you are an expert in these things that you don't trust other experts
I don't see how the grandparent comment implied a lack of trust in other experts, nor did they imply themselves to be experts.
> Catastrophic collapse is not really something generally assumed on the 2-3 degree warming path.
Actually, the IPCC, which tends to be rather optimistic on how bad things could be (or already are), predicts pretty significant socioeconomic problems arising from 2-3 degrees warming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Socioeconomic_Pathways
It doesn't take much imagination to come up with ways that "Social cohesion degrades and conflict and unrest become increasingly common" leads to "nation states with nukes and experiencing extreme scarcity and high social unrest declare war on each other"...
Your imagination might not be a good guide to take you from degrading social cohesion to something like nuclear war.
Even in general, socio-economic models are not of the same quality as the physics models (and no-one is making that claim anyway). The SSPs are more like share narratives rather than forecasts.
Okay so we've established that neither my imagination, nor the labors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are any good for determining how likely we are on course for nuclear war.
You know that humans do have nukes, right? And a long history of killing each other over pretty much anything? (from land rights to idealogies and everything in between).
So in your estimation, who would be a good source to determine how/whether humans get to a point where nuclear war is a likely scenario?
Why the obsession with nuclear war and trying to get totally imprecise scenarios there? They serve very little purpose other than building scary narratives. Some people's job is to worry about them, but that doesn't mean they are central to what we should do.
When a hurricane strikes, things are usually not just Lord Of The Flies - the idea of collapse into violent chaos is a popular one but doesn't really happen much.
I'm not sure what you are talking about re "experts" - I'm very much basing my statements on the conclusion drawn by experts.
I don't think that there's any expert out there that will deny that 3°C warming will lead to massive population movements.[0] Experts also conclude that there's already significant damage to ecosystems that will only increase with that kind of global warming[1].
But that's a little besides the point.
In the Paris climate agreement of 2015 we agreed to limit global warming to 1.5°C. Barely 8 years later we've blown through that limit and there is no credible effort to reduce or even stop the warming.
Models parametrized so that they predict a 2-3°C increase until the end of the century have already been invalidated since all of them expected 1.5°C to be breached by 2030 earliest - we're seven years ahead of schedule.
Right now we're on a track that even our modern neutered climate models predict will lead to a +5°C before the end of the century.
1.5C is gone - no point clinging to it. However, there is a lot if effort going into decarbonization. Where we are exactly is unclear, but claiming we are on track to 5C isn't really supported by that many (having past models being invalidated doesn't mean certain future overshoot, how much of invested changes are captured, etc.).
Also, the ecosystem discussion is somewhat orthogonal as we don't now what all is critical to human survival.
And soon 2.0C will be gone - no point clinging to it, right?
> However, there is a lot if effort going into decarbonization.
I don't see a lot of effort going into decarbonization. We still have about 7% of global GDP going into subsidies for fossil fuels. That's a lot of effort against decarbonization [0].
There is little actual progress being made[1]. Whatever reduction we had can be directly attributed to the economic upheaval created by the Covid pandemic.
> having past models being invalidated doesn't mean certain future overshoot
Given that our actions in the last 20 years pretty much track the "business as usual" scenario and given that we can eliminate all models that predict a warming of 1.5°C to arise any later than 2024, we're pretty much only left with models that give us a warming of 5°C until 2100[2]. Please note that even that is in the lower bound; the IPC 8.5 has a lower bound of 1.4°C in the 2040 - we've blown past that already. It's only getting worse.
> Also, the ecosystem discussion is somewhat orthogonal as we don't now what all is critical to human survival.
I'm not sure if you are joking or what. Our dependency on an intact ecosystem is absolute - we cannot exist without it. The "services" that the biosystems around us provide is invaluable and we utterly depend on them. Trying to quantify how much of it you can destroy for the sake of industry and profit is akin to asking how much of your liver you can sell away for cocaine.
This is a problem in how warming is reported in my opinion. Saying it's just 2 or 3 degrees doesn't sound like a lot. But that is warming the whole planet on average by that amount. This is a lot of energy being injected into the climate, and regional variations and extreme weather will be much more severe.
Meh I dunno, there's that website that reports how many hiroshimas of energy we're releasing into our planet per second, the skeptics/denialists don't seem to care much for that metric, either.
I don't think the problem is how it's being reported, I think it's just that this is the kind of news some people will do anything but hear.
I hadn't heard of the Hiroshima's per second before. That sounds like the kind of metric that might change a few minds.
Denialists won't listen to anything anyway, but I think there's probably a lot of people who hear 1 or 2 degrees (globally) and just think meh, doesn't sound so bad.
Dated 2013. 10 years ago we were already talking about how we're releasing 4 Hiroshimas into the atmosphere per second. Good thing that woke everyone up and enacted a decisive response to the existential thr---- oh.
Well, I think that's the point of that article. It says that we need to communicate in terms people can relate to better (than just some average temperature over the whole planet).
So no, we weren't talking like that 10 years ago, but we had identified that we needed better messaging. But we did nothing about that.
But that is distributed over a ludicrous amount of volume. These numbers are so large that I can visualize neither. How is this information supposed to help me?
First I would check the number that I gave you and make sure it is correct. Then you put it into perspective; e.g. how many millennia would it take for a couple of hundred nuclear reactors to produce that much of energy.
Play with the numbers and see what you can learn about them.
Not sure you need to consider that much of a volume; we're talking about surface temperature, so you can just take an approximation of heat capacity of the surface of Earth.
For it to be a Great Filter, it needs not to wipe out humanity completely, it's sufficient to end technological civilization. A nuclear war over resources can easily do that. As Covid has shown, even minuscule disruptions can lead to widespread scarcity, so a nuclear war might not even be necessary.
I could also say: covid showed that despite widespread disruption, technology civilization actually didn't collapse at all.
Anyone can imagine any kind of doom scenario, but then I could justify inaction all the time: if it isn't warming, an asteroid will get us or aliens or nuclear war or ..., so why bother?
Covid didn't cause a mass migration a 2-3 degree increase in temperatures will make big parts of Africa, India and China unliveable for a good part of the year due to wet bulb temperatures. Anyone without working AC will just die.
Those three contain about 2 BILLION people. That amount of people deciding that it's time to live somewhere else will cause issues. Our current migrant problems are a drop in the bucket compared to that.
> covid showed that despite widespread disruption, technology civilization actually didn't collapse at all.
What I hear: "hey look, I pulled a piece out of the Jenga tower and it didn't collapse! Clearly from this I can infer that more pieces can be pulled without any consequences!"
> if it isn't warming, an asteroid will get us or aliens or nuclear war or ..., so why bother?
Uh, because we don't have control over foreign sentient beings, nor the path of celestial bodies? Do you really not see the difference between those things and anthropogenic warming as a result of rapid industrialization?
You think we are physically unable to build an asteroid defense?
Anyway, I didn't say we should do nothing about climate change (and we are doing a lot), but if the counter to everything is: not enough, doomed anyway - then, yes, totally happy not to work in that field anymore.
> You think we are physically unable to build an asteroid defense?
Mate the dino-nuking asteroid that hit Earth was 10km in diameter. Even if we launched every nuke we had at such an object, it wouldn't do much to deter such an object. And that's assuming it's moving at a low enough fraction of c that we could actually detect such an object in time to mobilize all said nukes.
So, no, I don't think we would be able to defend ourselves today (nor by 2100, let's say) against such an adversary. Same deal with any species that is sophisticated enough to do interstellar travel. For them it's even easier, they can just pick up a few rocks from Kuiper belt, stick some mass drivers on them and it's bye-bye Earth within a few weeks/months.
> (and we are doing a lot)
The point is we're not. We haven't even reached peak fossil fuel yet. Even if we stopped everything tomorrow, things would still keep getting worse for at least another few decades. But as it is we're reading today about how bad we made things for ourselves in the 80s. Since then our consumption has only continued to accelerate, which can only mean things will be even worse tomorrow.
> but if the counter to everything is: not enough, doomed anyway
No. That's not what I or anyone else in this thread has been saying.
It's like this. We are on the Titanic. Some very clever people have charted our course and done ocean sonographs and determined there's a big-ass iceberg ahead. Many folks like you are insisting either a) there's no iceberg or b) icebergs are good for ship hulls or c) we'll out-technology the iceberg somehow and thus we don't need to worry about the iceberg. So right now all we've done is ACCELERATE towards the iceberg. If there was sensible suggestions like "let's alter our course slightly" I wouldn't be saying "well that still puts us on course for the iceberg so there's no point". I would be saying "great! that's a start!".
Correct, but we have managed to convert "later" to "significantly sooner".
The fact that eventually the climate would have changed unfavorably anyway at some unknown point in the future is no reason to be comfortable with humans inducing an unfavorable change right now. That's like saying there's no point in getting an oil change because the car engine is going to wear out eventually anyway. or like saying you might as well smoke and drink as much as you want because everyone dies at some point.
I am saying we already on a path not in the catastrophic collapse space and we need and will be able to handle things, because we need to for far more problematic things in the future anyway.
Well, it is Carmack we're talking about here. He's well known as a prolific programmer prodigy ;)
But also, some other things to note:
* A lot of "agile" development in corporate environments is anything but agile because of overhead in horizontally scaling human gray meat (until we get neural interfacing between one another or something)
* It was a simpler time back then. Carmack was coding against a much simpler architecture, with significantly fewer variants.
* It was a simpler time back then. Carmack could focus on blitting pixels to the screen as fast as possible, rather than spending 6 months trying to wrap his head around Vulkan.
* It was a simpler time back then. Carmack didn't have to worry about building for Windows, macOS and Linux, and iOS. And Android. And ...
* It was a simpler time back then. Carmack didn't need to worry about accessibility requirements. Web service integrations. Digital distribution complexitities. etc...
Even in the modern day there's still people who get prodigious amounts of work done when they can focus on doing something they like doing, and the stars align. A good recent example off the top of my head in game development is The Witness. Jonathan Blow + 2-3 other programmers IIRC.
He was building for at least Windows and Linux, and didn't have OpenGL so he was doing all the 3D manually. Plus assembly code, hardware specific versions like Verite, had to handle all the raw networking code, wrote tools to work with assets and process levels, also wrote Quake C, encryption to unlock the full game on the shareware Cd...
Everyone serious about gamedev at his age would be well versed in assembly language and such. It's unthinkable nowadays but normal for graphics programmers in 80s and early-mid 90s.
You can do it too if you follow his steps. I mean by programming Apple ][ and then IBM PC in assembly.
The dude was definitely doing stuff no one else had ever done.
Then again I have a 90's game dev book that covers ASM as well as manufacturing then programming your own sound card using the parallel port so... you're not wrong.
Are you sure about that? I remember in Doom 3 era Carmack was rocking a fancy NeXTStep computer and doing cross platform development. But before that I'm pretty sure everything was a strictly Windows affair...
Wikipedia seems to suggest in the first line that it was originally released for Linux. But the "Ports" section it mentions that:
> The first port to be completed was the Linux port Quake 0.91 by id Software employee Dave D. Taylor using X11 on July 5, 1996
And on that topic:
> In late 1996, id Software released VQuake, a source port of the Quake engine to support hardware accelerated rendering on graphics cards using the Rendition Vérité chipset.
> and didn't have OpenGL so he was doing all the 3D manually
So in other words he could focus on the fundamentals of doing vector math and rasterizing pixels, rather than worrying about 600 different incompatible OpenGL extensions, pipeline stalls, and memory management bugs?
> Plus assembly code...
Assembly isn't that hard. Pokemon Red/Blue was written entirely in assembly.
> had to handle all the raw networking code
Again, not that hard when all you're doing is blasting out UDP packets on a very simple network. You didn't have to worry about double NAT, people didn't expect your game to work for diverse peers connected from Germany to Belgium.
> wrote tools to work with assets and process levels
I think Romero wrote a lot of the tooling. Side note - have you read Masters of Doom? It goes into a lot of this stuff and is a great read.
> encryption to unlock the full game on the shareware
I couldn't find anything online but I doubt this was anymore more than some xor + rot13, it's not like Carmack was also Daniel J. Bernstein in disguise :) Back then the state of computer security was, well, rather nascent.
I hope this comment doesn't come across as contrarian. I also hope it doesn't sound like I'm trying to diminish the achievements of Carmack. He's a role model for me personally as a programmer. And he and his mates spawned an entire game genre that I have enjoyed for ... an amount of time I'd rather not disclose or think too much about!
The original point I was trying to make is thus: computers, and computing, have steadily become more and more powerful, which results in more and more complexity, and progressively more unwieldy abstractions to deal with all that complexity. Back when Carmack was cutting his teeth, computers were still fairly early on that complexity curve.
> Are you sure about that? I remember in Doom 3 era Carmack was rocking a fancy NeXTStep computer and doing cross platform development. But before that I'm pretty sure everything was a strictly Windows affair...
By Doom 3 NeXTSteps were way obsolete and the company had already been bought by Apple long before. He did show the Doom 3 tech first on a Mac at a WWDC though (and later did the same for Rage).
NeXTStep was used for Doom 1 and Quake 1 but by Quake 2 they had switched to Windows NT based computers (with a second Win95 computer for testing - and some artists still used DOS-based software like Deluxe Paint).
> I think Romero wrote a lot of the tooling.
AFAIK Romero wrote the editor for Doom and previous games but Carmack wrote most of the editor for Quake (the whole "brush" idea was Carmack's). Romero has mentioned a few times that he wasn't happy with the editor's usability. AFAIK by that time Romero spent more time on working on the levels (which were more time consuming to make than the Doom ones) and the QuakeC scripts.
> have you read Masters of Doom? It goes into a lot of this stuff and is a great read.
Indeed, i have read MoD, it is a neat book. One of these days i want to also read Romero's "Life in First Person" too.
> I couldn't find anything online but I doubt this was anymore more than some xor + rot13
It was a little more involved than that, there is a blogpost series[0] about it from someone who tried to reverse engineer and reimplement the original qcrack (which calculated a decryption key). The original qcrack was made almost instantly though.
IIRC from Masters of Doom, Carmack didn't really like the idea (most likely he expected people to crack it quickly).
Peter : Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh heh - and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour. (...) I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
(...)
Bob : What if - and believe me this is a hypothetical - but what if you were offered some kind of a stock option equity sharing program. Would that do anything for you?
Peter : I don't know, I guess. Listen, I'm gonna go. It's been really nice talking to both of you guys.
Bob : Absolutely, the pleasure's all on this side of the table, trust me.
Peter : Good luck with your layoffs, all right? I hope your firings go really well.
I am not sure I would consider much of what he did very simple (or easy) compared to what most of us are doing today. The last few chapters of Michael Abrash's Black Book is about his work with Quake (he was involved doing some of the graphics code together with Carmack) and it is pretty hardcore low-level advanced things they were doing. Remember they were software rendering everything in the first version.
And also they did pretty soon support MSDOS, Windows 95, and Linux (and possibly some more platforms?). In addition to supporting software rendering, 3Dfx, OpenGL, and possibly some more 3D API.
Didn't he code on Solaris or something weird in the workstation family and port quake over to dos? I only remember him having a giant CRT monitor where he'd sit and code for photos back in the 90s
It was NextSTEP and that was for Doom. I think they switched to Windows NT for Quake (or was that Quake 2?), which is what he was working on in that pic with the giant CRT.
> Memory pages marked as both writable and executable can be used only by apps under tightly controlled conditions: The kernel checks for the presence of the Apple-only dynamic code-signing entitlement. Even then, only a single mmap call can be made to request an executable and writable page, which is given a randomized address. Safari uses this functionality for its JavaScript Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler.
In other words, Apple only allows Apple to do Javascript JIT on iOS.
While this is technically true, WKWebView (which I believe is used by all non-Apple browsers on iOS) does allow Javascript JIT, because the renderer runs in a subprocess with these permissions. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19379739 .
But there are many other reasons besides JIT to want to have non-Apple-Webkit-based rendering engines (including wanting different JS engines with their own JIT) - and so IMO it's very much a restriction that regulators should force Apple to relax. The security considerations should be no different than those on a desktop platform.
Interesting, thanks. Didn't realise there was ways to embed WebKit views that also got JIT (escaped the walled garden a while ago!)
Still, my original point still stands. As you note, you can't have Spidermonkey running on iOS doing JIT. But you also couldn't have Gecko doing rendering and using WebKit JIT, either. ... Right?
> The security considerations should be no different than those on a desktop platform.
Completely agree. The "it's for your own security" angle is just usual Apple FUD to make their anti-competitive stance seem pro-consumer.
Some cursory web searches reinforce an assumption I had: Amazon absolutely dominate the eBook sales market, with figures from 65-80% of all sales being indicated.
So how can you make the case that Amazon doesn't have "leverage" to negotiate DRM-free publishing?
> together with CDs not having DRM
I don't recall printed books ever having any form of "DRM".
In fact, Amazon does allow eBooks to be sold through the Kindle store without DRM, and many are sold that way. It's completely up to the discretion of the publisher.
Whereas I have many eBooks purchased years ago from Apple's store that I can only read on Apple devices, not on my Kindle.
> And if you are a beginner, any attempt to do these exercises will invariably contain so many mistakes that they are not worth doing any more.
I totally disagree. StrongLifts (and the Starting Strength book it derives from) starts you with the empty bar. Unless you have a serious medical condition, putting 20kg on your back / chest is unlikely to result in serious bodily harm or damage to musculature. As you slowly and steadily increase the weight on the bar, you discover places where your form needs improvement. At least, that's how it worked for me (I only made it to ~100kg squats though).
Of course it's great if you can find a good coach. But I think an app like StrongLifts is a viable+reasonable substitute for a coach.