Very mixed. Sometimes great, but you have too watch it close as once in a while it will do garbage.
There is a lot of non-AI refactoring for C++ these days that is very good. And many more tools that will point to areas that there is a problem and often a manual fix of those areas is "easy".
What worked for me:
- quit sugar
- quit processed foods
- avoid fried food
- little fat (even the healthy ones)
- no nuts/seeds
- lifting weights
- little cardio
I have completely changed my life in one year.
It has been a very tough path, mostly socially, going out and not having a beer, burger… social pressure… but when you believe in eating healthy everything goes smooth. Also measure the results, once you get 12-15% of body fat, you may be gaining muscle weight.
The goal should be changing your lifestyle to one that is healthy and sustainable.
That sounds great, but I haven't found it to be sustainable. I also avoid fried foods, sugar, processed foods. I only eat meat twice a week. I count every gram of saturated fat I eat, and keep it under 10 grams per day. I eat nuts every day, for breakfast and/or afternoon snack -- I find the unsaturated fats and proteins prevent hunger. I also drink protein shakes (1-2 per day).
The main problem I faced was giving in “just this time”. Fat and sugar are addictive and when you fall, it makes it easier to fall again.
About healthy food, I had overweight and I mostly ate “healthy food”. I needed to go to a nutritionist and ask him why.
This is what O was eating a year and a half ago:
Breakfast: two bread slices with avocado.
Meal: mostly salads with lettuce, tomato, tuna, avocado, carrots, salt, vinegar and extra virgin olive oil. (I really wanted to lose weight).
Dinner: chicken, sushi, eggs… normally I would add a handful of seeds/nuts.
This is what my nutriotionist told me: you have been eating quite healthy, the problem are the fats: too many healthy fats (extra virgin oil, avocado, nuts… nuts have a lot of fats).
Only add protein shakes when you are trying to gain muscle and you are not able to add normal proteins. I started on protein shakes once I was slim and not able to eat that much food to gain muscle.
A year later I am fully conscious of what I eat. I can have eventually a burger, but I am fully aware that it is really unhealthy.
My proteins today are mainly chicken and salmon, carbs: quinoa, rice, lentils… and almost no fat (I’m trying to get my fat % to 12… it’s quite difficult)
Also read all packaged ingredients you will find nasty surprises in form of fats and sugar in diet / “high protein” meals.
I don't have a problem with food addiction or cravings, so I am fine to eat a huge burger here and there. Since I don't have this particular addiction problem, I use the "elasticity of willpower" a lot. E.g. if you restrict yourself too much you might rebound the other way, so I give in to desiring a burger in a controlled manner, I don't crave it for the next week.
As for what is not sustainable: for diet, quitting things cold is not sustainable, as small portions will not hurt me and not cause me to crave them. Instead I end up giving up on quitting them, and then they are no longer controlled by portion size.
I do have problems with limiting alcohol and nicotine, so I don't even have 1 sip/drag of those items, so I do know what addictive behavior is.
My cholesterol dropped from 250 to 200, and I do expect it to fall further as I shave off more rough edges from my diet.
What "shaving the rough edges off" looks like is making a slightly healthier choice on my 2 meat meals per week, e.g. single patty burger, skip the cheese, or have a 4 oz steak. Drinking only half the mango lassi, or skipping the milkshake.
I also dropped from 215 to 205 lbs. 200-205 lbs is my healthy weight, with 11-13% body fat.
This tracks with food writer Michael Pollan's advice for eating a healthy diet. In his view, healthy eating for most people means sticking to a limited set of rules and habits, without overcomplicating the affair. The main rules are [1]:
"1. Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
2. Eating healthy is common sense. Don’t make it complicated.
3. Avoid processed foods and ingredients you don’t recognize.
4. Use meat for flavor, not the main course.
5. Pay more, eat less."
While diet can be a contentious issue (with debates on meal timing, how many meals per day to eat, how much fat versus protein versus carbohydrates to eat per day, etc.), I've gotten a lot of mileage out of Pollan's central message that you eating healthily largely means limiting portion sizes and choosing fresh food over processed meals.
I believe it’s a good thing this shift towards apprenticeships, we don’t really need so many university graduates (I’m talking from an Spanish point of view).
More and more the university is degrading its own nature, focusing on preparing “workers” instead of cultivating the arts of knowledge: research, philosophy, history…
It is good that people from university goes to the private sectors, but we are doing it the wrong way, we do not need CS to go develop for Funny Startup, we need developers (technical apprentships) and probably some software architects (CS) that focus on how it should be done.
Private sector is pushing universities toward work training and we are falling back in advances and knowledge. The fine art of learn to learn, the place where people that love the field go instead than the people that searches for a job and money.
I lead Security in a quite large bank. I love this article, I’ve been advocating for this line of thoughts for more time that I can remember.
I have spoken to regulators hundreds of times, over this and a bunch other security topics that are definitely obsolete. Security policies that just don’t make sense…
The most important thing for this kind of things to advance is to have the correct people in the correct places, and usually in this positions you have dinosaurs…
In most of my banks in Europe, all but one, I cannot log without using an actual physical 2FA device the bank sent me. One of them, Deutsche Bank, sent me a specific hardware 2FA which works "by itself" (and is protected by a PIN). No password to log in: only the user account ID and that 2FA device.
The others require my Java SmartCard / national ID card to be inserted in a 2FA reader they sent me (it's a standalone reader with its own display: it is not a Java SmartCard reader hooked to the computer).
Do you guys hand out your customers physical 2FA devices?
Not anymore, we used to do that and maybe a bunch of customers still have that device to log in, but we have been replacing them (the “hard token”) with a “soft token”, kind of a Google Authenticator linked to your mobile.
It is interesting how “yubi”things have moved in the opposite direction (back to the physical device) and it has its value, after all, leaving your home with all your savings in your pocket is a risk we need to address.
We will end up using good old banks to hold those assets… at least the regulations make them solvent.
We need to read history and see what happened when the banks weren’t regulated enough and we are letting the crypto zoo run free and bankrupt many people.
Such a bliss the “we don’t need traditional ecosystem to thrive”.
I know how this is going to end, we will replicate the finance ecosystem into the cryptosystem.
I still remember the “don’t be evil” slogan in google, let’s give random people the power to store all our crypto investment and let’s see what happens…
I loved the “5 monkeys” comparison and I agree that everything depends on the real case scenario.
My point here is that what the article propose it is no “security through obscurity” it’s just good configuration practices. Change username, port…
Security through obscurity goes along in the line: “I have this algorithm in the js that obfuscate the password in the front end, and nobody is gonna guess it because it’s super complex”.
I can understand your statement, but by doing that you will find that A LOT of people will check the insecure options because “that a not going to happen to me”.
Remember you have the “rescue keys” from google to avoid these kind of problems.
The bigger problem is how you teach those people how to use the services in their situation.
It is not new, it’s been ages since some developers try to show off by bringing “cool” one liners to solve problems. Stretching operators, bringing up imaginative uses for lambda expressions or kind of abusing parts of the language to make some other teammate or reviewer, What did you make there?
I believe, definitely, that they are quite intelligent people that know a lot about the language or maths, but definitely they are not usually making the smartest choice, because you should use “languages” in order for the people to understand you.
In the last times I’ve been seeing lots of “show off” with nitty gritty features of C++… lambdas, templates and inheritance in a pattern that reminds me to the characters in an Agatha Christie book, where you need a graph to keep up with it…
Hope this era ends soon.
There was a Saint that said: “I meditate one hour everyday, well everyday except when I have a lot of work, that day, I meditate two hours.”
That proverb is superb, when something is wrong and the team seems stressed I usually use it and we call a meeting to try to re-evaluate the situation.
Definitely you end up prioritizing and cutting in order to keep things on track.
Usually delays come from two sources:
1. Bells, whistles and nice to have functionality that are already working and keeps refining.
2. Engineers Ego: refactoring when they find that a nicer approach is possible. Just stop that and keep in mind that business comes first and you will eventually have time to rethink (if everything goes smooth).
The problem is you not using a word generator and instead relying in your invention, most of the people will use top 5000 words (5000^5 = 1e18), imagine you can even lock one of the words (a color maybe?).
So this way of thinking might be good if you know what you are doing and use uppers and lowers and symbols, if not, it is actually a bad advice.
