I've always wondered what the health trade-off is for a less mentally stimulating role if it dramatically reduces your stress levels and offers better work/life balance.
On a similar note, I've often wondered what the optimum amount of exercise is if you don't like exercise, but want to maximise your time not exercising.
Don’t the government of various countries recommend 90 mins of cardio per week and 2-3 strength training sessions on top of 30-60 minutes of daily light activity?
I feel like they would be the ones to answer the optimal exercise question over a huge number of people.
If you want to do weight training but don't want to spend a lot of time in the gym, look into "myo-reps". Rather than doing a traditional "Do 3 sets of 12 reps separated by 90-120s", you do a set of 12, then do several sets of 5 after waiting only 15 seconds. It's more intense but just as effective, and a lot faster.
Doesn't really work on leg day if you're lifting heavy, because 15 seconds isn't enough to catch your breath; but has worked pretty well for me for push and pull days, where my whole workout is usually less than half an hour.
Myo reps might have training benefit for strength-endurance athletes, but afaik they don't improve muscle growth or 1rm strength comparably to traditional schemes. If new work has come out showing that please share.
As of about 4 years ago the research I'd seen suggested that taking rest breaks of 3 mins vs 30s or 1m improves gains over time, though to be fair the lower rest breaks resulted in less overall work being done, so that's not entirely surprising.
> they don't improve muscle growth or 1rm strength comparably to traditional schemes
I didn't say they improved muscle growth cf traditional rest times, just that they took less time. The person I responded to didn't sound like they wanted to be as huge as they could be. I don't want to be as huge as I can be either -- I primarily want to maintain muscle mass as I age (nearing 50). Getting in a solid workout in 20-30 minutes rather than 45-60 minutes makes a big difference to that goal. ETA: As they say, "The best workout is the one you actually do".
This guy is a bit vulgar, but has a lot of good information:
Great question. The approach I've always taken (now that I'm past my prime) is to just show up. If I train 15 minutes and call it a day, at least I was active and sustained the habit of being active. If I train for a couple hours, that's great too. What I try very, very hard to avoid is doing nothing.
I suspect I get the majority of the gains from the first 20 minutes or so. And since I'm no longer training to compete at a high level, I don't need to eek out as much from my training as possible...but I have no data to back that up.
If it's just a matter of time vs results, HIIT and overhead press/deadlift for 3 sets each of 5-10 reps, with ~2-3 minutes between sets (you can do stuff like bicep curls and chest flyes in between big exercise sets). Unpleasant but high reward/time.
If you want to optimize for exercise pleasantness, start consuming all your tv on a treadmill or elliptical at a slow-moderate (2.5-3m/h) pace.
Same here. I worked repetitive manual labor jobs for a long time before I switched to tech. I was bored out of my mind at work, but after work loved playing games and working on programming/tech/electronics projects.
Now that I'm in tech I have 0 desire to do anything screen based or deep thinking/problem solving after work. There are days I look out the office window and kind of wish I was the guy mowing the lawn and trimming trees. But I know I'd be bored.
I think the sweet spot is lots of mental stimulation and no stress. This is probably why university positions were so coveted in the past, before academia became completely dysfunctional.
I used to be a high school teacher and, though not as physically taxing as working on a farm, I feel the same about how much easier my current tech job is.
This is my focus. Though admittedly selfish, I'm spending time learning more songs on the guitar, improving my cooking skills, mastering a new language, etc. Once our children are out of the house, I plan to also become more involved in supporting our community.
It took time to understand that my time is better spent supporting our kids' activities and maintaining an organized home than chasing another promotion.
My kids are 12 and 14 and I can't get them interested in coding beyond what they might do at school. They showed an interest in Scratch, but I believe I introduced it WAY too early. Moreover, it moved them too quickly past the creative aspects and into writing code. Also, years later, I showed them PICO-8 and they weren't terribly interested.
In hindsight, I would recommend working with them at a young age (<10) to design game art and ideas. Then, the parent implements it and ports it to a portable platform. The child sees the creative aspects and the final output, but is shielded from the coding side in the early days. I imagine a child playing a game they designed on paper with crayons would be really satisfying. It would almost be like magic!
Then, let the transition to the coding side happen more organically or through a school program or some such. Maybe when they finally ask, "So, parent, how do I actually code these games?"
That's what I've been doing with one of my kids. They're designing the sprites and maps in the PICO-8 sprite editor and I'm taking the lead on showing them how to do the rest.
They've also enjoyed tweaking the sprites of existing PICO-8 games.
I've always considered Stack Overflow research to be very valuable. Less for the answer to my question and more for the related topics, edge cases, and other details that frequently are included in thorough answers / comments / discussions.
When AI answers your question (and only your question), that's great for that specific instance, but it feels to me like it's lacking in breadth. I wonder if that results in the user becoming really, really reliant on said AI as they don't fully grasp the interconnectedness of coding? Just a thought.
That's a fair take. I can't overstate Stack Overflow has been in the past, I think I often had that experience that it usually caters to common but specific scenarios, or I'm just impatient and lurk instead of asking a question and waiting for a response. Interesting I could paste Stack overflow discussions into ChatGPT to ask if this insight is related to my issue and it was usually open to relating the new info and helping me
I think it's great that GPTs make it possible for people to achieve things like this! And kudos to you for stepping out of your comfort zone and learning new stuff.
I think the main apprehension people (/devs) have about this, is how the new generation of full time coders will be. Will they blow our socks away, with their AI-enhancements? Or will they never have learned the core concepts, but just jump from issue to issue like a junior for ever?
My observation is that in both cases it is two steps process:
1. You use conscious part of your mind to slowly doing isolated drills with good control and understanding of every detail. On this step conscious part controls process and unconscious part of mind is being trained by observing the drill and outcome.
2. unconscious part of mind is now trained, and you can disable conscious part which will make result better, because unconscious part is better in contoling motor functions.
I would do I everything I could to connect with others pursuing that same goal with the hope being that by working together we could increase everyone's chances of success.
Becoming an expert in anything is going to be full of challenging days where you question why you're doing this, just want to give up, get distracted, etc. Having others to lean on (and be leaned on) can help get everyone through those challenges. Additionally, knowing you're part of a group may give you some sense of responsibility do you won't be as likely to slack off.
Lastly, in my opinion, working with others and building friendships along the way makes the entire journey more fun.
What would happen if you just let them get up and get to school on their own? They might be late initially, but I bet they would figure it out and be on time after a short adjustment period.
I think their problem is not actually the part about having to drag the kids out of bed, but about the kids needing to be up before 6:30a in order to walk->train->walk to school on time.
i wouldn't say in our heads like we made it up, but it's just an experience that you cannot replicate if you've already experienced modern computing. growing up and experiencing the changes from analog to digital, dial-up to always on gigabit, 8bit to 64bit address space, 8bit color to 32bit, 8bit audio to 24bit, is all different because we have that frame of reference so it means more to us.
also, i didn't read manuals back then. i didn't know where they were. closest to a manual i had were Byte magazines
