Also anecdotal, but I've met my share of early bird programmers. I often wonder how much of these habits are driven by ~~stereotypes~~ culture, since theoretically your energy level depends mostly on your lifestyle.
I program equally well early in the morning or late at night, basically the two times in the day when my daily tasks are mostly settled. If I advertise early morning programming, it doesn't feed into the mantra of "hard working" in corporate USA as well as the "burning the midnight oil" tropes.
So, I come into the office two hours early and get my programming done before the meetings start and get little to no recognition, or I stay three hours late doing the same and get lots of recognition. Savvy people will soon learn to feed the trope of working hard, working late, especially when it can excuse a late entry to work (but arriving early never permits a late exit).
I'd say the late night hacker is more a stereotype driven by culture.
No one is up or going to be up, likely. People aren't outside making noise. No inbound calls, less inbound emails or chats. Less notifications across social media.
[1] From The Computer Boys Take Over, a very good basic history of the professsion: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9247209-the-computer-boy...
I am a pretty ok writer & programmer in the morning; my productivity & quality of work falls off after 2pm. Under pressure, I'd much rather go to bed early and wake up very early to work on a next-day project.
I effectively can't do "work" writing at night. But I've found that fiction, humor, and other creative writing can benefit from being in a different headspace. Being tired to the point of feeling a bit punch-drunk can take you to interesting places. The few times I've truly surprised myself, I was writing in a somewhat (not drug-induced) altered state.
On the few times I've woken up both early and well-rested, I have both the quiet and a clear head, although I almost always have something that'd be better tackled in the morning than cranking out a blog post or an e-mail to a friend.
Well, do societies have a tremendous incentive to find unarmed martial arts which work?
If my tribe faces an existential threat from the next tribe over, wouldn't I pick up a stick?
Catch wrestling split in two ways. On one side, it had submissions banned and became Olympic freestyle wrestling. On the other, they played up the drama and it became modern professional wrestling.
https://www.abada.org/capoeira-history/
I think rather than look at the results, it is interesting to look at the forcing functions the results operated under.
The same applies for wrestling high-crotch or blast double. If you put someone down hard on the nearest solid object or concrete, there's a good chance the fight is immediately over.
That said, in a real scrappy fight, landing a proper judo through is a tall order. I've seen high level black belts fail to land clean throws on spazzy white belts. They get them down and technically win, but not cleanly, and not with the force needed to end the fight. Newaza (ground techniques, i.e. BJJ) comes in there to help finish.
Pure BJJ is great if you are fighting on dirt, and great to know defensively if you do find yourself ambushed or otherwise on the ground in an altercation. But in a real fight you should do your best to put the other guy down hard, get on top, and stay on top. Modern BJJ in particular is far too willing to concede top position, though modern MMA is thankfully pushing back on this some.
BJJ didn’t develop until the 20th century because the competitive rules in which that style of mock fighting is most effective didn’t solidify until the 20th century.
On top of that Severn, Frye, and Coleman all came from western wrestling backgrounds and they did pretty well in UFC...
1. Many martial arts consider armed/unarmed just variations of a theme, and practicing unarmed is often safer, and used as "phase 1".
2. A lot of the modern day stuff can be traced back to Japan at a time when the government funded "civilized sports that help you grow", and then the Olympics got involved... we're pretty far distanced from "defend the village" at that point.
There will be a whole lot more "custom stack to get exactly what you want" going around in the near future, pretty exciting.
I would say that the distinguishing characteristics of a wiki are:
- it is intended as a general repository of human-readable articles [x]
- it is designed so that authorized users can edit articles easily [x]
- it has affordances for lots of linking, internally and externally [x]
So, from the viewpoint of Gwern Branwen and only Gwern, it's wiki-like.
Nobody else has authorization or easy article editing, as far as I know. So for everyone else, it's just a really interesting site.
I think it would help us if we understood why this problem is so hard to understand and what our blind spots are.
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It is easy to see the problems that an obese person has. It is easy to feel like they should know better and make changes for their health. It looks like a big problem that should be taken seriously.
But that's not how that person got there. 1-5 pounds of excess fat does not feel like a big problem. Fat gain is usually quite slow and steady, and the body has time to get used to it. In other words, it's not a problem that suddenly shows up in a person's life, and it doesn't physically feel like a problem (until it's too late).
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Hunger doesn't have a number. Scientists have an aversion to studying things that don't have numbers. It doesn't feel like serious science.
Hunger isn't weakness or failure, it's a whole body response to lack of nutrients.
Hunger isn't one thing, it's a bunch of body sensations and psychological triggers and conditioning.
Hunger acts like a one-way valve - there is a strong negative feeling for a moderate lack of nutrients, there is no equivalent feeling for a moderate excess of nutrients. People can often lose fat while dieting, but then gain it back. That has been described as the hunger set-point. Winter is coming and losing your energy supply may kill you (says evolution).
Hunger is not comparable between people. I don't know how bad you feel when you miss a meal, and you don't know how bad I feel.
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I can eat like a king at every meal, every day. I can eat like a king of a different country every single day. I'm never limited to boring food.
Corporations make money from "adding value" to food, advertising it and selling it. The value add is to make food very tasty - sugar, salt, fat, flavor. There's no pressure at the corporate level to market food in accordance with health goals. The "sugar tax" has been thoroughly demonized.
The problem with gravy and sauces is not just the caloric content. It is the inducement to eat more. An experiment: buy unsalted and salted nuts of your choice (or unflavored and flavored rice cakes, etc). Eat as many of the unflavored item as you care to. Now think about eating the flavored version. Did you suddenly feel like you could eat more? Your gut and your mind talk to each other. If you taste something good or even imagine tasting something good, and it is different enough from something you just ate, your body will tell you that you are still hungry.
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On the calories out side, studies show that exercise has little effect on fat by itself. Exercise is good for health, but remember that your body will tell you to eat more to make up for it.
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Advice time: Learn to control hunger. This may take quite a lot of effort and learning. I recommend the books "The Hungry Brain" and "Burn".
Eat boring food high in protein and fiber.
Find exercise that you enjoy.
Control your food environment. If you have snacks around, your brain will remember them. If you have snacks within reach, your body may start eating them without conscious command.
That said, you offered some of the best advice I've seen:
| Eat boring food high in protein and fiber.
Which is effectively the opposite of nearly every kind of snack food that is currently popular.
If the article is correct (haven't verified myself), that lab animals on a controlled diet are more obesse now than in the past, that contradicts basically everything you wrote.
Am I mis-remembering recent studies showing that alcohol does no good whatsoever for health (in contrast to earlier studies to the contrary)? Or is this just one of those that stays an open question in the hope that someone proves it true?
I think it remains open because people really want to drink, and people really want to sell alcohol. There are many things like this in our diets, and the evidence is fairly conclusive. We just struggle to accept it.
https://hubermanlab.com/what-alcohol-does-to-your-body-brain...
IIRC, that last negative one (of course I might be a year out of phase with you) proved that alcohol consumption doesn't do anyone any good at any amount by redefining "anyone" and "good" and telling us what we already knew about esophageal cancers and alcoholism.
* Obesity: We are eating more. We are eating higher calorie foods. We are also eating more sugar. The days of cooking raw foods in the home are few, and when we do, we do so by cooking with pre-prepared items that tend to have high caloric intake without many of the previous dietary benefits.
Most families are down to one non-starchy vegetable a day, arguing that the tiny amount of pasta sauce counts as a vegetable as it contains tomatoes, ignoring the added sugar. To fix this, people are willing to sell us a never ending stream of services and advice, where the most effective advice is deemed uninteresting compared to the attention grabbing advice.
Our health industry has spawned a wellness industry, where we are being told that blending our fruits and vegetables (releasing more sugar) need to be sweetened with honey (more sugar) as it is more healthy than table sugar. Here is a clue, just don't blend the stuff and eat it; but, that would hardly spawn an industry.
- Alcohol: Yes, there have been numerous studies that moderate wine drinking can have health benefits. The main issue is that drinking in the USA probably involves at a minimum more alcohol than would qualify as healthy, and it is a relative health benefit that can easily be cancelled by too much ethanol.
Here's a hint, food is a mixture. Drinking gin-and-tonics might also prevent malaria, a health benefit, but give you cirrhosis of the liver, a health hazard. Mixtures do that.
- Boogers: Any biology student knows that they are primarily comprised of sugars, and are a mixture of sugar, whatever else is in the nose, and water. Why do they come in so many varieties? Sugar is flexible, making up trees, sugar glass, sugar for your coffee, and much, much more. No news here.
- Jeanne Calment: Most people believe she took over the identity of a relative to avoid inheritance tax. The French government refuses to entertain this idea, as they prefer to have a national icon. This is well covered in the article, but in a fit of "let's disregard the contradicting ideas" is summarily dismissed with "the fraud theory seems highly unlikely to explain the Calment anomaly" because, they're already believing Clament is an anomaly and thus cannot believe she isn't.
Oddly enough the Clament story is just like the other items in the list. If you start from a position of believing something is unusual, you have to assume that any bland explanation must fail because it wouldn't make it an unusual item.
So lab animals on controlled diets are sneaking out to the grocery store?
[0] https://osf.io/download/5fa6d1f29c7a4e006ca006be/?version=4
Throwaway.
Old-school furry, from the early 90s. I won't try to speak to the history - it predates me by a few years - but the comment "furries run the Internet" was true for decades. In the 90s and 00's the level of overrepresentation was off the charts, to such a degree that for awhile one large and successful contracting company (Taos Mountain) would actively recruit from the fandom.
Many, many successful early startups had multiple furries working there in key technical positions, including some who's earliest and most influential employees were furries (not naming names because those folks may not want to be 'outed' as furry). I worked for one pretty successful startup that, with I think maybe <100 employees, at least 10 of us were furries. For awhile if a company was an ISP or other service provider, data center operator, had an IT staff of at least 3, or just were a tech company chances are there were multiple furries working there. Some companies still have pretty large fractions of certain departments absent on weekends when large furry cons are being held.
I'd say we're still overrepresented in tech but the industry has gotten so much larger that the raw absolute numbers aren't as surprising as they once were.
Both. It depends on what I am doing.
If programming with completely new stuff, I need silence (but can't stand it). If programming stuff that is familiar, but still new, music is perfect, as long as it's not slow.
If writing, I do best when listening to music that corresponds with the mood of the current scene.
> Why does writing in the morning (anecdotally so far) seem to be so effective for writers, even ones who are not morning persons? While programmers, which seems like a similar occupation, are invariably owls?
Funnily enough, I write best at night when I'm slightly sleep deprived.
I've had more people praise my writing for a technical document [1] written during late nights than for anything else. They specifically praised the snark, which was just the result of a sleep-deprived brain.
I'm not sure why, but I have a hunch: I'm a little autistic and can be quite stilted; however, a sleep-deprived brain can go a little haywire. Going a little haywire seems to make me more human.
This is like the Ballmer Peak [2], except that this doesn't work for me when programming.
I'm currently working on code and a novel. I'm trying to get into the habit of programming when I'm fresh and writing the novel or technical documentation when I'm tired.
[1]: https://git.gavinhoward.com/gavin/bc/src/branch/master/manua...
