gilbetron (u/gilbetron)

gilbetron commented on The ROI of Exercise herman.bearblog.dev/exerc... · Posted by u/ingve

Exercising and building muscles when you're young is the very best thing you can do. These muscles shall stay for a very, very, very long time.

As a kid I was doing BMX, tennis (still do some), swimming then as a teenager street skateboarding, rollerskating, MX (motor)bike, tennis.

Now I'm an old man (52 y/o) and I don't do much sport. Some MTBing (still can do a wheelie and trackstand, ah!) but really not much. I drive my old sportcar (yup, that is physical and you do sweat). Some tennis while on vacation. And shooting at the range (and, yup, that is a bit physical too).

But I really don't do much. I'm of this school: "Qui veut voyager loin ménage sa monture" (french) which translates to "He who wants to travel far takes care of his mount.".

The number of friends my age who destroyed their bodies by continuing to exercise as if they were 20 or 30 years old is beyond belief. I think I'm one of the only one who didn't get knee surgery yet.

Running is terribly bad as you get older. Hockey (ice or grass): body destroyer. BJJ? Don't get me even started.

My doctor says "sport is death". He knows.

Tennis is particular in that you can really play it at your own pace: just pick someone your age and hit the court gently. No crazy rallies, just fun: I'm not going to win Roland-Garros at 52 y/o and you ain't either.

And there's something else among all of my friends who regularly do sport: as soon as they stop for a few weeks, they get fat.

Which is a problem I don't have.

So exercising a lot in your teens, 20s and 30s: sure. That shall build you muscle you'll keep for decades (my legs are still very strong).

But slow down after that or you'll break your body and then get fat as soon as you have to stop exercising (for example because you have to get knee surgery because you destroyed your knees running).

Something something about Buddha / Siddhartha warning to not put too much tension in a lute's strings or in a bow's string. There's a lesson in there.

You have your age, deal with it and act accordingly.

gilbetron · a day ago

Nearly all available evidence points the other way, sorry. Now, intense sports (like hockey) isn't as good as exercise where you don't put yourself in physical collisions and major strains is better, but both are better then sedentary lifestyles.

I'd recommend a better doctor. My dad was active and sporty well into his late 70s and lived until he was 94.

gilbetron commented on Vibe Coding Is the Worst Idea of 2025 [video] youtube.com/watch?v=1A6uP... · Posted by u/tomwphillips

bitpush · 5 days ago

Here's how Innovators Dilemma plays out.

Step 1: Some upstarts create a new way of doing something. It’s clunky and unrefined.

Step 2: "Experts" and senior folks in the field dismiss it as a "toy." It doesn't follow their established rules or best practices and seems amateurish. They wouldn't recommend it to anyone serious.

Step 3: The "toy" gets adopted by a small group of outsiders or newcomers who aren't burdened by the "right way" of doing things. They play with it, improve it, and find new applications for it.

Step 4: The "toy" becomes so effective and widespread that it becomes the new standard. The original experts are left looking out of touch, their deep knowledge now irrelevant to the new way of doing things.

We're at step 2, bordering on 3.

* Executives at Nokia and BlackBerry saw the first iPhone, with its lack of a physical keyboard, as an impractical toy for media consumption, not a serious work device.

* Professional photographers viewed the first low-resolution digital cameras as flimsy gadgets, only for them to completely decimate the film industry.

gilbetron · 5 days ago

> Professional photographers viewed the first low-resolution digital cameras as flimsy gadgets, only for them to completely decimate the film industry.

You oversimplify everything, but this is completely wrong. 320P cameras were useless to pro photographers, but as soon as the capabilities got near to what film could provide, they eagerly switched. Kodak was destroyed, but there wasn't much of a place to pivot to. "Masters of a complex, chemical domain" to "Yet another camera company" isn't a real pivot.

I'm bullish on AI, and think "vibe" coding was/is a cool experiment so don't agree with the premise that it is in the worst idea, but strongly disagree with your simplistic take on how tech is adopted. There are countless ideas that "experts" were right to ignore, ideas sitting in the trash can of history.

gilbetron commented on Nobody’s buying homes, nobody’s switching jobs, America’s mobility is stalling wsj.com/economy/american-... · Posted by u/sandwichsphinx

mingus88 · 10 days ago

I think it’s natural for homeowners to be resistant to new builds in the same way office workers hated the move to cubicles.

I was in the Midwest recently and it was wild to see a block of high density houses in the middle of farmland. Houses that look exactly the same, shoved onto tiny lots with little gap between them, and surrounded by miles of corn.

These are obviously attractive to developers as they are maximized profit vehicles, but the downsides to everyone else are enormous.

In my opinion, we need to build housing above stores, so communities can actually work. Build a town, not a subdivision. What’s the point of a $50k home if you have to spend two hours a day driving to make it work?

gilbetron · 7 days ago

For whatever reason, those houses get snapped up quick. I've lived in the midwest my whole life, and those cornfield subdivisions are hugely popular. I have a house near a small city, and I've had numerous friends and family ask me why I would live where I am rather than in one of the "much better subs".

I don't think people quite wrap their head around the fact that the US population love their cars and their huge subdivisions. A massive percentage of the US have no desire for walkable cities.

It is a bizarre alien thought to me, too, but it has become very clear to me.

gilbetron commented on Is chain-of-thought AI reasoning a mirage? seangoedecke.com/real-rea... · Posted by u/ingve

empath75 · 10 days ago

One thing that LLMs have exposed is how much of a house of cards all of our definitions of "human mind"-adjacent concepts are. We have a single example in all of reality of a being that thinks like we do, and so all of our definitions of thinking are inextricably tied with "how humans think", and now we have an entity that does things which seem to be very like how we think, but not _exactly like it_, and a lot of our definitions don't seem to work any more:

Reasoning, thinking, knowing, feeling, understanding, etc.

Or at the very least, our rubrics and heuristics for determining if someone (thing) thinks, feels, knows, etc, no longer work. And in particular, people create tests for those things thinking that they understand what they are testing for, when _most human beings_ would also fail those tests.

I think a _lot_ of really foundational work needs to be done on clearly defining a lot of these terms and putting them on a sounder basis before we can really move forward on saying whether machines can do those things.

gilbetron · 10 days ago

I agree 100% with you. I'm most excited about LLMs because they seem to capture at least some aspect of intelligence, and that's amazing given how much long it took to get here. It's exciting that we don't just understand it.

I see people say, "LLMs aren't human intelligence", but instead, I really feel that it shows that many people, and much of what we do, probably is like an LLM. Most people just hallucinate their way through a conversation, they certainly don't reason. Reasoning is incredibly rare.

gilbetron commented on How AI conquered the US economy: A visual FAQ derekthompson.org/p/how-a... · Posted by u/rbanffy

stackbutterflow · 18 days ago

Predicting the future is always hard.

But the only thing I've seen in my life that most resembles what is happening with AI, the hype, its usefulness beyond the hype, vapid projects, solid projects, etc, is the rise of the internet.

Based on this I would say we're in the 1999-2000 era. If it's true what does it mean for the future?

gilbetron · 16 days ago

Almost three years ago I gave a talk to a Staff+ group where I work and told them that AI felt like the internet in 1995 timeframe. It still does, and I agree we seem to be in the late-90s now. However, we need to be careful, this feels similar in a world-changing way, but it is different on so many levels. Amongst other things, the world is far more tech savvy than in the 90s. Plus nearly everyone alive and making decisions now were alive and making decisions in the 90s. That's why we're seeing this insane "all in" mentality - there is almost certainly going to be new Googles/Facebooks/Apples/Amazons that come out of this, or at least that is what capital believes.

I hate, hate, hate the Gartner Hype Cycle thing, it's just a dumb statement that things can get overhyped. Instead, I see it as a Cambrian explosion of everybody everywhere trying to find use cases for this new tech. Nearly all of them will fail, but many won't and we'll have a different world in a few years. There will be crashes and crazes and (hopefully) generally positive changes in the world.

It could be Terminator or Handmaid's Tale or 1984, too. The main difference between the 90s and now is that the world is much more educated on the downsides of tech and so there isn't that giddy sense of coolness from the 90s, and that bums me out.

gilbetron commented on How AI conquered the US economy: A visual FAQ derekthompson.org/p/how-a... · Posted by u/rbanffy

keiferski · 18 days ago

Well, there’s a fundamental difference: the Internet blew up because it enabled people to connect with each other more easily: culturally, economically, politically.

AI is more-or-less replacing people, not connecting them. In many cases this is economically valuable, but in others I think it just pushes the human connection into another venue. I wouldn’t be surprised if in-person meetup groups really make a comeback, for example.

So if a prediction about AI involves it replacing human cultural activities (say, the idea that YouTube will just be replaced by AI videos and real people will be left out of a job), then I’m quite bearish. People will find other ways to connect with each other instead.

gilbetron · 16 days ago

Connecting to other people, I think, is going to see a surge of desire. I've been feeling it, many I talk to are feeling. One strange piece of anecdata is that I've been working out (with my son) at a gym for the past 3 years, very consistently. Everybody has always just done their thing, almost entirely individuals working out, with a handful of pairs. I'm old, so I remember when working out at gyms would be a much more social situation, but times change.

There are a number of regulars that we've seen there for years now. Barely have interacted with them. Suddenly, the past week, through a chance interaction, two of them individually have talked to us and ended up introducing themselves. Plus I see other people talking more and more.

I think we've hit a on-your-own saturation point and the pendulum might swing the other way.

But I'm really staying away from many "predict the AI future" because we just don't know where it is going. I've read thousands of scifi books and nonfiction and futurist and any number of options are open and no one, and I mean no one, knows what will happen with any kind of certainty.

gilbetron commented on GPT-5 openai.com/gpt-5/... · Posted by u/rd

IshKebab · 17 days ago

It's really not. The wing is angled so it pushes the air down. Pushing air down means you are pushing the plane up. A wing can literally be a flat sheet at an angle and it would still fly.

It gets complex if you want to fully model things and make it fly as efficiently as possible, but that isn't really in the scope of the question.

Planes go up because they push air down. Simple as that.

gilbetron · 17 days ago

https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/VirtualAero/BottleRocket/a...

It is not that simple.

gilbetron commented on GPT-5 openai.com/gpt-5/... · Posted by u/rd

ge96 · 17 days ago

What is the actual answer? I know the "skipping stone" idea is wrong too, thinking it's just angle of attack

gilbetron · 17 days ago

Here's a relatively quick read (press the "next" buttons under the "Guided Tour" section to get to the other 3 slides) from NASA.

https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/VirtualAero/BottleRocket/a...

The "wrong" answers all have a bit of truth to them, but aren't the whole picture. As with many complex mathematical models, it is difficult to convert the math into English and maintain precisely the correct meaning.

gilbetron commented on If you're remote, ramble stephango.com/ramblings... · Posted by u/lawgimenez

Aurornis · 21 days ago

I understand the point you were making, but from a manager’s perspective this format is something we’ve tried to avoid. Having a place to have people ask questions is great and encouraged, but doing anything that starts gravitating the knowledge toward a person instead of a topic creates problems for discoverability, searchability, and risks creating the impression (for new employees) that certain specific people are at the center of projects they just happen to know a lot about.

So while the Q&A format is good to have available, I’d discourage creating separate channels around a person. I would encourage everyone to just go to the appropriate topic channel and discuss it there.

I do the same thing when someone starts asking specific technical questions in #random or #general: Redirect to the project specific channel. That’s the place where all of the relevant people will be relevant and watching and it’s the first place they’ll search in the future.

gilbetron · 21 days ago

This is a terrible suggestion, please ignore it.

If people have found an effective way to communicate information, leave them the hell alone. I have too often seen people like Auronis decide to come in and manage something to be proper, and then destroy the communication.

The appropriate thing to do is to find a way to augment, without interfering, the channel to shore up any weaknesses.

Formal channels are often too formal - people don't want to look dumb, or get chastised for asking something incorrectly. Formal channels are intimidating, not welcoming.

The point is knowledge sharing, not "appropriate" knowledge sharing.

I love how the OP was like, "hey, we created this informal channel and communicated valuable info to the whole company", and then Auronis is like, "yeah, don't do that!"

gilbetron commented on The Dollar Is Dead mathmeetsmoney.substack.c... · Posted by u/nhp_fermi

chasing0entropy · 21 days ago

I'm assuming you believe COVID shutdown was 2019-2020?

gilbetron · 21 days ago

Covid shutdown was 2020, do you remember who was president?