npsimons

Unfortunately I don't have the book to hand (loaned it out), but I'm pretty sure I remember him saying something along the lines of "you don't need bicep curls, just focus on the five lifts, but since you're going to do them anyway, here's the correct form." I haven't listened to interviews with him.

> I assume this was a typo.

Yes, it was; should have been "underhand", because yeah, they work the biceps more. As a climber, though, it's uncommon to do underclings (basically underhand/supine chins), but pretty common to do overhand pullup type motion, so I tend to focus on that over supine chins. Course, what's really good is hand jam pullups, but those are hard on the tendons and ligaments in the forearms and hands.

IIRC, he poo-poos assistance lifts such as bicep curls. The one exception is chins, which is in the official program and he insists on overhand because it works more muscle mass, despite overhand being the more practical version. Yeah, if you're bodybuilding get Pearl's "Keys to the Inner Universe" and plan on spending a lot of time just creating a program. But for most average people just looking to maintain, and especially beginners, the basic five lifts are simple, cover pretty much everything you need (for baseline strength) and can be done with a minimum of fuss, including creating programming and actual time lifting.

What are you talking about? He lists an example two week program complete with sets and reps in that book, plus outlines exactly how to find the weight you should be lifting with. Form is rigorously specified, to the point I've managed to stay injury free from lifting while never having been coached.

As someone who had done practically no strength training (benching with friends every once in a blue moon), SS:BBT took me from completely ignorant to regular lifter.

No, and you're not the only one. I've come to despise podcasts, because they are almost always very badly organized, if at all. I feel that we need a response to them, along the lines of "this could have been an email", except "this could have been a blog post."

Yes, your information might be insightul, but if I have to listen to 90 minutes of a couple of guys shooting the shit about it, it's next to useless in terms of actionable or meaningful content to me.

I really need a "TL;DR" for podcasts. Something along the line of the five minute precis from Gibson's "Count Zero".

This was exactly the feeling I got as I read his list: "these aren't features, they are, at best, nice to have library functions and syntactic sugar."

As for aerobics/cardio, I've never really picked up a book myself as I've been hiking my entire life. It really depends on what you're aiming for; if it's just baseline cardio, walks around the neighborhood are good enough. Beyond that you have to specialize a bit depending on what you're aiming for, be it endurance, speed, explosiveness, and also terrain and form. Swimming is probably the lowest impact, but requires a pool. I use cycling for groceries, errands and when I used to commute, but that's sort of an absolute bare minimum. At home I got a VersaClimber clone since I rock climb and mountaineer. I recently got into trail running after reading "Born to Run" but that's less a prescriptive/instructive book than an inspirational/entertaining read.

Recently I've gotten into Yoga as I've been neglecting flexibility. Yoga With Adrienne on YouTube has worked well for me so far.

I wonder how the claim stands up if we remove that "modern" adjective. Or perhaps consider that "modern" languages don't have some of these features as they turned out to be "harmful" (see Dijkstra's "GOTO considered harmful") - at least one reply in that thread calls out one of these "missing features" as very dangerous, sort of like how some C++ projects will forbid features (private inheritance, etc) for ease of maintenance.

It's been a long time, and I've not delved deeply in to a wide swath of languages (recently), but surely the features he's citing are in other languages? Hell, even the list of "features only Lisp has" keeps shrinking by the decade. Some of these PL/I "features" feel like things you could trivially implement in a library in other languages (ie, not have to implement half of PL/I to get those features). Some of it sounds simply like syntactic sugar, and not actual features.

What am I missing here?

> // is stupid, and the actual maneuvers we need to go through

> // are just painful. If programming were like this all the time,

> // I would quit.

Yup. Exactly why I refuse to ever work on Windows again, and won't even bother targeting it from other platforms. Total waste of my time and talent.

I think the point of "criticism-free" brainstorming is that it is time constrained, and a free for all. It's precisely geared towards getting people to not hold back, to throw anything out there.

The criticism will always come, sooner or later.

To me, this is a big thing that survivorship bias overlooks, to the detriment of us all. Taking Edison's "1000 failures to invent a lightbulb" can often be more instructive than the end result, even if you're not interested in inventing lightbulbs.

> The advice to be wary of experts reminds me of the advice to avoid criticism while brainstorming, the idea in common being that criticism and negativity supposedly stifles creativity.

I think the admonition to avoid criticism during brainstorming is so that any idea, no matter how infeasible, may be put forth. As I've understood it, this period of "unfettered criticism" should be markedly short, and while ideas will be recorded for future reference (and perhaps modification), they can safely be winnowed under the harsh criticism of reality after the brainstorming session.

That said, it has been common sense for quite some time that having a "box to think in" can help foster creative solutions to escaping the box.

Also reinvent the wheel. They can list four other configuration formats du jour, but conveniently leave out s-expressions, which have solved most problems people bring up over half a century ago.

Better for the environment too.

That quote reminds me of this quote:

> Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material. -- Alan Kay

Funny, Emacs seems to be written in Lisp . . .

This might be my number two reason. I learned Emacs in 2000. Meanwhile, I've not had to learn, over and over again, all those other editors and IDE's. To be sure, I've honed my Emacs skills, installed and learned new tools in it (hello flycheck, elpy, SLIME, org-mode, TRAMP, CEDET), and just generally get on with whatever I'm working on ATM.

My number one reason has been the power though, especially after reading things like this: https://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/3996068979/the-levels-of-e...

Probably. It always amuses me that people automatically associate "paleo" with "eating mammoths every day", when a simple glance to other primates shows a heavily plant-based diet, on top of which, how many mammoths do they think our ancient ancestors were killing? Even well into the 20th century, meat was not an everyday food, and it's completely unnecessary (some argue harmful) to the human diet.

Books like "How Not to Die" opened my eyes.

You get used to it. After a while, you prefer it, in no small part due to having that outside perspective that is all too valuable in realizing how bad groupthink is.

This alone speaks to why it's not just good for outsiders to be outside, but good for society as a whole.

Just saw that, nice. I like Norvig because he really cuts to the chase.

Visual Basic, PHP and Java come to mind. Probably C# as well.

The Blub paradox: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

(BTW, the TL;DR is people that know more than one language admit they all fall short one way or another, but there are some languages that are more productive than others).

Not if you don't go looking for it: http://www.norvig.com/java-lisp.html

ETA: And don't get me started on Design Patterns: https://norvig.com/design-patterns/design-patterns.pdf

To second this, I just read someone's anecdote about how unit tests/TDD is eliminating the need for type checking: https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=4639

> i think i disagree with this. the larger the code base the more flexible the program needs to be towards its input

And again, I'll second this with another anecdotal posting, but with the emphasis that input is not just run-time, but also specifications for programs: http://ivy.io/common-lisp/2015/03/03/guerilla-lisp-opus.html

As for Emacs learning curve, it's small when compared to the amount of time I would have had to spend learning other systems (over and over and over . . . ) over the past two decades. Emacs lasts, and so does the learning you spend on it.

For all the whinging about anti-social nerds, I've found the people most obtuse when it comes to social niceties to be the overtalkative that don't pick up on subtle cues that the person they are haranguing just wants to be left alone and get on with whatever they were involved in before they were so rudely interrupted.

No one owes anyone attention, particularly undivided.

I almost stopped reading there as well. The irony of bemoaning peoples' lack of experience in the bigger world, while lauding Cline was almost too much. But I find the overall message a good one, and was willing to write off this one point of utterly myopic incompetence for the sake of the rest of the article. Perhaps he was trying to make it more relatable to a younger crowd (while, again ironically, referencing a book that wears it's 80's nostalgia proudly).

ETA: Nope. Nope nope nope. Just can't finish the article. He keeps referencing the steaming turd that is RPO. FFS, has he even heard of Neal Stephenson? Maybe "Neuromancer"? So much good fiction on the topic, and he has to reference the bottom of the barrel garbage.