My first piano teacher was very artsy and whimsical, she and I simply were never able to establish any connection as I have always been a very logical learner. I suffered under her for almost 10 years as a child while she tried to teach music to me in the way that made sense to her.
My latest piano teacher was a professor and specialised in the pedagogy of music so he was more than equipped to deal with an overthinking logical type music student like myself.
Learning music and an instrument can and should be quite intuitive. And as performing is quite expressive, music can attract people that stereotypical creative type who just wants to play and feel music. But the study of music theory and classical music are quite rigorous subjects and they can be attractive to logical thinkers who thrive learning all the nomenclature. But knowing the nomenclature is not strictly necessary to play music and so you have this disconnect between the very diverse spectrum of people drawn to music.
In fact, there is a certain inescapable intuitiveness to music and the professor taught me to really learn to via feeling and establish feedback loops that always come back to the sound and my own motor sensations (did you achieve the sound you want while playing freely?). You can't really logic things like that and if anything it's more like a sport than something you can science when every person's body and dimensions are different.
I am now having singing classes and singing is even more mindbending than piano has ever been
That resonates for me. I spend lot of time teaching volunteers. Early on, I encourage them to learn the skill from me, but also take any opportunity to have others explain and demonstrate the same thing to them. I tend to work from first principles, explaining how the pump functions and why that means water goes in here and out there, and what different configurations of valves are therefore valid and which ones will never do anything useful. Others often explain it in terms of which valves to turn in which order to achieve a given outcome.
Neither is right or wrong. Most people will be left pretty cold by one explanation while the other will land neatly into a hole in their brain shaped perfectly for it. Which one is which will be different for each person.
I think that there’s value in gearing educational settings towards having a plurality of instructors available on each subject and letting students gravitate towards the ones that work for them.
One of the hardest things about teaching others in my opinion is that to really teach effectively you have to be able to meet them where they are.
As in, you have to be able to have some understanding still of what being fresh and new to the subject is like, coupled with the ability to change how you teach something.
I wouldn’t say I’m exceptionally good at changing how I teach unless someone can give me a hint of how they learn best. (Unfortunately, this is one of those things people don’t always know well about themselves and can sometimes change based on context. ).
I try to always stay humble in that 1. I know I’m not the best at anything I’m teaching. 2. Usually if someone isn’t understanding, it’s 100% on how I’m communicating, and 3. Really it’s both of us learning - many insights can come from those new to material at times.
Those are abbreviated and perhaps not communicated in the best way.
But 100% a plurality of instructors, and techniques, is incredibly helpful.
I once heard, that a masters degree qualifies one to teach the subject matter. To do so, you had to organize the material in a way to accommodate students with different backgrounds, learning, and thinking process. In the process of doing so, you come to explore the limitations of your own understanding of the subject.
> I am now having singing classes and singing is even more mindbending than piano has ever been
The thing that drives me crazy about singing is that while I don't have a trained ear, much less perfect pitch, when I made a spectrogram of my voice I was more or less correct in terms of pitch. Apparently it's enough to do this for years to have some frequencies baked in.
As in without a reference you were still correct for pitch from muscle memory? I think I saw on HN that they no longer think perfect pitch is something you're born with and is essentially based on what I think you are saying. You have a few rock solid internal pitches and then you can do very fast recall. Although the people I know with perfect pitch hear everything as pitches - the sound of cars, footsteps the washing machine etc
> As in without a reference you were still correct for pitch from muscle memory?
Yes, exactly. If I try to sing a melody I'll be off by a few semitones, because well, no real musical training whatsoever, but I'll fall within the usual frequency buckets. Singing in a choir I always needed to rely on others to start, which is not ideal.
> Although the people I know with perfect pitch hear everything as pitches - the sound of cars, footsteps the washing machine etc
Yeah and I think that's the core of the issue here. In a lot of hiring markets, the cost of letting in a bad hire is higher than the cost of filtering out a good hire.
I've read this a million times but worked at companies where the bar for hiring managers and leadership was shaking someone's hand the right way, which led to entire teams either running for the doors or actively led to ruin.
There's a separate problem here for hiring developers specifically, where realistically it should be easy to bring someone on limited term (say 3 months) and see how they work, but compensation and benefits in the US absolutely in no way support a system like that.
I can't remember where (maybe here) that you shouldn't use mouthwash after working out because of the effects on your oral microbiome. That fact shocked me just like this article does because it was unintuitive that your oral microbiome could have such an impact on your physiology.
The effect may actually be a similar one because nitrates do sound familiar...
You shouldn’t use mouthwash at all ever. It’s a nuke to the microbes in your mouth. There was a long, rambling discussion with a functional dentist on the Primal Podcast[0] that goes into this.
> long, rambling discussion with a functional dentist on the Primal Podcast
I don’t know what a “functional dentist” is, but the term “functional medicine” is used to describe alternative medicine doctors. They traditional misinterpret studies and exaggerate their impacts, focusing on small studies in mice or theoretical in vitro studies and then extrapolating those to treatment decisions.
In my own personal experience (chronic pain), "Real Doctors" seem to want to shove pills down your throat because "they work", or give things like steroid shots which have negative long term effects. Whereas "Functional Doctors" are willing to try more traditional things because historically they have seemed to produce good results and are typically less intrusive (but may require more effort from the patient).
So I can see "Functional Dentist" being more like a dentist that is willing to try more ways to save teeth & gums by using more traditional methods (eg. Balancing the oral microbiome, suggesting softer foods more often), rather than a "Real Dentist" suggesting extractions or root canals without ever mentioning the hardness of foods or oral microbiome.
> "Real Doctors" seem to want to shove pills down your throat because "they work", or give things like steroid shots which have negative long term effects. Whereas "Functional Doctors" are willing to try more traditional things because historically they have seemed to produce good results and are typically less intrusive (but may require more effort from the patient).
This is the functional medicine fallacy: That “real doctors” are “shoving pills” that are secretly bad for the patient, while functional medicine doctors are also “shoving pills” but they’re a laundry list of supplements and traditional remedies.
In my experience, the functional medicine practitioners push far more pills and unnecessary tests than anyone else, but they’re given the benefit of the doubt because they’re operating under the alternative medicine fallacy that primary care doctors are the ones doing the bad things.
> (but may require more effort from the patient).
This is another concept used to justify the ineffective alternative medicine treatments; If they don’t work, it’s the patient’s fault for failing to do some effort. Another common explanation for when they don’t work is to “discover” yet another thing that needs to be treated. The additional demands of the patient are also designed to create buy-in which amplifies any placebo effect. The more rituals and supplements you can get a patient taking, the more they believe it’s going to work.
It's unpopular to voice anti-science sounding sentiments about medicine but it's worth noting that there is often a disconnect between known and practiced medicine.
Optimal outcomes at the aggregate don't always translate to optimal outcomes for the individual.
This can mean that strategies like effective triage and prioritization lets people fall through the cracks of conventional medical treatment. This is especially true for both public healthcare and separately chronic issues which are often too hard to treat vs acute medicine.
Then in private medicine it can be a bit of a crapshoot of practitioners who are incentivised to upsell or recommend preferred treatments.
I think this has soured people's opinions of conventional medicine.
My own personal anecdote to offer on the subject is a friend who suffered from severe eczema and over their life and was just put on progressively higher doses of steroids until that stopped working. The last advice from the doctor was "we give up - our next recommendation is chemotherapy to shock your body. Maybe you would like to consider alternative medicine first"
They went to try traditional Chinese medicine and for the first time in their life got control of their eczema.
Given alternative medicine is a dirty word here what I'd say is missing these days is the family doctor who has excellent holistic patient history and is willing to provide a mixture of therapy and lifestyle guidance eg exercise or nutrition intervention.
Some people might claim a GP should do this but the reality is that GPs often aren't allowed to provide this kind of care due to capacity constraints or top down strategic planning.
Ironically you see the gap being bridged from the other direction with therapists increasing their scope - eg someone close to me went to an osteopath for neck issues to get diagnosed (correctly!) that the root cause was sleep apnoea
Funny thing: the techniques and skills they teach work, even if you don't think they will.
I think most (all?) new age stuff -- naturopathy, chiropractics, reiki, whatever -- is BS. But I can't argue with my lived experience of using tai chi, mindfulness, education, and other new skills to proactively manage my disease.
This is my first time hearing (reading) the phrase "functional doctor". WebMD defines them as specialists in digging deeper, seeing the whole picture. Perfect.
--
YMMV. Consult your doctor, etc. Most treatments don't help with treatment resistant conditions. Beware adverse effects. Yadda, yadda.
There are situations where mouthwashes are beneficial, such as with injuries... Just not the stuff you buy at the store. The best mouthwash for those situations is just warm salty water.
Erythritol and Xylitol do have a strong correlation with severe coronary diseases and risk of strokes under certain preconditions according to newer studies though.
Also not really advisable for people with Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
The problem with interpreting these results as a condemnation of xylitol consumption is that diet isn’t the only source of circulating xylitol. This compound is also produced by our own bodies through a process known as the glucuronate pathway, one of the pathways by which we metabolize glucose. So how did the authors ensure they were investigating the relationship between dietary xylitol intake and MACE risk?
They didn’t. ...
Attia also brings up something the study authours noted:
The rapid rate of xylitol excretion observed in healthy volunteers with return to near baseline (fasting) levels within hours following ingestion of a significant dietary exposure suggests that the plasma levels observed in our observational (validation) cohort represent variations in endogenous production/levels and not food intake.
This is true but how much will your body absorb via a mouthwash?
Erythritol is commonly found in sugar-free or keto-friendly products like beverages, desserts, and snacks. A single serving of an erythritol-sweetened product (e.g., a sugar-free soda, keto ice cream, or protein bar) often contains 10–30 g of erythritol.
Studies, such as the 2023 Nature Medicine study, used a 30 g dose in intervention experiments to simulate typical consumption (e.g., one sweetened beverage or dessert). This dose raised plasma erythritol to 5–7 mM within 30 minutes, a level linked to increased platelet reactivity and clotting risk.
there are mouthwashes that don’t nuke everything in your mouth. Just FYI in case you’re unaware. They are not popular but they exist. The added benefit is it doesn’t burn either lol.
Example: Tom’s of Maine Whole Care Natural Fluoride Mouthwash.
It’s extra beneficial if you live in a state / country that doesn’t add fluoride to drinking water.
I have an aversion to the alcohol washes after reading years ago that the change to your mouth biome may lead to the issues that they are meant to stop.
fluoride with no kind of antibacterial is fine (careful with thymol etc). Check your toothpaste for anti bacterial as well. you want to remove food and plaque, not good bacteria.
It's really worth noting that one of the biggest real world Haskell codebases in the world (ie Standard Chartered) wrote their own compiler to make Haskell evaluation strict and make it easier to do interop with C++
Laziness by default was definitely an opinionated design choice for a language when using it in production
When I worked for Standard Chartered I was told that Mu, the compiler in question, was only strict because it was originally written to target an existing strict runtime (called Lambda, and Mu is the next letter in the Greek alphabet), not because they particularly wanted a strict language.
Intensity of the workout matters. When I go wakeboarding with my wife I build up a nice big appetite. When I go to muay thai I get pretty severe appetite suppression and sometimes have to force myself to eat.
The other thing is that if you track >>performance<< you naturally start caring about diet and lifestyle. So for people just trying their first 5k - I highly recommend tracking and setting time goals.
Nothing keeps me honest about my diet like performance
Your examples sound like fairly short-term biological responses to intense activity, which are likely different than long-term biological response to a significant increase in daily calorie expenditure.
I've done a fair amount of wilderness backpacking. It's common to lose your appetite for the first few days due to the change in environment, schedule, activity, etc. But pretty quickly your body will realize this is going to keep happening and it's going to need to make up the extra 1000+ calories you're burning every day.
If you workout harder than your baseline, you will burn more calories than your baseline.
But if you do that workout often enough, for various reasons you will return to baseline calorie expenditure.
This means that if you want to lose weight consistently, working out is useless in that sense. You might see benefits for 1 month or 3 months or 6 months, but eventually your body adjusts.
Working out is great for a plethora of reasons. And this calorie budget rebalancing is one of them, since it means inflammation or auto-immune responses get downregulated.
Losing weight is not one of those benefits. Whereas it is often held up as such which leads to intense disappointment and relapse with overweight people, because they think "oh, if I just go for six intense two-hour jogs a week, I can keep eating sumptuously."
How exactly can your body adjust that much though? There is some minimum baseline level of calorie burn to stay alive and keep your body temp etc.
If you workout enough calories that exceeds the minimum baseline to keep you alive, the body can't adapt below that or adapt into the negative.
For a 200 lb man, jogging for 2 hours burns like 2000 calories, so that's 12,000 a week for 6 times a week.
What's the lowest a body will adapt to slow it's baseline metabolic rate? I am reading that the BMR can only reduce by like maybe 15-20% due to body adaptation.
This would put their baseline calorie burn at around 1500, and then if they are burning ~1700 a day from their jogging, they can eat 3200 a day to maintain or 3000 to even slowly lose weight over time, which is a decent amount that you can have a pretty fun "diet" of what you consume IMO.
> For a 200 lb man, jogging for 2 hours burns like 2000 calories
ogging a mile will burn around 100kcal, a bit more if you're decently overweight, let's be generous and say 150kcal. Someone who isn't in good shape and is overweight (the kind of person we're likely talking about) isn't going to be running that fast, maybe 3mph. So that's 6 miles in 2 hours. Even if I'm incredibly generous and say they'll burn 200kcal/mi, that's only 1200kcal. But in reality it's probably more like 900kcal.
But let's be real here. Your average (even above-average) overweight person with a not-so-great diet is not going to be jogging for 2 hours. Maybe they'll jog for an hour. So 450-600kcal. And maybe they'll do that 2-3 times a week.
1350-1800kcal extra burned every week is great! Except that still probably won't be what happens, exactly. Unless this person is also counting calories, or consciously working hard to keep their exact same diet, they will probably unconsciously eat more. Adding a 9mi/week jogging regimen to your life, especially if you're overweight, is going to make you more hungry than usual, so you will eat more. How much? Well, hard to say. Maybe enough so that you still end up with a calorie deficit, but in many (most, I'd guess) cases you'll still have a surplus, even if less than before.
This is all still a good thing! A 500kcal surplus per week when you're running 9 miles is much better than a 1500kcal surplus every week with no exercise. But this (hopefully) demonstrates that it's not as simple as "I'll just add some exercise and that'll get my weight under control". You need to change your diet, and take in fewer calories. It's hard. But it's the only way -- for the vast majority of people -- that this will work.
I never really found the eating more when exercising more that compelling personally. I mainly meal prep and eat the same amount whether or not I work out and how hard I work out.
I feel like saying that someone is going to eat more because they are start exercising a lot is a separate topic. But I would think that someone who has the willpower to start exercising drastically more also has the willpower to control what they physically put in their mouth. I have personally found that stopping putting things in my mouth to eat is easier than getting myself to exercise as much as I would like to, so I don't think it's a guarantee that someone choosing to exercise more will automatically eat more.
For a 200 lb man, just jogging doesn't burn 1000 kcal/hr. You have to actually run at a pace of about 8:30 min/mi. People who can sustain that for 2 hours per day every day are not overweight in the first place.
I lost between 50-70 pounds in a year, and I used a Garmin smartwatch which I wear all hours to track my calorie expenditure, which is pretty accurate. I think this effectively allows you to ignore the kind of exercise. You just keep track of your calorie burn. If your workout doesn't burn enough calories, you do more.
HEMA is great but I always find myself wondering what it would be like if there was no tennis and Federer, Nadal and Djokovic were all born into HEMA - like what would combat look like if we put weapons into the hands of the greatest 1vs1 athletes of all time.
Kendo and Fencing are both sports. For starters a shinai is way lighter than a real sword, even an iaito is usually lighter than a real sword. The "meta" then evolves around a might faster and lighter style.
Slicing with a katana is also very technical, if you've ever watched tameshigiri being able to properly cut is much more than just scoring a point. Kendo tries to simulate that in its subjective judging parameters, but having your attacks properly cut will be a different technique than sport Kendo.
In real life warfare knowing how to not get your weapon jammed in an opponent is important for survival but is very hard to practice in modern day life...
Edit: as an analogue: if you learn boxing or muay thai, first you learn how to hit a bag properly. Then you spend 10-100x longer figuring out how to execute those techniques in an actual fight. Then you watch a master like Canelo or Tawanchai work their beautiful art and feel depressed
Assuming we are comparing ChatGPT to an in person therapist, there's a whole universe of extra signals ChatGPT is not privy to. Tone of voice, cadence of speech, time to think, reformulated responses, body language.
These are all CRUCIAL data points that trained professionals also take cues from. An AI can also be trained on these but I don't think we're close to that yet AFAIK as an outsider.
People in need of therapy could (and probably are) unreliable narrators and a therapist's job is to manage long range context and specialist training to manage that.
> don't think we're close to that yet AFAIK as an outsider.
I was gonna say: Wait until LLMs start vectorizing to sentiment, inflection and other "non content" information, and matching that to labeled points, somehow ...
I am curious how this will work in the wild. I believe the capability will exist but with things like body language and facial expressions, it can be really subtle and even if it's possible, I think that run of the mill consumer hardware will not be high fidelity enough and will bring in too much noise.
This reminds me of the story of how McDonald's abandoned automated drive thru voice input because in the wild there was too many uncontrolled variables but speech recognition has been a "solved problem" for a long time now...
EDIT I recently had issues trying to biometrically verify my face for a service and after 20-30 failed attempts to get my face recognised I was locked out of the service so sensor-related services are a still a bit of a murky world
If you have more than high 5 figures of money lying around, should you be co-mingling it with your everyday activities?
I wouldn't feel particularly comfortable even having 5 figures of tradfi cash lying around in my house let alone carrying it on my laptop where someone could steal my bag or machine and that's before it is connected
My latest piano teacher was a professor and specialised in the pedagogy of music so he was more than equipped to deal with an overthinking logical type music student like myself.
Learning music and an instrument can and should be quite intuitive. And as performing is quite expressive, music can attract people that stereotypical creative type who just wants to play and feel music. But the study of music theory and classical music are quite rigorous subjects and they can be attractive to logical thinkers who thrive learning all the nomenclature. But knowing the nomenclature is not strictly necessary to play music and so you have this disconnect between the very diverse spectrum of people drawn to music.
In fact, there is a certain inescapable intuitiveness to music and the professor taught me to really learn to via feeling and establish feedback loops that always come back to the sound and my own motor sensations (did you achieve the sound you want while playing freely?). You can't really logic things like that and if anything it's more like a sport than something you can science when every person's body and dimensions are different.
I am now having singing classes and singing is even more mindbending than piano has ever been
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