...most IPS in most contries are just OK with piracy ...use proper VPNs for stuff that needs real security, enjoy your entertainment in peace (sure, if you're into weird kinds of pr0n). Most ppl who occasionally pirate also pay for content and have Netflix substrictions and stuff anyway (most artists do get payed - or at least some company gets paid for their work...), and those who don't would just pirate anyway, just switch ISP, so nothing gained by this.
(Side note: US seems like such a dystopian place nowaday... wasn't it "land of the free" or smth. And I'm comparing to like developed countries in Western Europe and Asia, not freakin Russia or Afganistan!)
You're just repeating the scaremongering that VPN providers use to sell their insecure s, please stop!
Tor + (~secure) VPN, but most things like pirating and pr0n DON'T require 'real' security!
You want privacy mainly and that's orthogonal to security.
If privacy is not enough and you need secrecy... well, just use your botnet as a VPN and from that get to Tor! (You do own a botnet in this case, that's what you need the secrecy for :P ...otherwise you'd have specialists hired for this at your disposal, or you'd be the specialist providing it to someone else).
ONLY private persons should own patents, and it should be illegal even for employers or institutions (academic, research) to own patents of people employed to do research. At most companies and istitutions should be allowed to add a clause of "perpetual-free-usage of any patents of employees resulting from direct work" - but an employee or group-of-employees holdig a patent should still be able to license it to other companies too. If businesses are hurt, that's GOOD, most should not exist as coagulated entities.
We're not gonna have proper freedom preserving capitalism ultil we properly decentralize: we all work like swarms of 1-person-companies / solopreneurs contracting between eachother. (No, not the gig-economy, in that distopia we're all still slaves that can't band together to fight the masters.) Legislation will automatically have to be refacored to make this work. With some exceptions, only human individuals should hold most property, not companies and not institutions. Groups/collectives only when the group members directly worked together and know eachother.
And Intellectual Property would just "click in" in in such context. IP sounds hellish and disfunctional because our own practically techno-communist society (yeah, even USA is practically "communist" nowadays in a way - newsflash: "the reds" have won! even the f symbolism is there, "the red pill" is the good one now... all's backwards) is messed up. It makes perfect sense in a hyper-decentralized hyper-individualistic REALLY democratic and REALLY capitalist society.
> yet it remains unrivalled in control engineering
No, its usage is just declining slower in those areas because ppl don't want unnecessary change introducing unnecessary defects, esp since safety and reliability matters a lot for some equipments, and also engineers spend time on smth else than learning new languages and frameworks.
In 20 years Matlab will be as legacy as Fortran is now, still some left but mostly forgone.
what are you talking about? There's a lot of numerical code written (and actively developed) in Fortran today. If you are anywhere near numerical mathematics, you are running algorithms written in Fortran that somebody is maintaining.
> In 20 years Matlab will be as legacy as Fortran is now
Not if MathWorks keep offering discounts to universities for putting MATLAB in the courses, gotta get those undergrads "hooked" early before graduating.
I've been involved in some hires of new graduates in both engineering and physics. What I've noticed is that students are acutely aware of job market for programmers, and to a somewhat lesser extent, the relative status of "hardware" and "software." They're differentiating themselves into programmers and non-programmers. I've observed that anybody who can program well enough to do it for money, will eventually be doing so.
They're all exposed to Matlab (it's on every resume), but that could range from actually knowing how to program, to having been given some pre-written scripts to run in a class.
However, the ones who are inclined to program, want to learn a language that they perceive to be relevant to the software development job market. Some of them have gone so far as to take a handful of CS courses and are as up to date on good coding practices as the CS majors themselves. This even includes some students in traditionally non programming fields such as biology and chemistry.
Remember that it's usually easier to learn your second language, so if a student has the itch to program, there's a pretty good chance that they will have learned Python on the side by the time they graduate.
Programming languages are not heroin... people want a tools offering some features and they use whatever has them and is not too hard to learn a new one.
Matlab-class languages are <1 week for anyone smart to learn and usably prodactive at then it's a smooth learning curve up. They're not Scala or Haskell or enterprise Java frameworks...
When Julia gets all the advatanges currently in the Python ecosystem (and it's just a matter of time), it's game over. Ppl use Matlab instead of Python bc Python is weird and slow at many linear algebra stuff... AI/ML ppl are OK with Python bc they rarely write low level numerics code and when they do it has to run on stuff other than regular CPUs so it's C anyway.
If Matlab looses (fairly) we all win. But Mathematica/Wolfram is a different thing... there's all the symbolic computing stuff and the idea of integrating access to a general real-world-knowledge-DB into the language itself in there that will take decades to re-invent...
Not really the reality imho. I was in a cursus where mostly Matlab were taught 10y ago, while I was already programming on the side in Python/R. Most of the students realized after their master that neither academia nor private company were using Matlab and because programming was not the focus, they had a really hard time to transfer their knowledge to any other programming language. Not SW/SE/Dev here, just scientific/engineer cross-over students.
After raising their voices, Faculty finally switched from Matlab to Python for those courses because what matters was your number of hire after their master not to get a deal for a software nobody uses besides two old professors.
And in general, the more academia moves away from private solutions (be it STATA, ArcGIS, Matlab, SAS, etc), education will move from it also.
(Belgian University)
Issue is most such codes are written in C and C++. Also anything else usually lacks native multidimensional arrays, element-wise array operations, and parallel programming facilities, let alone raw performance.
> In 20 years Matlab will be as legacy as Fortran is now, still some left but mostly forgone.
This is a joke, right?
In many academic disciplines that involve numerical work, the amount of Fortran code in use today greatly exceeds that of any of the rivals.
Professors were forced to use Fortran by their advisors when they were in school, so most of their code is in it. These professors are not going to allow their students to reinvent any wheels. And the cycle continues. To give you an idea of how extreme this phenomenon is - almost all the Fortran code out there in academia is still in Fortran 77.
There's basically zero widely used programming languages that are not open-source, get to grips with this ffs. Esp. since Wolfram strives to be somewhat-general-purpose in a way (it's not smth like eg. K who's niche anyway) and having an open-source version is crucial in this segment.
Hire some ppl (sales, mgmt, product etc.) who know how to make money from open-source (get some from RedHat, IBM etc.) and make this technology accessible to not have all this effort practically wasted, eg. I'd love to use Wolfram instead of Python, but non-opensource is just a no-go for any foundational technology (language, framework, server).
Wasted as in not fulfilling its potential even a little bit.
Mathematica is a very niche product. It isn't even very relevant in academia or in engineering. But it could have been if Wolfram hadn't hobbled it with unproductive restrictions. It could have had an audience of millions, and that audience would have brought it more value than a single company is capable of creating through a community.
Just look at Python. It is just a language. And a not particularly good one at that. ALL of its value comes from the community. Compared to Python, Mathematica isn't even a rounding error in terms of value created.
Imagine if Mathematica had been at the core of the last 15 years of data science, machine learning and whatnot? Imagine if the work and the value that went into the Python ecosystem had instead gone into Mathematica. Imagine if even just one of the many things Mathematica can potentially do well had become the go-to way for doing things.
But it didn't. Because Mathematica is fundamentally incompatible with the way communities work.
Just look at Python indeed. As you say it's a much worse language than many others that were equally available to anyone. And yet somehow it's at the the core of the last 15 years of data science, machine learning and whatnot.
If Mathematica had been open-sourced twenty years ago it wouldn't have taken the place of Python. It probably would be even more niche today - and worse.
> It probably would be even more niche today - and worse.
Maybe, but a better successor would've evolved out of it.
Matlab had Octave as an open source alternative. Not used much, but it inspired the creation of Julia. Based on how fast it's evolving Julia will be the superpowered-grandson-of-Matlab :)
The Mathematica/Wolfram bloodline will unfortunately die off at some point... lots of ideas will be lost and time will have to be spent to reinvent them from scratch atop a different platform... sigh...
(Kind of reminds of the Smalltalk story... in the 80-90s Java won bc. all the practically usable Smalltalk implementations were closed-source and had very bad pricing... We could've had much better OO+interactive languages instead if an open-and-free alternative of it existed... Instead we have ugly Java/C# or slow Ruby in that space.)
Forgetting that Java tool vendors are ex-Smalltalkers?
Including the JIT and GC that powers OpenJDK, which was only made freely available on Java 6 version.
Also that Sun went bankrupt trying to push Java everywhere, while the other Java vendors (and Microsoft with .NET Core), learned to only open the core part, while the crown jewels are kept commercial.
> Maybe, but a better successor would've evolved out of it.
> Matlab had Octave as an open source alternative. Not used much, but it inspired the creation of Julia. Based on how fast it's evolving Julia will be the superpowered-grandson-of-Matlab :)
That's a very contrived argument!
If Matlab has inspired the development of other products without ceasing to exist so can (maybe has) Mathematica.
> much worse language than many others that were equally available to anyone
I've been there during the Python take over and world and it's not my recollection of how it went.
Which are those superior languages that you are talking about?
An important property of Python is that while it may not excel at many things, it's good or decent at everything. Unlike specialized languages like R for example which sucks at everything which is not operations on numbers.
The consensus at the time was that one should only use Perl/Tcl for legacy reasons. And that these languages should be replaced with Python.
A few examples, there were countless articles like these:
2000 Eric Raymond (!) - Why Python?
> It was at this point I realized I was probably leaving Perl behind. ... For anything larger or more complex, I have come to prefer the subtle virtues of Python—and I think you will, too.
To clarify, I was mentioning Perl/Tcl as existing alternatives that were "equally bad" as Python - not necessarily better. In any case, the fact that a teaching language like python ended being used for numerical computing - a task that it was not suited for - is accidental.
lush was sadly dynamically scoped at a time the lisp universe in general had agreed lexical scope was the way to go. I feel like it could have gotten a lot more traction if it wasn't for that. (also if I remember correctly its desktop gui libraries were windows only)
2003-02-19: Rejoice, rejoice! Thanks to Leon, the CVS version now compiles and runs on Windoze under Cygwin. Be sure to read the README.cygwin before installing. What works: the interpreter, the compiler, the dynamic loader, X11 graphics and events. What doesn't (yet) work: external packages such as GSL, SDL, OpenGL...
I think that's a very important point: if you invest time in writing software to solve domain-specific problems, it is a lot better if you can do that in languages that have a hope of making it out of the lab and into software you can run as part of a processing chain or in applications.
A library written in a language usable for implementing whole applications is far more useful than, say, a Matlab project, which you then have to translate into some language before you can actually use it in software.
Python is indeed such a language.
(That being said, Python is a poor language choice from a software engineering point of view because it doesn't have a decent path-of-least-resistance to properly distributing software without burdening the user. I do a fair bit of embedded programming, and it has lead me to the conclusion that Python is a terrible tooling language. I've also had colleagues struggle with what happens when data scientists who are more scientist than software engineer write stuff in Python. It is messy, time consuming and frustrating to actually use the resulting software.
But from a language perspective, yes, Python is a better solution than languages that are narrowly scoped)
Python ended up at the core of data science because it was capable of serving a community. A community that produced comprehensive computational libraries, which, combined with the low threshold for getting started, made it more accessible for an audience that is interested in computation first and programming second.
This is largely the same audience as for tools like Matlab and Mathematica.
And to serve that market it didn't have to be a good programming language. You won't find most data scientists discussing the finer points of functional programming or OO. They'll be discussing what mathematical techniques to use or what stages to string together in order to achieve the computation they want. If you have ever worked with typical data scientists, most of them aren't even half way competent software engineers.
What Python shows is that community beats technical excellence. By orders of magnitude.
Whether or not Mathematica is a better language is irrelevant as it doesn't have the properties required a large community contributing value for free.
We can't know if Mathematica could have taken the place of Python if it was open sourced, because it wasn't open sourced. But it given that it had a more potent programming model, it could have led to a very different path from model to running software, for instance. And it could have made distributed computation arrive a lot earlier.
But it is actually quite a bit more challenging for Mathematica than that since its licensing terms are stricter than products you might compare it to, like Matlab. I don't think Mathematica would even have to be open sourced to be more successful - it would just have to be a less unattractive value proposition. Compare the revenue of Mathworks vs Wolfram Research, for instance. And then take into account that Mathematica has a much more potent programming model that could have far wider applicability than Matlab.
And keep in mind: Matlab doesn't even have a programming model as potent as Mathematica.
I think that the smartest thing Wolfram could have done would have been to open source the language, the runtime, and a reasonable standard library. Then they could have built a business on top of that of reasonably priced interactive software with GUIs, visualization tools, developer tools to make stand-alone applications, server applications for distributed computation and a SaaS solution for customers who want to run computation in the cloud.
And it isn't like Mathworks didn't miss the boat too. But they are still an order of magnitude more successful than Wolfram Research. Which still makes Wolfram Research the slowest kid in the class in terms of unrealized potential.
> We can't know if Mathematica could have taken the place of Python if it was open sourced,
I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have, not with it's current lispy syntax. There is ton of empirical evidence that overt functional style is unnatural for the human mind, especially beginners. Which is why there is no large scale use of any such language.
The fact that it's not wide spread is the empirical evidence.
> Clearly, there is an obstacle to the acceptance of FP. I think I know what it is. The functional paradigm is an unnatural way for human beings to think. People normally view the world as comprising objects. Nobody views the world as comprising functions, unless he is trained to do so.
> When it comes to functional programming, a lot of people start with, “But that’s totally unnatural!” Functional programming is compared to working “backwards” and some complain that it’s more about solving puzzles rather than working with code.
Those sources seem to talk about the functional paradigm, when your original claim was about lisp syntax.
It took me reading Practical common lisp to appreciate the Lisp origins of Python (down to documentation strings and a lot of other details).
As a counter datapoint, I have seen people responsible for designing custom parts in Autocad (back in the day when you had to issue commands) master the lisp syntax without giving it a second thought. I found it weird for 5 minutes when I was maybe 12-14 (we had some course about it in school, I don't remember exactly)
> Whether or not Mathematica is a better language is irrelevant as it doesn't have the properties required a large community contributing value for free.
The issue is that other languages which were better and more appropriate for scientific computing _had_ those properties. Or maybe these properties are very specific to python and then an open-source mathematica wouldn't have made a difference either.
> And it isn't like Mathworks didn't miss the boat too. But they are still an order of magnitude more successful than Wolfram Research.
Depends on your definition of success, of course. You focus on adoption but that's not the only goal. The company is an order of magnitude larger but that doesn't make the product an order of magnitude better.
Well, then let's look at some indicators of success.
In terms of adoption Mathematica is even less of a success than if you measure financially. And adoption is a key factor when evaluating whether or not you want to use a programming language for non-trivial projects. It impacts your ability to recruit, access to knowledge (books, forums, evolved practices), usable solutions to common problems (libraries) and even more or less existential questions like whether or not the language will be maintained. Python ticks all of those boxes. Mathematica partially ticks perhaps one of those boxes. And note that this is before we even consider if Python is any good as a language.
If you were to invest in developing a non-trivial system in Mathematica, how enthusiastic do you think investors would be if you nailed your flag to the Mathematica ship? It would not represent good risk management.
Then there's where things are heading. The number of jobs as "data scientist" or "statistician" of some description is growing sharply. It may gain Mathematica a trickle of new users. But the really big gains have been for languages like Python or Julia. Worse still, people tend to move away from software like Mathematica or Matlab, moving to languages like Python and Julia. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if just the growth in Julia alone over the past couple of years is greater than the total paying userbase of Mathematica.
Single digit, or even low double digit growth in a field that has doubled a few times in the same period isn't success. It is everyone else outrunning you. Fast. And I have seen up close and personal how people who find themselves in that situation will rationalize it with "but we're growing".
Is it a success that it is "good"? For some value of good? Well, a lot of people think Lisp is good. And yet after being around for many decades it is still so hard to find developers to maintain Lisp codebases. I've seen about half a dozen major systems written in Lisp being scrapped once one or two key employees leave. Sure, the systems may qualify as good, even great - but that doesn't help when it becomes a business liability? In the real world it doesn't.
I would have loved for Mathematica to succeed. But it hasn't. And I suspect it won't. Even if it were open sourced right now, I seriously doubt it would bear much fruit the first decade or so. If at all, since the big audiences are focused elsewhere.
Excel is built with programming language and can certainly be used as one, but that doesn't mean it is one. It's also a bit anal to classify Excel as a programming language, most people would say spreadsheets are a tool, where you could write programs, but again, doesn't mean it's a programming language. At most, I'd give you that Excel is a tool that can do "visual programming", but that's far of from being a "programming language".
This is unfair and a far too narrow definition of programming language. Excel sits very squarely in the functional reactive language space. Just because most of it's users don't "know" they are programming and most of our common tools don't work with it doesn't change the fact that it has pretty much all of the building blocks that any programming language gives you. Are there domains where Excel is awkward to use? Absolutely. The same can be said about pretty much any programming language.
Excel deserves to have the label of programming language even if it shuns that label due to it's target audience.
I guess what I was trying to say that Excel as commonly known, is a programming environment, rather than a language. Where you can use the "Excel" programming language for performing most (if not all) tasks a general purpose programming language can.
But it's still a bit like saying "Eclipse" is a programming language. You can do programming in Eclipse, that is true, but you can also do other things that are not programming, which makes Eclipse a programming environment. Just like with Excel.
I don't think this is a true dividing line for a programming language. The Smalltalk language for instance combines both the programming environment and the language together. I don't think anyone seriously argues that smalltalk is not a programming language.
Seems like equivocation — Smalltalk is a programming language when we're using "Smalltalk" to mean Smalltalk the programming language and Smalltalk is a programming environment when we're using "Smalltalk" to mean Smalltalk the programming environment.
Excel has conditionals and several forms of map/reduce which stand in for loops all without relying on VBA. I stand by my statement that Excel qualifies in everyway that matters as a programming language.
They avoid that label because of their target audience but the label absolutely applies.
There's many open-source alternatives to Excel. Rarely used, but it settles any fear of lock in.
This also made the area palatable for other commercial competitors to enter the space - Google-sheets drive A TON of enterprise org work nowadays.
You could say that open-source alternatives immensely popularized spreadsheets and resulted in the very nice ecosystem we have now.
Sure, heave finance user stick to MS Excell because MS is pressured to cater very well to their needs, else they will move away to other free or paid alternatives.
Also, there's a reason why multi-dimensional spreadheets are not more popular despite solving so many problems of regular spreadheets: all are proprietary and very different one from another - you probably pick smth like Quantrix (https://quantrix.com/products/quantrix-modeler/), and you'd get insane prices and 100% lock-in... better stick to Excell and/or its open-source and/or free alternatives despite being a worse tool :)
I can assure you its widely used by certain fields in academia. Im currently a research assistant in physics at a large lab, and mathematica is ubiquitous.
Not sure if this is better, but SQL is HORRIBLE... we probably put up with it bc it's based on sane math & theory, and we almost never write it by hand.
There's zero thought to any kind of ergonomics, there's no way to say "join table Y but prefix all its columns with employee_", it's expressed backwards ffs (instead of starting with FROM), results of queries with joins are forced to be flat tables and there's no way to get trees as you need 99% in app code - all the repetitve app code to "nest" entities in results that also needs to make brittles assumptions about ordering and uniqueness because people couldn't standardize on a "RESULT AS TREE [NESTING <Y> INTO <X>]" clause or smth. equivalent etc. etc.
PRQL though seems to also lack all the essetial features you would expect around joins.
Suff like Arrango DB's AQL seems to be a nice example of adding the missing feature to SQL, probably more of the need to accomodate graph data too, but it actually solves SQLs problems even in relational contexts - see https://www.arangodb.com/docs/stable/aql/tutorial-join.html#... .
> there are problems that are solvable by throwing a lot of human-hours at it (“Hard Work”), and problems that are not a function of raw work hours, but rather require dealing with ambiguity (“Difficult Problems”)
There's also the 3rd category of the hell of work that is easy, ambigous, but just uses up a ton of mental space to work through that mushy ambiguity. I'd solve difficult problems all day, can stomach doing hard work when its requirements are clear, but god keep me away from the hell of "death by a thousand papercuts" in the marshes of easy-but-mindspace/time-sucking quai-ambiguous problems...
Clarifying ambiguous requirements at least is rewarding when you achieve that clarity and help people understand what they actually need. But there's hellish work that is just unclarifiable before doing this, you just have to crawl to that mud of trivial but not-so-trivial-that-you-can-think-about-something-else-while-doing-them... 100% better to work a garden or serve in bar than that!
Ya after graduating from college, I spent 3 years moving furniture from 2001-2003 and consider that the epitome of hell work. In that time, on the paltry wage I received, I could have designed and built a machine to do the work for me. So I spent 3 years being gaslit that I should be grateful for that job and that it was my patriotic duty to be there since someone had to do it. The whole time coming up with an invention a day that would have made the job safer/easier/lucrative. That broke down my psyche to such a degree that I didn't fully recover until going through ego death and healing during the pandemic 20 years later. Now when I hear people say "nobody wants to work anymore", I think of successful people who didn't do what I did, and think to myself "damn straight they don't".
The yakk shaving of today's programming has become hell work. We need a better way, yesterday. But we're all too busy spinning our wheels doing hard work to make rent as the world burns.
Edit: I want to add that I miss the days of my youth and would trade if I could, even taking the good with the bad. Just because something is stupid doesn't mean that we have to let it fill our reality. Turn the guilt/shame into empathy and let go.
I always have to look up yak shaving when I read the term. I find it hilarious that Wikipedia seems to have two definitions for it, which are practically the exact opposite of each other.
So to use this great term to it's fullest extent, I would guess a lot of programmers think they're yak shaving when they're really just yak shaving.
Hahaha that's amazing, also I didn't know there were other spellings. I was thinking about yacc as I wrote yakk but I guess it's yak. Funny how associations work. And don't forget bike shedding and cargo culting!
I've solved so many of these uncertain problems by tossing coins. Once I make a decision, everyone comes out with reasons I'm wrong and just tells me what they want. Or, everyone accepts it and moves on and it is obvious nobody actually cares.
I think this comment gets to much negativity. Yes, this is often not a good approach. But it can be one tool in your toolbox that can get you unstuck when nothing else seems to work.
This 100%. I've learnt the hard way that the only way to get unstuck at this kind of hellish work is random action - I'm biased to over-analyzing the problem so get stuck because I can't pick an option. A bias towards action, ANY/RANDOM action if you can't decide is what seems to help here best!
As long as you don't ship your decision without review, and you're willing to change your mind if it's wrong, what's the problem? Like OP, I often find that people are reluctant to discuss anything that's ambiguous, until someone has made an attempt at implementing it, and presents it to them. Then, suddenly, every ambiguous choice that was decided wrongly (in someone's eye, anyway) in that attempt comes out of the wood work. It's an extraordinarily good way to spark discussions people don't want to have.
"Write one to throw away" is the greatest advice I've heard for our field. You will rarely fully explore the problem space by just talking about it ahead of time.
"Ignorance can be solved by random action"? I don't track.
If alternatives are actually equivalent, and that yields ambiguity in decision making, that's the worst time to go deep diving. "Resolve it and move on" is just a bias of mine.
Alternatives are almost never equivalent. If at decision time there is still ambiguity, it means that some criteria that separates the alternatives is not being considered.
You are suggesting to not search for that additional separating criteria and just use a coin flip to decide. Apparently you prefer a coworker that would flip a coin in order to move forward with a decision as soon as possible.
The other poster is saying the flipping a coin is the same as staying ignorant of that additional separating criteria. Apparently he'd prefer a coworker that wouldn't stay ignorant by choosing to flip a coin.
>> problems that are not a function of raw work hours, but rather require dealing with ambiguity (“Difficult Problems”)
> work that is easy, ambigous, but just uses up a ton of mental space to work through that mushy ambiguity
Am I missing something here? Because I read your third category as being exactly this second category. Or maybe it's halfway between categories one and two?
Solving ambiguity, and probably lots of it, is the difficulty. Easy but ambiguous is generally not a combination I see.
I frequently tell my manager/team that we have two kinds of problems: easy ones that just take a lot of work/time to slog through and difficult ones that may not be much actual work except for figuring it out.
Like, many hikes are just a whole lot of one-foot-after-another. But mountaineering is sometimes a short distance of don't-fuck-up-or-you-die.
"Easy but ambigous" sounds paradoxical, maybe the terms are not correct, but it is a very very different thing totally different than the other two.
Maybe there's a better way to explain this though: there's work that would be easy if it was clarified but it's not, and at the same time you can't just think hard and discuss and clarify and make it clear befor starting to work on it, so that you can set yourself to doing it, either in robot mode (while thinking of other things), or in regular problems solving mode; you just can't, that fog and ambiguity and unclarity is just "sticky", stays there until the problem is solved and sometimes even after, making it hard to even be sure that you've really solved it; there's no reward in tackling the hard problem of fully clarifying things because you can't succeed at it, but paradoxically there's no frustration either because you don't know it's a doable tasks either; you just have to muddle through, at every step of the way doubting yourself that you've chosen the right path since there's no clear way to measure stuff and to quantify your step; and you constantly have to interrupt yourself, going in "fishing trips" for information that is stuck in god knows whos brain because it was never documented, and never getting sure enough of what you discover to have trust that by documenting it yourself you make someone's life easier; and when you get to a "solution" you still keep the bitter taste in your mouth becase the systems have no adecquate testing tools and you can never be truly sure your solution will really 100% work; and if it seems to work for know, it's never sure it will keep working in the future, or that what it does will satisfy its operators...
To take your hiking analogy: it's basically a one-foot-after-another multi-day hike, but there's fog (and fog is a meteoreological phenomenon so you can't make go away), you're not really sure which of the destinations is the right one (or if many could qualify as adequate destinations), and there's a couple landmines hidden around, with very low probability of triggering them (1-5%) but yu still know they're there, and you have no water with you and you know that the water you'll find is 90% likely to give you disentery, and you might need to ask people for directions but it's hard to know whether they'll be right.
> I frequently tell my manager/team that we have two kinds of problems
...when enough managers/leads/architects/etc. mess things up in a row, you do end up with problems of the third kind :)
OMG this is so spot on. I've been putting together a business document without clear statement of what's needed, and I get the necessary info on what they want in increments, in the form of 'no, do it this way' afterwards, without any overview. It's just taken so much time, so much more than necessary, and worn me down badly.
Wow this thread is surprisingly helpful for understanding just what is so taxing about a current project. It's never difficult. It's never repetitive. It's an endless series of poorly specified requirements that only get clarified after implementation, and I don't have access to the right stakeholders to do anything about it.
Yes, this getting clarifications one drop at a time, or being unable to clarify things before doing them.
The KILLER extra topping for me is when you lack any kind of quick-iterative-feedback-loop too. Eg. maybe it's cloud infra done in a braindead way and any way to debug is to do a tens-of-minute-length rerun/redeploy etc.
I'm OK working incrementaly, and even with incremental ambiguity, but I need a FAST feedback loop to iterate.
Absolutely. Though sometimes quantity becomes quality. I had to take over a large project with countless moving pieces, none of which are particularly hard, but the vast surface area of the project makes it hard to hold all of it in my head at once.
> the vast surface area of the project makes it hard to hold all of it in my head at once
...yep, in general one of the root causes of having to do this kind of nasty work was someone (maybe even your past self) having failed badly at decoupling a distributed system ...add some "documenting it was supposed to be milestone 3" but then priorities got restructured and it never happened, then people left and others came, and voila!
Anecdata: exercise massively reduces my otherwise constant craving for processed sugars, deep fried and smoked or cured things, alcohol and smokes.
I'm not less hungry, but I'm less hungry for nasty stuff, so from my perspective there seems to be a lot of truth in this!
Context: I'm natively extremely lazy (phisically, not intellectually), I find any phisical activity a pain an a nuisance, I derive zero pleasure from any kind of sport and phyisical exercise (except hiking and skidiving, but not the phisical effort aspects of them), the release-endorphines-on-effort circuit is 100% broken for me or I just lack the receptors for those endophins... eg. 100%-lazy-cat except not fat because genetically I come from a line of people slim-no-matter-what-we-eat. (Probably more average or atletic people's bodies just don't work like mine...)
Anecdata: I'm way hungrier later in the day after exercising. If you look for reddit posts on cutting/dieting you can see a lot of people reporting that the extra food craving from exercise can frequently be bigger than what you burn with it.
I've noticed that I'll massively overeat if I don't get enough protein, salt and nutrients. So I'll chug something isotonic and eat a bunch of protein mixed with a food-replacement powder after running and weightlifting. I end up not being hungry the rest of the day.
This is my experience. I'll swim lanes for an hour, or maybe do a 2-3hr bike ride, and afterwards I'll do a protein smoothie or maybe bacon and eggs if I haven't yet had breakfast, but overall I avoid using the exercise as an excuse to eat an "extra" meal.
Also anecdata: I'm hungry after I exercise, but this is almost entire resolved by drinking something cold with a electrolytes. A big chug of coconut water for example
Could it be an evolutionary adaptation to fight or flight? After the exercise period, the body is still in 'active' mode, so it may seem that the period to use energy is still on (hunting & fleeing, not eating). However, after this ends the body switches back into 'inactive' mode to store energy for future 'active' modes.
Weights kill hunger, especially if you eat lean protein after (a shake made with water or low-fat Quark/Kwark). You can combine it with high intensity cardio too for burning fat.
Can't wait until the toddler starts school because then I can start again.
My anecdote: type of exercise makes a huge difference. Lots of steady-state cardio makes me hungry. After several hours of boxing / Jiu Jitsu practice, I have to force myself to eat, even several hours after practice has ended.
For me, cardio-type exercises leaves me wanting to eat stupid amounts of food afterwards, but strength exercises not so much. Perhaps the triggers are more nuanced than an overarching concept of exercise?
Interesting. Yeah, some of my running buddies report no appetite for about an hour after running.
I on the other hand am usually ravenous soon after exercise.
When I run more than 20 km I get the kind of bottomless hunger I used to have as a growing teenager, but I try to fill up with reasonably healthy stuff (sometimes it's fried chicken though).
+1 anecdata: cardio (though I take my heart rate to 175 bpm for 10+ minutes) absolutely makes me not hungry for hours. Lifting doesn't affect hunger, though I make sure I get enough calories.
I wrote a three-part series of articles on "50 Years of Running" [1], and the issue of motivation is specifically addressed, since how else would you keep up something for 50 years?
It's not at all about eating, and I'm honestly not sure it'll help you, but the tag in the first article is:
If you can't find time to exercise, you'll have to find time to be sick.
This is one of the least helpful advice one can give...
We all know that "if you can't find time to exercise, you'll have to find time to be sick", but in practice we're either wired to overfocus on short term rewards, or we don't really have any connection or emapthy with our future self ("let that bastard rot and die if he ain't got a currage to put a bullet in his head when it gets too nasty") etc. etc.
It's easy to talk from the high horse when you've been blessed with a mind not made up of pieces that are always fighting with each other or always prone to focus on other more stuff more important than your health (yes, there are more important problems in the world than you and your health!)...
>exercise massively reduces my otherwise constant craving for processed sugars, deep fried and smoked or cured things, alcohol and smokes.
Can confirm your findings in me. After the lockdowns and the birth of my son I got a _lot_ fatter. Started exercising just 3 months ago. My cravings for fast food and snacks disappeared. My love for Bourbon is still there but I can control myself better and I don't drink anymore. Before exercise I would drink one bottle per week ... which was becoming very worrisome to me.
> the release-endorphines-on-effort circuit is 100% broken for me
I'm also the laziest person I know. My brother who's well read into this stuff tells me that once I keep up the exercise routine for some time the circuit should come back.
> and the birth of my son [...] Before exercise I would drink one bottle per week
It's also the getting used with the little monster, can state that from experience... to me at least alchohol was a must-have drug to reduce & control rage and aggresiveness induced by the little one and all the people that had to be around and be interact with... not a peoples person and my natural reaction to demanding people is to want to make them go away one way or another, with a great temptation to do so violently and permanently. (to clarify, was never angry or enraged when alone with the baby himself, taken alone the little thing was sweet af... only with all the people that seemed to suddenly go crazy and become extra "caring", "attentive", "demanding" or what not... I like babies, but I find other peoples' excessive reactions to them utterly disgusting... "baby brain" is a real thing apparently and it makes people uttely unsufferabe...)
>> Before exercise I would drink one bottle per week
Now that you exercise, I'd hope this seems less excessive? When I take time off from running, I cut back on the alcohol hard else I feel like absolute shit.
I don't know, it seems equally plausible that the two are caused by a common factor. Specifically, "you being motivated to be healthy" causes you to want to exercise more and gives you stronger willpower to resist eating unhealthy foods.
I'm still prone to overeating when I'm in a lifting phase and since those come and go in spurts, I've never been able to tame that.
On the other hand, I've been a 3+ hour a week cardio guy for a decade and when I first got started at 20+ mile a week running, I would eat away any caloric "gains" by 2x. I no longer have those issues and, like others have pointed out, I tend to lose my appetite for awhile after a run/ride. The harder the effort, the less appetite I'll have.
Yep. Cardio makes me less hungry for a short period of time after exercise, then ravenous later in the day. I don't notice any effects on hunger from lifting
I suspect that your distaste for junk food specifically has a psychological component as well. The molecules discussed here are formed immediately post exercise. From what I gather, they are responsible for a short term antihunger effect not a long term effect.
(Anecdata): The past few years I've oscillated between periods of consistent exercise and then periods of inactivity and I definitely notice a pattern wrt hunger.
recent periods:
1. a period of months of inactivity.
2. a period of multiple months of morning exercise (running soon after waking, before any food)
3. a period of multiple months of inactivity
4. a period of multiple months of running again
The pattern I experience is clear: during the periods of exercise, after morning running, I don't feel any need/urge to eat breakfast. Easily skippable.
During periods of inactivity, my body craves breakfast. Not skippable without significant willpower.
> Context: I'm natively extremely lazy (phisically, not intellectually), I find any phisical activity a pain an a nuisance, I derive zero pleasure from any kind of sport and phyisical exercise (except hiking and skidiving, but not the phisical effort aspects of them), the release-endorphines-on-effort circuit is 100% broken for me or I just lack the receptors for those endophins
It's good to know that I'm not the only one, it's a bit sad to know that there doesn't seem to be anything I can do about it.
> It's good to know that I'm not the only one, it's a bit sad to know that there doesn't seem to be anything I can do about it.
Not sure you should see it so negatively/defeatist. Maybe you just have not found the right thing yet that gives you joy. I discovered my love for road cycling only in my mid thirties and now derive immense pleasure from long rides totally exerting myself and burning 2000+ calories in many of those rides. Lost 10kg of weight and am fitter at 40 then I ever was before.
And it will always be anecdata since the creation of lac-phe after working out is dependent on both your CNDP2 genetics and your intake of manganese which is the cofactor for that enzyme.
Anecdata^2: nothing reduces my craving for smoked meat. not sure excersise was the cause of my disintereset in fried foods, or just the realization of negative health benefits. excersise however most definitely does not reduce the cravings for alcohol. hell, i've been on soccer teams that was just an excuse to hang out to drink beer after the game. this wasn't world cup level, but we definitely worked out during play.
in other words, to me, there's just too many differences to make conclusions
Try this: step by step reduce your daily total carbs and your carbs hunger will go away. It worked for me. I went from 230+ g carbs a day to 50g a day and my carbs hunger disappeared. I also lost 9cm waist and 8kg as a nice bonus. Without eating fewer calories and without feeling hungry.
Definitely works. As I read about it and as I think it was originally studied, the link is feeding bacteria in your gut that release an SSRI-alike chemical that is addictive. When you don't give them carbs they don't/can't produce it.
More anecdata: For moderate exercise (like maybe an hour on an elliptical) I feel the same.
Going past that, into the a few hours of exercise or possibly 90 minutes of really intense exercise, I might feel ravenous again. Running a marathon? Eating a horse.
one simple way is to just not buy nasty stuff. Sometimes I spend 5-6 days with one meal max per day (rice, and raw garlic sometimes, that's all I eat), and these intermittent fasting are extremely regenerative, no exercise even needed
I envy you! I'm no less lazy and hate any physical activity maybe except for the ones that give other funs (hiking to collect fossils eg), but I'm so overweight...
Yeah I found the same. After I did the exercise grind for a bit of time I suddenly found out that my cravings for usual unhealthy foods have been reduced.
My trainer and doctor say that we have various receptors in our bodies tuned for our current way of life and that diet and exercise re-program these receptors which, yeah, is what I observed as well.
RE: your lack of motivation for working out, I found it is related to the type of exercise. The start of my journey was a series of train wrecks. I constantly stumbled on 22-year old boys whose wisdom was "get on the bench press, bro!" which didn't work for me. It was almost harmful even.
After going to physiotherapy for a while I then started training under the tutelage of the same people and I am already better. They are very careful not to over-strain me, give me just enough cardio to keep my heart pumping but not to make me wanna die, exercises are carefully tuned to strain me a bit but never too much. They don't give me big pauses between exercises (60 - 90 seconds) however. Some exercises are mostly stretching and "activating" a certain muscle (meaning just exercising it a little without any strain).
Not sure I can translate that to a workout strategy for you but these items might help:
- Do 3 series of each exercise. If it's too much then 2;
- Do more reps per series;
- Rest until your heart calms down slightly but not beyond that;
- Introduce a hard cap on the workout session -- mine is 1 hour. This was a huge struggle because I wanted to do all the exercises but there's no way to fit all in 1 hour (did that mistake several times);
- Start with slight cardio -- 5 or 10 minutes. Don't make it the focus of the session, it's just to start you off (a mistake I made many times);
- The moment you start feeling a tormenting strain is the moment where you train for 2-3 more minutes and cut the session short;
- If that moment doesn't come, still stop at your time cap.
The main point is to feel energetic and rejuvenated after the workout. Not "OMFG I wanna die!". My trainer / physiotherapist / masseur told me this is an extremely common problem for men because a lot of them just hang out in the gym and their main motivation is show-off and competition with others. He says there's a million ways to make yourself feel better by exercising and honestly? I believe him because it is happening to me.
Finally, it's the most normal thing in the world to fine-tune the exercise session to your specifics and you shouldn't try and imitate other workout regimes if they don't work well for you. My trainer quickly found out I have strong arms, shoulders and upper back and is rarely giving me exercises for them -- just for maintaining them a bit. But my legs, abs and lower back are weaker so 80% of my exercises focus on that. Works great.
If you are willing to press on, I wish you good luck. I am exactly like you, I view physical maintenance as nuisance and it's not easy to change the mindset. But I already started having that little little voice in my head that's sometimes nudging me to do a session because I know it makes me feel a bit better after.
In programming terms, I'd say reduce the size of the program/tests until it's manageable for you. My trainer said it's much better to train every day for just 35-40 minutes compared to two workouts of our and half a week.
I'm 40 and I recently started Stronglifts 5x5. It's stupidly simple and makes me want to come back for more as the weights increase every training. So there's always a personal record to break.
It also doesn't take a lot of time. About 45 - 60 minutes, 3 times a week. I can do it in my home gym as everything I need is a barbell, some weights and a bench/squat rack.
First time I actually have fun weight lifting/going to the gym.
I started with Stronglifts! It’s the program that finally gave me a degree of health and made lifting enjoyable/satisfying. Eventually went to something a little less leg heavy (although squats will always be my favourite exercise) with a better system for breaking plateau’s and more accessories, but Stronglifts was what finally made the gym fun.
> The main point is to feel energetic and rejuvenated after the workout.
The only thing a workout has ever made me feel is sore and tired. Light or heavy, long or short, cardio or strength. Doesn't matter, that only changes how sore and how tired I am after, and how long those feelings last.
I'd exercise way more if I ever felt "energetic and rejuvenated" after a workout. The only thing keeping me doing it is knowing how critically important it is to me long term cardiovascular health.
Some context: I'm overweight and could definitely stand to be more active. But I do value exercise and a couple of months ago started going to fitness classes, have played sports casually but regularly in the past, used to regularly go to a gym, and have dabbled with a few different kinds of home workout, including running. The game aspect of sport is fun, but the physical activity involved still only left me sore and tired.
> The only thing a workout has ever made me feel is sore and tired.
Just backing up what others are saying, I think it's a combination of it being an acquired taste, and also finding what works for you.
For me, I love swimming and cycling and get nearly all my cardio that way, but running or lifting weights? Just leaves me feeling defeated and in pain.
Wish I could help you but I'm not a therapist myself.
One thing I really have to assure you of however: there IS a way to feel energetic after a workout, you just haven't found it yet.
Had the same problem, eventually got fed up and went to physiotherapy and doctors to see if something's wrong with me -- and yes, actually there are a few things wrong with me that prevent me from reaping more benefits of exercise.
I'm working hard on addressing these deficiencies (one of them is a pre-diabetic condition; it's absurdly hard to reverse this thing).
Treat your health like a program that both has a bug and broken dependencies: you have to do a deep dive to solve the problem.
Please don't give up. The fight is very hard but the result is worth it. I'm probably 10% into my journey and I already know I'm never giving up.
the more you do it, the more your body will adapt and then after smaller workouts, say a 30min run in the morning, you will start feeling energized instead of tired, as your time to tire yourself out increases over time.
I have to say that I kinda like the feeling of achievement afterwards and also like feeling sore and tired for some reason. That's also the only time when I allow myself unhealthy food nowadays and don't even feel bad about it. I lost 10kg and am fitter at 40 then ever before.
I actually love being sore and tired. In my 20s I’d ride a bike until my legs fell off and would revel in just laying down in complete exhaustion. Not much has changed, 15 years later.
What has changed is my appetite- an all day bike ride used to be followed by a giant pizza; now it’s just a normal meal. My all day hikes are somewhat challenging even wanting to eat. A variety of tastes at my disposal (sweet, salty, sore, bitter, savory, Unami) helps.
I’m almost 190lbs these days and muscular. I started out much lighter.
In this context it's counter to the GP's posting that exercise is followed by feeling energetic and rejuvinated.
I do not want to feel sore or tired (I think "fatigued" might be a better word choice than "tired" here for what I was trying to communicate).
They are not pleasant sensations. They limit what other things I can do while experiencing them. Their presence is a negative reinforcement against exercising again. Plus I feel ripped off when so many others rave about how good exercise makes them feel while it just makes me feel crummy.
Hopefully you see this, a bit late to replying. The trick is sticking with it long enough that it goes away. I started weightlifting about a year ago (was always healthy and enjoyed cardio based exercise regularly) and I was regularly sore and tired. I set some ambitious goals that required dedication and effort. After about four months weightlifting three to five times a week, I no longer got sore or tired. Feels worse to not lift than to lift.
I personally really enjoy achieving things, so I put some ambitious goals on paper, staked my plan with some cash that would pay out to a close friend if I failed, and got to work. I paid out enough cash that it would hurt if I didn’t achieve my goal. I paid it up front and if I succeeded it would be handed back to me. And damnit I pushed hard to get that cash back!
Finally, I never would have done this without purchasing home equipment.
Exercises are typical compound weightlifting. Bench, squats, deadlifts, presses etc. set up home equip so I could fail on my last set of bench and recover (remove fear of failure).
Gained 12lbs pure muscle, dropped some fat, look better than I’ve ever looked.
Finally, I clearly upped my testosterone level a bit with the exercise, energy and behavior changes (all positive) were noticeable. Same with posture.
Just stick with it way past what you would normally do and you can reprogram yourself!
I completely relate and it was the same for me for a LOOOOONG time -- as I mentioned, I got some pretty dumb "personal trainers" few times in a row; they were more like guides to show me around the gym equipment and not actual trainers. Shitty luck but I didn't give up.
And the negative reinforcement isn't completely gone for me even today. I still mis-step sometimes and over-train a bit and then I don't want to do it for 5-7 days after. It's still a constant internal fight.
However, I'll still say that you haven't found what really works for you. My mother is 69 and she gets absolutely revitalized just by stretching for 25-30 minutes with almost zero strain or cardio. Weird, right?
It really depends on the person. There are almost no formulas.
You can find what works for you. Don't be discouraged to experiment -- pilates, light cardio (running, swimming, hiking, buying an elliptical at home, or a treadmill etc.), tai-chi / qigong, aerobics -- it doesn't matter what your thing will turn out to be. It is still out there waiting to be found by you.
But for me to start reaping even basic benefits I had to do no small amount of other things like stopping all dairy and most carbs, eating more veggies (which I still hate months later btw!), get various physiotherapy treatments -- electricity, laser, ultrasound -- and even take melatonin pills to attempt and make my sleep schedule less erratic. Only after persisting at maintaining like seven parallel operations, for weeks, did some first small positive effects of the exercises start to show.
It's a nasty grind. Think of it as overcoming huge negative inertia. It can be beaten but it can be an extremely thankless job for a good long while.
As a rather non-encouraging example, my wife had a friend who was fat and a bit unhealthy ever since she was a kid. When they were both 16 that girl figured she had enough and got a dietitian and a trainer and completely changed how much she eats, what does she eat, when etc., and also worked out 5 out of 7 days. It took her ONE YEAR of doing this, consistently and without skipping, to drop even one kilo and to start truly becoming healthy and losing weight. Ouch. But it did happen and she's completely transformed now.
Again, it's a grind. Motivating yourself to endure it is 50x harder than doing the exercises -- at least for me. My fight still continues (yep, even with the first positive results in). I hope yours will continue as well.
Thanks for the advice, but I hate cardio and running and aerobic exercise especially. Bench pressing and "cardio but done 'worng'" - eg. heavy biking or thredmill running, but with rare/insufficient breathing. Maybe swimming.
Problem is I fee either afraid I'm doing the exercises wrong so I stop doing them, or I find others impractical (eg. swimming or freediving).
Probably I should research into anaerobic that are actually considered helpful or somethig, since my brain seems to dislike the least these low-oxigen-effort types of exercises. Dunno...
It's frustrating because all the exercise advice I find seems targeted at people that are practically a whole different species from me...
That will not help you of course but before I began I hated all exercise with all my heart. It will pass if you keep at it though. :)
That "hate" is just hormonal dis-balance. And yeah I know that explanation doesn't help because you can swear on everything that's sacred that this is exactly who you are and it can't be false... But yeah, it still is false and no that's not you. Hormones are a b1tch, a chemical programming agent that's specifically designed to lie to our brains. It's how we're wired.
Not trying to convince you of anything. I know how I felt 6 months ago and I know nobody and nothing could have changed my mind back then; I would have likely physically lashed out at somebody if they tried to press the matter even.
I am only here to tell you that it can get better even if you are 100% sure that it can't. That feeling is false and it's our brain trying to avoid a change and that's why it fills us with doom scenarios and unreasonable hate to the source of the change. It's still just a facade for "but I don't wanna, I am comfy now!" and that facade can fall relatively easily.
> It's frustrating because all the exercise advice I find seems targeted at people that are practically a whole different species from me...
Nope, you just don't belong to the statistically significant group, that's all there is to it. If you keep looking you'll find your exact alien homies. ;)
(Side note: US seems like such a dystopian place nowaday... wasn't it "land of the free" or smth. And I'm comparing to like developed countries in Western Europe and Asia, not freakin Russia or Afganistan!)
You're just repeating the scaremongering that VPN providers use to sell their insecure s, please stop!