Thank you! It is a privilege and a joy to have made such a remarkable improvement to your life!

Sadly the sum of all natural numbers is not actually -1/12. It’s a divergent sum. You could call it infinity.

There’s a little parlor trick that maths teachers like to perform where they do algebraic manipulation on a simple formula, eventually cancelling out the variables and arriving at some absurd statement like 1=2. The game is for the students to figure out what went wrong.

The trick is always that at some point, snuck into the progression, you ended up dividing something by “(X-X)” before moving on, seemingly without violating any algebraic rules. Very astute students (or ones who were warned by students from earlier classes haha) will notice that right at that point in time, you are in fact attempting to divide by zero, which is not possible.

So the reason you ended up with 1=2 is because you applied rules to something which they definitionally cannot apply to. At that point, the equation became undefined.

…the funny thing though, is you were able to just…continue. And get something to come out. Now, in this case, that thing was utter nonsense. An amusement for children to help teach them of various pitfalls they might fall into when playing with numbers.

But what if you were one of the most brilliant mathematicians who ever lived, and you were concerning yourself with questions such as,

“What would happen if I took [1 + 2 + 3 + 4+ 5….], and subtracted [1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + 1/5…]”

Now, those are both divergent sums. So we could just call them both infinity. But the second infinity just kind of…feels smaller, doesn’t it? It feels like you should be able to just…perform some type of operation and get…something to come out.

It wouldn’t be “correct” to do so, but this is basically what Ramanujan did. Illegal math. With a nonsense output of negative -1/12.

The funny thing though is that this “nonsense output” is actually now a cornerstone of quantum mechanics. It turns out we subtract diverging infinites from each other literally all the time, even just by walking around, and that pesky little -1/12 trick has proven to be consistently useful. Astonishing.

He died a preventable death at 32. Imagine what the world might have looked like today if only he could have dreamed a little longer, asked more impossible questions, and broken more rules. Specifically he died after a bout of dysentery, in case anyone is confused why they’re reading all this in the shit posting community

Semi monthly results in 24 events per year while biweekly events happen 26 times

Just to save the next person the trouble,

It was introduced in 2009. Inflation calculator says that $0.89 in 2009 is the equivalent of…$1.34 in today’s money.

Wow.

I’d be curious to see the whole price history but yeah. Can’t believe how bad a deal all the fast food places have become

Edit: regarding price history, another commenter said it raised to 2.99 after only a couple of years. So 2011 to 2026 inflation calc results in $4.48. A second user said beef in particular is ahead of general inflation, so this might not be too bad of an example after all

Folks who become self-absorbed and preoccupied with their own comfort and convenience

the person who is counting the ways life did them wrong, using that as a justification to lick wounds and retreat from life, jaded and alone.

You’re a poet.

But yeah, I’ve met plenty of people exactly like this. Honestly it’s just so unpleasant to be around, I would think everyone would be filled with the fear of ending up that way

It’s a book/exercise methodology by Mark Rippetoe

The short story is he said everyone (literally everyone) should do 5x5s of squat, deadlift, and bench. With a little bit of pullups and bent over rows. And everything beyond that was totally useless.

The fiasco was basically just that reddit ate it up lol. For years all the weightlifting subs just recommended that. You still catch whiffs of it but usually someone corrects it

Pretty disappointing article. Just a bunch of the typical spewed nonsense and stereotypes that non-coaches come up with simply because it has a ring to it.

Gotta have the classic “bicep curls are a waste of time, for young people who don’t have serious goals” oh I’m sorry I didn’t realize taking out the trash and recycling, carrying groceries, pulling weeds, and the myriad of other ways we use OUR ARMS was “purely aesthetic”. Christ. Do you know how many older folks I meet who basically gave up on gallons of milk because they’re too heavy? And did you know that working them up to reps with 15lb dumbbells completely solves that problem?

Sorry. It’s a huge pet peeve of mine. Just pure cringe marketing to give your customers something to feel smug and judgmental about as they look around the gym and see people doing popular exercises.

However this is the first time I’ve seen CABLE CRUNCHES lumped into the “useless muscle” category. YOUR CORE??? Really guy? Later on he says the trap bar deadlift is actually great for building your core, so I guess the argument is that directly targeting it is a waste of time. But that’s outdated information, basically straight from early 2010 reddit and the Starting Strength fiasco.

Squats and deadlifts, especially heavy ones, challenge your core and your bracing, which hits them isometrically. But you really don’t want your core to be anywhere near the limiting factor for these movements. Direct ab training will ensure your core is strong enough to never worry about it. Obviously even outside of the gym, having a reliable core gives you a myriad of benefits.

Finally, yes trap bar deadlift is a very good lift. It’s in my personal deadlift rotation. But again, the article is just a deluge of nonsense that can’t help but to throw shade at other lifts instead of just promoting a good thing and encouraging people to try it. Oh, and I guess explaining to people that the most popular exercises ever are “useless or dangerous” must be a good way to get people to click on your affiliate links for the various scammy apps you also write about.

Any comment on those who direct their subordinates to launch bombs? Because I’m seeing quite a few loopholes here

Well, the reason they’re popular is because you can just toss them in a bag to go along with the rest of your kid’s lunch. Or your adult lunch lol I do cheese sticks + apple quite often.

They’re also not necessarily more expensive. The store brand sticks are actually the cheapest mozzarella per weight available anywhere near me. Even among other cheese types they’re cheaper.

The plastic waste is unfortunate, although they’re super thin sheets of plastic. It’s obviously more waste than if they weren’t individually wrapped, but I’d honestly be surprised if it wasted more plastic than the average product

Honestly though if you just walk away from all the big companies things are pretty great

Just off the top of my head, Silksong, Blue Prince, UFO 50, Animal Well, Nine Sols, Hades II. All reasonably priced and run great on aging hardware. Even if you tastefully game with larger companies, lots of amazing stuff out there that isn’t just polygons for the sake of it. The new Armored Core runs amazing on older hardware (excluding the customization garage lol)

As the other commenter said, biking is cardio. It has many overlapping benefits with heavy circles (resistance training), but they each have some unique benefits and they grant you those benefits through different biological mechanisms. So doing one or the other is very good, and doing both is extremely good.

American heart association has a very good breakdown of the benefits of cardio. They recommend 150 minutes per week of moderate intensity cardio (biking slower than 10mph/16kph) or 75min per week of intense cardio (faster than 10mph) to fully cash in on those benefits.

On a personal note: before “taking the plunge” with any form of exercise, most people experience the same form of “temporal sticker shock” that you’ve expressed concern with. The “need to reserve time” for it.

It’s very deceptive though, because the short time you invest into it actually gives back so much more time to your life. Like multiple extra hours per day, every day, where you feel refreshed, energetic, and capable of pursuing your passions fully. It’s extremely worth the time you spend upfront

Heavy circles proven to reduce osteoporosis, sarcopenia, likelihood of falling in old age, likelihood of getting injured if you fall, metabolic syndrome, heart disease, and even depression. You can pretty much cash in all of these benefits in 2 hours per week flat

I’ve done several assessments of the output of popular llms in my field of expertise. I generally conclude that they are “worse than worthless”, because they actively try to persuade you of false information.

Your whole thesis about people whose output is “lesser” than llms is totally misguided. Yes there is a systemic research and comprehension issue. No, the AI doesn’t help people with it. What I’ve observed is that people don’t really ever defer to the AI if it coincidently contradicts their beliefs, they just coax it until it says whatever they want, then end up problematically overconfident because “the ai told them so”

I could keep replying in regards to the unmotivated school children and the inappropriate reformatted analogy but what’s the point if you’re just gonna be a broken record? We all understand that you think most people are morons and that you and your buddies have deep talks about AI in which you’ve concluded that nobody can really “know” anything well enough to comment on their capabilities, but in spite of this you personally are able to not just “know” what it is capable of but even how it stacks up against against different types of humans. The line of reasoning is totally absurd

Do you think you’re helping the situation in any way by cobbling together random unrelated memories from a decade ago with unsubstantiated proclamations about the state of the modern industry?

Bro literally just said computers do not possess cognition or the ability to perform research, and you retorted with a list of qualifications implying that educated people believe the opposite. But instead of actually furthering your position you’re just making broad statements about how nobody can possibly understand the technology, or the brain itself, because they are too complicated.

Buddy. Nobody understands the complexities of physics enough to fully explain the myriad of processes and byproducts responsible for and resulting from the combustion of gasoline. Yet here we live all the same, in defiance of our ignorance, with working cars and shady car salesmen making specific false marketing claims about their vehicles.

Literally it’s the same as if someone said cars don’t have full self driving and you retorted by saying you worked at Toyota (leaving out how you left that job ten years ago) and furthermore nobody even understands how humans make driving decisions. Then calling everyone else out for their “uninformed assumptions” as if you didn’t just perform the conversational equivalent of crashing your vehicle into a parked car

Personally I surrender my cognitive load to the comments section under articles, so thank you for putting me at ease about this situation!

Oh, gotcha

Just so we can get on the same page, the field of “machine learning” at that point in time (and even still today) is a completely different animal than the current wave of parasitic “AI” products that are being aggressively marketed.

We need to be extremely clear when differentiating the two and understanding the thru-line, because the marketeers are intentionally trying to obfuscate the difference. For instance when you reply to someone who is talking about the capabilities of LLMs, you should be very clear when you start referring to the discussions machine learning experts used to have a decade ago. A lot has happened in that time

I worked for the largest AI researcher in the world

Wow the rhetoric coming directly from investor-bait think tanks characterizes the technology in a positive light? Tell me more

That scenario could also be arranged!

Responding to your second edit: the same way

Oh gotcha, thanks yeah that makes sense