I grew up fascinated by these essays from maybe age 8 onward.
Now I realize the pervasive bad faith in them, e.g. dismissing Murray (The Bell Curve) and enthronizing the in-retrospect-irrelevant Jay Gould. I knew his novels were kind of silly, but he was supposed to be a Scientist educating us in the scientific view of the world, goddamn it.
Maybe I wasn't receiving the full Fitness Message as someone proudly sedentary, but the way I experienced the world (seen through what I think I know now), it always seemed like people overemphasize weight loss and being thin as a marker of health.
People, people, I know many of you don't want to look like you lift, but skeletal muscle has moby advantages in minimizing the annoyances of old age. It also literally helps in weight loss. I'm also told it regulates insulin. Plus weight training also strengthens your tendons and bones. If you start deadlifting heavy at age 40, you will develop strong spinal erectors which will likely protect you from herniated discs when you're 60.
Losing weight is fine and will help preventing coronary / fatty liver etc diseases. But please make it priority number 2. Build muscle and try, as a bonus, to lower your body fat percentage. If you never do, it's better to be 35% bodyfat and yoked than to be 30% and made of blubber and chalk.
You can always restrict the meaning of "causality".
E.g. Granger casusality means that A is typically detected before B and not the other way around (so not mere correlation). It's a moby useful concept.
YouTube may have peaked as the outstanding source of impressively high quality content on a very wide range of topics about 3-5 weeks ago; possibly with Horses' guide on surviving in a desert island. It's still so, so good.
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I remember a film of Salvador Dali talking to a cheering crowd and saying in full dictator voice "... in the future... toilet bowls will be made of gold..." (roaring crowd). That's what's happened to the internet at large.
I've been using ChatGPT to develop the concept of a novel or TV show in which Al-Andalus never fell to the Reconquista, but rather conquered chunks of Central Europe... and fast forward we're traveling the stars. It's pretty good at following the "story A in the present / story B in historical flashback / stories converge in major themes" pattern.
This is unintuitive, but modern fortran is a shorter jump from Matlab than Python.
The greatness and wretchedness of Python is "pythonicity". It's very hard to miss the mark with Python (all things considered: life is finite, most people are more like analysts than developers, analysts deliver generally more value per hour than developers, Rust is hard to learn) but you basically need to submit to the "Pythonic" brainwashing -- which includes "anything performance-critical should be written in $fast_lang and then used from Python; but almost nothing is perf critical, and most of what's conceivably needed already exists".
I wish the Python<->Rust interop story was a little better. I learned to write some C++ for an embedded thing (smart flashlight, story for another time) and immediately started writing the Python extensions I struggled to write with Rust.
(The average data science/ML-ish person encounters/figures out custom algorithms maybe three or four times a year, and three of these are fast enough with vectorization contortions. I've had two cases that were recursive and 25X faster in $fast_lang than I could possibly make in Python.)
Now I realize the pervasive bad faith in them, e.g. dismissing Murray (The Bell Curve) and enthronizing the in-retrospect-irrelevant Jay Gould. I knew his novels were kind of silly, but he was supposed to be a Scientist educating us in the scientific view of the world, goddamn it.