Even if you're active, body fat is still a contest between food drive and will power, which vary widely between people based on genetics and upbringing. Realistically, people with very high food drive and easy access to junk food are going to struggle to maintain a healthy level of body fat even with an active lifestyle.
I know several people who lift weights three times a week, run for at least thirty minutes three times a week, and were still consistently 20-40 pounds overweight before Ozempic and similar drugs.
Exercise all you want, but for most people, if you eat garbage food in large quantities, you will be overweight.
I am exactly the same, btw. Most of my family was overweight when I was growing up. I was a fat kid, all the way through high school. Since then, I have been exercising consistently for 40+ years. Lifting weights, bicycling, walking every day, etc. But I still need to not just eat everything I want or I will gain weight. I try to avoid junk food, fast food, eating out, MOST days. Personally, I do one “cheat day” per week (see Tim Ferris’ Slow Carb diet for roughly the idea, although I’m not militant about the foods he says are ok, etc.).
I’m around 20% bodyfat at 5’10” in my early 60s, so I could use to drop 5-10 pounds of fat. What boggles my mind is that everyone says I’m crazy to think I need to lose ANY weight. I’ve got clearly visible fat around my middle and other areas, even if I’m not “technically obese”. I don’t look great in most clothes. But compared to the typical person (my age or not), people think I’m in great shape.
I wouldn’t say what I do is incredibly hard. But it’s also not just “do whatever you want all the time”.
> I wouldn’t say what I do is incredibly hard. But it’s also not just “do whatever you want all the time”.
I think the difficulty varies from person to person a lot more than people realize. We all end up making decisions between what we want to eat and what we think we should eat, but the level of deprivation people feel when they forego the tasty option for the healthy option seems to vary.
I think we eat similarly, and it's not incredibly hard for me, but I think it's much harder for some people.
There's more and more research that says you do need to do some sort of resistance/strength training to minimize morbidity and mortality. It doesn't have to be weight lifting, but if you're only doing cardio you're missing something.
I don't minmax life for the same reason I don't minmax games. We had healthy people before the recent weight lifting craze; my strength training is rock climbing.
> We had healthy people before the recent weight lifting craze
Most people did manual labor. Even if they didn't, everyone walked more, or rode horses, chopped wood, drew water from wells, and did a hundred other things that required using their muscles in a way that's just not necessary today.
> my strength training is rock climbing
That's weight lifting too. Bodyweight is still weight.
To have a higher quality of life in old age, you need to build strength in your youth. The shift to sedentary lifestyles has happened in the last 50 to 70 years, and that also coincided with an increase in life expectancy.
The comment you responded to about not "min maxing" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46499625 only advocated resistance and strength training, not "weight training" specifically. It's hard to dispute that having a stronger body is better for living a healthy life.
> Even if they didn't, everyone walked more, or rode horses, chopped wood, drew water from wells, and did a hundred other things that required using their muscles in a way that's just not necessary today.
None of that will bulk you like weight lifting nor is similar to weight lifting. Those guys were smaller. By our standards, they would do a lot of low resistance repetition, basically.
> That's weight lifting too. Bodyweight is still weight.
I mean, you are stretching the definition of weight lifting to unrecognizable. Climbing is not weight lifting anymore then walking is running.
> None of that will bulk you like weight lifting nor is similar to weight lifting
Even weight lifting won't bulk you unless you actively try to bulk. Seriously, appearing muscular or bulky when you're fully dressed is actually quite hard to accomplish for most people (practically all females and maybe half the males). It takes years and years of gym work and diet that most people won't ever put in.
Rock climbing is probably going to be just as good at weight lifting. My understanding of the mental model here is:
Up until around age 60, your body adjusts your muscle mass based on usage. Somewhere around 60, you start losing muscle mass. If you have just enough muscle for day to day activities in a sedentary life at that point, then over time daily tasks like carrying groceries or standing up out of a chair are going to become prohibitively difficult. You need to do something that encourages your body to grow more muscle than you need for day to day life so that you can afford to lose some of it.
You are missing even more when you do just weight lifting. The weight lifting part is the less important part. Being bulky is easthetic preference, lifting is pleasant hobby for quite a lot of people (actually including me), but it is nothing necessary for health.
A friend of mine has a junior engineer who does this and then responds to questions like "Why did you do X?" with "I didn't, Claude did, I don't know why".
Some other comments suggest immediately firing.. but a junior engineer needs to be mentored. It should be explained to them clearly that they need to understand the changes they have made. They should also be pointed towards the coding standards and SDLC documentation. If they refuse to change their ways, then firing makes sense.
Java's in great shape now, but the period between when Oracle bought Sun (~2010) and about 2017 wasn't great, and there was a lot of concern about Java's future. I think most people who moved away from Java then haven't looked back.
I believe that is mostly due to Sun's stagnation and lack of funding. Oracle released Java 7 in 2011 and Java 8 in 2014, which is arguably the start of modernizing Java.
I assumed it was Kotlin and/or Android. Oracle otherwise seemed fine to treat Java like IE6. It was only as alternatives (rise of Go, Rust, Clojure, etc) increasingly made the language look bad that really started to push development.
I don't think Oracle/OpenJdk really cares about Kotlin. It's usage is still minuscule compared to Java the language, and you're still using Java the platform by using it. I'm not sure they're really concerned about Rust either because it doesn't fill the same use cases. Go might be a concern, but who knows. I personally find Go the language to be worse then Java the language.
Part of that equation, FWIW, is that certain countries would flood the market with supply to make any new projects suddenly unprofitable.
Which sucks extra bad because if you shut the project down but start it back up you can't just flip a switch. Gotta put together a whole new team and possibly retrain them.
Most of the things people say about efficient markets assume low barriers to entry. When it takes years and tens of billions of dollars to add capacity, it makes more sense to sit back and enjoy the margins. Especially if you think there's a non-trivial possibility that the AI build out is a bubble.
We only need the memory manufacturers to not collude with each other, not even external pressure.
You want to tame their cartel like behaviors? Just get into their books and it would be clear as day if they’re artificially constraining the supply, and I’m not even talking about spending extra billions.
You cannot manufacture something that modern life depends on and not get government scrutiny.
