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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • 8 pullups is great. To get to high rep counts you need more overall weekly volume. One thing you can do is don’t think just about how many you can do in 1 session, but instead per day or week. For example, when I was specializing to get to 20 in a row, my preparation would simply be 5-6 sets of 10+ reps, but the progressive overload is that the total for the day’s work started at 60, then I would add 5 reps to the total quota for the next week’s working sets. That achieves the “progressive overload” requirement to stimulate growth. It is MUCH easier to add 5 reps at some point in the day than to add 5 reps right after the end of the last set. The progression is stronger if you cluster your work together, but if you can’t progress in clusters, then you space it out until you can progress. Eventually around 85 reps per day, the 20 in a row became feasible. So by this point most of my sets were 14-17 reps.

    This is similar to how you progress in body building or strength training, at an advanced level you can’t progress every workout, so you may add an extra work day elsewhere in the week. Or you just add an extra set to one of those days, the spacing gives you more window for progressive overload and thus progress over 2 weeks or cycles instead of every week. The growth isn’t as rapid when spaced, but growth will still happen.

    Also if you aren’t lean, get lean. Pullup reps scale very strongly with weight loss, so if you’re packing excess bodyfat, your reps will be pretty significantly depressed.




  • 2 things to try, a day where you practice runing at higher speeds, like intervals or sprints. Also try doing a “long run” once a week where you do 1.8 to 2x your usual running distance, but at a much lower intensity.

    This helps raise your fundamental aerobic capacity so that your usual 5k pace is using a lower percentage of your capacity (which allows you to increase the pace a little).

    Besides those things just keep going and stay consistent. Just being consistent in running is a win, and improvement is going to come.




  • Yeah, the simplistic “Just be yourself” advice doesn’t take into account the “If you don’t love me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best” type of attitude.

    It also bypasses the fact that “yourself” is such a fuzzy concept anyway. So because I’m bad at public speaking, that shouldn’t mean I should “be myself” and avoid it. I should merely be aware of my current limitations. That was an accurate way to describe myself in the past, but instead of accepting it, I worked on it, forced myself into a job that requires it, and now I’m pretty good at it.

    I think almost everyone can look back 10 years ago and think of some way they ended up changing. So with that being the case, who knows who we’ll be 10 years into the future? No need to anchor too hard on who we think we are right now, it’s valuable to also give consideration to the kind of person we want to be in the future and take action towards becoming that person.


  • Yes, just a lot less because theres no app for it, so I only check it from a desktop PC instead of constantly the way I have in the past.

    Maybe it’s just me but the volume of interesting posts has fallen off a cliff after July 1st. The front page has much less activity and noticably more of it is reposts (which were there before, just a much higher ratio now).

    The niche subreddits were always the key draw though, those still only exist on Reddit and nowhere else on the internet.


  • I heard somewhere that people on average will make 3 career changes during their lifetime. Which is not a hard fast rule of course but the point is to expect that your goals may change over time as you yourself will also likely change over time.

    So in the meantime, I suggest pursuing stable work that gives you a comfortable standard living and maximizing the use of your free time to pursue enrichment in your life and not worrying too hard about trying to get satisfaction from your work.


  • I cook most of my meals too. I just barcode scan the ingredients. For vegetables it’s the same as grocery selfcheckout, just type a few letters in the search bar and tap the corresponding listing, like “USDA broccoli” or “USDA red potato”.

    They have a “create a recipe function” where you just scan in all the ingredients. So like I put in my turkey chili components, it resulted in 3994g of chili, so basically 10 servings of 400g each. Because I put in all the ingredients, it knows the total nutrients, and the amount in each serving. So when it comes to actually eating, I just go into “My Recipes”, tap “Turkey chili” 1 serving. I measure 400g into my bowl and I know I’ve consumed 26g carbs 22g fat and 66g protein, totaling 538 calories.

    This is also applicable the first time I cook it, because on subsequent cooking times it’s already been entered. Also, it keeps a recent history so you don’t need to search frequently for eaten foods, it’s already available to tap.

    It definitely takes a fair bit of time in the first weeks, you’re not wrong about that. But it also gets a lot faster and easier after those first few weeks.



  • MyFitnessPal. I had heard of it, but counting calories is a pain in the ass, no way I’d waste my time with that shit.

    Workplace gives it to me for free, so why not take a look? Damn it’s so fast and easy and it has made such a huge difference in dirt success. Just wave the camera over barcodes and the rest of the data falls in place. When you actually get enough protein instead of thinking you’ve got enough protein, then you don’t have to feel hungry in a calorie deficit.

    It seemed like a frivolous app, but it turned out to be the biggest driving factor for success. The key thing is, I didn’t realize how much it appealed to the nerd gamer instincts. The same way out optimize a build/load out for increased performance like in Diablo, that’s the same way rewarding feeling you get when you figure out new life hacks to optimize your macros even more to pack even more food into your calorie budget


  • Yeah, it’s very relaxing stress release. I spend a lot of my day looking forward to my lifting between 10-11pm and thinking about what accessory work I’ll be able to get to do after my main lifts.

    You can listen to podcasts, nobody is coming to ask you to do something and demand your attention, there’s no other chores to do during that hour.

    It’s addicting too, feeds the same itch from video games leveling up, grinding in Diablo for that piece of loot that raises one stat by like 2% you get hungry for those little boosts and they stack up over time and you keep trying to optimize your loadout so you can squeeze out a little more performance from the build, same thing with lifting and trying to keep pushing to the next increase.


  • There should be no illusions about resisting an attack. That’s not really possible in the modern transparent battlefield. All fixed defenses are struck in the opening salvo, AA defenses, radar networks, airfields. China would take immediate air superiority. Amphibious assaults are ridiculously dangerous, nigh impossible, but every shot fired in defense receives immediate retaliation from the air. This is different from the war in Ukraine where there’s contested airspace instead of one-sided superiority. Mines will slow the landing but without the ability to resist it, its just a matter of time. Deterrence needs to be economic and political, a military deterrent is not going to work on the doorstep of a world power with anything short of nuclear armament.



  • A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would look nothing like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. China could attack Taiwan with fires from the mainland, there isn’t a deep depth of terrain within which to hide. It would be more about resisting an occupying force than trying to meet them on the battlefield.

    The deterrence here isn’t in stopping an invasion, but from making the fallout so costly that it wouldn’t be worth it. Just rigging the TSMC plants with explosives and blowing them up when an invasion starts would accomplish deterrence more effectively than having soldiers shoot at each other. The unified economic sanctions of Russia after the invasion of Ukraine has been extremely costly and acts as a major message of deterrence against China trying to take Taiwan and risking reduction to the foreign trade that’s so vital to their stability (which is why they’re to develop their domestic market to reduce economic dependence).

    Taiwan should stay independent, but it doesn’t make sense to have a lot of people bleed for it.