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Jared's Weekly Wisdumb's avatar

After hearing how important it is to strength train enough times, I joined a gym last year so I could “test out” lifting weights, something I haven’t done since high school. I followed a program from a book that inspired me to lift in the first place (Bigger, Leaner, Stronger). After a few months, I was shocked to see real muscles on my normally skinny/athletic frame. I then went all in and built out a home gym with great but secondhand equipment from fb marketplace. 9 months later, I’m still lifting every week and at 48, am stronger than I’ve ever been.

My next change is trying to learn to swim properly. To force it, I signed up for my first sprint triathlon. Now I have a deadline and a real life need to be able to do the thing I want to learn or I face potential drowning. That’s a great motivator!

A decade ago I needed to use an android for work and absolutely hated it. However, given how crummy Apple AI is, I’m guessing, newer androids are a heck of a lot better in that category. Curious to see which one you prefer.

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Jon Cunningham's avatar

So sorry to hear about your house. What a profound change.

On learning and change, I recently found this article about the evolutionary pros and cons of learning quickly and adapting to ones environment:

Study: Optimal learning in noisy ecological niches

Organisms that respond quickly to changing environments have an advantage over those that don’t. However, reacting too quickly wastes time and energy in tracking meaningless environmental changes. The authors derive a scaling law that shows that an organism’s learning rate should change as the square root of the rate of environmental change.

They also ask what happens when organisms seek to engineer the time scales in their environments — adding structure or erasing structure through niche construction.

Lastly, the researchers looked at how learning and metabolic costs intersect. For small, short-lived animals, learning costs exceed metabolic costs. Conversely, metabolic costs dominate for larger, longer-lived animals, or for those whose environments change slowly, promoting longer memories.

https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/study-optimal-learning-in-noisy-ecological-niches

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