[Deliberate 113] – What should I take for longevity?

Howdy to Deliberate Internet – my newsletter combining nuanced perspectives on Remote Work, Technology, Psychology, and other latest obsessions.

Parental leave is a great time to refocus yourself: in the precious moments between diaper changes, feeding, and managing your family, you get to do a little bit of what matters. What matters (at least when I have more time on my hands) is family, health, swimming in mountain lakes, and a little bit of hacking.

The five most important supplements for Longevity

For a few years now, I have had an evergreen TODO to “figure out the supplement situation.” This is my (incomplete) research so far, which you should not trust because I am not a doctor. I’m publishing this as a reminder to myself and a jumping-off point for further research for you.

And for the love of god, eat more veggies and fish.

Magnesium

It seems that I stumble onto Magnesium in any resource I put my hands on. It’s essential for everything, and it’s almost impossible to take too much (it increases absorption of Calcium, which depletes Magnesium in turn).

  • Essential for copying safe copying of DNA, protecting against cancer-causing mutations,
  • Despite Magnesium’s critical role in over 300 enzyme processes and its importance in muscle functions, energy production, and electrolyte balance, half the country doesn’t even meet the RDA – Rhonda Patrick
  • Magnesium malate can help in keeping inflammation levels low and mitigating muscle soreness post-workout. – Andrew Huberman
  • Magnesium helps with inflammation1 but gets depleted. You need more Magnesium in inflammatory environments.
  • Helps with sleep (particularly Theorate)
  • Improves blood vessel function
  • Improves Insulin resistance
  • Lowers LDL (bad) cholesterol

Magnesium is not well absorbed on its own, so supplements are in bioavailable (easier to absorb) forms/compounds. Some of the better forms are Glycinate, Malate, Chloride, and Theorate. Citrate is the most popular and okay.

According to USA RDA (Recommended Daily Allowance), you should take around 400 mg of elemental magnesium per day, but some people recommend 5-10mg per pound of body weight. ( 11-22 mg per kg )

Because Magnesium is in these bioavailable forms, in order to get 1000 mg of elemental Magnesium, you would have to get 6600 mg of Magnesium Malate, but of course, you should take multiple forms.

Vitamin D3

  • Essential for synthesizing serotonin, crucial for immunity
  • Important for Calcium absorption in bones
  • Important for heart function and regulating heart pressure
  • It helps prevent type 1 and 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, cancer, and autoimmune diseases.

According to “The Big Vitamin D Mistake” study, adults should be taking 10,000 IU instead of the recommended 4000 IU.

The official RDAs are outdated because:

In contrast to the context of the recommendations of the 1960s of 4000 to 5000 IU/d to avoid rickets, our diet today is poor in wild fish (×10 richer in vitamin D), wild eggs, and fresh milk. Children are playing and people are working indoors all day long, and powerful sunprotective cosmetics are used to prevent melanoma. Even sunny countries such as Greece present a high prevalence of vitamin D deficiency, as the angle of the sun rays from autumn to spring do not result in sufficient vitamin D production with usual sun exposure

Omega-3 fatty acids: ALA, EPA & DHA

  • Essential for brain development, particularly in pregnancy
  • Lowers bad cholesterol (LDL)
  • Lowers inflammation
  • Helps with insulin resistance
  • Protects against heavy metal poisoning
  • Removes free radicals from the body

ALA is available in plant sources (ex flaxseed) but EPA and DHA are only available from marine sources like Krill and Cod liver. Take 1000-2000 mg two to three times per day.

The body converts ALA to DHA/EPA, but the mechanism is inefficient and dependent on genetic variance.

Aged Garlic Extract

  • Helps with weight loss
  • Lowers bad cholesterol
  • Helps with immunity
  • Protects against cancer
  • Helps regulate blood sugar levels

Take 600 mg two to three times a day.

Creatine

Important for building muscle and cognitive function. It helps preserve muscle mass, and helps meet your protein requirements. Additionally, it helps your overall performance, giving you more energy during the day leading to multiple secondary effects.

Creatine has been proven through numerous studies to enhance muscle performance.

Andrew Huberman

Take 5 grams per day for individuals around 180 pounds ( 80 kg), 10 to 15 grams for those heavier, and 1 to 5 grams for lighter individuals.

I’m basing these recommendations on “Huberman Lab” podcast, “Found My Fitness” podcast, “Four Hour Body & Tools of Titans”, and “Your blood never lies”.

Footnotes
  1. Inflammation is the cell’s “emergency state” in which cells get into overdrive when met with bad conditions (pollutants, free radicals, radiation, damage, all sorts of stuff). If they stay in that state too long, you get chronic inflammation which damages them. Most of these supplements help with getting the emergency done with faster. ↩︎

Electrolites AKA DIY LMNT

If you’ve been listening to podcast ads, you have probably heard about LMNT electrolytes. Electrolytes are important for muscle and cell communication, especially when exercising.

LMNT is a brand that sells ready-to-use packets. Since I live in Poland, I cannot try them, but it turns out they published their “formula on the blog:

½ teaspoon salt provides about 1 gram sodium
400 mg potassium chloride provides about 200 mg potassium
¼ teaspoon of magnesium malate provides about 60 mg magnesium

I bought the bulk ingredients and mixed a few portions in my home lab:

Parental Leave hacking

Apart from my health quest, I am using this time to rewrite my hodge-podge personal infrastructure hacks into a productized version everybody can use.

I created a WordPress plugin that syncs your WordPress private notes with Evernote. It works both ways, including attachments. If you’re interested in reviewing/testing, here is the pull request.

[Deliberate 112] Cringe, and the crushing force of Technology

We are busy raising a newborn, and I don’t get to open my laptop or – to be honest -use my brain that much. However, overall, I am surprised how quickly we got our bearings in caring for our little boy: parenting is much easier the second time around. Your first child is a living, screaming, running, throwing, jumping, and dancing, proof that you can go through this. You can let go of the fear, embrace the chaos, and enjoy your beautiful family. Plus, it turns out that parenting not-during-covid-lockdowns is much easier. Go figure.

The best things in life are cringe.

I have to admit I’ve grown to enjoy some things I previously deemed cringe: Weddings, reunions, photos of my kids, Italodisco.

I am not sure if it was a quirk of the 2010s or my specific age at that time, but it seemed the ultimate goal in life was to be cool: Detached, unbothered, slick, and never cringy.

I get the appeal of cool: It signals to the world you are stable, with enough life experience to remain unfazed, and it’s hard to impress you because you have somewhat refined taste.

But it’s easy to fake cool: Be blase about everything, never get excited, never give anything a chance. By avoiding cringe, you avoid something you might actually enjoy. By being protective of your cool persona, you rob yourself of cool experiences.

Really cool people dictate what is cringe and what is cool, and don’t give a damn what others think. Go enjoy what you like.

Technology feels like a crushing force

Last month, Apple released the iPad Pro, their “thinnest yet”. They also decided to release this ad in which they crushed a series of objects to “squeeze them” into a thin iPad.

Click to see 90 second ad on YouTube

It made people uncomfortable, and Apple even issued an “apology.”

Apple’s Ad unwillingly captured the tradeoffs technology presents and how we pay for the advances by losing the world we know.

YesBut
You can do so much on a single device Netflix is also there
It’s thin, comfortable and lightThe colorful, tangible, and beautiful spectrum of tools is lost
It’s slick, modern, and minimalisticEverything looks the same, and we lost all other forms
You can paint, create music or writeAI can, too
Technology brings opportunityIt feels like a crushing force
The future is hereThe past is destroyed

Deliberate Technology is an ongoing topic on this blog and now it has a perfect illustration. I’m still working through my relationship with Tech.

  • I love reading on my kindle, but my children never see me with an actual book
  • I advocate for Remote Work, not to Work from Home, but to Work from Nature
  • Our company mission is to “Democratize Publishing and Commerce,” but it leads to spammers, scammers, and the extreme incentives of the Internet. Should everybody create?

Interesting things from around the web

How to be more Agentic

In the 52nd issue of Deliberate Internet, I shared Simon Sarris’s “The most precious resource is Agency”. Cate Hall published a fantastic complement about how to be more Agentic.

Agency is the skill that built the world around you, an all-purpose life intensifier that lets you make your corner of it more like what you want it to be, whether that’s professional, relational, aesthetic, whatever. Build a better mousetrap. Have an enviable marriage. Start a country. No one is born with it, everyone can learn it, and it’s never too late.

You can just assume world is a malleable place. Just try to make things happen and you actually may succeed. You can just ask for things, and you can just learn complicated things.

Most subject matter is learnable, even stuff that seems really hard

But beyond that, many (most?) traits that people treat as fixed are actually quite malleable if you (1) believe they are and (2) put the same kind of work into learning them as you would anything else.

Ask for things. Ask for things that feel unreasonable, to make sure your intuitions about what’s reasonable are accurate (of course, try not to be a jerk in the process)

One trick is to embrace the low status: do the things you do not know yet how to do well and will fail at in the beginning:

making changes in your life, especially when learning new skill sets, requires you to cross a moat of low status, a period of time where you are actually bad at the thing or fail to know things that are obvious to other people.

I’m pretty sure Agency and Taste are going to be increasingly important to differentiate Human work from AI work.

[Deliberate 111] Parenting, Part Deux

I have great news to share. I have a son now!

Two weeks ago, we welcomed the newest addition to the Piszek Family.

I am thrilled to experience raising a boy. Not because boys are in any way “better” or “worse” than girls, but because I can learn from my own childhood. In particular, I want to continue the tradition of calling my son Junior, as my dad did, inspired by the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I wrote my son a letter on this blog, as I did for my daughter.

You can expect a little more parenting content for the next few months, as I am currently on a parental leave – a fantastic perk that Automattic has bestowed on me.

WordPress AI Site Builder

Prior to my leave, I was working with my friends on an AI site builder that turns your dreams and vibes into a fully functioning WordPress website that you can further tweak with AI, your personal no-man agency.

We spent a lot of time fine-tuning the user experience, preparing components for AI to use, and tweaking the results. In some respects, plugging AI into the system was the easiest piece.

The project is now in beta, and you can sign up to be a tester. You will get a year of WordPress.com for free.

Physical Paper, Phone Calls, and Poop

Tech folk tend to solve their own problems, and what they we focus on is sometimes disconnected from what the majority of the population experiences. People working (and hyping) the AI products will be even more so.

This week, OpenAI and Google have announced exciting breakthroughs in their respective AI products. Both were laying out a vision of AI agents – semi-autonomous assistants that will perform the tedious chores for you.

The upside is exciting, but the use cases they (particularly Google) presented were not that appealing – booking flights, returning shoes, finding dog walkers in a new city.

As – once again – a parent of a newborn, I am faced with basic reality. I had to assist my brave wife in giving birth, tend to my son, and deal with paperwork, nurses, doctor’s offices, and so on.

I – once again – rediscovered that reality runs on Physical Paper, Phone Calls, and Poop. None of which can be helped by AI agents yet.

There are some products that would be life-changing for some people, but those groups are underrepresented in tech industry, and particularly Google:

  • An app for the elderly to read what it is that they are looking at.
  • An AI service that calls all my contractors via phone (we are slowly gearing up to build a house) and checks up on them, scolds and badgers them to keep their promises, using my voice.

Furthermore, the agents approach is problematic because I am not sure I can trust AI to not get me into trouble. There are tons and tons of corner cases, where AI will either have insufficient information or it would have to make a decision. Currently, I will not trust AI, but could use:

  • A service that will navigate calling the doctor’s offices to schedule an appointment for my baby’s first RTG.
  • Smart camera that monitors my sleeping toddler and alerts me if they are about to do something dangerous so I have time to walk the dog
  • Service monitoring used baby stuff sites for the parts / gear I am need

Ultimately, Poop and Paper will have to be managed by me personally. I have to make sure laundry, dishwasher, diapers, trash, and all that stuff is taken care of.

But my biggest goal in life is managing my older daughter’s complex feelings about having a sibling. She is no longer the sole benefactor of their parents’ attention, and she is slowly coping as best she can. My role is supporting her and spending quality time so she knows she’s as loved as she was before her brother was born.

As exciting as the new AI models are, they are not helping me deal with emotional support, paper and poop. The most exciting technology around is still the washing machine.

Hey Junior!

Life does not come with a user manual. But why?
This series of posts is addressed to my children and documents the aspects of life that I should have learned at school but didn’t.

On this day, you have embarked on your brave journey into the real world. You didn’t hesitate one bit – you decided the world is exciting, enticing, and full of adventures that you can no longer postpone.

Your sister, your mom, and I are very happy to welcome you. We had some head start to figure things out, but I am sorry to say we got nowhere. We are pretty much clueless, but nevertheless, we manage.

Right at the start, I will ask you for some patience and forgiveness towards all of us. Inevitably, you will get less attention than your sister did—such is the fate of second children. But hopefully, we will have some of this parenting figured out and won’t be as stressed as we were around your sister.

All of us, as well as the two of us, will have lots of fun, adventures, and good times together. I can’t wait for all the mischief. I have some experience being a boy, and Grandpa Robert was an awesome dad, so hopefully, I’ll know what to do.

Since I am older, I feel obliged to share some advice in no particular order and selected for no particular reason:

  • It is ok to just want things. Because you think they are cool, interesting or for no reason at all. Remember the things you consider cool when growing up, because afterwards its easy to think in terms of obligations. Most of the items on my Bucketlist are something 15-year-old me would consider cool.
  • It’s easy to confuse wanting things with trying to impress other people. A good rule of thumb is, “Would this still be cool if nobody knew you did it?“. But then I go around publishing all the cool stuff I did on this blog, so 🤷‍♀️.
    People generally will not spend time thinking about you, except for your parents of course.
  • You do not have to be consistent. There is no prize for acting like someone you (or other people) thought you were. You have one life, so feel free to reinvent yourself.
  • But try to keep your promises. It is not always possible, but do the things you said you would do.
  • Try to have high standards – you want your standards to give you energy and inspiration for a better quality of life, but you don’t want to become a permanent source of guilt.
    Permanent guilt is a very good signal of an unrealistic standard or misaligned expectations—in personal life or at work.
  • Be kind to others and yourself. Men can easily become hostile to themselves and brush it off as “toughness”. This gets you through whatever you need to go through but creates problems in relating to others and trying to enjoy life.
  • The only rules that really matter are the ones against hurting other people. Be a good man, and be compassionate, even if that is against the rules.
  • Being a man is hard to figure out nowadays. There are a lot of old weird traditions and conflicting new dogma. Should a man like watching football? Should he be outgoing or leave more space for others? Should he like cars?
    Above all, a man is a healthy, good, and dependable human – and whoever he chooses to be, interested in whatever he considers interesting.

Enjoy your time here. The world is an amazing place.

Dad

PS. Here is a letter I wrote to your sister

[Deliberate 110] Keeping promises to yourself

When somebody agrees to do something for you, you usually expect them to keep their word. Do you expect the same when you make a promise to yourself?

So what if I don’t keep that promise?

It may be deceptively easy to convince yourself that promises you made to yourself are like borrowing money from yourself – it squares out in the end:

  • If I disappoint somebody, they will be sad and annoyed by me. I can pay some social capital
  • But if I’m disappointing myself, then I can let myself off the hook and erase disappointment like it was never there. Look how smart I am!

But promises exist for a reason. They are a way of deferring obligations, so you don’t have to do them now.

It’s impossible to hide your track record from yourself, so if you are not keeping your promises, you know that you can’t trust yourself.

Without this trust, you won’t be able to defer those obligations when they really matter. Even when you are super busy, overwhelmed, and exhausted, if something really matters, you will have to do it now because you will not be able to put it off for later. Future you cannot be trusted.

This manifests in the following cycle:

  1. Ah, I gotta get my shit in order
  2. Huge changes, new me, stuff is working like clockwork
  3. Tiny wrinkle puts the brittle life system out of balance
  4. I’m missing all deadlines, constantly grasping for air, total anxiety.

There are 2 ways to keep promises

  1. Make damn sure you do everything in your power to keep the promise you made, spare no expense, and put in the extra effort
  2. Make only the promises you intend to keep.

The trick to reducing anxiety is being really honest about what is a promise and what is a nice-to-have. With yourself, and with other people.

Keeping promises as ADHD medication

I am diagnosed with ADHD, and the single best trick I can recommend is

  1. Whenever you are beginning a sidequest, note it down for later
  2. Make sure you are regularly browsing those notes

Once you can trust yourself to follow up on those great ideas, you can safely let them go to your notetaking system because you know the future you will return to them.

A thing I’ve read

Zone 2 Cardio

Ever since reading up on Zone 2 cardio in A Guide to the Biggest Thing Missing From Your Fitness Routine: Zone 2 Training by Brett & Kate McKay, I have been on a research, and it seems like I do not spend enough time at this level of exercise intensity. Here is a quick summary:

  1. It’s a moderate-intensity exercise and an effort that is easy to sustain:
    • “When you’re exercising in Zone 2, you can comfortably have a conversation, but will still sound a little breathy; you’re not able to talk as clearly as when you’re at rest, but you’re still capable of talking.”
  2. Apart from being comparatively easy, It has the best intensity for burning fat because it’s still an aerobic exercise.
  3. The more you exercise in Zone 2, the better your body gets at burning fat for energy
  4. Exercising in Zone 2 improves your overall daily fitness while exercising in higher zones improves your peak fitness.

In zones 1 and 2, you’re using primarily fat. As you shift to Zone 3, you start using carbohydrates. When you reach zone 6, you use creatine phosphate to create ATP
(…)
In Zone 2, your exercise intensity is at a level in which you are stimulating your cells’ mitochondrial function the most. You can meet your body’s demand for ATP using only fat and oxygen in your mitochondria

The scariest part is that when we are “motivated” and decide to get after it, we tend to exercise in zones 3 and 4. These are called “Garbage zones” by Peter Addia Md. because you’re not exercising at a high enough intensity to improve your anaerobic fitness, and you’re not exercising at a low enough intensity to improve your aerobic fitness

Excercise zone alerts on Apple watch

On Apple Watch Workouts app, you can set alerts to inform you which zone you’re in during the workout. You have to set it on the watch:

  1. Open Workouts
  2. Pick a workout
  3. Click (…) 3 dots in the upper right corner of the workout tile
  4. Scroll down to preferences
  5. Alerts
  6. Heart rate
  7. Pick Zone 2

You will have to set it up for each workout that you use the Workout app for.

Concentration of Castles in Europe

Massimo shared a fantastic map:

Concentration of castles in Europe. The country with the most castles is Germany. It’s estimated the country has around 25,000 castles within its borders. Wales is the country with the most castles per square mile. Despite its small size, Wales had over 600 castles.
The French Ministry of Culture states there are currently 11,000 castles in France. However, Parisabout mentions that, if all the private residencies in some ways similar to a castle and historic ruins were considered castles, the number could be well above 45,000. That’s why the density in France.

8 years ago, I flew my bike to France, so I can cycle a stretch of the Loire valley. Here is a video and my ranking on Loire valley castles:

#182 Cycle the Loire Valley

Augmenting WordPress autocompleter quick links with your own post type

WordPress has a quick way to link to your other notes without copy-pasting. If you type [[ (just as in in Roam Research), you will invoke a dropdown to search your posts and pages. Like so:

This is called an “autocompleter”. It’s the same dropdown that powers block inserter (invoked by /) and the people-tagger (invoked by @).

You can see the source of the links completer here.

How to add your post type to autocompleter

I am currently writing a WordPress-based notetaking system that aims to simplify your entire knowledge management stack, from reading to publishing, all inside WordPress.

As part of this endeavour, I am introducing a Note post type that will never get published, but can be embedded and linked from everywhere and to everywhere.

And I want this “Note” post type to show in the completer alongsited Posts and Pages whenever you type [[. There are 2 problems with this, however:

  1. As you can see in the above source, the completer uses the `/wp/v2/search’` endpoint, which only searches public-facing content of the site, so it will not work for my Notes post type.
  2. The completer for the [[ command already exists and there is no way to augment that specific one. So what should we do?

Merging completers

What if we had a third completer that would merge the result of 2 others and serve as a “unified” completer?

Let’s do that! First, we need a completer for our Note post type. This completer will insert a Note block instead of linking to the note, but it could link by returning <a> in getOptionCompletion.

const NoteCompleter = {
	name: 'links',
	className: 'block-editor-autocompleters__link',
	triggerPrefix: '[[',
	options: async ( letters ) => {
		let options = await apiFetch( {
			path: addQueryArgs( '/pos/v1/notes', {
				per_page: 10,
				search: letters,
			} ),
		} );
	
		options = options.map( ( { id, title, type, excerpt } ) => ( {
			id,
			title: title.rendered,
			type,
			excerpt: excerpt.rendered.replace( /(<([^>]+)>)/gi, '' ).substring( 0, 100 ),
		} ) );

		return options;
	},
	getOptionKeywords( item ) {
		const expansionWords = item.title.split( /\s+/ );
		const experptWords = item.excerpt.split( /\s+/ );
		return [ ...expansionWords, ...experptWords ];
	},
	getOptionLabel( item ) {
		return (
			<>
				<Icon
					key="icon"
					icon={ overlayText }
				/>
				{ item.title || item.excerpt }
			</>
		);
	},
	getOptionCompletion( item ) {
		return {
			action: 'replace',
			value: createBlock( 'pos/note', {
				note_id: item.id,
			} ),
		}
	},
}

In order to merge this completer with the links from core, we will need this mergeCompleters function:

  • It assumes name, classname and triggerPrefix are similar for all these completers
  • It will trigger `options` methods in parallel and merge their results
  • Each result will have a completer index attached, so that the expansion gets handled by appropriate getOptionKeywords, getOptionLabel and getOptionCompletion from the original completers
function mergeCompleters( completers ) {
	return {
		name: completers[0].name,
		className: completers[0].className,
		triggerPrefix: completers[0].triggerPrefix,
		options: async ( letters ) => {
			const completerResults = await Promise.all(
				completers.map( completer => completer.options( letters ) )
			);
			const opt = completerResults.map( ( completer, completerId ) => completer.map( option => ( { ...option, completer: completerId } ) ) ).flat();
			return opt;
		},
		getOptionKeywords: ( item ) => completers[item.completer].getOptionKeywords( item ),
		getOptionLabel: ( item ) => completers[item.completer].getOptionLabel( item ),
		getOptionCompletion: ( item ) => completers[item.completer].getOptionCompletion( item ),
	}
}

And now we hook into editor.Autocomplete.completers

  • We filter out original links completer
  • Merge it with our NotesCompleter
  • And feed back to to the completer list

function appendMergedCompleter( completers, blockName ) {
	const linksCompleter = completers.find( ( { name } ) => name === 'links' );
	const allCompleters = completers.filter( ( { name } ) => name !== 'links' );
    return [ mergeCompleters( [ linksCompleter, NoteCompleter ] ), ...allCompleters ]
}


// Adding the filter
wp.hooks.addFilter(
    'editor.Autocomplete.completers',
    'pos/autocompleters/links-and-notes',
    appendMergedCompleter
);

And now we have the Notes post type alongside regular results:

Fun ways to exercise

The modern world is too legible. Too many things are a thing.

One of those things is the concept of exercise or a workout. The act of using your body the way it’s supposed to be used becomes a chore, something to drive to, something to pay for, something to organize.

This post is inspired by this prompt on WordPress.com:

Daily writing prompt
What’s the most fun way to exercise?
View all responses

My ideal ways to work out and exercise do not feel like workouts or exercises at all. I would just use my body while doing something fun.

Outdoors

Biking

A mode of transportation, way to explore, and an exercise in one? While on the bike you get to enjoy so many things at once:

  1. You get to go somewhere nice
  2. You never get stuck in traffic
  3. You get to use a route without cars or people. Bikes are nimble, and you can explore the scenic routes, the small pathways, and that part of town you never thought you’d see
  4. The bike is the easiest way to consistently stay in Zone 2 for your cardio, which has a host of benefits
  5. The bike has a perfect speed for exploring. It’s at the edge of the human speed, where you still get connected to your environment and can notice people and nature around you.
  6. You get to take your baby with you
  7. Or you can take your friends and have a great workout while chatting

Water Sports

I wrote about the joys of water sports before, but here are the sports that I semi-consistently practice. I organized them from the easiest to organize to the hardest:

  1. Swimming
    • Preferably in lakes, but a swimming pool will do
  2. Stand-Up paddleboarding
    • I have my own SUP. I recommend Gladiator Origin Touring 12’6
  3. Wakeboarding
  4. Windsurfing
  5. eFoiling

Indoors

BodyCombat

There is a class called Les Mills Bodycombat. It’s martial-arts inspired cardio with great licensed dance music. Who wouldn’t like to kick ass to some David Guetta?

    VR

    There is BodyCombat VR and a similar app, called Supernatural. I love it so much I have a separate post about it:

    Installing Supernatural VR workout outside the US

    Doing an on-demand workout in VR is great for those moments when you really need to:

    1. Get in the mood ASAP. You put googles on, turn the workout on, and suddenly, you feel like moving
    2. Don’t have much time. You can get a pretty good workout just before picking the baby up from preschool without going to the gym, waiting for the class to start, showering over there, packing your bags etc.
    3. You don’t have to schedule it

    Plain old Gym

    Don’t forget the leg day! I use the Fitbod app to track my other workouts and prepare a workout plan with the equipment available at my gym.

    I just do whatever Fitbod tells me to do.

    The World runs on invisible labor

    I am going to try to explain the XZ vulnerability recently discovered in many systems and its connection to caring for your grandparents.

    Imagine you have a hobby

    Let’s say you used to learn to play the guitar. You even joined a band in high school! You edited your songs to release 1 CD, of which you sold 100 copies, which was great fun.

    Then, life intervened; people moved, others got married, you got a baby, and the band was no more. You decide to release your CD as free music for everybody to enjoy.

    The Rolling Stones use a piece of your song in theirs. It’s very flattering at first, and what great fun! But there is a catch: every time Rolling Stones play, an army of lawyers descends on you to square the rights to this song. It quickly becomes a major source of stress.

    Invisible labor of modern technology

    I know this was a crude analogy, but it kind of explains the situation of Open Source maintainers:

    1. They produce some piece of code for fun
    2. It becomes extremely popular in a very obscure way: as a crucial support of somebody else’s product
    3. They are now expected to maintain that piece of technology, forever, for free, with no upside and very niche recognition.
    This is not an exaggeration. From XKCD

    Fast forward to today: XZ

    Recently, a massive vulnerability has been discovered that could affect countless servers, services and critical points all around the Internet. Here is my crude summary:

    1. A guy in Netherlands creates the XZ package: A compression algorithm that is useful for specific use cases
    2. That package made its way to some Linux distributions to help with compressing data for the main process, which escalates privileges for the code connected with the package
    3. That guy in the Netherlands has been maintaining the project for years without any compensation, rewards, or recognition.
    4. Suddenly, he is flooded with requests to do more work on the software. He tries to keep up, but the demands start being overwhelming
    5. A contributor steps in and helps out with these requests. The original author slowly decides to hand off the project to “New Management”
    6. “New Management” slowly introduces a specific and very obscure backdoor. It only works because of a quirk of how Linux packages are put together
    7. New versions of a few Linux distributions are released with a backdoor that allows the “New Management guy” to take control over any computer running this software. It’s estimated that this would affect around 1% of world servers.
    8. Another guy at Microsoft recognizes that on some servers, it takes half a second longer to log in. He starts digging and uncovers the whole plot.

    There are a few points worth underscoring:

    • There was really a lot at stake. 1% of servers may not sound like a lot, but once you have some foothold, it’s much easier to extend your influence in other ways
    • There are plenty of frustrated, unrecognized, and burned-out Open Source maintainers. Their code and labor are treated like commodities, and entitled people expect them to maintain it forever. At the same time, it’s critical to almost the entire economy
    • I cannot explain how sloppy programmers are with pulling dependencies. Most of the time, they will install random packages found on a website somewhere, and I am surprised (or maybe oblivious) that we don’t hear more about dependency attacks.
    • That being said, this attack was extremely elaborate, which probably points to a state-sponsored actor.

    Invisible labor is all around us

    It is hard for my mom to spend time with her granddaughter because helping her own parents takes most of what she has to spare. I – on the other hand – have to help my other grandfather, and I won’t even mention the challenges of fatherhood.

    There are countless untold stories of people caring for the young, the old, the sick, and the disabled. We like to romanticize this as beautiful, inspiring, and “proper”, but dealing with neurodegenerative diseases of the elderly is thankless, depressing, and exhausting.

    I can’t even imagine what single mothers, parents of very sick children, or families of alcoholics have to go through daily just to keep going. And there is A LOT of people in these situations. We just don’t like to think about them because it’s depressing.

    All there is to win is more work

    Did you notice how all stories end with “happily ever after”, some resolution, some kind of end?

    It’s rarely like this in real life. The “happy ever after” of a love story is the actual labor, after which comes the labor of parenting. It’s rewarding on its own terms, but it also requires more work than getting the girl – the story being told.

    Most things in life are like this: The reward for winning is more work, more invisible labor, more responsibilities.

    We need to celebrate and reward that invisible labor

    People all around you (or maybe yourself) are making sacrifices quietly because the situations are not glamorous or heroic. Remember that, and remember to thank them.

    For the love of God, Big Tech companies need to support Open-Source projects they are benefiting from. In WordPress, we have Five For The Future, and we need more similar initiatives.

    Writing serialized Gutenberg blocks in PHP

    Sometimes you want to append to `post_content` in PHP.

    You can use the get_comment_delimited_block_content function to serialize Gutenberg syntax in a way that correctly shows as blocks in the editor:

    $post_content .= get_comment_delimited_block_content(
        'block_name',
        [
            'attribute' => $value,
        ],
        '<p>' . $content . '</p>'
    );

    [Deliberate 108] Avoid negative-sum games

    Winning wealth and happiness takes effort, skill, and luck. But there is a shortcut: deciding which games to play – and what is even easier – deciding which ones not to play. Negative-sum games are particularly easy to spot and always toxic.

    People (especially competitive ones) tend to put a lot of effort, preparation, and attention into winning real-life games: getting that promotion, getting a raise, outgrowing a competitor, choosing a winning stock.

    Our perception of game theory is skewed toward a zero-sum game scenario in which the winner takes all and the loser leaves with nothing. The term “Zero-sum game” was coined by John von Neumann for the analysis of nuclear conflict. But he later resented the concept of both zero-sum and non-cooperative games (prisoner’s dilemma) as something deeply incompatible with human nature:

    What von Neumann disliked most about Nash’s approach, though, was the axioms upon which it was built. The idea that people might not work together for mutual benefit was anathema to him. He was central European to the core, his intellectual outlook shaped by a milieu where ideas were debated and shaped over coffee and wine.

    Book: The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann

    Positive-sum

    Positive-sum games are presented as the alternative: In this situation, more value is created than destroyed. It can either be a win-win scenario, where we both benefit, but also a win-lose scenario where you get more than I lose.

    A good way to think about this is favors: let’s say I’m going to the store and can pick up something for you. It’s a relatively low effort for me (since I’m already at the store) and a much bigger benefit to you (it saves you a trip to the store). Value gets created.

    A more complex example is capitalism: value gets created by parties involved in positive-sum games. From Paul Graham’s “How to make wealth”:

    Suppose you own a beat-up old car. Instead of sitting on your butt next summer, you could spend the time restoring your car to pristine condition. In doing so you create wealth. The world is– and you specifically are– one pristine old car the richer. And not just in some metaphorical way. If you sell your car, you’ll get more for it.

    Essentially, positive-sum games are what we call “progress”. Most opponents raising points about the progress being unsustainable or impossible long-term (“the resources are finite!”) didn’t do their homework and assumed positive-sum games do not exist.

    Negative-sum

    Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

    You are playing a negative sum game when you destroy more value than when you create: for example, you steal complicated machinery to sell for scrap metal. You have destroyed value in the world.

    Negative-sum games are just making the world worse

    I can’t stress this enough: Everything you hate is to prevent people from playing negative-sum games.

    • Passwords, locks, keys, and fences that make cities unwalkable are meant to safeguard against trespassers, thieves, and fraudsters.
    • We have to limit the functionality of software we develop to protect against spammers and free plan abusers
    • You cannot have a beer in a public park because few dumbasses created disproportionate problems when they did.

    Every “stupid” rule comes from somebody overstepping the guidelines of reasonable behavior. If you are curious why a pickle has to bounce in Connecticut, or why it’s illegal for Donkeys to sleep in bathtubs in Arizona, this infographic by Olivet Nazarene University:

    Why negative-sum games are bad even for the winners

    “Sure Artur, but I am a winner and I am here to win! Why should I care about the world or others?”.

    Let’s analyze this case in a purely rational payoff-matrix way:

    1. Positive-sum games have unlimited upside. Negative-sum games are limited to the total value of assets in the game. So the upside is limited.
    2. Not only is the upside limited, but because it’s a negative-sum game, the upside is lower than the downside
    3. Even if you have extreme skill, being in a game means an element of chance. You will eventually lose. When you do, you will lose more than you won in previous rounds because of the negative sum.
    4. There is also an opportunity cost. By playing a negative-sum game, you are missing out on positive-sum or even zero-sum ones.

    Negative-sum games to avoid

    1. The #1 destroyer of wealth is divorce. The #1 cause of divorce is infidelity.
    2. A good heuristic for stupid games is doing it just “to show them”
      • Rage quitting (your job or otherwise) gives you momentary satisfaction but long-term consequences of missing a good timing
      • Buying stuff to impress your neighbors never works out.
    3. Stealing. Despite what you might think, the vast majority of scammers and fraudsters do get caught.
    4. Shooting yourself in the foot by making stupid choices regarding important aspects of your life.

    Funny how you can avoid all that by being a decent person. Act accordingly.

    A thing I’ve made

    I created a small app to render AI-created worlds inside a VR headset. All scenes are fully AI-generated based on a prompt.

    If you have a prompt idea, send me one, and I’ll add it!