I recall the small dot-c text file that was passed around, that contained his sequence of tests for float integrity on a portable C compiler and architecture. It was a gold-standard at the time.
Wow! It went down from over 2000 seconds to less than half a second, as HW improved. And the last test was ran on a Pentium 4. I wonder what are the results on today's HW.
OK, tested the C version on my Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1065G7 CPU @ 1.30GHz and following the instructions
> Measured run time in seconds should be divided by 400000
to normalise for reporting results. For archival results,
adjust iteration count so the benchmark runs about five minutes.
so it ran for 246 seconds (almost 5 minutes) and the normalized result is:
Me too, though it was more like 25 years. If someone asked me "who is your hero", I would answer John Walker. To be honest, I didn't know all that much about him beyond The Hacker's Diet, his own autobiography/Autodesk File, and the stuff on his web site circa 15-20 years ago. But the things I did know seemed admirable:
* He was an engineer's engineer, and when his company became successful, the impression I got was that he stayed one.
* The Hacker's Diet is a good example - approaching weight loss as a problem to be solved the same as any other: by learning what's known about it and using empiricism and data.
* As far as I can tell, at some point he decided he had achieved all the money he needed so he went off to Switzerland and became a sort of mad scientist, pursuing whatever interested him for the rest of his life. Including things like the hotbits random number generator, where he installed a radiation source in his basement and used it to serve random bits up via a public web API.
None of us are perfect, and it's best not to know too much about one's heroes, so I didn't. I looked up to the John Walker in my mind as the person I want to be when I grow up, and this sad news hits hard.
It's basic CICO, from having skimmed it. The problem is this type of diet has the greatest likelihood of failing. CICO is hard to maintain. Eventually willpower fails and gradual overeating begins, leading to surprisingly large and abrupt weight regain. Being persistently hungry all the time just sucks.
Some of the stuff is possibly wrong, like this
There's a lot of nonsense floating around regarding exercise and weight control. The only way to lose weight is to eat less than your body burns. Period. Exercising causes your body to burn more, but few people have the time or inclination to exercise enough to make a big difference. An hour of jogging is worth about one Cheese Whopper. Now, are you going to really spend an hour on the road every day just to burn off that extra burger?
There is scant to zero literature to suggest exercising raises metabolism. Recent research by Herman Pontzer shows the opposite, that calories burned with exercise are negated later through lowered BMR and NEAT. So if you do a 400-calorie run and then eat a 400 calorie cookie, you will still get a net 400 gain, or close to it.
Didn't want to delve into it in the original comment but what you mention is correct and is one of the reasons I mentioned how far back this was.
I haven't read Herman Pontzer's recent research, I'd equate to becoming a more efficient runner; as efficiency increases energy demands are reduced.
Some of today's research just didn't exist when this was written. Of course, some of the advice was already debatable by the time I got to read it in the mid-late 00's, but that can be said for a lot of health and fitness advice even today.
I didn't follow it proscriptively. What it did do was give me a different approach to tackling it as a problem and was the first resource I had read that helped in that regard. Everything else was very much eat less of this and more of that
Like thread's asking which book/resource to use when learning to code, there are many good examples out there. Not all are perfect, and some are occasionally wrong but like that example, this was the one that stuck with me.
Something most people miss, as it is only briefly mentioned, is he was eating on big meal each day after work. That's basically like 20/2 intermittent fasting. It definitely would have had an effect on his metabolism and insulin resistance. It's not a dictum, he just gives an anecdote and mentions it.
I was reviewing HD a few years ago to see if it still held up against current, prevailing wisdom and noticed this. Kind of blew my mind.
There is scant to zero literature to suggest exercising raises metabolism. Recent research by Herman Pontzer shows the opposite, that calories burned with exercise are negated later through lowered BMR and NEAT. So if you do a 400-calorie run and then eat a 400 calorie cookie, you will still get a net 400 gain, or close to it.
You could achieve a constant NEAT by having a daily step goal or some prescribed amount of activities outside your exercise routine. I am supposed to do 2 hours of exercise per day plus give or take 10K steps. This can easily make me extremely active by American standard.
Now, surely your BMR will compensate, but probably only to a certain point.
In the end, it's probably easier to just eat healthy and eat less rather than trying to increase your caloric expenditure, but that's also rather hard to do for a variety of reasons.
Also, regular exercise will have more benefits than just increasing your caloric expenditure. It keeps your muscle mass from deterioriating as you age.
> CICO is hard to maintain. Eventually willpower fails and gradual overeating begins, leading to surprisingly large and abrupt weight regain.
The key difference, for nerd hackers, is the floater/sinker graph and the average. Some apps do this these days, though it seems to be less common than it was a few years ago (e.g. Withings and Apple no longer present their data that way).
So as long as the sinker is below the trend you will lose, at some rate. You don’t have to be starving yourself unless you have a fetish, just stay below the trend line. When you have a spurt of enthusiasm you can drive yourself lower; when you are finding it hard, just try to stay below trend.
That's not enough, the energy will be provided by glycogen stored in muscles and fat stored in the liver and those will be restored quickly. What happens if you do a 3000 calorie bike tour is the interesting question.
Exercising raises metabolism at least during during the exercise (anything different would be a physical nonsense) - the issue is not exercising enough.
>It's basic CICO, from having skimmed it. The problem is this type of diet has the greatest likelihood of failing.
I couldn't disagree more. THD is not really a diet, it just explains the baseline facts of weight loss and enables you to choose whatever diet that works for you. It takes the mystery out of it. You may gain weight one week and lose weight the next, but you will know why.
The hackers diet makes a very convincing argument that any diet that works is in fact "CICO in disguise". The key point being that "Calories in" is not whatever is printed on the box, it is instead /what your body has absorbed from it/.
So for example when you eat 3000 calories of salmon in bearnaise sauce as part of your Atkins or whatever and you lose weight, clearly your body is not absorbing 3000 calories (for whatever reason). If you follow the hacks in THD you will discover this, and any other effect various foods have on /you/. It will also help you discover if a 400-calorie run actually works for you or not.
I am very thankful to Mr Walker for writing THD. He gave me the tools to "fix myself" when I notice that I have put on a few, and I have used those tools successfully many times.
> The problem is this type of diet has the greatest likelihood of failing. CICO is hard to maintain.
CICO is hard for people who are fat or who will become fat. It is not true it is hard. It is poor impulse control, not lack of willpower.
> There is scant to zero literature to suggest exercising raises metabolism. Recent research by Herman Pontzer shows the opposite, that calories burned with exercise are negated later through lowered BMR and NEAT. So if you do a 400-calorie run and then eat a 400 calorie cookie, you will still get a net 400 gain, or close to it.
Nonsense, this is a lie to make obese people not exercise. Anyone who has exercised knows this is fake news. By perpetrating fake "science" you are also a source of demotivating people to improve. It is disgusting to post this. Look at a runner, your fake "science" busted. The Hadza are as genetically removed from other humans as possible (including their distance from other African peoples).
>There's a lot of nonsense floating around regarding exercise and weight control. The only way to lose weight is to eat less than your body burns. Period. Exercising causes your body to burn more, but few people have the time or inclination to exercise enough to make a big difference. An hour of jogging is worth about one Cheese Whopper. Now, are you going to really spend an hour on the road every day just to burn off that extra burger?
He is wrong and very wrong at that, while stating something that is factually correct. This is like telling a man that he is poor because he earns too little and spends too much - "see it's simple arithmetic" is the stand take by someone who does not know all the variable.
Most geeky types personalities are like that - they completely fail to realize or appreciate the enormous complexities of biological systems and think that they can model a biological system in their spreadsheets or formulas.
Anyone else feel a little weird reading the section about exercise?
> You exercise because you'll live longer and you'll feel better.
It's a little depressing that despite a good diet and exercise, he had a slightly shorter than average lifespan. When I put in the effort to eat well and exercise, I know I certainly have the mindset that it will extend my life. I hope that at the least he felt strong and healthy.
Long before I had heard of Autodesk, I came across John Walker's site in the late 90s because he was the author of Speak Freely, an early Internet voice chat program.
Speak Freely was the best, and saved me literally thousands of dollars when I was a post-doc in Australia and my fiancee was still in Canada. I once used it to help with an interview of wearable computing pioneer Steve Mann and an Australian journalist and had to fix an endianess issue to do it.
I loved that language. I actually forked it, used it for a lot of stuff, bloated it (started by just trying to port to x86-64, ended up with a mini-FORTH with regexes, FFI to C, etc.). I still use it every day, though mostly for doing math in hex.
Another atlast fan here. I used it as an extension language for SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) and wrote games for the GP2X handheld in a Forth-like language. Everything should be scriptable.
This snippet is amazing and hilarious at the same time:
>The game has changed. In 1977 this business was fun—the sellers and buyers were hotshot techies like
ourselves, everybody spoke the same language and knew what was going on, and technical excellence was
recognised and rewarded. Today, the microcomputer industry is run by middle manager types who know far
more about P/L statements than they do RAM organization. They are the people who determine whether you succeed or fail, and their evaluations are seldom based on technical qualities. Hence, the first thing any venture in this field has to be is businesslike.
I felt that way in the early 90s with PCs programming and late 90's with the Internet. Once the "suits" take over, things get boring for us techies.
> Once the "suits" take over, things get boring for us techies.
To be fair, "suits" are a sign of success and growth. Once your company is large enough to be just a single team, and starts requiring too much time to keep track of all things happening and what each employee thinks and does, managing becomes a dedicated job and delegating management requires dedicated managers.
Also, I think that point of view is through rose-colored glasses. One circle of hell is comprised of being managed by an awkward antisocial techie.
Although rare, there are managers who are both technically competent and good at managing people (disparate skillsets). I think a manager who knows nothing about tech is often as destructive as a technical manager who's bad at people management. There just seems to be more of the former
I would say that if someone is supposedly good at people or managing, but bad at tech and therefore bad at managing tech, then they are not good at people or managing.
Rose or not. The current future of suits letting go of valuable talent to get a 0.2% higher quarterly earnings statement sure doesn't appeal to me. At least if some power hungry techy rants at me there's usually some technical fault I made instead of simply being a pawn on the board. There's nothing to learn or reflect on in a layoff.
I've read it at least twice over the years and its descriptions of hard-learned lessons, sales tactics, product decisions, hiring, management structures, internationalization, funding, dealing with partnerships, and chasing and reaching break-even are very much applicable to today's startups. Some paragraphs in the book even sound like PG whispered advice in John's ear but obviously the rise of Autodesk predates YC by decades.
It still is. Any serious CAD user knows that there’s nothing that comes quite close to AutoCAD after all these years (even with all the pork introduced by new developers).
One of my earliest "big" gigs for good money was a mid 80's use of the newly released AutoLisp(?) to generate non standard (for the day) engineering forms for computational analysis.
The architects made a bit of a wild sketch for a big international mega millions build contract, the engineering crowd made it work - the architects got a fancy award, we got a thank you bread and cheese thing with drinks.
Perhaps, but certainly consistent. John was famously not a fan of large government, be it the USSR, the USofA, or the EU - a believer in small government and prepared to sell merch to just that end.
I guess it's tongue in cheek, and it is funny, but some of what is written is a bit weird.
"anti-democratic ... empire at the expense of the natural rights, individual liberty, local autonomy, and cultural diversity which made Europe the wellspring of Western civilisation."
Firstly, I wouldn't call Mesopotamia and the eastern Med Europe exactly.
Secondly, lot of cultural and scientific advances that did happen in Europe were under (among others) the Roman, Holy Roman, British and Spanish Empires, which are exactly what he is against!
It's also weird that he thinks the EU "began to sprout" in 2003, a decade after Maastrict.
Latin and Greek are both successors to the Phoenician alphabet. The Phoenicians settled parts of modern day Europe and brought their alphabet and other technologies that they inherited from Mesopotamian civs. The Greeks would have been nowhere without Babylonian maths and astrology.
West and East is very grey though. I've made a distinction that I'm happy with, and pointed out why I'm not happy with John's.
It seems like satire today given what's happened in the last 10 years but given it was published 2003, he was well ahead of the times and possibly writing with tongue in cheek, even if he did believe the thrust of it
I remember discovering his website in the mid 90's and immediately falling in love with all the random stuff he had. I had an early laptop back then and took it to my high school astronomy club meetups loaded with his astronomy software. We were able to use it to help us point this giant clunky telescope and immediately I saw what the future would be like with portable computing.
I emailed him once ( without knowing who he was ) about an issue with his JavaScrypt tool. Super down to earth. His website is so unpretentious I didn't realize he was the founder of Autodesk.
AutoCAD is a transformative product and one that really helped me appreciate good software design (albeit only seeing it through AutoCAD’s commandline and AutoLISP). Autodesk has lost a legend and his legacy will live on.
It really was. It replaced manual drafting. Drawing revision before AutoCAD involved maintaining a master drawing and updating it manually with pencils and erasers. Final drawings were inked in. Copies were made by running master drawings through a blueprint machine. When there were too many revisions, someone had to redraw the drawing by hand, and the copy had to be checked by hand by a checker.
There were CAD systems before AutoCAD, but they either required a more expensive computer than an PC, or they couldn't handle a drawing too big for memory. The big innovation in AutoCAD is that it had a paging system for working on drawings too big for the machine. The code was paged in and out in segments. The drawing was paged in and out in sections.
(I did some of the early AutoCAD ports to non-IBM PCs. Compatibility hadn't been established yet. Everything needed a driver. AutoCAD had "more drivers than Yellow Cab" at one point.)
On balance, CAD has improved the industry for sure. But, because I'm old enough to yell at clouds, I would like to point out the flip side.
In manual drafting days, changes were hard, as you note. But because of that, there was a LOT more pre-planning, because once you start putting the Koh-I-Noor to mylar, changes were difficult. So you avoided them whenever possible. Architects had to sit down with owners and say, "look, past this point, you don't get to make changes, at least not for free."
Now, buildings are quite often designed-by-addenda. The due date is just a date. You get extra time to actually "finish" the job by issuing massive addendums prior to bid. And because of that, architects don't make owners sit down and tell them everything, so you'll get A/V or finishes or whatever really, really late in the design phase. "No problem, we'll fix it by addendum."
I am also a bit sad that drafting skills have died out somewhat. I've seen some really, really beautiful bluelines. I've heard of electrical engineers who would make smiley-faces with their homerun arrows. And the process of manual lettering is very zen, and teaches people spatial awareness like nothing else.
All that said, man alive, I love AutoCAD. Embedding Lisp in the program was amazing. The modern thing is now Revit, which has some good things going for it as well, but it is not (and may never be) anywhere near ACAD for a lot of work. RIP John.
AutoLISP was put in because it was a memory-safe interpreter. Allowing users to extend AutoCAD with C would have created a debugging nightmare. AutoLISP could detect its own errors without crashing AutoCAD. LISP was the only game in town back then for interpreters which could deal with variable-sized data.
AutoCAD users were not programmers. Computer knowledge was not widespread. Keeping users from losing their drawing files, a major long-term asset, was crucial to product acceptance.
There was a strong "don't screw up" ethos within Autodesk. Much of that came from the founders, who were mostly mainframe operating system programmers.
Interesting. As I recall, we never thought of the paging as a big innovation: just what had to be done in order to do anything in a memory space of 128K bytes. You can bet that it presented an interesting challenge in adding the UNDO feature to the existing system. BTW it seems to me that AutoCAD never got much recognition for its technical innovations. One very early example: It was almost certainly the very first program which could run equally well with or without the 8087 floating-point chip (ahem - except for speed!), needing no special user configuration or anything. Credit where credit is due: Not a Walker idea, but an inspiration of one of the unsung super-hackers among the original crew.
When steve jobs died people were leaving post its and mementos at my local apple stote… which were promptly removed. Corporations are completely sociopathic
I first heard of his passing in an email from an guy I knew from the olden days at Autodesk. He was passing on an inquiry from Carl Bass (CEO in the first years of the century). Took a couple of days to find a solid answer, which came from a Swiss site that John had posted to in recent years.
BTW, neither the SF Chronicle nor the local Marin paper, San Rafael Independent-Journal, has run an item on this; nor did either evince any interest when I sent them the news. It hardly needs mentioning that Autodesk is very well known in Marin County.
The lack of public notice on the Autodesk site is rather odd; the company management in this century has had nothing like the contempt for the founders that prevailed in the Bartz regime.
Since I came across it in its very early days, for nearly three decades the fourmilab.ch site has been the one constant in my weblife. Treasure trove of projects and ideas and book suggestions. Eclectic is the word which pops up in my head right now and insists on being used.
Had a few email exchanges with the man himself. On randomness, on English grammar, on Swedish adventures in The Thirty Years' War, on certain politics (where we didn't necessarily see eye to eye but where there was plenty of room for civilised discussion). Unfailingly polite, informative, entertaining, and of course with cognitive ressources most of us can only dream of.
John Walker, thanks for all the effort and the inspiration. I shall miss your presence.
Your complaints about modern Autodesk seem inappropriate in someone's memorial thread given that Walker appears to have nothing to do with the valid points your raised, and likely was against them.
Walker resigned from Autodesk in 1994, and stepped down as chair years before then.
For one, around 2000 he thought "the emergence of viable international OpenSource alternatives to commercial software seemed to guarantee that control over computers and Internet was beyond the reach of any government or software vendor—any attempt to mandate restrictions in commercial software would only make OpenSource alternatives more compelling and accelerate their general adoption."
I dunno what to say mate but what a horrible thing to comment especially when he left in 1994. I knew John from the early demoscene and he was an exceptional engineer, friendly, opinionated but always trying to help.
I cold called him one day and despite my having been a rando he took the time to help me out.
His relaxed view on learning foreign languages (along the lines of "as long as you avoid having tonnes of manure dumped in your front yard, you're doing OK") was also very helpful!
I have benefited from his "The Hackers Diet" book - https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ and his numerous book reviews. He was one of persons who inspired me with his voracious reading habit. It was unbelievable to me first. He also led his life in his own way, with not many knowing that he was the founder of Autodesk. He will remain an inspiration to hackers.
This past weekend I noticed I've been logging my weight daily on his site (it does a 10 day weighted running average) since 2006. I was thinking of sending him an email thanking him for the help he provided me. So, a strange coincidence. RIP.
If you mean The Hacker's Diet, then yes. It's just a way of doing CICO and weight tracking (+ smoothing to avoid demotivating wild fluctuations), so yes.
Yes, but it's not articulated in detail why and how it works.
It's a good start, and for many it will help - hell, it did help me just by putting it down in clear numbers that ultimately calorie deficit is the crucial thing.
> it's not articulated in detail why and how it works
Answering that is a very long and fascinating deep dive in human biology with plenty of unknowns. I wouldn't even try to summarise as I myself am nowhere near knowledgeable enough on the topic. For myself, I've noticed that maintaining a calorie deficit is simply easier if it's a regular meal and then no meal than if it's two half meals.
I can go for days without eating and not think about it too much - but as soon as I start eating, I become obsessed with food and cannot stop. So if I just eat dinner, there's not enough time left in the day to overeat.
Reduction of meal count definitely helps in maintaining caloric deficit, and even more if like me, you're insulin-resistant.
Trying to do classic '5 meals a day', no matter their size, ensured I'd end up with completely out of whack blood sugar driving me into cravings that ensured there was no weight loss, but weight gain.
I hope those who take care of John's affairs will find a way to preserve fourmilab.ch (although the Wayback Machine is already doing the job, too) – although the site's still up, I worry that some direct debit will fail...
I saw his article on reversing myopia and followed his advice to this day; I hope he doesn't mind me sharing his suggestions!
"I think the next time I go for new glasses, I'll skip the
progressives (which are extremely expensive) and just get
reading/computer and driving glasses, each fixed-corrected to
the appropriate distance. This will probably cut the cost in
half, and I find that when I'm travelling and wearing the
progressives, I usually just push them down my nose to read
rather than trying to read through the lower part, which is
pretty wonky (this may have something to do with my astigmatism
correction)."
amazing human taking time answering rando emails from the internet.
world would be infinitely better with more like him.
The world's changed since then. If you go to the right online glasses providers, you can get progressives for much less (<half) than the cost of a pair of single power glasses in a high street store.
i.e. I'm near sighted now (need reading glasses) and have astigamatism (I've always had that but until I needed reading glasses I never bothered with glasses so my brain has adapted, if I wear lenses that correct for the astigmatism everything looks the wrong shape for quite a while before eyes adjust then when I don't wear them everything looks the wrong shape but the other way so in the end I just went for glasses for close vision work (screen/reading) since that was less bothersome than "fixing" a problem that isn't really a problem).
I'm in the same situation. Astigmatism and really mild myopia all my life (got glasses but never really used them).
My eyes got really tired a year ago and I got glasses for short distances. But now they got much worse and I think I'll have to order new lenses.
I was thinking about progressives but it looks like a lot of people have issues adapting. Since my myopia continues low, I think I'll just focus on the reading glasses for now.
I got dramatical improvement in my myopia over a few months time when I switched to a Paleo-ish diet, drastically cutting sugar and supplementing with vitamins including luteine.
I no longer needed my glasses to drive or go to the movies. Granted it was only -1 but still.
Now a decade on, my diet isn't so clean any more, far away details are somewhat blurry but still better than they used to be. The biggest impact is the amount of sleep I had the night before.
Progressive's are the highest margin lens for both the retail store and the manufacturers (Essilor, Zeiss, Hoya, Rodenstock, etc). By putting a fancy curve on the back of a lens a $1 piece of plastic is transformed into a $500 piece of plastic. There is a lot of pressure to sell progressives. Without the high margins on progressive lenses many optical retail stores would not make a profit.
Progressives are fine as long as they aren't being sold as a lens for all situations. For example a lens that would be good for driving or playing golf (using mostly distance vision) would be terrible for sitting at a desk (using mostly the reading area). Depending on your lifestyle there may or may not be a design available that is less annoying than just changing glasses. Bifocals are even more limited in this respect. This trade-off is not related at all to the issue of adaptation which is something else.
So the first question you have to ask is if having both a distance and reading Rx in the same lens is something that is better for you compared to separate distance and reading glasses. My monitors are at head height so simple reading glasses are the best solution for me when working at my desk. If I wore progressives with this setup I would have to tilt my head back in order to view my monitors through the reading area of the lens which is at the bottom of the lens. If I instead worked on a notebook computer all day, looking down at a screen, then viewing that screen through the reading area of my glasses wouldn't be a problem.
I'm currently wearing a pair of fancy fully personalised progressives that retail for £2000 a pair but I still use some cheapish reading glasses for working at my desk. However to be fair to the progressives I adapted to them just about instantly; the design just wasn't suited for reading for long periods of time.
The adaptation issue is another issue and another thing you should consider. Adaptation refers to the ability to become accustomed to the distortion that often exists at the edges of progressive lenses. They can make you feel a bit dizzy when you first wear them. The general rule of thumb is that if you have a small "add" then it will be easy to adapt to them but if you have a large add it may be difficult.
If your add is small now and don't see the point of progressives but are thinking of trying them later as your near vision deteriorates you may want to consider starting on them early just to make it easier to adapt to them later. Otherwise you might get stuck with bifocals which make you look old.
Anyway if I had to boil that advice down to just a few quick points I'd say:
- If you're planning on using the glasses just for working at a desk then I would just get reading glasses (that also correct your astigmatism).
- For other situations where you need both distance and reading then progressives can be nice.
- If you're not quite sure about progressives but think you'll definitely want them later in life then it is better to start on them now.
- If you're buying online I would only get single vision lenses. To get a nice fit for progressives you need to get a bunch of stuff measured that doesn't get put on your prescription.
It also depends on how old you are and how bad your presbyopia is (the condition where it's hard to flex your lenses and so change focus from near to far). Progressives are great if you do have this condition - I have a Costco membership largely to get cheaper glasses for this reason...
Is that 2000 British pounds sterling? That seems high?
In the US I paid $300 for glasses with progressive lenses and my eye insurance covered the whole cost -- Many US eye insurance carriers pay for a new pair of glasses aevery two years.
My progressives work fine and it only takes about 1 day to adjust to them.
Yes they are that expensive (although I didn't pay anything for them). The price you paid is definitely more typical. I adapted to mine quickly too I just don't like them very much.
Zeiss & Hoya make good lenses. Both also have expertise in photography equipment and they have their own coatings, so they're also a plus. Their lenses might not come cheap, though.
I also used Japanese Tora and French Essilor Crizal lenses (cylindrical, not progressives), and they had good resolution with superb coatings.
Currently I'm using a domestic lens with blue filter, and my eyes are happier than ever.
My mother uses progressives. A bad progressive is a life quality reducing expense, so paying the price for a good lens pays in dividends over the short and long run.
Last two sets of glasses I got were progressives from zennioptical.com. You have to be happy to fit the glasses yourself (worked okay for me), but I've been happy with the quality of the hardware and the quality of vision and fit. The last pair I bought was in 2020 and I'm still wearing them all the time. All up cost was US$108 including frames with progressive lenses, high refractive index plastic, oleophobic coating and delivery. I'm about -6 with an astigmatism in both eyes.
In the end he recommends if you need cataract surgery, i.e. a lens replacement, to get a lens focused at reading distance. Note that there is progress being made on accommodating implantable ocular lenses (also called variable-focus) which can shift their focus similar to your natural lens. I'm personally keeping an eye out on these guys https://ocumetics.com/ .
This is interesting, I'm going through an internal debate about what type of lense to go with for cataract surgery. The latest progressive lenses or just correct for distance and wear reading glasses for close in work. I've come to the same conclusion, better to go with single lense, rather than the progressives.
Progressives just don't make sense to me. I have a pair of computer glasses, and a pair of bike riding glasses, and I never ride my bike while using the computer. So why would I want to have 50% of my vision blurry at all times?
I got bifocals for driving, so that I could read the gps when necessary. Turns out it's not really very useful because it's hard to "glance" that the gps and get it in the right area of my vision to use the "reading" part of the glasses. I wouldn't do it again. That being said, having the "reading" part of the glasses doesn't negatively impact my using them for distance, so I could see the benefit of the bifocal just so you always have the reading part available without needing a second pair of glasses.
To the best of my knowledge, bifocals are just progressives with a distinct line where the prescription changes; instead of having an area where it "transitions". They look archaic (social concerns, if you care about that kind of thing) in exchange for not having a whole area of the lens that isn't usable at all.
>> amazing human taking time answering rando emails from the internet.
Life tip: Most people will do that if your email is about something they are interested in and (most importantly) they have time. Celebrities are usually off the table (no time for all the fan email), but this guy is "just" a retired engineer who made a big product and a lot of money. You were also asking about some side interest of his, so I would almost expect a response.
Be polite and fairly concise (brief, they don't need your life story out the gate) on a topic of interest to them and most people will respond positively.
>is "just" a retired engineer who made a big product and a lot of money.
Gernerally those 2 go hand in hand. You make something well known and they get dozens of emails a day about advice, business deals, the usual spam, and more.
just over 10yrs and my prescription used to get steadily worse due to the 20/20 power yet I stare at the screen (arms length) a lot. I was -4.75 and is now -4.25 I'm just happy it didn't progress into -10 arena. I have 3 pairs of glasses one for everyday (short distance), one for driving, and one sunglasses also for driving.
235 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 315 ms ] threadThanks for posting these.
I was hoping the second post would be "expected to make a full recovery", but unfortunately no.
> Measured run time in seconds should be divided by 400000 to normalise for reporting results. For archival results, adjust iteration count so the benchmark runs about five minutes.
so it ran for 246 seconds (almost 5 minutes) and the normalized result is:
0.000617025
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker%27s_Diet
I should do that again actually. Gained some weight during COVID.
* He was an engineer's engineer, and when his company became successful, the impression I got was that he stayed one.
* The Hacker's Diet is a good example - approaching weight loss as a problem to be solved the same as any other: by learning what's known about it and using empiricism and data.
* As far as I can tell, at some point he decided he had achieved all the money he needed so he went off to Switzerland and became a sort of mad scientist, pursuing whatever interested him for the rest of his life. Including things like the hotbits random number generator, where he installed a radiation source in his basement and used it to serve random bits up via a public web API.
None of us are perfect, and it's best not to know too much about one's heroes, so I didn't. I looked up to the John Walker in my mind as the person I want to be when I grow up, and this sad news hits hard.
Some of the stuff is possibly wrong, like this
There's a lot of nonsense floating around regarding exercise and weight control. The only way to lose weight is to eat less than your body burns. Period. Exercising causes your body to burn more, but few people have the time or inclination to exercise enough to make a big difference. An hour of jogging is worth about one Cheese Whopper. Now, are you going to really spend an hour on the road every day just to burn off that extra burger?
There is scant to zero literature to suggest exercising raises metabolism. Recent research by Herman Pontzer shows the opposite, that calories burned with exercise are negated later through lowered BMR and NEAT. So if you do a 400-calorie run and then eat a 400 calorie cookie, you will still get a net 400 gain, or close to it.
I haven't read Herman Pontzer's recent research, I'd equate to becoming a more efficient runner; as efficiency increases energy demands are reduced.
Some of today's research just didn't exist when this was written. Of course, some of the advice was already debatable by the time I got to read it in the mid-late 00's, but that can be said for a lot of health and fitness advice even today.
I didn't follow it proscriptively. What it did do was give me a different approach to tackling it as a problem and was the first resource I had read that helped in that regard. Everything else was very much eat less of this and more of that
Like thread's asking which book/resource to use when learning to code, there are many good examples out there. Not all are perfect, and some are occasionally wrong but like that example, this was the one that stuck with me.
I was reviewing HD a few years ago to see if it still held up against current, prevailing wisdom and noticed this. Kind of blew my mind.
You could achieve a constant NEAT by having a daily step goal or some prescribed amount of activities outside your exercise routine. I am supposed to do 2 hours of exercise per day plus give or take 10K steps. This can easily make me extremely active by American standard.
Now, surely your BMR will compensate, but probably only to a certain point.
In the end, it's probably easier to just eat healthy and eat less rather than trying to increase your caloric expenditure, but that's also rather hard to do for a variety of reasons.
The key difference, for nerd hackers, is the floater/sinker graph and the average. Some apps do this these days, though it seems to be less common than it was a few years ago (e.g. Withings and Apple no longer present their data that way).
So as long as the sinker is below the trend you will lose, at some rate. You don’t have to be starving yourself unless you have a fetish, just stay below the trend line. When you have a spurt of enthusiasm you can drive yourself lower; when you are finding it hard, just try to stay below trend.
It’s a manual form of gamification.
That's not enough, the energy will be provided by glycogen stored in muscles and fat stored in the liver and those will be restored quickly. What happens if you do a 3000 calorie bike tour is the interesting question.
Exercising raises metabolism at least during during the exercise (anything different would be a physical nonsense) - the issue is not exercising enough.
I couldn't disagree more. THD is not really a diet, it just explains the baseline facts of weight loss and enables you to choose whatever diet that works for you. It takes the mystery out of it. You may gain weight one week and lose weight the next, but you will know why.
The hackers diet makes a very convincing argument that any diet that works is in fact "CICO in disguise". The key point being that "Calories in" is not whatever is printed on the box, it is instead /what your body has absorbed from it/.
So for example when you eat 3000 calories of salmon in bearnaise sauce as part of your Atkins or whatever and you lose weight, clearly your body is not absorbing 3000 calories (for whatever reason). If you follow the hacks in THD you will discover this, and any other effect various foods have on /you/. It will also help you discover if a 400-calorie run actually works for you or not.
I am very thankful to Mr Walker for writing THD. He gave me the tools to "fix myself" when I notice that I have put on a few, and I have used those tools successfully many times.
CICO is hard for people who are fat or who will become fat. It is not true it is hard. It is poor impulse control, not lack of willpower.
> There is scant to zero literature to suggest exercising raises metabolism. Recent research by Herman Pontzer shows the opposite, that calories burned with exercise are negated later through lowered BMR and NEAT. So if you do a 400-calorie run and then eat a 400 calorie cookie, you will still get a net 400 gain, or close to it.
Nonsense, this is a lie to make obese people not exercise. Anyone who has exercised knows this is fake news. By perpetrating fake "science" you are also a source of demotivating people to improve. It is disgusting to post this. Look at a runner, your fake "science" busted. The Hadza are as genetically removed from other humans as possible (including their distance from other African peoples).
>There's a lot of nonsense floating around regarding exercise and weight control. The only way to lose weight is to eat less than your body burns. Period. Exercising causes your body to burn more, but few people have the time or inclination to exercise enough to make a big difference. An hour of jogging is worth about one Cheese Whopper. Now, are you going to really spend an hour on the road every day just to burn off that extra burger?
He is wrong and very wrong at that, while stating something that is factually correct. This is like telling a man that he is poor because he earns too little and spends too much - "see it's simple arithmetic" is the stand take by someone who does not know all the variable.
Most geeky types personalities are like that - they completely fail to realize or appreciate the enormous complexities of biological systems and think that they can model a biological system in their spreadsheets or formulas.
https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/introduction.html
> You exercise because you'll live longer and you'll feel better.
It's a little depressing that despite a good diet and exercise, he had a slightly shorter than average lifespan. When I put in the effort to eat well and exercise, I know I certainly have the mindset that it will extend my life. I hope that at the least he felt strong and healthy.
https://www.fourmilab.ch/atlast/
Rest in peace.
>The game has changed. In 1977 this business was fun—the sellers and buyers were hotshot techies like ourselves, everybody spoke the same language and knew what was going on, and technical excellence was recognised and rewarded. Today, the microcomputer industry is run by middle manager types who know far more about P/L statements than they do RAM organization. They are the people who determine whether you succeed or fail, and their evaluations are seldom based on technical qualities. Hence, the first thing any venture in this field has to be is businesslike.
I felt that way in the early 90s with PCs programming and late 90's with the Internet. Once the "suits" take over, things get boring for us techies.
To be fair, "suits" are a sign of success and growth. Once your company is large enough to be just a single team, and starts requiring too much time to keep track of all things happening and what each employee thinks and does, managing becomes a dedicated job and delegating management requires dedicated managers.
Also, I think that point of view is through rose-colored glasses. One circle of hell is comprised of being managed by an awkward antisocial techie.
And heaven is, competent techies, who know and trust each other and know the mission - and need not being managed.
Must be a common pattern in tech.
I never saw early autocad, here's demo https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Apb5ayyCHaE
One of my earliest "big" gigs for good money was a mid 80's use of the newly released AutoLisp(?) to generate non standard (for the day) engineering forms for computational analysis.
The architects made a bit of a wild sketch for a big international mega millions build contract, the engineering crowd made it work - the architects got a fancy award, we got a thank you bread and cheese thing with drinks.
(And paid .. that counts.)
R.I.P. John Walker - https://www.fourmilab.ch/evilempire/
"anti-democratic ... empire at the expense of the natural rights, individual liberty, local autonomy, and cultural diversity which made Europe the wellspring of Western civilisation."
Firstly, I wouldn't call Mesopotamia and the eastern Med Europe exactly.
Secondly, lot of cultural and scientific advances that did happen in Europe were under (among others) the Roman, Holy Roman, British and Spanish Empires, which are exactly what he is against!
It's also weird that he thinks the EU "began to sprout" in 2003, a decade after Maastrict.
West and East is very grey though. I've made a distinction that I'm happy with, and pointed out why I'm not happy with John's.
What do you think?
His main website is really fantastic, well worth a visit: https://www.fourmilab.ch/
It really was. It replaced manual drafting. Drawing revision before AutoCAD involved maintaining a master drawing and updating it manually with pencils and erasers. Final drawings were inked in. Copies were made by running master drawings through a blueprint machine. When there were too many revisions, someone had to redraw the drawing by hand, and the copy had to be checked by hand by a checker.
There were CAD systems before AutoCAD, but they either required a more expensive computer than an PC, or they couldn't handle a drawing too big for memory. The big innovation in AutoCAD is that it had a paging system for working on drawings too big for the machine. The code was paged in and out in segments. The drawing was paged in and out in sections.
(I did some of the early AutoCAD ports to non-IBM PCs. Compatibility hadn't been established yet. Everything needed a driver. AutoCAD had "more drivers than Yellow Cab" at one point.)
In manual drafting days, changes were hard, as you note. But because of that, there was a LOT more pre-planning, because once you start putting the Koh-I-Noor to mylar, changes were difficult. So you avoided them whenever possible. Architects had to sit down with owners and say, "look, past this point, you don't get to make changes, at least not for free."
Now, buildings are quite often designed-by-addenda. The due date is just a date. You get extra time to actually "finish" the job by issuing massive addendums prior to bid. And because of that, architects don't make owners sit down and tell them everything, so you'll get A/V or finishes or whatever really, really late in the design phase. "No problem, we'll fix it by addendum."
I am also a bit sad that drafting skills have died out somewhat. I've seen some really, really beautiful bluelines. I've heard of electrical engineers who would make smiley-faces with their homerun arrows. And the process of manual lettering is very zen, and teaches people spatial awareness like nothing else.
All that said, man alive, I love AutoCAD. Embedding Lisp in the program was amazing. The modern thing is now Revit, which has some good things going for it as well, but it is not (and may never be) anywhere near ACAD for a lot of work. RIP John.
AutoCAD users were not programmers. Computer knowledge was not widespread. Keeping users from losing their drawing files, a major long-term asset, was crucial to product acceptance. There was a strong "don't screw up" ethos within Autodesk. Much of that came from the founders, who were mostly mainframe operating system programmers.
Had a few email exchanges with the man himself. On randomness, on English grammar, on Swedish adventures in The Thirty Years' War, on certain politics (where we didn't necessarily see eye to eye but where there was plenty of room for civilised discussion). Unfailingly polite, informative, entertaining, and of course with cognitive ressources most of us can only dream of.
John Walker, thanks for all the effort and the inspiration. I shall miss your presence.
Walker resigned from Autodesk in 1994, and stepped down as chair years before then.
A quick read of his 2003 "The Digital Imprimatur" at https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ tells me he didn't like these changes either.
For one, around 2000 he thought "the emergence of viable international OpenSource alternatives to commercial software seemed to guarantee that control over computers and Internet was beyond the reach of any government or software vendor—any attempt to mandate restrictions in commercial software would only make OpenSource alternatives more compelling and accelerate their general adoption."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39300605
His relaxed view on learning foreign languages (along the lines of "as long as you avoid having tonnes of manure dumped in your front yard, you're doing OK") was also very helpful!
Yes, but it's very barebones basics of calorie deficit calculations, and do not take into account (very individual) differences across the day.
It's a good start, and for many it will help - hell, it did help me just by putting it down in clear numbers that ultimately calorie deficit is the crucial thing.
Answering that is a very long and fascinating deep dive in human biology with plenty of unknowns. I wouldn't even try to summarise as I myself am nowhere near knowledgeable enough on the topic. For myself, I've noticed that maintaining a calorie deficit is simply easier if it's a regular meal and then no meal than if it's two half meals.
That's why it works for me.
Trying to do classic '5 meals a day', no matter their size, ensured I'd end up with completely out of whack blood sugar driving me into cravings that ensured there was no weight loss, but weight gain.
It is oasis in the midst of all the internet cacophony and I'm glad to 'it's being taken of'
https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/?chapter=chapter2_99
Fake news always gonna fake, eh?
1992!
"I think the next time I go for new glasses, I'll skip the progressives (which are extremely expensive) and just get reading/computer and driving glasses, each fixed-corrected to the appropriate distance. This will probably cut the cost in half, and I find that when I'm travelling and wearing the progressives, I usually just push them down my nose to read rather than trying to read through the lower part, which is pretty wonky (this may have something to do with my astigmatism correction)."
amazing human taking time answering rando emails from the internet. world would be infinitely better with more like him.
i.e. I'm near sighted now (need reading glasses) and have astigamatism (I've always had that but until I needed reading glasses I never bothered with glasses so my brain has adapted, if I wear lenses that correct for the astigmatism everything looks the wrong shape for quite a while before eyes adjust then when I don't wear them everything looks the wrong shape but the other way so in the end I just went for glasses for close vision work (screen/reading) since that was less bothersome than "fixing" a problem that isn't really a problem).
My eyes got really tired a year ago and I got glasses for short distances. But now they got much worse and I think I'll have to order new lenses.
I was thinking about progressives but it looks like a lot of people have issues adapting. Since my myopia continues low, I think I'll just focus on the reading glasses for now.
Any advice welcome.
I no longer needed my glasses to drive or go to the movies. Granted it was only -1 but still.
Now a decade on, my diet isn't so clean any more, far away details are somewhat blurry but still better than they used to be. The biggest impact is the amount of sleep I had the night before.
Progressives are fine as long as they aren't being sold as a lens for all situations. For example a lens that would be good for driving or playing golf (using mostly distance vision) would be terrible for sitting at a desk (using mostly the reading area). Depending on your lifestyle there may or may not be a design available that is less annoying than just changing glasses. Bifocals are even more limited in this respect. This trade-off is not related at all to the issue of adaptation which is something else.
So the first question you have to ask is if having both a distance and reading Rx in the same lens is something that is better for you compared to separate distance and reading glasses. My monitors are at head height so simple reading glasses are the best solution for me when working at my desk. If I wore progressives with this setup I would have to tilt my head back in order to view my monitors through the reading area of the lens which is at the bottom of the lens. If I instead worked on a notebook computer all day, looking down at a screen, then viewing that screen through the reading area of my glasses wouldn't be a problem.
I'm currently wearing a pair of fancy fully personalised progressives that retail for £2000 a pair but I still use some cheapish reading glasses for working at my desk. However to be fair to the progressives I adapted to them just about instantly; the design just wasn't suited for reading for long periods of time.
The adaptation issue is another issue and another thing you should consider. Adaptation refers to the ability to become accustomed to the distortion that often exists at the edges of progressive lenses. They can make you feel a bit dizzy when you first wear them. The general rule of thumb is that if you have a small "add" then it will be easy to adapt to them but if you have a large add it may be difficult.
If your add is small now and don't see the point of progressives but are thinking of trying them later as your near vision deteriorates you may want to consider starting on them early just to make it easier to adapt to them later. Otherwise you might get stuck with bifocals which make you look old.
Anyway if I had to boil that advice down to just a few quick points I'd say:
- If you're planning on using the glasses just for working at a desk then I would just get reading glasses (that also correct your astigmatism).
- For other situations where you need both distance and reading then progressives can be nice.
- If you're not quite sure about progressives but think you'll definitely want them later in life then it is better to start on them now.
- If you're buying online I would only get single vision lenses. To get a nice fit for progressives you need to get a bunch of stuff measured that doesn't get put on your prescription.
I also used Japanese Tora and French Essilor Crizal lenses (cylindrical, not progressives), and they had good resolution with superb coatings.
Currently I'm using a domestic lens with blue filter, and my eyes are happier than ever.
My mother uses progressives. A bad progressive is a life quality reducing expense, so paying the price for a good lens pays in dividends over the short and long run.
Last two sets of glasses I got were progressives from zennioptical.com. You have to be happy to fit the glasses yourself (worked okay for me), but I've been happy with the quality of the hardware and the quality of vision and fit. The last pair I bought was in 2020 and I'm still wearing them all the time. All up cost was US$108 including frames with progressive lenses, high refractive index plastic, oleophobic coating and delivery. I'm about -6 with an astigmatism in both eyes.
Where did you see it? I'd like to read it too.
To the best of my knowledge, bifocals are just progressives with a distinct line where the prescription changes; instead of having an area where it "transitions". They look archaic (social concerns, if you care about that kind of thing) in exchange for not having a whole area of the lens that isn't usable at all.
Life tip: Most people will do that if your email is about something they are interested in and (most importantly) they have time. Celebrities are usually off the table (no time for all the fan email), but this guy is "just" a retired engineer who made a big product and a lot of money. You were also asking about some side interest of his, so I would almost expect a response.
Be polite and fairly concise (brief, they don't need your life story out the gate) on a topic of interest to them and most people will respond positively.
>is "just" a retired engineer who made a big product and a lot of money.
Gernerally those 2 go hand in hand. You make something well known and they get dozens of emails a day about advice, business deals, the usual spam, and more.