Here is a little overview of the current most popular fitness influencers, and what you should know about them before listening to anything they say.

The Team

Alexander Bromley

Mike Israetel

Milo Wolf

Greg Doucette

Drug dealer with a loud mouth. Has an absolutely insane video editor.

His videos are 90% drama with some workout advice sprinkled on top. His workout advice is extrememly basic and generally good.

Do not listen to him concerning supplements, even if everything he sold worked, he is still very much in the game of peddling turk (which has never shown any efficacy).

Jeff Nippard

Lylo

Jeff Cavalier

The Conclusion

The last couple of weeks have been a whirl.

Recap

1. Solomon Nelson¹ has published a video essay tearing down Mike Israetel’s PhD thesis².

2. Using Milo Wolf³ as a mouthpiece, Mike has made a response video . Mike claims that Solomon has reviewed an old draft of the document. This draft was allegedly—by no one’s mistake— uploaded by Mike to the University’s servers. Milo has read an alleged “much later version” where most of the mistakes were corrected.

3. Jeff Nippard⁴ commented on Solomon’s critique with a truly ignorant comment:

   Bro was out here adding semicolons to mikes rough draft from 13 years ago thinking he did something

   – Jeff Nippard

4. Greg Doucette⁵ has chimed in (because of course he did) suspecting that the “much later draft” was a forgery.

5. It turned out that the “much later version” was indeed a forgery and was even older than the version that Solomon has reviewed. Mike Israetel admitted this himself in an Instagram post.

Why does this matter

We could dismiss what is happening here as your Tuesday YouTube drama. However, I think that it has some larger impact.

Sports science peer review is bottom of the barrel tier. The field is already criticised for poor studies due to small sample sizes and bad methodology, while needing to deal with extreme inter and intra subject variance Adding abysmal review standards and the “science” label evaporates.

Jeff Nippard’s behavior also makes it clear that scientific method plays a second fiddle to the protection of the group.

What I’m saying that sports science is useless.

What I’m going to do

With more studies are being published⁶ disproving previously touted methods for optimizing training⁷, I am going back to the tried and tested methods of bros. Yes, bros have won.

The new, revised, training recommendations

1. Consistency – Showing up day after day, month after month, year after year is the only way to build reasonable amount of muscle.

2. Technique – Can’t lift if you hurt yourself.

3. Close to Failure – In order to grow muscle, the training has to be challenging.

4. Volume – The more you train, the better the results. No top end has been found, keep your technique in check so you don’t get hurt.

That’s it. Everything else (e.g.: progressive overload) is corollary of these four basic steps

These are my notes on two videos by the writer Hilary Layne: Modern Heroes are Weak and Boring and Modern Villains are Pitiful and Impotent.

Both issues stem from the lack of objective morality in the worlds created by modern writers.

The concepts of Good and Evil in modern literature are based on how it makes the reader/writer feel. This makes them extremely malleable and ultimately meaningles.

Readers prefer anti-heroes because they are closer to the classical definition of a hero: “The main male protagonist of the piece”. Anti-heroes are closer to objective morality as they can act, whereas modern heroes can’t.

In this series we look at some foundational programming concepts. This is not a course about how to program in general. Rather we look into specific tools, what they represent, when should we use them, and also situations where they are not the right choice.

What is a Set

A set is a collection of elements that are unique.

From this definition we can figure out some interesting properties:

• Each element in a set will appear only once.
• Inserting an already existing element in a set does nothing.

A set is usually implemented using a binary tree or a hashmap. Although you don’t necessarily need to know what this means, it is important to know that this gives sets the following properties:

• Elements in a set must have a way to determine they are unique!
• It is very fast and cheap to:
  • Insert an element into a set.
  • Delete an element from a set.
  • Verify that a set contains an element.

What does it mean for an element to be unique?

In practice two elements are unique if they are not equal, i.e.: a != b.

This will depend on your language, but broadly speaking if your element is primitive (boolean, number or a string) then it just means that they are different.

When do I use a set

If your email had the most important part at the beginning; I would not have to summarize it using AI.

We put so much value of convenience, that we send signal to the younger generation that learning basic skills is a waste of time.