Skippable Personal History

I started lifting 10 years ago using the Starting Strength 5x5 iOS app¹. I would still recommend it for beginners.

Then when I switched programs to 6 day Push/Pull/Legs ², I switched to a paper notepad with just handwritten weights and reps like so:

Since my progression solely depended on the last time and the goal was to do “moar”, with a 6 day split it was easy, just flip 3 pages before and compare.

Eventually I started using multiple gyms, and didn’t have the notebook with me, so I switched to a long note in the Notes.app on iOS. There the comparison to previous time was more tedious, one had to scroll up and down.

Naturally I made an app. I started by making it an iOS app, but quickly abandoned that since I realized nobody will ever use it and I do not want to go through the review process.

Then I made it into a progressive web app.

You can find it here: https://apps.yozy.net/swolog/web

Note that I made this app for me. I am sharing it with the world since it is based on many open source contributions. I am licensing it under AGPLv3, but I provide no support, or would answer for any feature requests.

I bought this toothbrush almost exactly 4 years ago. It replaced my then 4 and a half years old Oral-B PRO 3000 toothbrush. Today, the Series 8s is dead, due to failed battery. This article is a little post-mortem, a review after the whole lifetime of the product.

Let us start with the good parts:

• The toothbrush cleans teeth well.
• The best feature is that the pressure sensor not only indicates when too much pressure is applied (all decent electric toothbrushes do this), but also indicates when you do not apply enough pressure.
• You can customize the color of the LED and it has RGB, which is always great.

However this is where the good parts end. The main problems with the device are:

• It is expensive, and so are the replacement brushes.
• Its smart features are pure gimmick: the position tracking does not work and nobody needs to track their brushing frequency.
• The travel pocket is way too small to actually fit the toothbrush properly.
• It gunks up easily.
• Too many brushing modes make the menu tedious to use.

The battery is so bad it merits its own paragraph. The toothbrush became unreliable after maybe two years of use. Randomly, in the morning it would drop charge from 100% to 0, suggesting faulty electronics. Even at its best it would not last through a 10 day trip.

Verdict

Do not buy this, and steer away from the iO line in general. Myself, I bought a newer model from the PRO series for two reasons:

• The battery in my old one still work and I use it when I go visit my parents.
• You can now get off-brand cheap (and ecological) brushes for the from The Humble Co.

We all know the “10x developer”. A person who walks into the office after lunch and codes until they get kicked out by the night guard. In the morning their colleagues wake up to a ton of pull requests that require “immediate attention”.

They write verbose code of poor quality. They consider rules to be roadblocks: coding conventions, DRY, separation of concerns… However they deliver features, fast.

Leadership praises them because they do deliver. They are branded ‘10x’ developer because they seemingly deliver more value to the company than 10 of their colleagues.

But do they?

These individuals will pump out features at breakneck pace until everything grinds to a halt because of the countless refactoring the project has to go through. Naturally they do not refactor the code themselves, or they do them with disregard of other people’s work.

Eventually the 10x developer leaves the project because they are frustrated by the slowing pace. The team takes the blame for failure, and the life goes on.

In short, being a 10x developer means borrowing time from the future by eschewing good practices.

And now we have AI¹

10x developers have been rare. After all, they needed to be proficient coders and have a strong work morale (if not ethic) to remain focused. If not for their ego and impatience, most would be excellent developers.

But with agentic AI anybody can be a 10x developer. That is: anybody can spew hundreds of lines of code that “do stuff”, and do not follow any rules.

I know this is a hot topic but LLMs in agentic mode absolutely can produce complex functional code all the way up to fully functional programs².

Agents make it stupidly easy to create interactive prototypes from nothing.

Herein lies the problem: The quality of the code they produce follows the quality of the prompt. The LLM does not know about your good practices, unless your documentation is in context and extremely explicit it will pull the general good practices for React developers even if you write a fuel pump controller in ADA.

You will end up with a horrible mess, that nevertheless works (and is of course full of bugs). But debugging code is hard, and somebody using an LLM to just zero-shot things will have neither skill or patience to make it clean. They will send it to you for a review.

If you actually take the time to comment on all the problems, they will most probably just feed those back to the machine, inevitably losing context. Worst of all, they will not learn anything, so you will remain in the role of the slop reviewer forever.

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

My favourite at the moment. Unfortunately the last video contains AI generated animations which I’m not fond of.

• Bro

Mike Israetel

• Science Based

Milo Wolf

• Science Based

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