I saw someone mention elm in a thread here on HN and decided to look into it, as I'm not familiar with the language beyond knowing it exists. I entered elmlang.org into my browser and found a page that not only provides me with the correct location, but also has a curated list of additional resources - not the least of which is a link to who's hiring using elm as part of their tech stack.
I'm grateful for the small, but valuable effort provided by whomever it is that runs elmlang.org. Thank you, mysterious stranger!
I live in a mostly rural part of Norway, and I have had a very similar experience with a volunteer group I cared deeply about. I created a Facebook account solely to access two groups they used to coordinate events. Initially it worked, but over time, Facebook’s algorithms stopped showing me new posts at the top. Since I was not an active user, I missed important messages and caused real frustration, both for others and for myself. Trying to explain why I was not seeing the content was more awkward than simply saying, “Sorry, I am not on Facebook.”
Eventually, I decided to step away. This was partly because I was not willing to engage more deeply just to make the platform work properly, and partly because of personal circumstances, such as having twins. After deleting my account, I noticed a significant reduction in stress.
These days, my children’s kindergarten uses a dedicated app to communicate with parents, and their sports club uses another (Spond, which seems fairly common in Norway). However, when I try to connect more informally with other parents, the conversation almost always leads back to Facebook, Messenger, or "insta". Even when people express understanding or sympathy for my choice to avoid those platforms, exchanging phone numbers or using alternatives rarely leads to real communication. It feels as if, socially, I cease to exist if I am not part of those groups.
So no, I would not suggest trying to push others onto Signal or similar platforms. I relate to your experience completely. Although we may have made different choices, the underlying challenge is the same: wanting to participate meaningfully, but finding that the tools we're expected to use often come with a cost we are not willing to pay.
As in improving cardiorespiratory fitness. According to the article, a Swedish study suggests that, for men, an improvement in cardiorespiratory fitness of 3% annually may reduce risk of prostate cancer by as much as 35%. From how I understand the statements made in the article, they (the researchers) seem to emphasize regularity and intensity; that is, regularity is key, and higher intensity as substitute for duration. They also seem to primarily focus on lower-body activity (i.e. use your legs) while making it clear that activities that involve movement of both legs and arms are preferable.
Two key indicators he tracks are grip strength and VO² max. They are the product of (most typically) structured weights and cardio training respectively.
Another key thing he addresses is to actually plan for old age, i.e. to factor in how the body will lose muscle mass/ conditioning as we get older - and set eg strength targets for activities to do later in life (i.e. be able to lift grandson) and work back from there.
In other words, this means that building a solid reserve in younger years and then maintaining as well as possible is the way to go.
(To lift grandson at 85, need to be able to lift a helluva lot more at 50).
Read the book/get his audiobook would be my recommendation; I'm listening to his Audible and finding it kind of life changing.
Great book. But his recommendations are hard to follow.
40 minutes of zone 2 cardio at least 4 times a week plus zone 5 training once a week plus a strength training regimen plus mobility work.
I exercise about an hour 5-6 days a week and that isn’t enough to cover this regimen.
His recommendations make sense given that his most important indicator for longevity is exercise. But it’s a lot of time per day. Two hours some days if you really follow it.
That grip strength falls apart when you meet climbers. I know we are outliers in general population but it overall seems like a poor measure with tons of corner cases which invalidate it.
Older marathon runner can have a baby pinch due to not using his/her hands for any sport, yet somehow I doubt they fall into same category as some morbidly obese 250kg ball of fat who didn't move from the bed in past few years.
I'm not convinced climbers ruin the grip strength metric that much. Yes, as a climber your grip strength will be proportionally stronger when compared to other metrics. However, this also means that you climb regularly, which involves a lot of other muscles, balance, and lots of hiking if you do it outdoors.
It's used as a proxy for overall strength, as it's very easy to measure in a clinical setting and there is a good amount of data floating about with it.
A bit like BMI, it could be useful for looking at in overall populations even if there are pockets where it doesn't measure overall strength in an accurate manner.
It's not saying if you train your grip strength you will live longer, but _generally_ those that live longer have greater grip strength than those that don't.
So it's the act of getting fitter, i.e. there must be a constant improvement of 3% a year, it's not good enough to get "fit" and then maintain it? Doesn't that take a huge amount of effort after the first few years?
I don’t think the 3% was an annual metric; instead they simply looked retrospectively at cohorts of subjects whose VO2 max was down by 3% or worse, stable, or increased by 3% or better. The outcome measure over a mean of 6.7 years was incident prostate Ca.
Importantly, the study says nothing about how the subjects achieved this result or whether it was an active process at all. The author’s comments and the first sentence in The Guardian overstate the actual findings. It’s reasonable to assume that purposefully pursuing a cardiovascular fitness regimen aimed at improving VO2max will reduce your prostate Ca risk but the study doesn’t address that.
Yeah, I thought of the same, a 3% year-on-year improvement must necessarily hit some ceiling at some point. The study didn't get into _how_ to achieve a 3% improvement, but from how I understand it, looked at the average year-on-year decline, stability, or improvement, over a period of 7 years.
My own take-away is that there's even more data that confirms "being fit" is about a continuous effort, and that putting in an effort (even quite minimal) to stay fit comes with a whole range of positive health benefits.
If you start from next to nothing, you can sustain 3% growth per year for 33 years until you reach 100% growth. That is 33 years to go from lifting 50lbs to lifting 100lbs. You'd actually probably have to work hard to improve that slowly. For cardio that's going from a 20 to a 10 minute mile over 33 years. After a plateau, you generally need to train smarter rather than harder, and then you can keep gaining.
Even if you can't sustain it forever, you're getting fitter than if you weren't doing anything, so your life expectancy is still getting longer.
> I have not yet completely understood what made Book Depository special. Was it only the free international shipping? Or was there more to it?
My understanding is that their business model was to offer a really wide selection of titles, instead of the "top 10" type offering Amazon is mostly about. I think that's a significant part of it.
I apologize if it came across as I made the claim that they really do; I was making an attempt at summarizing my understanding of how the business model for bookdepository might carry some value adding proposition to customers that extended beyond "just" free international shipping. That understanding comes entirely from this quote from a Guardian article about Book Depository's demise:
> The Gloucester-based bookseller was founded in 2004 by Stuart Felton and Andrew Crawford, a former Amazon employee, with the mantra of “selling ‘less of more’ rather than ‘more of less’”. It aimed to sell 6m titles covering a wide variety of genres and topics, as opposed to focusing solely on bestsellers. [0]
Seeing as Book Depository later became a subsidiary of Amazon, it's fair to question whether that model held true. I don't have enough insight into Amazon's catalogue to say either way. Also, I can't remember to which degree Amazon relied on "other sellers" back in 2004 or if that came later ("other sellers" being a way to offer a wider selection than what one carries oneself in retail).
To answer your question for an example of a title Amazon doesn't have; I recently found myself recently looking for "Hur svårt kan det va'" by Eva Bodfäldt, which may admittedly be a contrived example, although Amazon does carry another title in Swedish by the same author [1] (though used and from a third party). As it happens, Book Depository has the title... alas, it's not available for delivery anymore.
I'm grateful for the small, but valuable effort provided by whomever it is that runs elmlang.org. Thank you, mysterious stranger!