Clever idea and implementation! I think from a health standpoint, though, this is a false positive and it is probably better to go for an old fashioned _walk_; or to drop to the floor and do some yoga.
For instance, sitting down too much is in itself detrimental to ones health (whether pedaling or not). E.g. prostate health, posture, etc.
In contrast, a stationary bike or road bike, the rider can stand up and pedal fast, etc. There's a much broader range of motion which make the activity healthy!
I bought an under-desk bike near the beginning of lockdown and have run the odometer into the four figures. I highly recommend it to anyone.
I definitely agree with you that it is no replacement for walking, yoga, or other active forms of exercise. But I have found it a great substitute for just sitting while using a computer.
What about men's testicular/prostate health though? Bike seats are specially designed for cycling ergonomics; desk chairs are design for sitting upright in an ergonomic _stationary_ position.
I say this because I had some prostate bruising (I recovered from that quickly doing yoga), but I attribute it to sitting too long; I don't even want to think what a pedaling motion in my chair would do down there! Granted, I have never pedaled in my chair so I accept that maybe it is fine—I'm just not willing to take the risk.
Personally, I'd go more for a walking desk or something where the motion is natural, but the desired cardio effect is the same.
For longevity, AFAIK you don't need that degree of cardiofitness, and walking is sufficient. It's possible to reduce longevity through running too fast, for example. Cultures that have noted longevity are not known for having an exercise culture either, rather they are moderately active throughout/several times a day.
Unfortunately I can't find my sources right now, so take that as just something some guy said on the Internet.
Two guys. I've seen a lot of confirmation from medical researchers that moderate rate walking (easy to converse meanwhile) does provide some aerobic benefit as well as improve strength and balance. Faster walking (difficult to converse) delivers more aerobic benefit still, to the extent that for folks over 55, it's suggested that fast walking is sufficient to get aerobic benefits.
And if that's not enough, you can always speedwalk.
Walking up hills is the gentle-to-the-body challenge increaser, and makes sense since even tribesmen of 50k years ago needed to walk up hills and mountains regularly.
I'm surprised there is a distinction between the two at this point. What we have are "user interfaces" and both are graphical, whether it's interacting with text or graphics.
I think the main issues of usability are paradigm-independent—how do you make the UX more discoverable for text interfaces? How do you make the GUI more powerful and accessible to scripts? GUI development was introduced to make computers more tactile, and feel more life-like and accessible; and it works.
The reason Text-UIs work better for automation is that programming languages these days are text-based. How might one shift to a more graphical-programming paradigm? Machine learning I think has a lot of potential in this area and I would love to see some new work in this space.
Software today is a complicated mess. On the consumer side, peoples minds are so fickle and they want the latest shiny object or app; on the software side, companies are constantly inventing new ways to do the same old thing; hardware is getting tossed in the dump, when it is actually still very viable.
It's fascinating to see what people are doing with old hardware like Commodore 64, because it's understandable and doesn't change at this point. If we can use hardware that is almost 50 years old, why are cycling through things so rapidly?
This is a mis-understanding of the OP. The internet is inherently a very __useful__ tool. The problem is that social-media companies have turned the need for social interaction into a crack-like addiction (by design) where peoples attention-spans are being sold piecemeal.
Social media is often a junk-food version of social interactions designed to sell ads to people. This leads to short attention spans and social anxieties. How many dinner tables have you sat at where couples sit there on their phones, and scarcely talk? This seems commonplace now...
MS Office is a great example of this because they squeeze money out of folks when it seems the features added are minimal. The only interesting aspect is cloud-collaboration, but that could be P2P instead. I'm willing to wager most folks still use the same subset of office functionality: page layouts and fonts and such have been around for a while; financial formulas rarely change; etc. But yet, they are charged an arm-and-a-leg for the "cloud."
And then there's Amazon with their lambdas—trying to convince people that they should forget how to program and rely on a plethora of beautiful, shiny one-liners.
MS Office is a good example, and like you mentioned Word is pretty much Word from 10 years ago.
But you know who else does this? Book publishers. Specifically, textbook publishers. Every year there is a new edition of a calculus or algebra book. So this is a business model that has been around for awhile, and takes a variety of shapes. Such as planned obsolescence.
Software has it easy today, though. They can just cry "security updates" and instantly have a solid case for the subscription model. Even if it is nonsense.
> They can just cry "security updates" and instantly have a solid case for the subscription model
or they can cry "changes in browser and OS!" stuff that worked 5 years ago may not work the same today, or at all. Having a business model around it to help keep up with changes that are largely outside the control of that vendor helps ensure the value still stands. Or... new value can be unlocked - want your useful service to be able to handle that new video format, or compression, or audio format? I seem to remember something as 'trivial' as Apple moving MacBooks to "retina" displays caused a lot of problems and non-trivial amount of work for a lot of tools and services to be able to work 'correctly' with the new formats.
Lambda is absolutely the worst thing to happen to software engineering in recent memory, IMO. I've seen it used well, but only a tiny percentage of the time. The rest of the time it's tortured and abused and the project turns into a sadistic exercise in forcing the problem to fit the desired solution, instead of the other way around.
Natural selection seems to have selected us from ancestors that mostly followed herds of ruminants around and ate them in place of vegetation that we can't digest.
Absolutely—but they didn't factory farm and the herds of animals were healthy and in their natural habitat. The grand scope of agricultural waste is pretty disgusting. Just look at North Carolina:
https://www.ehn.org/hurricane-florence-floods-north-carolina...
Now imagine there was no hog farms and it was all regular plant crops and/or vegetation.
Before your edit, I assumed you were not being serious. Regardless of the claim that meat and dairy cause health issues...
Bad diets generally do not make people die during the period where they are able to have children. Natural selection has very little effect. Even if it did, the time period it would take for these effects to matter is significantly longer than most people care about when confronting the climate crisis that requires immediate action.
This is why I think the proper crypto currencies are backed by another functional use instead of "just coins." (e.g. Ethereum vs. Bitcoin)—one is a useful Turing-complete machine; the other only exists to send coins.
Bitcoin will probably always outshine the other "just coins" because it was the first. Why get another coin if this one works fine for monetary transactions?
Similarly with the functional ones: Ethereum will probably always outshine the other "Global Turing Machines" because it was the first. We don't really need another one—assuming it can adapt to changes in efficiency with hard-forks as needed.
The rest of them really ought to provide another service underneath to become valuable.
> Ethereum will probably always outshine the other "Global Turing Machines" because it was the first. We don't really need another one—assuming it can adapt to changes in efficiency with hard-forks as needed.
I second this: it's because C is a simple language. Modern languages are a cluster-f*k of features and there are still opportunities to code in security holes. Frankly, if you were to boil down the "unsafe" C vulnerabilities it is a small class of exploits, suitable for automated detection.
The interesting thing about C is that it is one of the few languages which has been able to survive without massive changes throughout the years. All these hyped-up modern languages are in flux ALL THE TIME.
It is certainly not simple, and while there's a limit to what languages can do to assist correctness, C sets a particularly low bar, one that newer low-level languages like Zig and Rust can and do improve upon. Having said that, eliminating memory errors from C is not only doable in principle, but used in practice, so far more than new low-level languages (see, e.g. https://trust-in-soft.com/). It does take a fair deal of work, but for established codebases, the approach is cheaper, less risky and better established than new languages.
For instance, sitting down too much is in itself detrimental to ones health (whether pedaling or not). E.g. prostate health, posture, etc.
In contrast, a stationary bike or road bike, the rider can stand up and pedal fast, etc. There's a much broader range of motion which make the activity healthy!