Not a newsletter, volume 1 issue 1

It's hard to get back into the habit of blogging for fun when you also blog for money. Tweets are easier, just throw up a wry observation in a popular joke format. But Twitter isn't what it once was, and neither is Reddit. I'm feeling unmoored.

I don't have a compulsion to write, but I do have something of a compulsion to explain and teach. I still have a list somewhere of posts I wanted to write on various fitness subreddits. I learned a lot from some of those communities. I feel like I should both repay that debt and help to improve those places so those who come after me get an even better start. But I don't feel like I can provide free content to Reddit in good conscience anymore.

Somebody told me this week, somebody who only knows me through my writing on Reddit, that if I had a podcast they would listen every week. I know just enough about podcasting to have a sense of how much work it would be (a lot) so I will not be doing that anytime soon. But I figure maybe I should share some thoughts on a regular basis with a personal platform. It's not a newsletter because I don't trust the newsletter companies any more than other forms of social media, and also, I hate email.

So here goes, my latest way of putting possibly-worth-reading content onto the internet in my spare time. It will be a sort of weekly review of notable things I've written and read, with some lifting content in there for the meatheads and meathead appreciators.

What I wrote this week (best of)

• Why You Should Think of New Habits as Skills - the idea for this came when I was listening to the If Books Could Kill podcast episode on James Clear's Atomic Habits. Michael mentions meal prepping as a habit that just doesn't work for most people, and I was like--wait a minute. That's not a habit, it's an entire skill that I had to learn over time, with lots of trial and error to avoid the issues that Michael just named as the reasons why he doesn't do it. I've written about how to meal prep without it taking over your life, because it really isn't as simple as "do it more often." Most habits aren't. I actually read Atomic Habits for this, and came away even more convinced that we make it harder on ourselves to establish new "habits" (or what public health folks call "behavior change") when we assume that all habits are interchangeable and that our failure is in simply not doing things that we know we should do. In fact, our biggest obstacle is usually that we don't know how to do the thing. We don't respect how hard it is or how many new things we'll have to learn along the way.

• No, Light Weights and Heavy Weights Can't Give You the Same Workout - inspired by several news articles this week stating that it "doesn't matter" if you lift heavy or light weights. This is a total collapse of nuance: Both can be good, especially if you are new to lifting and not sure where to start. Both can be used (in different ways) to increase the size of your muscles. But there are things you can accomplish with heavy weights that you cannot with light weights, and there are meaningful reasons people might prefer one over the other.

• TikTok Myth of the Week: Borax Is Good to Drink - Just some good old fashioned bad advice making the rounds, and already getting debunked more than promoted, I think I hope.

• Last week's TikTok myth pubbed this week as well, and this is a case of "I clicked so you don't have to." The so-called "ice water hack" or "ice water diet" is neither a diet nor a hack, just a gimmick to get you to watch a video that turns out to direct you toward supplement ads.

More, as always, on lifehacker dot com.

By the way! At work I'm being encouraged to write more about health and fitness tech, and about products/objects/tools in general. What stuff should I try out? I already wrote somewhat sheepishly about my experience with both Huel and Soylent.

I don't think you can reply here, so you'll need to find me on social (@bethskw on all the big platforms). Or write your comment in a letter, and hand it to the weirdest person in your gym. If they don't know me, chances are they know someone who does.

Training

It's deload week. Hi, I do Olympic style weightlifting (the sport of the snatch and the clean-and-jerk) and I'm going to share a few highlights here each week.

I'm nearly a month into a 12-week program (from my coach at PFP) meant to get me stronger and build my work capacity. I have been instructed to "go full meathead." The first three weeks were pretty heavy; this week is a deload, where the weights get a bit lighter to give me a break before we go heavy again.

Here's an attempted four-rep-max of power snatches off high blocks. Three powers, one full.

Deload week was not totally devoid of heavy lifts, though. Here's a quarter front squat at 140kg, over 300 pounds. A quarter squat is just what it sounds like, you only go partway down instead of all the way or even halfway. These are amazing for core strength and for getting used to having heavy weight on your shoulders. Major confidence builder.

More training videos in my daily stories on Instagram.

What I'm reading/thinking about

There's been a lot of depressing news about AI and digital media this week. I'm not afraid of text generators like ChatGPT replacing the work that journalists do; they clearly can't do that and aren't on a path toward it, either. But they are a new way of shoveling crap onto the internet to try to get better Google rankings, and G/O Media (which used to own Lifehacker) is already attempting to play this game.

Jim Spanfeller, who has spent his entire time at G/O embodying the guy-putting-a-stick-into-his-own-bicycle-spokes meme, ordered that error-filled AI articles be published on sites like Gizmodo, and has still refused to answer writers' and editors' questions about what the hell is going on. Employees who are responsible for what goes on these sites were never consulted, nor given an opportunity to even correct the errors. Spanfeller then told Vox he plans to do more of the same.

Google replied by saying that they will tank the search rankings of entire websites that publish AI articles meant to game rankings. (Manipulating search rankings has been an entire thing for decades now, including by the search engines themselves, but sure, let's make this about ensuring that articles are "people-first.") Meanwhile, Google has been showing news outlets an engine that can reportedly write or assist in writing news articles. Google has scraped the internet, and is selling the scrapings back to the people whose data it scraped, so that they can construct further data for Google's own profit. How much do we want to bet these articles will be "read" and summarized by Google's AI bots, so that humans won't even have to click through and read the articles? I also find it concerning that Google's focus here is news, that is, things that aren't already in its database because they haven't happened yet. We're not serving humans, we're feeding machines.

At first I thought AI's place in digital media would be as a cheaper, faster content mill. (There are already underpaid humans churning out error-filled, SEO-friendly text that clogs the internet; that's not new.) But it turns out that LLMs may be too expensive and resource-intensive to actually be the cheap version of anything, and now I'm thinking that generative AI may not be viable for the business purposes that everyone is seemingly excited about.

I don't think AI is coming for my job. I think my job, already a rare one, will become even rarer as media companies insert themselves into a google-to-google pipeline that will destroy them, much like the facebook-to-facebook one a few years back. Remember the mass layoffs amid "pivot to video" and then the next round of mass layoffs when it turned out that didn't work? I'm not sure exactly what the AI bubble will do to the industry that employs me, but I don't expect it to be good.