Thanks this is new to me (I'm mostly a cardio guy), didnt' know there was any difference in sleep quality/duration between cardio and lifting. They both help sleep btw it just turns out according to recent research resistance training helps more.
Both are need though for a healthy lifestyle and I think cardio is actually more accessible for most people; I'm gonna count brisk walking as cardio for most people and that's the most accessible type of excercise everyone but the extremely debilitated can do.
I don’t like anecdotal evidence, but for myself I was running regularly but still experiencing suboptimal sleep. I started resistance training again and my sleep immediately got better.
I'm down with that , resistance training is clearly good. Cardio is also clearly good (both groups had better sleep than the group that didn't do any cardio). People should just do something, even walking birskly. We should all simply try to move and/or lift things.
> Same for therapy modalities, which often show similar efficacy in studies, but different efficacy for any given person.
It's even more complicated than that - you can probably click well and succeed with one therapist and get a completely ineffective treatment by another therapist and I'm not sure we even understand why that well (saying one therapist is better than the other is not always true).
With it being the way it is , I think A.I actually could be another tool for people to try; not currently but once it improves enough with memory and reliability (I know many people are gonna downvote this but what's your alternative?).
The only constant in effective therapy is that the client in good faith wants to make a change in their life/outlook. The therapy modalities are all tactics but the strategy remains the same
I agree we are headed into very unstable times, all the more reason for people to exercise. The stress relief effect is magical, and if you do it outside you get some fresh air and vitamin D. Exercise isn't a magic cure to make everyone honkey dorey but I do believe it should be seen as one of the best (and free) tools we have to maintain mental health.
First of all exercise should be seen as one of the first lines of defense against not only depression but chronic health problems (which also lead to depression). So you shouldn't wait until you are depressed to start exercising - ideally it is something you do all the time.
Secondly - someone who's depressed is not keen on most things - including talking to a therapist , yet we still encourage them to do it. If you have the will power to pay hundreds of dollars a session to talk to a complete stranger, in theory you may have the willpower to walk birskly for 150 minutes a week. As a society we should simply encourage everyone no matter what age or state of mind to do that.
You really don't have to go to a gym if you don't like it , or do something "hard" that many people dislike like running.
You can simply walk briskly for 150 minutes a week (which is the recommended dose, and which 80% of Americans and other Westerners don't meet). That is time outside (vitamin D) + moving your entire body - less chronic pain, better joints, better bones etc. I think even this alone without resistance training (which is important) could be enough to help most people with morbidities and depression. Our machine is simply not meant to remain stationary all day and be bombarded with social media and TV, there's no wonder neurosis is off the charts.
I actually do exercise. What I'm suggesting here is that there was never anyone helping me to build that habit forming, it has been entirely "self serve".
>You really don't have to go to a gym if you don't like it ... You can simply walk briskly for 150 minutes a week
I don't like flossing and brushing my teeth either, but yet I still do it regularly. In fact, I never met anyone who brushes they teeth out of enjoyment, but out of habit.
Similarly, the habit of exercise(and other health related activities) needs to be cultivated, you don't have to like it, you just do it because it's what's best for you.
If you take no accountability over your own actions and agency and expect life is about doing only the things you enjoy, then no amount of SSRIs or expensive therapy sessions will fix this.
Maybe I’m an odd duck, but my key trigger to brush my teeth is an aversion to how gross my mouth is if I don’t, not habit. The reward is immediate, and the task fast. Noticing my mouth is gross catches any failure of the habit of teeth brushing in my routines. The habit developed from repetition but is very much not necessary to get me to do it, there’s an actual, natural, reliable trigger for it independent of the habit.
I’ve tried various kinds of exercise over the years, and I think the key is to keep experimenting until you find something sustainable that you actually like.
And make it as frictionless (in terms of getting started) as possible.
I use a walking pad at home. Each night after dinner, I’ll go into that room and watch a movie (or half) on my iPad when I’m walking on it. I did over 3 miles last night (at a moderate pace), and that’s pretty typical. Not because I’m trying to work out, just because I’m into the movie and don’t want to stop. If I had friction of needing fresh gym clothes, having to drive somewhere, or thinking about if the weather is nice enough for an outside walk, I would probably be too lazy to walk most evenings. If I didn’t have the entertainment of the movie, I would probably find the exercise boring and not feel incentivised. I do it because I’m looking forward to the movie and I know I’ll feel great afterwards.
As they say, you need to design your habits for the laziest, most unmotivated version of yourself.
I'm with you up to a point.
If you have time watch Dr Liberman's video about why people resist exercise so much despite wanting to do it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vzS7-MtObo&
There's nothing new here, we all know this, but he brings the point home very well.
I think brisk walking is within the realm of possibilites for most people. Running and lifting - idk. I personally love it but so many people I know have such a huge psychological resistance to doing it. So I say lets get people to at least walk!
>why people resist exercise so much despite wanting to do it:
I don't need to watch a video, I can just do introspection and I know why I resit exercise. In fact, most people will watch the self help videos and learn the exact same things they already knew, if only they'd be honest with themselves about their issue and not try to avoid accountability. But it's easier to accept things when a professional specialist tells them to you, often for money.
The problem is many people want for someone to tell them that the issues they have are not their fault, so they can feel better about not doing anything to improve their situation.
> I think brisk walking is within the realm of possibilites for most people.
Walks are good except when you live in a concrete hellhole full with busy traffic. That's why I avoid telling people exactly what exercise they should do, as that depends on their health, location, financial situation and lifestyle.
> I don't need to watch a video, I can just do introspection and I know why I resit exercise
Well just if anyone reads this , Liberman's point is that we are biologically programmed to NOT want to exercise unless there's a clear biological incentive - like getting food, or a social incentive - like a tribe participating in a dance or children playing. Since for millions of years we couldn't tell when the next calory of food would come - exercising for the heck of it was insanity and you wouldn't survive. You expended so many calories just gathering and hunting you mostly rested when you could.
So basically our biology does not fit into the world of calory abundance we live in.
Because the concept of exercise is a very modern and unnatural thing for humans. We've been moving all day to make a living for most of our history, only when we switched to sedentary desk jobs did we discover the need to do exercise to maintain our health, but that's like the past 50+ years compared to 50K year history of being hunter gatherers. It doesn't take a prestigious scientist to connect these dots.
When you suffer from a clinical depression, no amount of accountability will fix this.
Also, when you are low on mental resources, don't try to do something that you dislike to begin with just because you believe it's optimal. Instead, do the thing that's potentially non optimal but sustainable.
For example, start to do regular walks instead of going to the gym.
To be honest, I am kind of shocked of the comments here on HN regarding this topic.
LLMs are pretty mediocre for a lot of money queries like searching to buy shoes, looking at flights etc due to them not being up to date. So sure you can use them as a wrapper on top of Google but I assume a huge chunk of people will just go to Google to do that or use Google agents. Chrome will prove a very valuable asset for that - the whole experience can become agentic and Google is very well positioend to convert billions of users into their AI.
Power of habit and also Google will deliver a very high quality experience at scale that only OpenAI can currently compete with.
I'm not saying their search / ads revenue is never gonna drop - it might. But it will be a slow process (as we can see. it's actually still freaking growing in the high tens) and Google is well positioned to recover the lost revenue with its A.I offerings.
LLMs can execute searches? You can absolutely send ChatGPT to look for a cheap flight and it will do pretty well. And because I am paying for ChatGPT rather than the advertiser's, I am the customer and not the product.
You may pay to ChatGPT, but sooner or later you will become their product too. All the conversations you had or will have will be turned into signals to match you with products from advertisers, maybe not directly in the conversation with them, but anywhere else. It's not a mater of if, but looking at the pace things are going, and how financially pressured openai is, it's only a matter of time that their conversations with them will be turned into profit in some way or another, they basically have no choice financially.
How do they consistently mess things up ?
Current market cap 3.7T, only Apple and Nvidia are bigger. Youtube is a huge success, Search is still growing at 10%-15% which is crazy, cloud growing at 35%ish, TPUs enable them to be independent from NVidia etc. Gemini market share went up from 5%-6% early 2025 to 21% early 2026. I personally bet Gemini market share will keep growing.
They are executing well on all verticals imo, not messing up.
Exactly. You might not like what Google does, but you can't deny it's a massive commercial success. Just because their approach to creating and delivering apps might not be to your liking, you might actually be the niche.
Yeah but if we think about this in terms of "people love dumb things", then it makes sense what the other person is saying, no? As an example, compare it to how people are when it comes to tech, as in, they are tech-illiterate. Us, power users would not want an OS that is dumbed down... or compare it to YouTubers who are richer than an SWE and all they do is upload "brainrot". That is the audience, that is why these YouTubers also have "massive commercial success".
It told him "this is what our religion says we should do" without any kind of weird prompting, role-playing, or persona-shifting beyond using a different language.
As a westerner, you may regard athiests with suspicion, or even contempt, but you've at least heard them speak publicly. From a culture where most haven't, hearing an authoritative voice which can perfectly cite support for any point it's making, how could it not have a huge potential for radicalization?
> This is an underrated take. If you make someone 3x faster at producing a report nobody reads, you've improved nothing
In the private market are there really so many companies delivering reports no one reads ? Why would management keep at it then ? The goal is to maximize profits. Now sure there are pockets of inefficiency even in the private sector but surely not that much - whatever the companies are doing - someone is buying it from them, otherwise they fail. That's capitalism. Yes there is perhaps 20% of employees who don't pull their weight but its not the majority.
I don't know what to tell you aside from "just go and work at a large private company and see".
I'm not smart enough to understand the macro-economics or incentive structures that lead to this happening, but I've seen many 100+ man teams that output whose output is something you could reasonably expect from a 5 man team.
Sorry I meant to say the private sector, not sure if it changes the argument though since you seem to believe inefficiencies are all over the place - in public companies, private etc.
I've worked in tech all my life and in general if you were grossly inefficient you'd get fired. Now tech may be a high efficiency / low bullshit industry but I'm assuming in general if you are truly shit at your job you'd get fired no matter the industry.
> In the private market are there really so many companies delivering reports no one reads ? Why would management keep at it then ?
In finance, you have to produce truly astounding amounts of regulatory reports that won't be read... until there is a crash, or a lawsuit, or an investigation etc. And then they better have been right!
Got it that's a fair point - you're saying many companies deal with heaps of regulations and expediting that isn't really adding to productivity. I agree with you here. But even if 50% of what a company does is shit no one cares about - surely there's the other 50% that actually matters - no? Otherwise how does the company survive financially.
>In the private market are there really so many companies delivering reports no one reads ?
Just this month the hospital in my municipality submitted an application to put in a new concrete pad for a new generator beside the old one that they, per the application, intend to retire/remove and replace with a storage shed on it's pad once the new one is operational.
Full page intro about how the hospital is saving the world, such a great thing for the community and all manner of vapid buzzword bullshit. dozens of pages of re-hashing bullshit about the environmental conditions, water flows down hill, etc, etc, (i.e. basically reiterating stuff from when they built the facility), etc, etc.
God knows how many people and hours it took to compile it (we'll ignore the labor wasted in the public sector circulating and reading it).
All for a project that 50yr ago wouldn't have required 1/100th of the labor expenditure just to be kicked off. All that labor, squandered on nothing that makes anyone any richer. No goods made. No services rendered.
>Why should hospitals be for-profit organizations? Sounds like all the wrong incentives.
You're conflating private ownership with the organizations nominal financial structure. It has nothing to do with the structure model of the organization and everything to do with resources wasted on TPS reports. This waste has to come from somewhere. Something is necessarily being forgone whether that's profit, reinvestment in the organization or competitive edge that benefits the customer (e.g. lower cost or higher quality for same cost). The same is true for a for profit company, or any other organization.
FWIW the hospital is technically nonprofit as is typical for hospitals. And I assure you, they still have all the wrong incentives despite this.
I used the term "private market" when I actually meant the private sector. I just mean all labor that isn't government owned - public companies, private companies etc.
So yes - in a reasonably functioning capitalist market (which the U.S still is in my eyes) I expect gross inefficiencies to not be prevalent.
> So yes - in a reasonably functioning capitalist market (which the U.S still is in my eyes) I expect gross inefficiencies to not be prevalent.
I am not sure that is true, though. Assume for a moment that Google would waste 50% of their profits. Truly, a huge inefficiency. However, would that make it likely some other corp could take their search/ad market share from them? I doubt it, given the abyss of a moat.
One could say: True, therefore search is not a reasonably functioning capitalist market.
Yeah, I know, this can turn into "no true capitalist market". Still, it seems reasonable to say that many markets work in a certain kind of way (with lots of competition), and search is not one of those markets.
The parent was referring to the whole US as "market". In that sense the numerous exceptions and non-functioning markets invalidate the statement, IMHO.
The goal might be to maximize profits, but that only means that managers want to make sure everyone further down the chain are doing whatever they identify to be the best way to accomplish that. How do you do that? Reports.
> What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value?
I think broadly that's a paradoxical statement; improving office productivity should translate to higher gdp; whatever it is you're doing in some office - even if you're selling paper or making bombs, if you're more productive it means you're selling more (or using less resources to sell the same amount); that should translate to higher gdp (at least higher gdp per worker, there's the issue of what happens to gdp when many workers get fired).
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