There's a huge difference between:
- Don't use this, it's harmful to you, and
- Don't use this, it won't make things actively better.
Study after study has shown that it is extremely, almost absurdly difficult to lose weight and keep it that way in the long term.
If "not actively causing long term weight loss" is the only criteria for advising against something, then we should be advising against a heck of a lot more things that are perfectly fine.
It's phrasing like this that causes people to go on crusades against random foods, rather than actually using moderation in all things.
The article states reasons for its recommendations in addition to not being effective for long-term weight loss:
"WHO also noted that “potential undesirable effects from long-term use” of NSS, such as an increased risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The results of the review also suggest that there may be other dangerous consequences such as the increased risk of premature death among adults."
Small counter-opinion here; if I interview a candidate, offer them a role, and find out that they have been using our time only to get a better deal from their current employer, then I will most likely choose not to interview them again in the future.
If you have engaged with me in bad faith (pretending to want a job with us when you actually don't) then I would be very uncomfortable endorsing you to join one of my teams in the future.
By all means, interview around. And if you get a better offer and accept it, then I will cheerfully congratulate you and wish you the very best of luck! But if you're operating in an area where the pool of potential employers is small, make sure you don't burn too many relationships in the process.
In one case, the same person did the same thing to us twice in a row - interviewed, got an offer, then got "counter offered" from their existing company the next day. Pretty confident that they're just interviewing as a negotiating tactic.
But honestly, in general, if someone interviews around then decides to stay at their existing company for more money, they're probably not the folks I'd be likely to hire regardless. They're not looking for new learning opportunities, or new ways to grow, they're maximizing for some other value structure. And best of luck to them with that, I'm sure they'll find plenty of companies where those values are the expectation and norm.
You're "playing the game", but I build teams out of folks who aren't game players. :)
This is a bit unethical, but the candidate in question could just say that their current employer gave them a newer, better offer that they couldn't refuse, essentially giving plausible deniability. Though I do agree that the interviewer would be fully in their right to not re-interview the candidate.
This class of users is also some of the most easily scammed.
These folks, who need "less security", are the exact same who will tell a stranger their password over the phone simply because they said they worked for Google. Scammers can use data from an email account to write convincing fake communications that lead to folks losing their life savings.
Teaching folks that their data isn't important enough to turn on security, is teaching them to fall into scammer's traps.
I'm highly dubious of any research that equates "went to a top tier university" with "is highly intelligent" as its only metric. Especially one that also says "but outside America that's not true".
Could it be that people who come from backgrounds that value attending a top tier school as a status symbol also come from backgrounds that (can afford to?) pursue a biollionare-making career? And that in countries where the billionaire class do not value top tier schools so highly, fewer billionaires went to top tier schools.
Keep in mind that this book was published 7 years ago, using data from 13 years ago. That does not mean that it is untrue, just that the statistics may no longer be as relevant or timely. (A bit more recent, from the same author: https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1559195349092376577 )
Something that you might want to consider, but which hasn't really shown up in the comments, is... Do you actually _want_ to do the finishing?
Are you taking on these projects because you want the end result to exist, or because you just really enjoy the initial phase of learning and discovering and mapping and planning? If you are getting joy/mental stimulation/a creative outlet from this, then perhaps it is serving its purpose already.
Sometimes, doing something you love, even if you leave it incomplete or do it poorly, is exactly what you need to refresh you. Maybe your hobby isn't building software. Maybe your hobby is just... Dreaming up new projects, and learning about new technology. And if this is your hobby, and not your job, maybe you don't actually need to finish projects at all. Leave the finishing to your day job.
There are still professional, high quality hand knitters in the world.
Of course, having people hand knit garments used to be the only way to get a knitted garment at all.
Then we invented industrial knitting machines, and those hand knitters found their roles had changed. Instead of knitting a whole garment, they would be closing up the toe on the socks, or doing finishing work on a sweater. Of course, companies didn't need anywhere near as many knitters under this system, so a huge proportion of them lost their jobs.
Then the knitting machines got better. They could close the toes on the socks themselves, could do most of the finishing work automatically. Some of the remaining knitters became industrial knitting support workers, but most of the actual knitting jobs dried up.
But there are still professional, commercial hand knitters, even today! They test hand knitting patterns for the hobby market. Make the samples up for photographing, and make sure that all the sizes come out right.
They number... Dozens? Maybe? And most of them treat it as a side gig, despite being the absolute pinnacle of hand knitting talent, since it pays terribly.
A job doesn't have to have been totally replaced to be effectively replaced. As we find ways to hand over larger and larger pieces of the work to an automated system, the number of real roles in that field diminishes, until it eventually becomes infeasible as a career choice.
This is what a lot these digital content creation jobs are heading. Gradual obsolescence.
Except natural selection can't start over. It onlu works if there are always a high rate of survivors and even if that was not an issue consider 4 billion years and a generous generation life of one year (natural selection cycle), 4 billion isn't a whole lot even for small features when you don't have an enormous population and birth rate. Let's say there were 100000 humans at some point and only a 1000 fatal features (being generous) it's not just the replacement rate of defective humans that needs to exceed the elimination rate, a certain percent of replacements must be free of all fatal defects and survive. Also, consider how there should be many failed species that attempted to evolve into a human like species or a primate. You can't always luck out, at some point the entire branch has to fail, requiring subsequent attmepts meanwhile the fatal conditions that required the evolution will not go away.
What I am saying is that rate needs to continue to be positive and out of 20% survivors many will not carry the survival gene. And on top of that, it isn't just one thing that kills a rabbit in your example, the climate, not finding mates, predators, disease and more all must be overcome at once. Survivors must overcome a wide array of adversity and succesfully pass on that combination of abilities and this needs to happen every generation.
Look at it in bits and bytes. For each adversity overcoming feature that a species has inherited, let that a be a bit set to 1. With 2 adversaries you have only two bits where only need one out of 4 individuals that has both bits on. For a realistic adversity of 32, you need 4billion bits all set to one. And this is without considering how a survival trait against one adversity can be a fatal trait against another. Now these bits need to be passed on, if one of them is missing then the only chance that individual has to survive is by pure chance they avoid that adversary.
Think of the endless adversities we face and overcome, you are saying for millions of generations, there has been an unbroken chain of survivors that kept overcoming a geometrically expanding adversity. Just a degree increasing in the global temperature causes entire ecosystems to collapse.
Yet creatures survive and reproduce, the fact that you can observe, analyze and even control.
I think you’re ignoring a bunch of dynamics by trying to model it with binary.
Prey population going down means a predator population also going down and a competitor population going up. It’s not an endgame, it’s just an “ear” of a very complex attractor, which with time only sharpens it ability to have as little escape points as possible.
1°C fluctuation by itself does nothing, because life usually has much wider tolerance due to long seasonal fluctuations. A global +-degree means there will be a tipping point somewhere which would bring a local drastic change. Locally life may suffer, but it counteracts with migration and preexisting diversity. It simply suffers everywhere, always. It’s a modus operandi. A little bit more is barely fatal.
So yes, survival is the default because life naturally specializes in it.
If the advice is intended to let you "win the game", or "get ahead of the competition", then yes. If everyone is doing the same thing, then using it isn't going to provide you with any particular advantage over anyone else. "Add these words to get to the top of Google results" is doomed to eventual failure.
If the advice is intended to help you improve your quality of life, or improve at something specifically for the joy of being better at it, then being well known will not dilute it. "If you're feeling sick, then you should drink more water and rest" is just as valid now as it was when it was a new and revolutionary insight.
A familiar dream, that kind of misses the actual challenge of programming is not the syntax. HTML really doesn't take long to learn - at least, not the kind that's being produced here. The hard part is unambiguously describing what you actually want. That's what code is, at a fundamental level - a way of describing exactly what you want in a way that cannot be misinterpreted.
Consider the instructions.txt given; 'This is an application called "My Bikes".'.
Okay, so what does "called" imply here? Is this what you want displayed in a title bar? Or is this the name that should be used for links to this application? Or is this text that should be displayed in large type at the top of the page? Or is this the name you're going to refer to it as in other "instruction.txt" files, when you want to link or reference this app? Or is this the label that should be used when someone adds their app to their phone home screen? Or something else entirely? I would argue that any of these would be valid interpretations of the phrase, but I'd bet that at least some of them would not be what the author originally intended (or even considered) when they wrote the phrase.
Consequently, you might find that you need to say something more like 'This is an application. The browser title bar should be "My Bikes". The displayed heading should be "My Bikes" in large, sans-serif font. When other pages link to this page, they should use the link text 'EricaTheGreat's Bikes'..." etc, etc.
And you can bet that pretty soon, users of this language will start complaining that "I have to type so much to get even the most basic things going. Could I just simplify it down to something like 'title bar: "My Bikes", heading text: "My Bikes", heading size: large, heading font: sans-serif"... "
Well look at that! In making this statement unambiguous, we've just created a very verbose programming language!
It remains as ever a delightful dream, but unfortunately one that doesn't actually solve the real problem - that natural language uses a lot of words to say things that are ambiguous and ill suited to producing the desired outcome.
This misses one particular market though, which is the users that don't care how "My Bikes" is displayed. This is the Shopify / Squarespace market; people that just want to sell/conduct their business, not design a website.
To those people a natural language such as this could be a huge boon to business, because they could just spend an afternoon writing an instructions.txt and publish the website that night rather than spending hours figuring out how to use the built-in editor and customization options.
Study after study has shown that it is extremely, almost absurdly difficult to lose weight and keep it that way in the long term.
If "not actively causing long term weight loss" is the only criteria for advising against something, then we should be advising against a heck of a lot more things that are perfectly fine.
It's phrasing like this that causes people to go on crusades against random foods, rather than actually using moderation in all things.