People often confuse severe consequences (a fall = death) with high probability. Alex, like most climbers, reduce that probability to near zero through obsessive prep.
The travel to/from Taiwan was statistically riskier than the climb.
It's not 25% per climb, but it's not near zero either, especially in aggregate. It only takes one mistake. A fairly high percentage of famous free soloists (I'd say over 25%) have died prematurely, either while free soloing, or during other extreme sports.
>A fairly high percentage of famous free soloists (I'd say over 25%) have died prematurely
Yes but I'd also say Alex is a bit of a different beast. He's clearly not a thrill seeker who attempts climbs he isn't sure about. And as he has once said, there's a very real risk of dying when you get in your car, play football, are a boxer, and so on.
People have a stark reaction to the visual of a guy being 200 meters above the ground but the reality is if you're a circus acrobat and you're 10 meters up the air you're also likely dead or maimed if something goes wrong. It doesn't get more dead than dead and in many ways he's probably more calculated and less reckless than people in other sports or performances.
> People have a stark reaction to the visual of a guy being 200 meters above the ground but the reality is if you're a circus acrobat and you're 10 meters up the air you're also likely dead or maimed if something goes wrong.
No, it's the large number of free soloists that have died. And the small number of circus performers who have died. People's intuitions about the relative risks are actually very accurate here.
I suffered from migraines for over a decade. They were infrequent at first but, at the peak, I was getting 1-2 a week and felt like I was just "surviving" in life. I saw countless doctors and specialty clinics, none of which offered long term relief other than drugs.
For me, Rizatriptan helped take the edge off pain but I always had more migraines than pills could safely relieve in any given month. In the end, most months I had to choose whether I would get relief in the moment or save the 1-2 remaining pills for the following week(s) before a refill.
I had every blood / allergy test available and none ever showed any issues. I thought there may be a correlation to gluten but there were times where gluten (bread) helped with the nausea side effects.
Ultimately, I gave up gluten, coffee and sugar all at once. Within weeks I felt better and suffered no migraines for over a year until I decided to test the waters with a flour tortilla. Within a few hours I was bed ridden with a migraine for 2-3 days.
I have worked sugar back in to my diet in moderation but gluten and coffee are still out. I have only had that one migraine in 3+ years.
Anyone suffering, the absolute best advice I ever got was to keep a food / pain log. Do it every day no matter what. It may take a week, months or a year but it will uncover something that will help reduce frequency. Also, listen to your body. I had numerous doctors tell me I didn't have any food allergies and to focus on other areas for relief. Every single one was wrong and I could have had a cure years previous.
I've heard coffee can relieve migraines, including from a friend that has migraines and doesn't like coffee, and other people with migraines and these people don't know each others.
I've not read on the topic, at this point I wouldn't rule out the placebo effect, and it seems in your case coffee wasn't helping you, but it would be interesting to know if coffee caused migraines in you without the gluten.
At one point, if I drunk a coffee just before a migraine started it would go away. Nothing scientific here but it happenned too many times (both had the coffee and didn't) to establish the result for me.
My migraines stopped when I went carnivore which meant no gluten and sugar as well (though I kept the coffee). I'm now in a more keto diet but still no gluten at all and I've only had a couple of light migraines in a year or so (used have them a monthly or more frequently).
It is interesting to know your case as it is a smaller dietary change than mine.
Since I dropped caffeine, my migraines also became much less frequent and when I have some caffeine, I am at risk for getting one. It seems closely related to sleep for me and caffeine (even in moderation) just greatly affects my quality of sleep.
Same for me. As a Brazilian, I’ve always drank coffee without much care, but eventually I started limiting it to mornings.
Then I noticed if I ever forget to drink coffee (or had decaf coffee instead) I’d have a headache in the afternoon.
My solution was to remove caffeine completely, now I only drink decaf coffee and this particular problem disappeared after a few days.
Now about auras, it’s hard to say if there was any effect as they’re more rare for me. This thread is the first time I’ve read people say they drank coffee after the symptoms show up and it can block the headache that comes later on.
When I read stories like his, I always wonder what we’re doing with our wheat that so many people become completely wheat-intolerant in just 15 years. It is clearly more than just fashion, clearly people can diagnose it themselves and it happened in the anglo-saxon world first.
I'm not really that convinced that it isn't mostly social.. There were more intolerant than diagnosed until the 90s and that has now just flipped with the social overcompensation.
It's really very easy to buy in to the dominant social narrative as an explanation for one of the many undiagnosable health incidents we experience in a lifetime, and the placebo effect confirms whatever is socially helpful.
Most of these social changes now originate or become big from the US first because it dominates international media.
Or do people in a rich society like ours just have more opportunity to notice problems like this vs if you live in a society where life is more hard? It's like it seems we have more people today identifying as gay vs 100 years ago. Is it really more gay people today or do we just have a more tolerant socity that enables more people to identify as gay?
I can agree that for me it was cutting my "wheat" (flour, gluten, etc) consumption that helped me have far less migraines over all. I don't really eat much processed sugar (however I used to when I was a kid). I have taken away caffeine and brought it back without much change in frequency. The hardest part for me was a manager one time thinking it was how much I wasn't spending on doctors to poke/prod/image my head to find the cause or take a new medicine that really angered me. Dealing with people who can't understand that I have no control over when they happen and go away is the worst.
I just started noticing this and I am in the exact same spot, no allergies, lots of migraines.
Thank you for posting this 'cause I though I was making things up by noticing things when all tests were negative.
edit:
though it seems to me that coffe(+iburprofen when things are bad) helps.
I started connecting it to food when I noticed I started getting pain on my lower back that slowly creeps up on the course of half a day or so and becomes a migraine. When it starts stopping and I massage my neck down to half my back I get tons of relief when I press on the right nerve/muscle/whatever.
I tried everything over the years - stopping smoking, removing amalgam fillings etc etc.
Reducing sugar has really helped me, although I take propranolol daily and have rizatriptan to hand if need be.
Used to get chronic paroxysmal hemicrania too - ended up having emergency surgery on an impacted wisdom tooth, ended up in ICU for 4 days but haven't had one of those headaches since.
Definitely always believed I have some trigeminal nerve deformity.
I'm rapidly approaching 50 and in the gym 7 days a week 2+ hours a day for heavy lifting and cardio.
Creatine is one of the few supplements that I can say has noticeable immediate difference on or off. Without it, my recoveries take longer and I have to back down workouts to 4-5 days a week.
5mg a day... time doesn't seem to make a difference but I take pre workout. No hair loss or other side effects.
There is not a proven pathway from creatine to hairloss, but if you are genetically predisposed to male pattern baldness then increasing the amount of DHT in your system via creatine supplementation may contribute to further hair loss insofar as DHT drives hair loss for certain men.
I've experienced this hair loss, and if you read the comments underneath most posts/videos about creatine, you'll find a lot of people chiming in with the same experience. If you don't have male pattern baldness though, seems you're fine.
How are they "taking everything from the community"? You mean researching user feedback on other printers and building a better product?
I have owned a dozen or so printers over the last decade going back to PrintrBot. As with a lot of users, the BambuLabs X1 was hands down the best out the box experience of any printer I own. It continues to be my go to printer while my other Prusa's + Creality's sit idle. As long as the cloud service never becomes a paid subscription I could care less that I am locked into their ecosystem. The additionally functionality that provides is a plus for me not a minus.
The fact they have crammed a bunch of the same features of the X1/P1 into a smaller printer that is sub $500 is pretty amazing.
I heard the same arguments for the Ender printers when they were popular. Best prints ever, incredible detail, etc, etc. At least Ender wasn't actively trying to trap people into their ecosystem.
It won't work though. The clones are coming. Many companies have tried to get the cloud lock-in but it just doesn't make sense to buy in as a user.
I don’t get how they can trap people into their ecosystem. Does it print STL files, or does it have some way of owning the asset life cycle? Whether I sneakernet an sdcard,m, load via octoprint, or something else, I’m not super locked in. Or does locking in mean “making it so user friendly and easy that you wouldn’t want to use a Marlin firmware printer?” Otherwise it’s just another UI for managing my STLs and slicing. That’s a lot different than an iCloud scenario where all of everything is end to end across the closed device ecosystem. Just the last mile of my STL files is nothing.
As an example, Creality giving in and open sourcing the K1 (their clone of Bambu's tech) after initially going as far as violating the license on Klipper to push their own cloud system.
I run a small consulting practice and we have pivoted almost exclusively to helping customers reduce cloud spend. Across 100+ engagements, with cloud spend raging from $500k-$40M per year, I can confidently state the following:
>90% of companies are overspending on cloud resources. On average, 30-40% depending on provider (AWS is typically the worst).
>75% of IT/Engineering teams have overbuilt their environments to leverage the latest & greatest tech stacks / toolsets with no justifiable business need.
>50% will confidently state they have “optimized” their environment and in almost every case there is money being left on the table. We have only engaged with one customer that we couldn’t offer savings. They spend $30M+ per year on AWS and had a full time staff of 3 engineers solely focused on cost optimization.
>50% of IT / Engineering leaders became incredibly defensive when presented with savings analysis which almost always included reduction in technical complexity of stack. We have since pivoted and marketing/engaging almost exclusively to CEO/CFO as first contact.
>50% of companies had one of more cloud costing/monitoring tools in place that was not being leveraged, or worse, gamed to produce inaccurate reports.
I can confirm having had a similar experience, albeit at a smaller scale (fewer customers but similar annual spend.)
My favourite find was a database backup someone configured where it was keeping full uncompressed daily backups forever. Fixing just that cut their spend by $100K annually, and then we kept going.
The worst offenders are governments, especially in some countries that haven't had sufficiently brutal economic downturns recently to force anyone to do some belt tightening. Australian government is spectacularly wasteful, burning piles of money in the cloud for services that only malicious bots ever visit.
Like you said, these places love to pad out there resumes at the expense of the taxpayer. I regularly see multiple Kubernetes clusters deployed for one web app. Or architecture diagrams that look like a spiderweb of connecte d systems for something that should be running on a single VM.
I bought one of the ~$400 tent saunas on Amazon and it was the best health related purchase in recent years. It only gets to 135 degrees, whereas the one at gym reached nearly 200, but it feels hotter and I can only last about half the time.
I sit in it at least once a day followed by a 10-15 minute cold shower where I drink a 32oz of water and another 32oz of water mixed with popular powdered green vitamin.
For these familiar with Whoop, I consistently have 5-10% better recoveries and sleep performance on the days I use the sauna. I also feel better which is what really matters.
Worth noting, the first one lasted 13 months before the frame became fairly rusty/moldy from sweat. I would put most the blame here on me though as I was only one using it so I didn't always wipe up the pool of sweat after use. I would also say I'm on the extreme end of customers using it once or twice daily.
The second one, which I bought last month, now has a plastic frame instead of metal so should be non-issue. It also now has a washable foam floor panel I take out after each use to dry and can be machine washed.
Nerdy addition, I got paranoid about some Amazon reviews/comments mentioning EMF exposure so I bought an EMF meter to test the sauna. I don't remember exact reading but it rated lower than sitting in my car while idling. While it may still have been high for some, I justified it by the fact I'm driving far less since I WFH so in the end about the same.
This was written by team.video who is in a hyper competitive space. Every hour spent on Aviary is an hour not spent on differentiating customer features. Why? There are a ton of open source CM tools that give you same functionality and do it better. This is a problem you should have solved after you were a) profitable b) at scale and c) probably not even then.
So like, unless you're one of their investors upset at how your money's being spent, why is this any of your business? Startups often take unusual paths to profitability. They all seem crazy at first, many are in fact crazy, a few turn out to be quite prescient.
Not being an investor doesn't preclude me from having an opinion. There is nothing prescient here... just an engineering team burning cycles better spent elsewhere at current stage of the company.
The travel to/from Taiwan was statistically riskier than the climb.
Selfish? Not even close.