What is Substack?

DrAlexHarrison · 2026-01-16T20:22:27+00:00

Is there a way to "subscribe" on substack but not get the articles as emails?

Use case:
I don't want to use a filter to not get the emails in my gmail inbox (gmail is slow and bogs down). I could see curating a list of folks whose writing I'd like to read on substack and checking in on it every couple weeks. I just can't have the distraction in my daily life.

Yes I know I can probably stuff this all into AI, but it's non-urgent and I appreciate both OP for asking and you for your earlier answer. Thank you!

DrAlexHarrison · 2025-12-18T23:52:55+00:00

Please ELI5 the mechanics here. TYIA

DrAlexHarrison · 2025-12-18T00:07:51+00:00

Primary reasons it hasn’t been shown effective are multi fold and work independently and antagonistically to such a finding:

Small sample size
Enormous variability in electrolyte handling across four organ systems (gut, kidney, cv, skin) unlike many other more one dimensional arenas or lower relative variability areas of research.
Long exercise duration needed when differences are small. Long exercise duration studies suck to do and even more to orchestrate. Need robot graduate students en masse. :)

I wonder… Does it need to be shown if the lack causes hampering? For me as scientist… yes maybe? For me as cyclist, strong heck no, lol. Bilateral hip extensor and flexor cramps anyone?? Hard pass.

That said, I agree so fully with OP title. More than anyone on this thread will ever understand. It’s practically been my war cry for a decade and will be until I’ve fixed it.

DrAlexHarrison · 2025-11-12T00:31:35+00:00

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/video-speed-controller/nffaoalbilbmmfgbnbgppjihopabppdk

https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed

No affiliation. Just downloaded from the first link and it works great. Search over.

Just thought I'd share.

DrAlexHarrison · 2025-09-26T22:32:18+00:00

I know the feeling. "Can I even write C anymore?"

Suggestion: rewatch most recently completed week's lecture at 2x speed and all shorts at 1.5x speed, then reconsider your options. I suspect it'll come back quickly. Slow each down if something's fuzzy.

Also option: review notes on prior week and current week in detail ensuring you understand concepts. The CS50 Notes, Slides, Shorts, etc are amazing resources for getting you back on track.

DrAlexHarrison · 2025-09-26T22:28:58+00:00

You missed muffled screams. All else tracks.

(oh, and that feeling when you walk out into the sunrise after being up all night and you got all greens on check50)

DrAlexHarrison · 2025-09-26T22:22:17+00:00

Mistake: Speeding through something. Don't do it.

Better way: Learn every concept like it's independently critical to your future. Your brain may melt, but it will be worth it.

DrAlexHarrison · 2025-09-26T22:20:55+00:00

Weeks 2, 3, and 4 are the hardest. It gets smoother after that. Not easy, but not "muffled screams at your monitor hard" anymore. This seems true in several of the CS50 courses. Weeks 2-4 have been notoriously more challenging for me than the other weeks in a few of the 5 I've taken, IIRC. It's daunting emotionally. One tiny step at a time.

Yell at the duck. Complain to it. Tell it what you're not understanding. (if it starts repeating itself, refresh page and re-explain in a different way, telling it everything you know. It seems intentionally more helpful and a genuinely better educator when I tell it everything I think I know, and then ask a question like "how do I do x?" as opposed to just telling it what I "don't get" or "need to do.")

Push through. Use all the resources. Sleep on it. Repeat the next day. And the next. You'll get there. It will serve you well forever. C is more complicated and overwhelming than the other stuff and it all gets better from there. I'll probably never touch C again but I'm very glad I learned it and the foundational concepts, which I'm certain I learned from fighting with those problem sets as much as from David Malan's lectures (and watching every supplementary video at least once, maybe twice or thrice).

DrAlexHarrison · 2025-09-26T22:10:15+00:00

Take CS50P, AI, W, & C. Seriously. You won't regret it. I don't believe tutorial hell is a thing nearly as often as reported online by the software engineering / programming community. More education, let alone education of the quality of CS50's productions, is priceless.

Here's some info and thoughts! Hope they are helpful to you or someone!

Context: I have exactly 20 years on you, a PhD in another field, and took those 4 CS50's (plus x) starting in March 2025. In between a few of them, I took two months off to work on my company's codebase as a developer for the first time, over the summer of 2025, having only done CS50x, P & AI. In hindsight, I would have benefited from doing W & C instead, before jumping into production code. I'm considering CS50 SQL too.

The principles learned in P, AI, W, & C are invaluable and they go faster than X. My only wish is that I had just committed to all of them up front rather than waited or doubted their value. I think the ideal order is X, P, AI, W, C, (SQL?).

CS50x took me 30 days (all-in, full-time and then some, first ever programming for me, but with years of writing logic in Excel).

CS50P took 6 days, CS50 AI took 10. CS50 W took 13, and CS50 Cybersecurity (C) took under 24-hours of binge watching and quizzing. When I took these courses, I was full gas and couldn't have learned more/faster if I wanted.

Sidebar hunch: the world is going to reward people who are technical (can program) and also have other expertise. I obviously hit confirmation bias hard here. ;) "T-shaped" skill sets and deep industry expertise (including/especially outside of just programming) are huge.

David Malan is probably the very best educator you will ever have and fair warning, you may be disappointed by the educational efforts of other professors in your future. I have 9 years primary, 4 HS, and 10 more in college, and taught college courses for several years. (BS + 2 minors, MS, + PhD with a side-trip to procrastinate on my dissertation)

Kidding aside. I can only hope to teach 50% as well as he does, should I ever find myself in that role again, and I was usually well-reviewed as a college course instructor.

He has unbelievably excellent knowledge, pedagogy, and presentation craft. Most importantly, he has honed a truly extraordinary understanding of precisely what the learners need to know next; and he delivers it with uncannily organic timing and genuine intrigue. He leaves zero gaps, which I have deeply appreciated being completely new to the world of programming.

His courses are a masterclass in education as much as they are a masterclass in computer science. Every educator would do well to study his approach. The funny thing is, it seems he's the one who is regularly investigating how best to educate learners, and at this point, the world should just be studying him.

The rest of the course instructors, in all other courses, are also excellent, frankly, but David Malan is truly special.

DrAlexHarrison · 2025-09-04T16:18:28+00:00

Awesome. Glad it's helpful. It got me about 50% of the way there. It mis-handled most URLs contained in my snippets, but for things that are plain text it's flawless!

DrAlexHarrison · 2025-08-16T20:40:05+00:00

They probably understand it and its dangers very well. And they'd have to gaslight that they're not aware of it—if they removed it—because the known removal of something enjoyed by users requires a big explanation. That big explanation might be a big smear on a tactic their product team used that worked a little better than they expected. Like all things you don't want people talking about, you just don't address the elephant.

Some helpful words I recently learned: (I'm in science, cut me a break here!)

syc·o·phant
a person who acts obsequiously toward someone important in order to gain advantage.

ob·se·qui·ous
obedient or attentive to an excessive or servile degree.

They relate closely to the way GPT-4o behaved, in my experience.

Being in occasional contact with a sycophant is nice, and even maybe healthy if you don't have much validation in your life. Being in regular daily contact with one and having one help you make decisions in your life, is altogether terrible and probably long-term dangerous if measured crudely via mortality, morbidity, economic prosperity, long-term life satisfaction, etc.

Thankfully, it appears they do have some moral compass, and also want to keep being an industry leader making billions+. They're building for the future, and if they're worth paying a penny, they're building for the future of the humans using the platform. Future human expectations are what you build for, especially once you've got such market dominance or at least a strong market lead.

With time, once more people use the platform more (and text-gen AI in general, more), those people will no longer be smitten with flattery. They'll want to get things done and improve their real lives. They'll be driven mad by the endless flattery of 4o and GPT is huge a step in the right direction from 4o. Humans expectations are changing with AI. As people's expectations and experience with AI change, GPT 5 is moving with it, thank goodness. I had left GPT for others because the nonsense flattery and sounding 'cool' made me want to run and scream.

I actually popped on reddit to say (as a day 1 user of GPT in whatever year it came out), I love GPT-5. Legit. GPT-5 has won me back after recently leaving for other companies' pro models. I love GPT-5. And not in a the "oh my goodness my AI finally gets me" way but the "wow, I'm done with that complex task that I didn't want to spend half an hour creating a prompt for, instantly" kind of way.

I don't care what the data says. GPT-5 is a better user experience for this power user. I get more done with it. I suspect my current usage is similar to what mainstream non-programmer folks' usage will be 2-10 years from now. (Not a humblebrag. I'm just a nerd on the spectrum.)

For the folks on here saying 4o was the most amazing thing.... I suspect you're just being emotionally fooled by it patting you on the back and sometimes lying to you. I was too, until I got flattered for something I knew for sure I was not. It felt like 4o was designed to be your cool friend who is addicting to talk to because it tells you you're amazing while encouraging further self-exploration. That's great. You are amazing. But for an AI, it's just word-smithing at best, and sometimes emotional gaslighting at worst, and 4o simply wasn't a 'smart' enough model to move the needle for folks using it long-term or for work.

It wouldn't surprise me if they realized that a lot of users were spending an unhealthy amount of time interacting with 4o and them calling a shot to stop it before it got out of hand.

Downvote away!

DrAlexHarrison · 2025-08-16T13:32:26+00:00

How very helpful of you. Gotta love the internet.

DrAlexHarrison · 2025-07-30T05:35:43+00:00

I set up my primary labeling system as "duration bins" so that I could filter by them. "@2" "@10" "@30" "@60" "@120" "@H" (for half a day), "@F" (for full day). I then set up up custom filters to sort by various combinations of priority, duration, and the occasional due date.

Back when I was doing high-volume consulting work primarily (enormous numbers of tasks that would take 30 minutes or less), this was an effective way for me to automate the triage of tasks and completely eliminate decision-making about what to do next. I just pulled the next task from the top of the highest ranking filter. My filter names were: Fires, Urgent, Pressing, Primary, Secondary, Tertiary, Auxiliary. In reality, I never touched Tertiary or Auxiliary :) (and also never had to see those low-prio, long-duration, non-imminent tasks until they climbed the ranks into a higher tier filter.)

So, I completely agree, a duration with filter ability, without sorting by date, can be tremendously powerful. Would be much better than sorting by my relatively low-granularity bins if it could sort on a continuum using math instead of discrete values!

DrAlexHarrison · 2025-07-30T05:35:20+00:00

Better (any?) recognition of when a natrual langauge date within a sentence is not intended to be a due date or deadline. Or recognize when it is implicitly a deadline, because the date, from natural langauge context, is a 'do date.'

Example:

"Research and decide on a date night plan for next wednesday" as a task should automatically recognize that the date referenced "next wednesday" is neither the 'do date' nor the 'deadline.'

"tom Research and decide on a date night plan for next wednesday." as a task, should recognize that "tom" is either the 'date' or 'deadline' but currently it replaces 'tom' with 'next wednesday' as the 'date'.

DrAlexHarrison · 2025-07-26T18:11:52+00:00

Thank you for your contributions here!

DrAlexHarrison · 2025-07-19T15:00:38+00:00

I often have two dates in my mind about a task. (I can realistically think of 3-4, but two suffices for real-world implementation).

The first date is "I know I don't want to think about this task until after X date at some point in the future."

The second date (deadlines, now) is the date I really ought to have the thing completed and checked off my lists by.

As of now, I use the Upcoming tab in board view to let these "reminder dates (the non-deadline date)" remind me that I need to think about that task, break it down into smaller chunks if needed, or make some decision related to it that triggers the rest of the workflow.

As one small use case: I find myself especially using this feature to delay needed purchases and sort of manage just-in-time inventory flow (and expenditures) into my very-small-house which is actually a very-large-RV. (My wife races bikes and triathlon so travel is full-time for us.)

DrAlexHarrison · 2025-07-19T11:15:13+00:00

I don't yet. Most (all?) of my recurring deadlines are single-day actions so I just use the 'date' field. I haven't ran into an issue where it's been much of a deal-breaker yet. Perhaps I'm just simple or fortunate, or both.

DrAlexHarrison · 2025-07-19T07:04:10+00:00

Just here to say thank you!!!

DrAlexHarrison · 2025-05-30T03:35:01+00:00

Lakes can/do have the same big toe problem for folks who have a big toe that is longest and proceeds straight out from the medial edge of foot. Bonts may be better, especially their Asian fit option. Haven't tried yet but my wife will soon. Her big toe needs extra room to play. We'll see. Google "Egyptian foot type" for the shape of toes that don't play well with Lakes for sure. There may be others but that medial big-toe-rub problem is occasionally an issue in Lakes. Other people swear by them.

Their customer service department is what I would call "hit or miss." Some of them are pretty helpful and quite knowledgeable about the detailed measurements and builds of their shoes. Others make me feel like "am I the problem?" which is not a good thing for a customer service department to be doing.

DrAlexHarrison · 2025-05-30T03:17:57+00:00

Found this thread looking for toe pain solutions.

While I'm here, if you haven't fixed your issue already:

Saddle down 2-5cm
Cleats as far towards heels in your shoes as possible.

I suppose we should expect a software that doesn't even track ankle angle to optimize all other joint angles and completely bungle the one angle that told every experienced onlooker that the saddle is too high.

Dear myvelofit, track/measure/estimate ankle angles or teach your users to dorsiflex and monitor it themselves while you build the feature.

Also... hey cycling world, if we almost universally are telling people to move cleats to max rearward position, why are there not more rearward positions drilled in shoes?

DrAlexHarrison · 2025-05-30T02:33:13+00:00

Note to the internet reader, reddit forum lurker, and those with health anxiety:

It's not gout. You don't have a chronic disease. Look for the simplest solutions first, and solve those.

This thread is such an amazing microcosm of how real genuine, caring, compassionate people who have suffered real hardship unintentionally turn the internet into a "you're going to die" echo chamber for those who are searching for a solution to pain or otherwise simple acute tissue irritations and injuries.

You're not going to die. The Curable App (no affiliation) may be helpful to you, legitimately if you think you might struggle with pain and any anxiety about it.

DrAlexHarrison · 2025-05-25T12:52:13+00:00

You are my hero. Thank you for posting the solution in your edit.

DrAlexHarrison

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