The issue is that he never explains why he does particular stuff, what specific results particular stuff he tried had, what worked and especially what didn't.
His website is full of "look at my amazing results!", which makes for good marketing talk but does not good science make and is not good nor helpful for people who are trying to separate what works from what doesn't - but is great for Mr. Johnson' budding supplement business's baseline.
On my hand, I encourage everyone I know who is interested in longevity to stick to actual scientific research and stay away from Mr. Johnson as much as possible. There are more red flags around this man than in the entire People's Republic of China. Let's make a small, non-exhaustive list of them:
1. First of all is that he talks significantly more about the supposed results of his program than he does about why his program is like that or even what does his actual program consist in. You will notice that nowhere at all is the actual "program" explained or even described in its entirety. As has been mentioned, all of his content is about "wow, look how amazingly strong I am" or "wow, look at my amazing metabolism" but none of it is actionable content beyond telling people to buy his shit.
2. Speaking of "telling people to buy his shit", once you get beyond the amazingly extensive wall of "wow, look how amazing my results are", his website looks remarkably like every single other unproven supplement peddler out there. I am looking at his website right now as I write this and the number of supplements he sells himself has, in fact increased greatly. He has gone from the $60 olive oil which was his original product to a branded line of spreads, drink mixes, and whatever else to the point that he's starting to look a lot like the Liver King (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKpmAGZQetc), if more "creepy 50 year-old trying to look like a teenager" than Liver King's "creepy 50 year-old trying to look like a jacked piece of salami"
3. While I admire Mr. Johnson's willingness to self-test unproven treatments supposedly in order to figure out if they actually work for himself, his website is remarkably light on warnings on which treatments are actually unproven and which might actually carry some level of danger. The amount of warning on unproven and unlicensed therapies in his website amounts to a single footnote very well hidden under a gigantic wall of "wow, look how amazing my test results are and how impressive my wall of supplements is!"
4. Speaking of his test results, early on Mr. Johnson actually used to talk about challenges, things that went wrong or even just "not so great". As time went on, it's all rah-rah "look at how amazing I am! My measurements are better than an Olympic athlete!!". And while I truly do hope Mr. Johnson's (unexplained, just-so) protocol is just that great, it does seem a lot like peddling his olive oil and whatever else would suffer if he were to say that anything he did was anything beyond perfect.
5. Oh god, the "philosophy" parts. I really want to talk as little as possible about this one, because it's all vapid bullshit and even talking too much about it helps it spread - in fact Mr. Johnson is well-known for actively courting Twitter drama as a way to strengthen his brand. (It should be a well-known fact by any human being living in the 21st century that controversy will make grifters stronger in the short run). His rant on how he is somehow going from "First Principles thinking" to "Zeroth principle thinking", which is "the base of genius" can compete with anything written by any "motivational guru" who talks about "quantum healing" to large audiences... Including a part where he says that anyone who doubts him and his protocol must be weak, miserable, scared of being left behind, afraid of change, and lacking self-control. Wow.
6. Now, let's look at what all this high-minded philosophical talk builds up to. Well, it seems that somehow Mr. Johnson's protocol will help you resist "corporate profiteering at your detriment" and also stop us from "destroying the biosphere" by "aligning us with what the 25th century would value". Huh. Ok, seems pretty great. How can we get there, Mr. Johnson?
It would have been hard to predict the books that would be written with the introduction of the printing press; or what the internet would enable. The same principle applies to what the human race can become when paired with the torrid wave of technological and scientific progress. We can take baby steps as we work on stretching our imaginations:
Week 1: drink the Green Giant (GG) daily.
Week 2: GG + Super Veggie (SV) daily.
Week 3: GG + SV + Nutty Pudding (NP) daily.
Week 4: GG + SV + NP + supplements daily.
I was thinking the same thing. This article seems remarkably light on the facts. They throw around a handful of scary words, but there is very little evidence to back it up or even specifics of how this surveillance might be happening or what data is being sold.
Thank you. Much too often the replies in threads on prices are just a conspiracyfest of people alleging things that make no economic sense without providing any kind of evidence.
Because it is of course completely obvious that collusion among very large, very complex competing entities is a very easy proposition, you just need a magic algorithm to do it! /s
Fragmentation is a problem that solves itself, though. People tend to preferentially attach to larger communities and small communities tend to evaporate into a "hard core" of very dedicated people. If you look at the market as a whole, Java, JS, C# and other mainstream stuff is still most of everything. Whether that's good or not is a different issue.
Elm had a massive shot at making the big time circa 2015-2016. If they hadn't blown that shot, yeah, they'd be the kind of tool a lot of people use and complain about. But what I see when it comes to Elm is a lot of people who don't use the language shaking their heads in frustration at what they see as missed potential, while a handful of people who do use the language insist that it's perfect and unchangeable and that Evan could never ever make a bad decision, all the people who disagree must just be short-sighted.
I don't think it's very charitable of you to assume that the massive amount of people who have left the Elm community are all, and I quote: "a legion of idiots who have been conditioned on the open source models made possible by huge corporations".
I get the point you're trying to make here, and I agree that funding from big corporations has fundamentally distorted the open-source landscape in ways that might not be the most desirable, but we can acknowledge that without invalidating people who believe that the Elm project has been mismanaged by just assigning them to some "those kinds of people" bin.
I'm not above using inflammatory language when I want to and I don't subscribe to tone-policing in general. But in the context of the paragraph you quoted, "a legion of idiots" refers explicitly to a specter in the mind of any person with code written that’s considering releasing it open source. It does not refer to any specific individual, situation, project, etc. It is a fear of the mob and of the dog-piling we so often see in open source communities.
But to continue on the topic you brought up - I am also not interested in calling out people who decide a project is not for them and decide to walk away. I am calling out people who jump into discussions about the core fundamentals of projects that they are not currently contributing to and turn those discussions in a hostile direction. Once they realize that their technical contributions are not wanted they turn to character and reputation attacks against the project owners and core contributors. Even if one out of one hundred users matches this description, you end up with a situation most sane individuals want to avoid at all costs.
So there is no invalidation of people who believe Elm went in the wrong direction. There isn't invalidation of people who wish to express that opinion publicly and even on project hosted forums, chats, bug-lists, etc. It is against those who go the "extra mile" and persistently push for changes even after they have been rejected and who resort to attacks on a person's character or reputation when they fail to get their way. And it is against those who defend such behavior by invoking some unspoken rules of open source development.
> There isn't invalidation of people who wish to express that opinion publicly and even on project hosted forums, chats, bug-lists, etc
This was and I believe still is disallowed on any communication venues controlled by the Elm core team. Any discussion of alternative designs or workarounds was shut down and deleted, regardless of tone.
That is fair enough. And sorry if I seemed like I was policing your tone, I was actually just disagreeing with a certain characterization of the situation.
There is a certain self-centeredness present in many people that bothers me and that this piece displays in spades.
It usually goes something like this.
"I am A Very Smart Person. I do not understand the point of Thing X. Therefore, Thing X must be useless and anyone that cares about Thing X must be an imbecile."
The core issue here is that the only thing this kind of argument does is portray the person making the argument as incapable of even conceiving the idea that there can be other points of view and other ways of interacting with the world than their own. In this case, to the point that after making a fully subjective argument, the author claims that their point is "objective" seemingly due to lack of self-awareness.
I am aware that the author is autistic and that autism usually comes with a certain difficulty when it comes to putting oneself into other peoples' shoes and a certain lack of self-awareness, but the self-aggrandizing tone of this little essay is simply very tiring.
ldd itself, at least on most Linux variants, is simply a wrapper around setting the LD_TRACE_LOADED_OBJECTS environment variable and then running the wrapped command, which can bite people in the ass, as it assumes that the code being run by ldd will respect the environment variable.
His website is full of "look at my amazing results!", which makes for good marketing talk but does not good science make and is not good nor helpful for people who are trying to separate what works from what doesn't - but is great for Mr. Johnson' budding supplement business's baseline.