Everyone should work up to at least meeting the physical activity guidelines for health [0]. Highly recommend the Barbell Medicine podcast for more information.
If you're an adult male who's been training consistently for 3 years and can't deadlift 405 for a working set, you probably need to change your programming.
Being 40 isn't really an excuse. You're 40, not 80.
Try looking into 5/3/1, Hepburn style programming, or Tactical Barbell.
The chapters on both constraint solvers and logic programming are pretty short overviews, we're talking less than 15 pages. I wouldn't recommend it if that's what you're specifically interested in.
For SAT/SMT in Python, I've heard this book is pretty good: https://theory.stanford.edu/~nikolaj/programmingz3.html. Google OR-tools has a Python frontend and they have interactive tutorials (https://developers.google.com/optimization/examples). I don't know about logic programming in Python. Note that while there's some overlap between logic programming and constraint solving ([1] [2]), the communities are pretty independent from each other. Different histories, tools, techniques, etc.
> Physics and maths! I'm in my gap year at the moment, but I want to be prepared for my physics degree next year. I'm already really quite rusty.
You should really check out Math Academy! It'll diagnose where your gaps are and build you up to all the math you need for a physics degree and then some [0].
I'm just about finished Mathematical Foundations I on Math Academy:
95% finished
2950 XP
63 hours
I started October 21st and aimed for 60 XP a day, every day. I tended to miss one or two days a week (so the equivalent of a weekend), and I ended up having one period of 9 days I missed completely (last week).
One XP is supposed to be roughly 1 minute of work, so 63-(2950/60) means I've done 13 hours more work than I should've theoretically needed.
I found the course after looking up Hacker News recommendations for learning math. I had hoped to have gotten through the course faster, and I had wanted to be more consistent. I really wanted to grok the concepts and understand them with complete confidence, but don't feel total confidence in quite a few areas.
But ultimately, I'm very happy with this course. I struggle with consistency and underestimate time ranges (it feels like I've done MA for less than 6 hours, not more than 63), and it's got me interested in math again and given me the confidence to do other online courses after years of feeling behind and helpless. I did a SQLite course and I've been using those skills in a big way in two recent software projects.
- - -
My goal for early 2024 is to start and finish Foundations II, as well as independently learn mental math to a higher-than-average degree. I've felt the lack of clear mental math impeding my life as well as greatly slowing down my math progress, so I'd like to be able to understand numeric relationships on a more innate level. I'd also like to learn some graph theory and release my Unicode graph website in the next month!
Thank you for the recommendation! I hadn't heard of Math Academy. "The Challenge: Knowledge Retention" sounds like precisely my problem. I'll try it out.
As long as someone has to be held accountable when something goes wrong, or has to translate human needs into software solutions, humans will need to be in the loop.
The better you are at programming, the better able you are to use AI to produce working software. It becomes a tool that expands what you're capable of doing.
Learning to program well without AI will also train you to be better at thinking and problem solving.
If you want to learn how to program, all of the above are in your favor. Just avoid using AI to learn since you won't be able to tell when it's hallucinating. Only use AI for things you already understand and can verify yourself.
My understanding of successful blind programmers is they basically are forced to write code in a way that fits in their head, and this is the essential feature of good code.
I'd be interested in more concrete examples of what specifically you're referring to though.
[0] https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/where-should-my-priorit...