Automation kills creativity because it creates predictability.
The life of a programmer these days feels very weird. "What am I good at?" and leads to even more impostor syndrome... "I seem to still be 'good' at prompting my LLMs and managing workflow design." but it's definitely a different skill/feeling than when you cranked out some awesome piece of code that did something very neat.
I felt this way a bit when I was tech middle management; should I feel like I'm getting credit for my team's work, when I had very little input aside from helping with the "unblocking" when they ran into a tough problem.
I think that’s the whole point the article/comments are making.
Many things we used to learn are becoming obsolete by AI.
A analogy (if not the best one)3 People used to be much less sedentary, and in some ways healthier, before automobiles (or working from home).
So setting aside intentional exercise became much more necessary to be less sedentary and healthier.
But it requires discipline and motivation, and many people don’t exercise enough as a result.
Before AI, learning was a necessity to get things done. We had to check our own spelling/grammar before these tools existed. Etc.
Now, learning and using these skills will be simply for the “exercise” of using our brains in ways that were necessary before AI.
Some people will continue to code ok the side “for fun” or “for exercise”, but it will no longer be a means to simply getting something done — that can be done with AI.
Any you certainly won’t be doing for a company whose primary focus is to make money.
Another thing is that an equivalent ICE version of the Roadster would most likely use premium gas. There is no such thing as premium electricity - an electron is an electron. So the cost savings are even higher.
But personally I would recommend people consider a used Model 3. They can be $25-30k which is new Prius territory. I don’t recommend other manufacturers because IMO the competition only started making good electric cards in the last year or two, so these tend to be higher-priced because they’re newer.
I think this reason is understated. A friend was attacked at a gas station years ago, and since then she's had a major fear of gas stations. Her husband would fill her car for her so she could commute to/from work. She bought an EV a few years ago, and this was a major reason for it - she can fuel-up on her own without being a pain to her husband.
EVs are nice, and Im full EV on all my cars at this point. But I concede I would not own any EV if I could not charge at home. If I was still in an apartment, I'd be ICE all the way
100%. Yes, many of my points are mostly negated if you can’t charge at home.
Not only is charging away from home no less expensive — and sometimes more expensive — but the time it takes to charge on the road is a deal breaker.
That’s why I mentioned I own an ICE vehicle purely for long distance travel.
I’m hoping someday away-from-home charging drops (significantly) below gas prices, and also that charging speeds get closer to the time it takes to fill a tank of gas.
Or, more likely, that range will allow you to drive several hours without ever having to charge on the road, so that you can just use destination charging.
EV driver for 10 years, and that is absolutely the big difference maker. The economics and time savings disappear if you have to use public charging infrastructure. I feel like it is almost like a tax that is put on people who can only afford to rent an apartment.
I've had two EVs and have been driving EV only for about 10 years. I've been driving an ICE vehicle lately due to an issue with a wiring harness on my EV that it is getting service for. It's been so long since I regularly drove an ICE that it has been an unpleasantly shocking experience.
- The cost savings are as much as a car payment. >$100/week in gas when my entire household electric bill averages only $200/month. Up until this recent issue at 85k miles, I've had $0 in maintenance costs (excluding tires). Those same miles in an ICE would have cost me about $2000 in oil changes and brakes by now.
- Getting gas sucks. Sure, it is easier to get gas than charge an EV at a public charger. But it is far more convenient to charge at home every day. In 10 years, I've used a public charger maybe 10 times, but I have to get gas at least once a week. Would you rather have a phone with 6-7 days of energy but you had to drive to a dirty gas station to fill it, or just plug it in every night?
- ICE range anxiety when I have a quarter tank left. I know I can get gas all over the place, but it is pretty rare that my EV has as little range in it at the start of the day as this ICE vehicle with a quarter tank left. Either I go to the gas station more frequently, or I have to account for going to a gas station before driving 30-40 miles away.
- EV powertrains are so much better than gas powertrains. More powerful, smoother, quieter, drive better especially due to the better weight distribution (front to back, and height of the center of gravity).
I own an ICE car and an EV. We use the EV for long trips and it is great. The only time we hesitate is when we are going out into the middle of nowhere.
EV advantages on trips:
- Smooth ride
- Always-ready A/C
- Pet mode
- Self-driving
You do have to plan a bit more. The Tesla route planner is excellent. Having a charger at your destination really seals the deal.
So it sounds like you're solving for different problems here. If I'm taking a long trip, the primary problem I'm solving for is "time to location" and "difficulty planning" and ICE wins, period, if charging is required mid-trip.
Maybe people want to take leisurely strolls while charging up or will be stopping for lunch at that truck stop anyway, but that does not solve for my problems as well. I don't have a pet, my car's heating/cooling is perfectly cromulent, and I enjoy the act of driving a car.
Also, what is "smooth ride"? Are we talking suspension or accelleration/braking?
> If I'm taking a long trip, the primary problem I'm solving for is "time to location" and "difficulty planning" and ICE wins, period, if charging is required mid-trip.
You should be able to recharge at least 200 km of range in a 20 minute stop which is probably enough until your next break. An ICE lets you cut out those breaks but you really shouldn't because breaks are good for you (and your driving).
Either your car or whatever you use for GPS directions already handles the planning for you. It will automatically find and route you to chargers as needed.
that's interesting. we have both ICE and EV and would never think of using the ICE over the EV for long trips, that's primarily the reason we keep the ICE vehicle.
not having much maintenance and charging at home are huge ones. i don’t understand why there is no creative advertising around that. such obviously huge wins
Because most car brands and especially the dealership network make a lot of money with maintenance. The maintenance frequency and cost of my electric Audi is not much cheaper than my previous Diesel. It is a rip off. Only Tesla is more aggressive with longer intervals and they kind of communicate the cost savings in their ownership cost calculator.
> The maintenance frequency and cost of my electric Audi is not much cheaper than my previous Diesel. It is a rip off.
Then don't take it in for servicing if it's not needed. DIY the few things an electric car actually needs, or take it to an independent mechanic if you can't be bothered or lack the skills.
You lose the warranty if you skip the maintenance intervals and mileage thresholds imposed by Audi. At least in Germany.
That’s my point, they impose those intervals and they are the same as a petrol car. It does not make sense but it makes the dealerships happy. Only Tesla has very long intervals that truly reflect the nature of an electric car.
For one, renters are largely locked out of reliable home charging in most cases. No apartment complex I've lived at had any charging stations, never mind the quantity needed if most residents opted for EV.
This is particularly nice when you're warming the car up in the garage during cold snaps. Hard to do this with ICE vehicles without risking carbon monoxide buildup.
Can we just say it out loud? Because it's good for the environment and we don't want our children or their children to have an unlivable planet. This should probably be the number one reason, but yes EVs are better in many other ways too.
Driving cars is not good for the environment whether your fuel is electric or diesel. The billions acres of concrete and asphalt to support car commuting, the electricity that charges the cars, the rubber microplastic tire dust made 100x worse under hard acceleration of heavy vehicles .
Best I can say about EVs is they’re quiet and don’t wear out their brake pads, and the lack of other service is economically efficient, so in that sense they are progress towards a vehicle less likely to fail on you (software updates not withstanding!)
If you care about the environment you get an old VW or ideally a Mercedes that runs on used vegetable oil. A thousand pound lithium battery per household is not a tenable way out of destroying ecosystems.
> If you care about the environment you get an old VW or ideally a Mercedes that runs on used vegetable oil.
This is not realistic nor scalable. The reality is that the US and Canada were built around cars, and even if we had huge transit projects there would still be a need for roads and vehicles due to the size and rural/industrial areas.
Lithium batteries can be recycled. All the studies have shown that electric cars are a huge net win for the environment, and the cries about the environmental cost of building the cars in the first place don't actually match the reality. Especially when you consider that future ev ecosystems should and hopefully will have a strong battery recycling operation.
I appreciate that the question deserves a more pragmatic response than “buy used”
So I will speculate, there could be a more adequate supply of used cars if we found ways to keep old cars running longer. back in the 90s, a 200,000mi car was a real beater, doomed to transmission failure at least, uneconomical to repair. cars made in the 2010s are lasting into half a million miles just from improvements in engineering (Toyota hybrid planetary drivetrain eliminates many points of failure: no clutch, no alternator, 0 belts. Brake pads are only engaged below 5 mph and may not need replacing in the useful lifetime of the vehicle)
I don’t even know why I’m such a hater on EV, it is better in the same ways, it’s just also a luxury vehicle that is heavy and fast af. I would love to see more ev hype for efficiency, like this car is so lightweight it goes twice as far for the same kWh. Maybe Aptera will pull it off.
Unfortunately, lithium is abundant enough that it will always be cheaper to manufacture from virgin material, battery recycling will probably just look like power grid load balancers. When batteries age they don’t fail, they just lose the ability to deliver hundreds of amps when you floor it.
As Hannah Ritchie (Our World In Data) has pointed out, even with the worst coal powerplant powering the grid, an EV is getting a much better CO2 per mile driven than an ICE. As the grid powerplants improve, that only gets better. An ICE car is always an ICE.
Of course, if you look at the energy mix for our grid. But the possibility (maybe even the inevitability) exists that the grid will be powered by cleaner sources over time. No such possibility exists for an ICE vehicle...
I generate 80% of the power I drive on (PHEV + 10kW of PV on the roof), though I mostly commute by bike so I don't drive a ton.
Grid electricity generation is more efficient than ICE. Fossil fuel extraction is a major emitter even before the fuel is burned. Decarbonising the grid is underway.
True, but that's not a limitation of EVs but rather the state of energy production in most countries. An economy that moves towards solar/nuclear/wind will see blanket decreases in emissions across the entire fleet of EVs it supports.
It's not really magical thinking; if the grid moves to solar/nuclear/wind then there are virtually no emissions here.
Yes, we're not there yet, and that's why I prefaced with "True", but I think this kind of splitting hairs is part of the problem. EVs are vastly better for the environment and have no emissions of their own. Yes emissions do come from somewhere in the current state, but path to a cleaner environment is not radically far away and the thesis that "emissions come from somewhere so that's not a reason to buy an EV" is ludicrous at best and disingenuous at worst.
In my experience electric cars aren’t significantly smoother or quieter. Most noise in a modern passenger car is generated by the tires and air drag, and for some reason I found these more pronounced in the electric cars I’ve tried (maybe for the lack of engine noise).
My wife and I share a plugin hybrid and an EV. You'd think the EV is as loud, because you notice the air and tire noises in the absence of the engine noise.
But in the plugin hybrid, the change in noise is very noticeable when the car goes from pure EV into hybrid and the engine kicks in. It's specially loud when the engine revs up as you're accelerating, but even when the car is cruising, I can still hear the engine noise.
That is true above 50 km/h right? In many european cities you drive below that. In many French cities the max speed is even 30 km/h. Then EVs are much quietee.
I'd say the majority of the reason is no engine noise, but also keep in mind EVs are heavier than ICE cars. More weight means more road noise. Regenerative braking means they have significantly less brake wear than ICE cars despite the weight, but the tyres take more stress.
You’re trying to apply an arbitrary metric to two radically different process. Suppose you could pay an extra 1,000$ so it fils in 40 seconds vs 4 hours at home (and only at home).
Personally it wouldn’t be worth the money to me because the only thing that matters is the time to plug it in and the time to unplug it.
Really? I didn’t seem to have too many issues with it, especially compared to my experience with the Oculus Quest (where I can get headaches after 10 or so minutes).
After longer sessions with it, sure, but I don’t remember 5 (or even 20-30) minutes giving me issues.
While I get the spirit of your message, advertising has been around for over a century, and I don’t believe it has done near the damage to society over that timespan that AI will likely do in a decade (if we’re not careful and responsible).
I also don’t believe addiction and other psychological exploits are used for the sole purpose of ad revenue. There are other more direct forms of monetization involved, such as microtransactions and subscriptions.
If you really want to blame something, it really all comes down to one word:
It will not slow to a crawl because popularity = power. Even if the the platforms themselves stop ads, the users will not, either for other or for themselves.
Ads are what allow these products to exist. Take away ads, and the platform cannot sustain its own server requirements. People won't pay for stuff like this; it's only mainstream because it's ad-supported.
Advertising has become 'active', very recently in the overall lifespan of advertising. For most of it's lifespan it was passive, it blared out at you from the TV or radio or bus stop. Now, however, it's reaching out and taking pieces of you back for analysis and reconstruction, and on-selling to any other entity interested in doing the same.
The reason is greed, yes.
We can't regulate human greed, but we can regulate the manifestation of its symptoms.
We can also choose not to work towards expanding the capacity of said symptoms.
To think greed is some innate human trait seems to not be greatly substantiated by evidence on early human behavior. To see what we call greed all around us in market economy is only proof how we're all drilled from early childhood onwards to exhibit this behavior of greed, in accumulating money to survive, to archieve social status and approval etc. Drastic changes the economic system, and the very behavior set we are all programmed into, would more than likely regulate the behavior of greed. Though obviously that is extremely unlikely to happen.
> We can also choose not to work towards expanding the capacity of said symptoms.
Not if we need to eat and raise our kids. Then we need careers, which depend on what everyone else is doing, so we can't stop, our own future depends on how competitive we remain in the new context. I see an idealist streak here, some kind of naive platonism that ignores everything runs at a cost and nothing executes for free like platonic heaven. We can't take decisions that contradict our own needs.
Despite what the media leads you to think, there are still jobs that provide a living without contributing much to current social problems. You can do ok in medium tier cities with an average job, and still live in a safe neighborhood. If you pick a state with a good university system, the kids can get a good education without any debt. They won’t automatically get the connections of a top-tier school, but if you teach them the importance of connections early then they will do well (these schools often have strong alumni networks).
Continuing to work for evil people is a choice. Don’t brush it off.
One hand you have proven damage. And if we are honest, the damage is way more than what has been proven; especially 2nd/3rd order which are easy to reason but hard to prove.
On the other hand you have pure speculation.
Not only that, AI has been immensely liberating/empowering for many ordinary people (That's why these AI companies have millions of users).
It's a shame so many people only resigned for ethical reasons once their employer's threat level progressed from exploitative to existential. Better late than never, but that does not excuse their tardiness.
As someone who's going to the doctor next week to discuss potential shoulder surgery, this is timely.
I really need to figure out whether it's going to make things better or worse, but unfortunately, that feels like something a doctor can't guarantee one way or the other.
Any anecdotes or other experiences/thoughts are appreciated.
One thing that bodybuilding taught me is to never underestimate how significantly you can change how your body works through weight training, mobility work and physical therapy.
I used to suffer from chronic low back pain. It hurt to get out of bed every day for years. 1-2 years after getting into bodybuilding the pain disappeared and didn’t come back. Not only that, but I’m not physically limited by my back whatsoever.
I’m not suggesting you start bodybuilding. But the things I think that helped was 1) weight training, 2) mobility work / stretching, 3) physical therapy. That combo can be really powerful.
Double down on this. I had a way worse back and bad pain in my early 20s than now later in life. I started with just walking an hour a day, later added gym. You don't need to become the next Arnold, just show up consistently.
One side note: There are core strength/posture issues but also issues that need medical attention. The tricky part is figuring out which.
Yes me too! I used to have back problems all the time, sometimes it would give out for no reason and I'm stuck in bed for a week. I started lifting from nothing, just the 45lb barbell, using a simple program called Stronglifts. That was probably 10 years ago, I have had some ups and downs of course, but overall my back has been solid since.
this is well intentioned but bad advice for people with shoulder issues. The shoulder should not be put under load such as weight lifting.
I would recommend doing band work and calisthenics and also highly recommend analyzing your kinetic chain and form in any activity you do and figure out how to reduce shoulder arm and wrist for any force generation in sports such as tennis, golf, throwing etc.
After playing college tennis and developing bad shoulder issues with MRI indicating that surgery would be recommended. Two years prior my high school friend had had the same surgery and ultimately developed a opioid dependence during the crises and subsequently died of an overdose after 18 months of spiraling.
I ultimately was able to attribute the onset of flare ups to weeks where I was hitting a lot of serves and at first simply instituted a “pitch count” and later studied my form and discovered that I was not loading as much as I should have been from the base of my kinetic chain and a lot of that load was being put on my shoulder.
About 12 years later and I’ve recently switched to pickleball (no over head serve) and jokingly refer to myself as a tennis refugee.
As a body builder with a history of shoulder injuries, this is oversimplifying at best and wrong at worst.
You yourself recommend band work which is putting your shoulder under load
The real answer is the shoulder is complicated mechanically and you need to work on reinforcing or building the smaller groups (Is, Ys and Ts type of exercises and many others), if you can actively stabilize your shoulder this way you will reduce pain, inflammation and decrease the propensity for injury, allowing you to do traditional shoulder exercises like press etc without issue. I suggest working with a good PT
Unfortunately, it goes both ways. I started training 6-7 years ago and today have constant lower back pain (non-existent prior) and chronic shoulder pain (again, non-existent prior). When you lift, even with reasonable weight in a conservative progressive overload program, injuries can and will occur. In my case, there was no singular “injury”; the pain just gradually crept in and has not gone away.
I still wouldn’t stop weight training, as it’s a part of my life that I love. However, despite never going for ambitious PRs, I have chronic pain that I never had prior to starting - and no amount of physical therapy has resolved it.
My mother-in-law has spinal surgery last christmas, the pain for her, prior to the surgery, was unbearable so it's hard to justify not running from that into the arms of a surgeon. The surgeon showed exactly what was to repair though so it was simple enough to understand and clear in the way it was going to help her.
About 9 months out from that surgery and she doesn't have anymore pain.
> My mother-in-law has spinal surgery last christmas
I dunno if spinal surgery is comparable to shoulder surgery.
I had spinal surgery; the scans were conclusive (specific disks had ruptured), the surgery to put in prosthetic disks (2x in total) is apparently quite routine, and the procedure itself is simpler (limited 3D motion in each vertebra - if you lose motion between any two vertebra after surgery, you might not even notice).
Compare to shoulder surgery where the scans are frequently inconclusive ("we think this surgery might fix the pain, but we are not sure"), and the surgery is uncommon, and the procedure itself is complex (large range of large movements across a large number of axes).
I know about a dozen people in real life who have had spinal fusions, but not one who has had shoulder surgery.
Of course there are reasons to do surgery, it's not all make believe. The point is more that it is overprescribed and that most nonspecific back pain does not correlate well with imaging "abnormalities" and surgery may be the wrong treatment.
Read the Substack of Howard Luks, he's an orthopedic surgeon who has a lot of experience.
At the least I would heavily consider exhausting conservative treatment first. All but the worst tears can heal on their own, it just takes time and steady effort.
No matter what you choose to do, the adherence to rehab will determine your ultimate outcome.
What? No, tears do not 'heal on their own', that's completely wrong. Famously, labral tears of the shoulder and hip do not heal in the slightest without external surgery- even tiny ones.
That doesn't mean that surgery is always the appropriate treatment (I'm living with a shoulder labral tear that's untreated). But it is not even remotely true that tears heal on their own. Example, I just had an MRI on my tear, and the ortho said it looked exactly the same as the last MRI I had 8 years ago- no better, no worse
Sorry to hear about your issue, that must be really aggravating.
Labral tears look bad, yes, I'm talking more about tendon partial tearing here, which I think is more common than labral tearing (though I think, like the meniscus in the knee, after a certain age we probably all have tears in these tissues that are asymptomatic, so it's really a matter of degree).
For a long time it seemed to be accepted wisdom that even a partial tendon tear required surgery, but there's a lot of newer evidence that the body can recover from these with the right rehab protocols and time.
Labral tears however are also commonly asymptomatic and occur in a large fraction of athletes and people who train. I don't think surgerizing those is usually indicated.
The question you want to ask is what is the long-term outcome. In 10-20 years time will you have better usage of the shoulder with or without the surgery?
As an anecdote: Family member has a partial lateral meniscus tear in the knee. Surgery was considered as if successful then returning to running might have been possible. Specialist opinions varied as did their reading of the MRI scans.
After a lot of research there was emerging evidence that long-term, surgery was more likely to result in osteoarthritis. So had to weight up long-term mobility over short-term pain relief and not having a major lifestyle change.
You see professional athlete undergoing surgery the next day, but their income relies on regaining usage as quickly as possible. The alternative is physio exercises to strengthen the supporting muscles and avoiding anything that might cause a re-injury.
Anecdote:
My dad has had two shoulder surgeries, one to repair his rotator cuff +15 years ago on his right arm, one back in March of this year on his other shoulder. I couldn’t tell you what specifically was wrong with it this time.
He was a regular golfer until last year when the pain got too bad to play through. He just started playing golf again at the beginning of September. He told me after three or so rounds he can’t even tell he had surgery or any previous pain in that shoulder.
He’s had one doctor do his knee surgery and the aforementioned shoulder surgery and he’s really happy with all of their work.
I hope you have as good of an experience as my dad has had.
Go see a specialist sports doctor. They deal with lots of these types of injuries. My physio sent me to one when I did my shoulder in a motorcycle accident and for my case, the data showed that it was better not to operate.
I’ve had two shoulder surgeries (one on each side) and they have been life-changing. On one side I’ve gone from extremely restricted movement and severe pain to complete freedom of movement and no pain. On the other side I now have total freedom of movement and some pain returned after 5 or so years so but whereas the pain before was more or less constant and completely unbearable now it aches a little sometimes when I have a bad day.
Just my anecdote but I would say it clearly matters a lot how good your surgeon is and also how seriously you take recovery (which is a slow and painful process in itself). If you have a good surgeon and you do your physio exercises like a good invalid it seems to make a big difference.
I would say ask your surgeon what the reasonable expectation for recovery would be. Mine was pretty frank with me that there isn’t 100% relief in 100% of cases but I felt comfortable enough with the error bars she gave me that I went ahead and in my case that turned out to be a great decision (whereas for example I talked to an eye place about Lasik and it turned out my current vision is within the range of what they would consider successful surgery so I decided not to go ahead in that case).
For all such things, my advice is to get an opinion from an orthopedic doctor and also an opinion from a good physical therapist. You may or may not get the same answer from both. In my case, the doctor was at a teaching hospital and coached a resident through doing a gauntlet of gauntlet of pushing, pulling and poking tests, and they both agreed that PT was the right answer. YMMV, of course.
I had a shoulder injury that was effectively treated by several months of twice-weekly sessions of PT. This was the embarrassingly difficult sort of PT involving doing exercises with carefully supervised form that looked very, very easy and were almost impossible. Before this experience, I never knew that half-pound barbells were a thing or that they might be very difficult to lift the way the PT wanted me to lift them.
Related to posture or something else? It took me about a year to fix my posture but I no longer have back/neck pain. It basically meant being aware of it all day and consciously adjusting, but now I feel a lot better. It's hard to undo a decade of potato in chair.
Not posture. My particular issue seems to be either injury or something resembling an injury. Pain is part of it, but range of motion is (currently) the bigger problem. And it happened pretty quickly.
I’ve had a Stanford orthopedist (remotely) review my records, and he feels that surgery may be the only thing that can get me back to 100% (RoM or pain).
PT may help, but it can’t heal the damage that’s been done.
Pain is a very strong feedback signal. The memory of the pain helped me to keep my posture right. Though, I'd prefer to become aware of my posture before the pain emerged.
Strength training is good as mentioned already. Something else I’ve learned is that everything is connected, so if i have neck pain maybe it’s due to tightness somewhere else, like my back for example.
I suffered from peroneal tendinitis that was partially caused by not properly activating my calf/quads/glutes while running, so addressing this fixed the problem.
Most recently, I started to feel some extensor tendinitis swelling up in my foot, looked into it and it was suggested that properly stretching/massaging the tibialis could help this issue. My extensor pain was significantly less / almost gone after.
Got my shoulder surgery last month, after 1 year healing didn't work out. Surgery went well. 2 of my sports colleagues did have the very same surgery, they also went well. Bicycle crashes are really terrible.
Back surgery on the other hand is only recommended for crazy illnesses.
Since you asked for anecdotes, I fixed my shoulder pain doing PT at home based off a plan cobbled together from Gemini and YouTube. I think the key is determining if it’s shoulder impingement or rotator cuff tear (there are YT videos to help diagnose). For me it was shoulder impingement and I just did the same exercises multiple times a day for a month. Pull-up bar hangs and doorway stretches with my hand above and to the side ended up being the most effective. If you don’t want to roll your own, maybe talk to a physical therapist.
It depends on your injury, but I had great experience with physical therapy for healing my shoulder issues (imaging diagnosed it as shoulder impingement).
Of course, many people don't like the recurring PT appointments, nor do they like hearing that you need to continue the exercises to some degree even after the sessions end. But I've incorporated them into my regular workouts, and a year later have completely functional shoulders. Best of luck.
Obviously, don't take medical advice on HN too seriously, but my uncle had shoulder surgery and was happy with the results. I have heard many more complaints about back surgeries making things worse than shoulders.
However, if available I would try to find a good Pilates/dance/sports instructor that has a Gyrotonic machine, which is built for repairing and strengthening shoulder muscles. I had debilitating back issues from sitting in a chair all day and a good instructor fixed it over a year through low impact Pilates. YMMV and group classes tend to be ineffective because so much of it is doing the exercises precisely correct - they were built for injury recovery
Eleven years ago, I was in a horrific car accident and messed my back up. The ortho said it wasn't debilitating - I just had the spine of a 50 yo in the body of a 30 yo. He said I could try to work my back out so the muscles could provide the support my spine couldn't.
I've been on and off with being consistent with that over the years and was dealing with lots of back pain. Having a desk job doesn't help.
But when COVID hit, I dedicated myself to Olympic weightlifting and pilates by paying (quite a lot) to have coaches and trainers. Since then I've had zero back pain. I recently quit both to get into long distance running because I was getting to be pre-diabetic, despite eating decently well and doing the aforementioned exercise. (Probably genetic - my dad's mom and my mom's dad were both diabetic.)
After all that - my one anecdata point is that pilates is the absolute best and most sustainable for life. My increased flexibility and core strength have totally changed my life. I couldn't even tie my shoelaces before but now I can squat almost to the ground to pick up my son. I'd put running second because I genuinely think the human body is designed to run and your body will figure itself out once you get into running shape. I love Olympic but you'd really need a good coach and be committed to do it well and not injure yourself.
All the above took me years of consistency and commitment, but now I'm on pace for a 3:10-3:15 marathon next month and I'm in the best shape of my life with zero back pain. I think losing a ton of weight from running has also lifted the stress from my back.
That's my experience, fwiw. Good luck man, hope whatever you end up doing will improve yourself.
exercises that place the arm above the head become difficult if not impossible after some shoulder surgeries. these exercises position the shoulder in a comfortable locked in position. training in this position (eg. pull-ups) serves to strengthen muscles like the lats, which in turn support the shoulder in its resting position. i cant say avoiding surgery is fool proof - there is a markedly higher risk of dislocating, and many exercises (eg. bench press) become impossible with a loose shoulder joint. but personally i dont care, my destroyed shoulder becomes fixed after consistent pull-up training, do not see a need to lose half a year in recovery atm.
> As someone who's going to the doctor next week to discuss potential shoulder surgery, this is timely.
I was in the same position at age 42-ish. Shoulder pain in right shoulder so bad that I could not even lift a cup of coffee.
> I really need to figure out whether it's going to make things better or worse, but unfortunately, that feels like something a doctor can't guarantee one way or the other.
I heard the same thing from 3x different surgeons (orthopedic, I think), which lead to...
> Any anecdotes or other experiences/thoughts are appreciated.
... not having any surgery. Over the course of the next 3 months it remained the same in severity (did not get worse, may have gotten better slightly or else I started learning to live with it). The subsequent six months the pain started abating. Over the next 6 months the pain went away almost totally. Now, 8 years later, I don't feel any pain at all.
Of course, I am diabetic, so make of that what you will. When the first surgeon checked my scans (MRI, Xrays and something else - ultrasound, maybe), and said they are not sure if surgery would fix it, I went to a second surgeon with the same scans, got told the same thing. When the third surgeon said the same thing, I decided to wait and see.
Good thing I did; surgery doesn't always turn out well.
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