Book review: Raeste & Sokala: The World's 50 Most Dangerous Companies
Juha-Pekka Raeste & Hannu Sokala: Maailman 50 vaarallisinta yhtiötä (“The World’s 50 Most Dangerous Companies”) (2020, 2022)
Reporters Sokala and Raeste have written (in Finnish) what is essentially a “Who’s Who” of corporate giants. As the name suggests, the book lists the world’s most dangerous companies, though the final result is necessarily the authors' subjective view. Additionally, for example, Visa and Mastercard are such similar companies that, just for the sake of variety, only one was chosen to be included.
In any case, predictably included are, for example, firms in the petrochemical industry and private military contractors, but also a significant number of various financial institutions. In the Top 5, we find Google, Tencent, Amazon, and Facebook, whose danger is based, of course, on how they seek not only to know all possible data about their users but also to stifle competition through, for example, predatory pricing or simply buying competitors out of the market. These billion-dollar companies can also afford to break all possible laws; for instance, Google easily pays off even large multi-million fines with just a few hours of its operating profit. With a practically endless cash reserve, it’s also nice to lobby for favorable laws while simultaneously pursuing world domination through artificial intelligence.
The text flows smoothly and doesn’t dwell on any one company for too long. However, the subject matter of the work is inherently so heavy that I didn’t feel like reading more than a couple of chapters a day. Still, this is quite an educational and recommended reading experience! 📚📔📖
Lessons from years of software engineering
Early in my career when someone asked me in a job interview what it is that I like about the practice of software engineering I would say something like “solving problems”, and I know many others say that as well. The older I’ve grown the more I’ve found that it’s not really about the problems, but the people who have those problems. Nowadays what I like about the practice is helping users solve their problems more efficiently with better software.
See, many students of computer science believe, myself included, that software development is an exact science. It’s not fuzzy like the social sciences, it’s more like math. Well, if you’re still a student with this belief, I’ve got news for you: it’s actually very fuzzy, and you will need to learn to embrace that fuzziness. Software is developed by people according to specifications created by people, to be used by people and to exist in an environment regulated by people.
Back in the university we had some software development course with a long group project where each week we’d get an assignment to add new features to it. I was frustrated: why wouldn’t they just tell us all the requirements in advance? It would’ve been so much easier to incorporate the future requirements if we had just known about all of them ahead of time! News flash: it turned out to be the best course to simulate how real software development actually works. You never get all the requirements beforehand, and even when you thought you did, they will change on the fly. This is an example of the fuzziness I mentioned.
I was reminded of these discoveries when watching the Cocaine and Conway’s Law presentation by Greg Wilson. He’s quite a big name in the industry, being an educator, author, and academic, but also having worked in the industry. Conway’s Law basically states that organizations produce software that mirrors the structure of said organization. If teams A and B never talk, then the parts of the system representing or implemented by A and B never talk either. Wilson argues that when there’s resistance to change when deploying a new piece of software, it’s largely because the people using that software instinctively but possibly subconsciously realize that the organization would also need to change now, which is of course always anxiety-inducing. Wilson also advocates for the “humanist” tradition to be included as the fourth cornerstone of computer science, the commonly recognized ones having been the mathematical, engineering, and scientific traditions.
The obvious danger here, however, is that students will stop listening at this point when something fuzzy is presented to them, as they didn’t think that’s what they signed up for. Wilson has this example student “Jay” who does not want to be lectured about DEI or any social aspects of the work, but who enjoys coding as problem solving. A proposed solution is to start with something that looks technical, but in the end leads to the human side of the business. Jay would also need to meet the users and other stakeholders of his piece of software to start caring about them, and this would happen naturally within these project courses, for example.
Corollary to the fact that software exists in a world of people, I’ve also been thinking that computer science is a funny thing in the sense that it’s almost nothing in and of itself. Software has no natural domain, and it inherits the messiness of whatever domain it’s being applied to. When you study computer science, you may land a job in almost any industry: finance, logistics, gaming, retail, telecommunications, nonprofits, chemistry, etc, and it’s of course fascinating to learn about these new domains as a programmer.
So, these have been my biggest revelations during the past 15-20 years. Software development is not an exact science, and it kind of only exists in the context of other industries. The problems also aren’t the thing, but how solving those problems helps people.
Random Things Sunday #12
Some interesting media to watch and to listen to this time. One short, one medium, and two long ones:
- Wat, from 2012, is a four minute comedy show by Gary Bernhardt about the quirks of some programming languages.
- The new video game documentary channel Pixel to Publish did a 25-minute video on how Factorio was made. It’s interesting with the ups and downs even if you haven’t played the game.
- In a recent episode of the My Perfect Console podcast the host Simon Parkin talks with Andy Davidson, creator of Worms. Andy talks us through how the iconic game came to fruition and how he got a publishing deal with Team17 when he was just a teenager. This show lasts for some 90 minutes.
- Google DeepMind just published a 1.5 hour documentary called The Thinking Game that details the story of Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind, and how he set himself to “solving the AI” from early on, and how last year he got awarded the Nobel prize in Chemistry for his and his team’s work in protein folding. An interesting tidbit of knowledge was that before his time in the university Hassabis worked briefly for Bullfrog, creating the AI of the hit game Theme Park.
Using AI at work
us-east-1, Eight Sleep, and the Internet of Things
A couple of weeks ago on October 20, 2025 Amazon Web Services (AWS) had a catastrophic failure as their us-east-1 region (North Virginia) went down. Amazon does not publish info on how many data centers each region has, but the public guesses linger around one hundred for this particular one. This failure also brought down or severely degraded the performance of many high profile services such as Slack, Zoom, Lyft and Hulu, and the event made it to the mainstream news around the world.
To me, however, the most striking service that suffered from this was one that I hadn’t even heard of before. It was a company called Eight Sleep, which makes smart beds to optimize your sleep quality. The beds have sensors and will adjust the temperature of the mattress for comfortable sleeping. On the night the us-east-1 went down many Eight Sleep users apparently woke up because their bed was too warm: the beds couldn’t handle being offline as their background servers were unavailable! Adding insult to injury the beds even had no local override: when offline, you could not adjust their temperature or inclination, so that users also had their beds stuck in wonky positions.
Additionally, disgruntled users began looking into the web traffic patterns of their mattresses, finding out their beds upload between 16 to 24 gigabytes of data into the cloud every month. To put this figure in perspective, it’s like having an always-on telephone call consuming your bandwidth. Coincidentally, that’s also about equal (or more!) to the amount of telemetry that an actual Apollo mission spaceship used to send (source: Wikipedia). Furthermore, the beds aren’t doing anything that the Apollo Guidance Computer couldn’t have easily calculated some sixty years ago already.
The audacity of this service is something else. These things always bring me to one of my favorite movie quotes, from Jurassic Park (1993):
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.
Just because it’s possible to connect your mattress or your refrigerator to the internet doesn’t mean you should do that. I in fact recently bought a new fridge, and while it does seem to have some wifi indicator I have no intention whatsoever to ever connect it to any network. There’s just no use case for it.
Similarly, when I bought a new watch its sister model would’ve had Bluetooth. However, it being a non-smart watch, I found no use case for it. It might be worth for you if you constantly travel over timezones and need to adjust your watch, but I can do that manually a couple of times in a year just fine.
I’m not some luddite against technology and I in fact really like my Philips Hue lights around the house, but they actually have use cases, and they even work when the internet is down. Also not insignificantly I’m reminded of the truth by the world famous cybersecurity professional Mikko Hyppönen:
No need to widen the attack vector for malicious actors for nothing. For example, if your freezer is hacked, your food may rot and you may need to replace your floor when the ice in the appliance melts.
Andy Weir: Project Hail Mary (2021)
A man wakes up from a coma in a strange cylindrical room, with only a computer and robotic arms taking care of him. The reader knows he is on a spaceship, but the man himself has such a severe amnesia that he doesn’t even remember his own name. However, the man discovers he is quite competent in the natural sciences and gradually begins to recall flashes of his past too.
The story progresses on two timelines: the present on the spaceship and sometime earlier on Earth. The reader thus learns about the protagonist’s past at the same pace as the man himself. Gradually, it becomes clear that nothing less than the future of all humanity is at stake.
Weir is known for his first book, The Martian. In the movie based on that one everything goes wrong for Matt Damon and he ends up as a potato farmer on Mars. Hail Mary is Weir’s third novel, and Murphy’s Law is still strongly present. As a reader I found myself almost frustrated at some point, wondering if this thing couldn’t have gone reasonably well either.
In any case, the book was captivating, and the world that Weir had developed was detailed and interesting. The category is so-called hard SF, meaning science fiction that strives for scientific accuracy, or at least attempts to explain events scientifically, and for the lay reader, it certainly passes for the real deal. I recommend this one. 📚
PS. I just learned that there’s a Project Hail Mary movie coming in March 2026, starring Ryan Gosling! So read the book now and be prepared for it. 😃
Random Things Sunday 11: Neal.fun, aka. Destroying your productivity
This time all the links are from the same site! This guy Neal has created plenty of addictive content for the internet. Don’t click on any of the following links if you intend to get any work done in the next hour or so! Let’s get to it:
- A couple of years ago the The Password Game went viral. It’s a game about increasingly complex password rules: every time you satisfy one condition, an even stricter and weirder rule appears. You thought you could make a strong password just by adding a number and a symbol? Think again!
- I now checked what other stuff Neal has recently made besides The Password Game and found out about Infinite Craft, which I ended up clicking for way too long. You start with the basic elements: earth, wind, fire, and water. Then you combine those to get absolutely anything. The game often surprises you with the end result, but it also often makes sense too. For example, earth + earth becomes a mountain, and mountain + fire becomes a volcano. Earth + water, on the other hand, becomes a plant, and plant + fire becomes smoke. With these kinds of chains I’ve managed to eventually craft, for example, Leonardo DiCaprio! 😂
- The third and last way for one to waste time with Neal’s creations that I want to introduce is the Stimulation Clicker. It starts as a deceptively simple page with just a button, but it soon gets pretty crazy. The “game” can be seen as clever social commentary on the attention-market the web has become: you earn and spend stimulation, and everything on the screen tries to grab your attention when you need those short dopamine hits. Can you resist finding out how/if the game ever ends??
So, these were my selections from Neal’s site, but he has created plenty of other things as well, many of them even educational. You might want to check them out at Neal.fun – but you might waste even more time if you do that, so be warned!
Random Things Sunday #10
Some random findings from the internets, this time catering to programmer-minded people:
- My former colleague Robert turned out to be quite a penman. He wrote a cool short sci-fi story called Null and void and published it in his blog. Check it out!
- Darwin Awards collects events where people have removed themselves from the gene pool by doing something stupid. The history of the site goes back to the 1990s, so you may have heard about it already, but this year they’ve got a new category for AI Darwin Awards. This new category honours the visionaries who looked at AI and thought “You know what this needs? Less safety testing and more venture capital!".
- Finally, you thought you knew what an email address looks like? The E-mail.wtf quiz is here to prove you wrong! I scored 14/21…
Watch woes revisited and resolved
In February I reported that the number six in my watch had come loose. Miraculously, that problem fixed itself over time, as the digit disappeared into a crevice in the watch face. The joy was short lived, though, as one by one the other digits also became loose. Needless to say, I was very thankful I had not invested in fixing the number six… Oddly enough, the other digits also disappeared into the crevice.
Now, the watch was still usable, but the final nail to its coffin was when the coating at the underside started chipping so that the watch became abrasive. At this point I had to ditch it and start looking for a new watch.
I browsed some watch retailers and makers, and even had a chat with ChatGPT as to what kind of a watch I should get. ChatGPT highlighted the Casio G-Shock 2100 series as potentially interesting to me. I don’t really like the bulky look of some of the G-Shock watches (see: the GA-010 series), but the 2100s are sleek, and they’ve got so many variants of it.
I didn’t want to order a watch from an online store, because I want to know how it looks and feels before I commit to it. Sure, you could return it, but that’s always a hassle, so I visited a local retailer in a brick-and-mortar store. There, the Steel Edition GM-2110 with an orange watch face caught my eye. I must say none of the product photos online really do justice to the watch, it looks really great in person. In the end, yes, it blew up the budget I had set for myself, but I can justify it as being a birthday present to myself.
PS. Fun fact: the fan community has nicknamed the 2100-series “CasiOak”, thanks to the octagonal bezel, reminiscent of the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak. The Royal Oak’s price point, however, is “if you need to ask, you can’t afford it”…
Kagi revisited
Back in March I wrote about how I have ditched Google for good and become a Kagi user. I’m happy to report I’m still a happy Kagi user – so happy that I’ve upgraded to the professional plan that costs $10/month and gives you unlimited searches. The price is a bit steep considering the other major thing you get is more tokens to access the Kagi AI Assistant models, but I’ve read they’re working on a non-AI plan as well, so that’s good news.
So anyway, why did I upgrade, why wasn’t 300 searches per month enough for me anymore? In short, I’ve found that Kagi has put the fun back into searching the web again. Google would keep disappointing me with the ads and other crud time after time, so I had maybe even unconsciously significantly reduced my Google search usage. With Kagi I have slowly regained my trust in search engines and started using normal searches again, instead of trying to interrogate some LLM or going directly to some site that I’d expect to be of some use.
Every now and then I’m still accidentally directed to Google, namely through certain Android features, and I’ve learned, as undoubtedly everyone else as well, that Google nowadays features an AI-generated answer to your query as the first result. The internet is full of examples of where this AI answer has gone wrong, so I don’t need to highlight that. Kagi, however, does it a bit differently: regularly you never get an AI-generated answer, but if you want one, you can easily get it by making your query a question, i.e. just by adding a question mark to it. I’ve found myself utilizing this feature every now and then, and I quite like it, as it also diligently adds source links to its answers.
Kagi Translate is another Kagi Service I like but haven’t really gotten into the habit of using yet. At some point in relatively recent history I figured that ChatGPT is a perfectly fine translator as well, and that it often seems to outperform Google Translate, so I’ve been using ChatGPT instead. But as with LLMs always, it often takes some liberties, and then you end up fighting with it over some detail. It depends on what you are translating, of course. For example, I’ve wanted to translate some of my Finnish texts to English, and I think Kagi Translate just keeps my voice, whereas ChatGPT often tries to be too clever.
One use case where I’ve still used Google on purpose has been wanting to actually buy some physical products, because I know Google will try its darnest to connect me with a seller, so that they can get some ad revenue – and even then I’ve still used Kagi first.
So, why are you still letting yourself be disappointed in Google results? Try Kagi!
PS. Also try Wiby, a “Search Engine for the Classic Web”. It’s quite like Kagi’s Small Web initiative, as it only targets those personal, non-commercial homepages that you can’t ever find with Google.
Richard Osman: We Solve Murders (2024)
Finished reading: We Solve Murders by Richard Osman 📚
Amy Wheeler is a specialist in tough situations: equally at home on the tatami mat or the shooting range, or applying her skills on the battlefield. Amy is a professional bodyguard and works for Maximum Impact Security.
The book begins with Amy on a private island, protecting retired millionaire author Rosie D’Antonio. D’Antonio once lived a wild life and has now irritated the wrong oligarch, possibly just to add some excitement back into her life.
To Amy, the gig seems easy; who would find her client from a deserted island? However, someone has managed to kill other Maximum Impact Security clients, and it’s starting to look like Amy is being framed. As if that weren’t enough, Amy soon realizes she herself is on someone’s hit list.
Amy’s husband, Adam, works in finance and would likely curl into a fetal position when danger threatens, but Adam’s father, Steve, on the other hand, is a former police officer hardened by London and softened by an idyllic small village after retirement, now a private detective. Amy and Steve have a close relationship, and thus Amy calls her father-in-law to help solve the murders. Rosie D’Antonio also stays involved, as she has excellent resources and contacts – and Amy, of course, cannot abandon her client.
We Solve Murders is an excellent substitute for fans of The Thursday Murder Club series. The book is also fun, pretty much perfect summer reading.
A light exercise in vibe coding
A few months ago I tried vibe coding an ant colony simulator, but in the end it didn’t work out. I did mention that I had had successes in vibe coding, and lately I had one of those again.
For my previous post I needed to embed several YouTube videos. That, however, is very cumbersome when you’re blogging with your phone, as the mobile version of YouTube does not have the option to easily just copy the embed code, unlike the desktop version, so it was about to turn into an exercise in frustration.
But lo and behold, ChatGPT to the rescue. I gave it this prompt:
Käärijä & KAJ
Käärijä almost won the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) 2023 with his song Cha Cha Cha. If you haven’t seen his performance, check it out here – you won’t be disappointed:
Now, Käärijä had a long career of several years already before the ESC, but he was a rather underground artist back then and I admit I hadn’t heard of him either. After his performance in the contest I started listening to his earlier music as well and found some great stuff. Most of Käärijä’s songs are about various aspects of partying, but what, I believe, makes him so popular is his attitude: he’s never dissing anyone except maybe himself, and he’s always happy to engage with his fans of all backgrounds. It’s a bit shame that he doesn’t have too many proper music videos, but here’s a couple of my favorite pieces from him anyway.
Välikuolema (2022) is about having to lie down and take a break from partying. It’s literally translated as “intermediary death”. Käärijä wants to party but he can’t and needs a break.
Auto jää (2023) Käärijä made with Antti Tuisku, a very successful Finnish pop star who became famous in a talent show in 2003. The piece is about how your plans can change and you end up partying even though you thought you’d drive straight home from work. “Auto jää” translates to “the car stays” or maybe more accurately “drop the car”, as you can’t drink and drive.
KAJ finished fourth in the ESC this year (2025) and like Käärijä I hadn’t heard of them before either. Their song was Bara Bada Bastu:
I looked into the group and it turns out they have been making hits for some ten years already! Pa tu ta na kako (2015) is a J-pop style song (they call it KAJ-pop!) about your grandma force-feeding you more and more cake. They have a brilliant music video and even a behind the scenes documentary (part 1, part 2) about the video (in Swedish). After the video you might want to watch this live version with subtitles.
Another hit from KAJ is Taco hej (me Gusta) (2016). This one is about having a cozy night at home, making and eating tacos and tortillas. It’s as catchy like Pa tu ta na kako and the music video is shot in a single long take somewhat in the spirit of OK Go:
Taco hej also has a making-of documentary in Swedish (part 1, part 2), and you can also watch a live version with English subtitles.
So there you have it: it’s worth looking into the Eurovision artists, you might discover some gems from their other songs. Leave a comment if you know of any other hits from any Eurovision artists, besides their ESC entry!
Random Things Sunday #9
Without further ado, here are some random things I’ve recently come across: a new game mode in Clash Royale, 1-bit LLMs, and some game making:
- Clash Royale, a mobile game I recently wrote about, came up with an entirely new game mode called Merge Tactics. It’s an auto battler where you play a few rounds with your familiar characters, but once the game starts, you cannot affect the outcome. Between the games you use elixir to acquire new characters and place them on the grid. Similar characters have synergy bonuses. Check out for example this video for further info!
- LLMs such as ChatGPT are all the rage, but the models are huge and training them takes a lot of time, energy, and money. I came across this video about 1-bit LLMs that are very promising. The one bit refers to the model’s weights, which are often 8 or 16 bits, but research seems to show that equal results can be produced with a much simpler model as well. Technically a “1.58-bit” model is even more accurate, as then the weights can have a zero value in addition to plus and minus one, but see the video for yourself. 🙂
- Finally, this game called Vuntra City has several interesting making-of videos by the dev, Lara. I found this video about simulating one million unique and persistent NPCs in the city fascinating. A million non-playable characters is a lot, but she came up with this trick of storing their basic data into a bitmap, and suddenly an image with a million pixels is not that big of a piece of data after all. Honestly, more games should let you peek behind the curtain like this.
Elevator Saga game
Robot Battle, an old Windows game
How NetHack got me into the Battlefield series
NetHack is a notoriously difficult game that some people play for decades and never win, even if they have all the spoilers available. I used to play it a lot some twenty years ago.
The game may not look like much; in fact by default it consists only different characters and symbols of different colors: you are the @ symbol, a grey d is your dog, a purple capital letter is some highly dangerous monster, a brown % is food, and so on. It takes a bit of imagination, but once you’re fully immersed into the game, even looking at your own email address may send shivers down your spine because it looks like you’re in a narrow corridor surrounded by monsters.
The goal is to descend down a perilous dungeon, retrieve a powerful magical item called the Amulet of Yendor, come back up, get to the Elemental Planes and the Astral Plane, and finally offer said amulet to your deity, who will grant you the gift of immortality in return. This called ascending the game, i.e. ascending to demigod(dess)hood.
So, how did NetHack get me playing the Battlefield series, then? Battlefield is a series of first-person shooter games that has always been bragging with some cutting-edge graphics, so it couldn’t be much farther away from NetHack.
Random Things Sunday #8
A bit of Star Wars and some programming this week:
- SC 38 Reimagined is a fan-made remake of the Obi-Wan vs Darth Vader fight in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. The film is short but it has high production values. It makes the original Alec Guinness vs David Prowse battle look rather geriatric, following Vader’s aggressive fighting style seen in the prequel films and TV shows. This fan-film even has a Wikipedia article.
- Google may have profiled me after my previous Random Things Sunday post, as that list contained a reference to a piece of game-making software, and then YouTube’s algorithm recommended me the Make tiny games video by Juniper Dev. The video is about retro game engines, such as PICO-8, that force you to be creative by limiting the resources you have at your disposal, but that can also be fully mastered due to their limited size. If one wants to make games, start small, and nothing is smaller than these engines!
- Finally, Joshua Barretto did a great write-up Writing Toy Software Is A Joy, which I think is a good follow-up to the previous point about tiny games. The point of the post is that if you’re a programmer, you should have hobby projects too. You cannot know how, but they’ll pay you back when you’ll acquire knowledge you didn’t know you’d need. And it’s also just more fun to program 20% the work for 80% the results, rather than trying to account for every exceptional case like you’d do if you were writing production quality software, where the first 90% of functionality takes 90% of effort and the final 10% of polish takes the other 90% of work.
Micro.blog June photo challenge day 26: Bridge
Tulvaniitynsilta in Helsinki, Finland, crossing River Vantaa. #mbjune 📷
This is a leaning tied-arch bridge for pedestrian and bicycle traffic, opened in October 2020. It looks pretty wild from this angle, as if it’s falling down. The bridge deck is arched too, horizontally, so it’s quite unusual in every way. There’s an extensive article about the bridge in Finnish here.
Cycling wattage
I consider myself a pretty decent cyclist: during my commutes I’m usually the one who overtakes others, or I can ride a hundred kilometers at a more leisurely pace. That’s all anecdotal, however, and it only occurred to me recently that there are ways to actually measure how good one is at cycling, without taking part in competitions: enter power and watts.
Those more serious about cycling keep an eye on their wattage (more precisely, power) and very likely have high-end bike computers that display the wattage in real time. In short, the watts tell the power the cyclist can generate, and the more power the faster they can go, basically.
So what if you’re a more casual cyclist like me and don’t have nor want to invest in a cycling computer? In my case I recently got myself a gym membership after some thirteen years away. (As a side note, it was weird to notice that all the weights had been recalibrated during the last decade! For example, a 10 kg dumbbell definitely wasn’t that heavy the last time I tried!) At my gym are several Matrix exercise bikes, which have a fitness-test program. The program asks you to maintain a cadence (pedaling rate) of 60-80 RPM (revolutions per minute), and then it ramps up the level every two minutes, making it harder and harder to pedal. Once you can’t sustain the 60-80 RPM cadence, the test ends.
In my case I found that a leisurely pace is, for me, about 58 RPM, so already maintaining the required cadence took some conscious effort, even when the resistance was initially negligible. I got exhausted at around 14 minutes and 30 seconds, at which point the device displayed the final results: estimated VOâ‚‚max (maximum oxygen intake) of 46,7 ml/kg/min and then just “245 Watts”.
The VOâ‚‚max value is good or very good for a male in my age group according to different normative tables, but I don’t remember entering my weight into the device and I doubt it measured it either, so I’m taking that with a grain of salt. However, the watts was what I was interested in in the first place, and that the device should be able to measure precisely. But what kind of a figure is that? I tried to find the manual of the bike and even sent a query to Matrix to find out, but to no avail.
My own research and asking around suggests that the value is probably the peak power output, estimating the maximum aerobic power (MAP). The MAP clearly isn’t that interesting a figure, since you cannot maintain that kind of a power for any prolonged period at all, so what we’re interested in instead is the functional threshold power (FTP), which reflects a rider’s sustainable power output level. According to the online sources I found, a decent estimate of FTP is 0.75×MAP = 183.75 W. (Individual variation exists, though, so in practice the FTP is usually somewhere between 0.7×MAP and 0.8×MAP.)
Fine, but how does that value compare, then? Alone, it doesn’t really tell much so it needs to be scaled for the rider’s weight, and in my case this power-to-weight ratio rounds to 2,0 W/kg. Most tables I found are for professional athletes, which I’m not, but 2.0 W/kg is still good for an amateur. A club cyclist would have the ratio at around 3.0 to 4.0, and the very best of the best cyclists in the world have the ratio of some 7.0, which is just insane, translating to them riding steep uphills roughly as fast as I commute on flat ground.
To double check the results by the Matrix bike I did the test again a week later and got the same results, so at least it’s internally consistent. Next, I tried this online calculator, plugged in the numbers from one of my regular commutes, and arrived at 2.1 W/kg, which is close enough to 2.0. (I use Strava to record my commutes, but only because it has an API. I find the free version of Sports Tracker a much better app and used that one for years, but they don’t have an API, which I need, so what can you do.)
So, what did we learn? The functional threshold power is a good way to measure the relative “goodness” of a rider, but calculating it without a proper cycling computer might not be entirely trivial. Also, for casual riders like me, the figure is basically useless anyway, unless I start to train regularly and in a determined way, at which point I’m not exactly a casual rider anymore. There are also several different methods of estimating the FTP, such as the ramp test that I described, but also an 8-minute and 20-minute test. Anyway, at least I found all this interesting, and in the end that’s all that matters for a blog post!