Play CTFs, maybe the Flare-On challenge if you particularly enjoy reversing. Microcorruption is a just small taste of what the full CTF scene has to offer. picoCTF and pwn college are good starting points for beginners.
If you can find a competent instructor from a lineage that preserved the fighting applications of tai chi, you can see some pretty interesting grappling and joint-locking techniques. It's not all snake oil.
Here is a pretty good example of a very large trained fighter and a very excellent and much smaller tai chi guy going at it reasonably hard (like maybe one of them walks away with a concussion type hard).
I think that's a pretty good example of what "people who can actually fight well use tai chi techniques" looks like. A lot of force is going into those throws, bodies are flying, and they aren't students doing a demonstration for a crowd. Legit.
It's better than most of bullshido videos but it's obvious that the greco wrestler is acting and not really trying: no head control, no wrist control, high center of gravity, dramatic throws.
That "very excellent tai chi fighter" is, if I'm not mistaken, Chen Ziqiang - son of Chen Xiaoxing and nephew of Chen Xiaowang, part of the family that the Chen style comes from. He's the current master of the original Chen village school of Taijiquan, one of the biggest winners of Chinese push hands and wrestling championships (for his weight) and one of the most serious practitioners I know. I've been there and seen it, it's lots of heavy exercises, hours of daily practice and sparring.
He is indeed excellent, but if that is the level it takes to use Taiji in practice, you won't find many people in the world who can.
I have heard it takes roughly ten years of practice of tai chi to be able to fight reasonably effectively using tai chi principles, assuming you have a very workable base of kung fu or something equivalent established (say ten years) before that.
If it's just about learning how to fight really really fast the WW2 combatives courses seem to be the best available system. I don't think any martial art is suited to the speed and directness of modern life.
My Tai Chi teacher (Yang Family) is also an Aikido teacher and he teaches Tai Chi as a martial art, interpreting the form in terms of blocks, grappling moves, joint locks, etc. He learned at least some of that from earlier Tai Chi teachers who treated it as a cryptic martial art.
The purpose is to practice slowly with care to learn the moves thoroughly so that when it's time to perform them quickly you'll know the form and can flow quickly - the teacher was showing slow demonstrations.
I've never fought anyone, but as I've been taught the moves in Tai Chi's martial technique are generally intended to put people down quickly and hard by doing things like breaking elbows, eye gouges, and other grappling intended to severely injure the other party, essentially breaking every MMA rule that would get you disqualified.
This all varies significantly depending on the teacher, my teacher studied Chinese grappling, Mongolian wrestling, Aikido, and other arts that I'm sure he brought elements in from.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc3Q6vqvemA this is pretty much what high level skills in Tai Chi look like. You can see that it's mainly very, very secure footwork and explosive coordinated force delivered when the opponent is off balance -- this is a grappling situation but the logic is pretty similar if they were hitting each-other or even using swords / spears.
Not an online website, but I found my typing ability increased considerably after playing the typing-of-emacs game (https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TypingOfEmacs). Because the penalty for mistakes is extreme (losing 1 out of the 3 lives you have), it encourages you to type with perfect accuracy.
There's a 2-3 second timeout to motivate you to type fast. Also, it pulls words from the buffer you have open, so you can practice on a set of words that you use regularly. It starts with short words and gradually moves to longer and more complex words to see if you can keep up.
Nice, it works in evil-mode on emacs as well! Although for emacs I would just use query-replace, which does the same thing with y/n confirmation, and it can also be run on just a selected region if desired.
(If anyone actually enjoys writing JavaScript, or can do it in their sleep, feel free to take over. I'm 95% a backend dev, so I was just aiming for something easy to maintain, ideally generated from something like a CSV file. The intention is to link to it from Reddit's /s/ErgoMechKeyboards.)
Nice visualization! I like how you added filters for all the different options. The repo I linked to is a fork of the original abandoned one; it seems to be being updated regularly (last merge 8 days ago).
zsh-autosuggestions has definitely saved me more than hundreds of hours. When you type part of a command, it auto-suggests previous commands you've executed and then lets you expand to them, cutting down on your typing, on average, 75% or more.
For example, typing "scp" could expand to "scp -r myself@servername /home/myname/.logs/logfile ."
It's a concept that originated with the Fish shell, but is useful if you want to maintain some semblance of bash compatibility.
Knowledge of assembly is also extremely important for computer security related topics such as reverse engineering, malware analysis, and exploit development.
