devonsolomon

Not it unfortunately.

I fear there’s no coming back. When convenience destroys a culture, I’m not sure you’re ever able to get ever get the heart of it back. Especially when it was the network effects that made it special. I’ve read the recommendations in the comments of this, none of them really hit the same.

I probably should have just included it in the post, because now I’m replying the same thing hoping someone finds it…

I don’t think it’s BSS unless there are EPs from before what’s on Spotify. It was more punk rock than BSS, I think.

From the other comment TLDR… Male singer; Something like Blockparty/ TV on The Radio, song lyric was (maybe) something about throwing away your newspaper / no bad news today

I selfishly wanted to but: 1. It’s a little besides the point 2. I didn’t want to embarrass myself with how badly I remember it.

Anyway, here’s my shot: Male singer + (from other comment) It was pretty alt-grungy (something like TV on The Radio or Blockparty at the time). Lyric I remember is from a song starting with something along the lines of: throw away your newspaper/ no more bad news today.

It was pretty alt-grungy (something like TV on The Radio or Blockparty at the time). Lyric I remember is from a song starting with something along the lines of: throw away your newspaper/ no more bad news today.

The thing I miss most, and the thing we’ll never get back was the cultural buy-in and network effects.

My music discovery then was different friend groups incrementally amassing large collections of albums in whatever sub-culture that friend groups had doubled down on. My iPod would be the culmination of my friendships. I would then fall in love with bands and albums and tracks on these albums without any influence before hand on their popularity or their algorithmic match to my music tastes.

The result was pure joy: my music taste would develop in all weird and wonderful directions, my favorite songs would be the one I hit back on to listen again while I moved through an album, songs that friends skipped over and didn’t know at all; bands that never charted anywhere but made interesting music… bands that never knew their music made it to an iPod in South Africa.

(I’ve got a song still stuck in my head from a Canadian indie band that made its way onto my iPod via via and I’ve done all the searching in the world for the lyrics I remember and have never found the band. I love this that I’ve never found them!)

I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn’t built for this, and invariably find 90% of my listening happening on algo-generated playlists of songs that sound exactly like a song I like. I never learn the names of the songs or the names of the bands as the songs go by, and I fall in love with none of it… It just vaguely sounds like stuff I like. It sucks.

I don’t listen to any AI generated music consciously, but given the music experience today I probably wouldn’t notice as these playlists, like a boiling frog, slowly became AI music dominated.

I bought a record player as my protest, and it gives me immense joy to find obscure records and play them through; but it’s really not the same thing, and I miss what we had.

I worked for some years in cancer prevention.

Last year, my mom was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. My family largely agrees with this article: treatment was a mistake and likely worse than the disease (bar palliative care and a stent).

The headline we used in cancer education is about 38% of cancer cases are likely caused and perhaps preventable by modifiable lifestyle factors: Tabbaco, infections, alcohol, UV.

Widespread vaccination (HPV, Hep B/C etc) and precision prevention (genetic counseling and preventative interventions) add another layer of preventative opportunity, and could significantly move the needle inclusive of and beyond/above lifestyle factors.

This leaves a lot of room for change, but requires a changing of economic incentives and cultural factors: which are incredibly slow moving ships.

The next layer is early detection (pre-cancer and early cancer); and technology advancements look promising - multi-cancer blood tests like Galleri and whole-body MRI (Prenuvo, Neko, Midjourney) are scientifically and economically promising, but all commercially ahead of their time.

These two additional pots potentially provide another significant opportunity to reduce the burden where the cost-benefit on personal suffering makes sense.

I’d add as the last personal suffering cost-benefit promising intervention layer targeted immunotherapy (and perhaps to a lesser extent ADCs/smart-bombs), where many patients enjoy results without bearing equal or exceeding suffering. Though with smart bombs, the maths isn’t as convincing, and with both you’re heading into lower odds bets.

Ofcourse, many people are helped by classical chemo, but much of the time (and especially in later stages) you’re hoping to be the exception, and at this point, the population wide experience is in many cancer types net negative.

Many people pin there hopes on this last, narrow category of intervention for breakthroughs; and hopefully they come; but likely this hope, attention and capital is misplaced.

Thanks! Great idea to use configurator. Turning my iPhone into a dumb phone has been one of the best things I ever did. My relationship with my phone was weird (using it for distraction from anxiety, zoning out on it etc) and all this has gotten way better, I’m finding I can focus again. (I’ve set something similar up using an ad blocker app, but it was a bit of a hack.)

I’d highly suggest installing Dumb Phone (dp) from App Store to simplify your home into a monochromatic list, to top off this excellent guide.

On the contrary, I spoke with a local coffee shop branch owner who said that squatters are essential to keeping the space lively, popular, and “cool.” This atmosphere draws in passersby and casual visitors, who are the real source of their revenue.

My guess is that coffee shops fall into one of two categories:

1. Those in high foot traffic areas, where a no-laptop policy helps maintain turnover, or

2. Those in low foot traffic areas, where it makes sense to do everything possible to fill seats and cultivate an appealing, vibrant environment.

The problem is… When (if) we pick up the phone today it’s because we want to speak to a human.

Most people, avoid phone calls if possible.

If I get a call and it’s an AI, I, like everybody else, is putting down.

If I’m picking up the phone to call a company, it’s because I can’t achieve what I want to on their website.

These AI phone calls are as or more limited than the website.

There is a use-case for voice AI - most of these demoes really miss the mark with “we’re going to replace your call center”.

If founders had any idea how much performance matters in a call center, and how hard it is to achieve, they’d focus on a use case better served by voice AI.

I had deep-access to this industry in a past career - the way online sportbooks talk about their customers in private is all you need to know to know that this isn’t business, it’s predation.

It’s only Lean Startup methodology if the lies stay limited to consumers; otherwise, it’s just sparkling securities fraud.

I loved this footnote:

“I followed up by asking GPT-4o to draw “Explain who the enemy is”, and it generated an image with nothing except the word “SELF” in bold letters on a beige background. Odd.”

While this might have just been 4o guessing what the user wants given the prior thread obsessed with self… “Self” as the enemy is a beautiful idea common in eastern philosophy and the unexpected and odd way it’s delivered is like an allegory of a Zen master’s sudden lesson to a student.

Humans are incredibly perceptive, and the soft robotic buzz (as in the demos) will do as much to diminish rapport as a foreign accent.

I learned on this. It’s near perfect. Nothing to say but thank you!

Love it - Great work. I’m gonna give it a go.

Hard to pull off! But I imagine the wave of Bryan Johnson fans would be game.

Great experiment! It’s important to highlight that even in rigorously blinded studies which find a drug ineffective on average, there can still be genuine responders—this is known scientifically as “heterogeneous treatment effects.” Essentially, individuals vary in genetics, metabolism, and neurochemistry, which can cause meaningful differences in drug responsiveness. Thus, an N=1 trial, like yours, might indeed reveal real personal benefits that wouldn’t appear in a population-level analysis.

However, systematically performing robust N=1 trials individually across multiple substances can be impractical—too laborious and time-consuming for most people. An interesting business model might be a startup that facilitates personalized N=1 experiments at scale: providing users with high-quality compounds, matched placebos, structured dosing schedules, and data-tracking tools. This could empower more individuals to accurately assess personal efficacy across a wide variety of substances, potentially offering valuable, personalized insights that large-scale clinical trials can’t capture.

My favorite part was my iPhone struggling to run this thing once it got busy, and me desperate to not lose the game. Took me back to the old days!

Guess all those breakthroughs curing mouse cancer in human models are null then… back to the drawing board, tiny scientists!

True. Guess I’m disheartened by years of clickbait.

Graphene seems to be like a hotshot actor who lands a million auditions but somehow never makes it past a walk-on role in a toothpaste commercial.

Yesterday I laughed with my brother about how harsh people on the internet were about World Labs launch (“you can only walk three steps, this demo sucks!”). I was thinking, “this was unthinkable a few years ago, this is incredible”.

People of the internet, you were right. Now, this is incredible.

It has no problem talking about the terrorists other names (Akhmed the One-armed). Then bombs out when talking about his aliases.

Agreed. Reads as a bit of a gotcha. But wouldn’t we expect and want humans to be in the loop here?

Ya that’s true. I guess I’m imagining the “25%” being pushed towards 4chan type environments, and perhaps then a subset of that towards more dangerous environments.

My question is: What behaviors will come sideways out of this prohibition?

My guess: You can’t outwit a digital native generation. Websites with less concern for the rules in general will become digital hangouts.

For something a little contrarian and very interesting: Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing by Alexander Neil

TLDR: Children do not need teaching as much as they need love and understanding.

Addressed on Lex Fridman with Dario Amodei (CEO) and Amanda Eskell of Claude, they both insist the answer is no.

I interpret their explanation for “no” as follows: these are probabilistic outputs, and so given any changes, for some inputs, some outputs will be worse some of the time.

The argument goes that, given they’re probabilistic, even without changes, for some inputs, some outputs will be worse than the last time you gave it that input, some of the time.

To be fair to them, it makes sense that any change would then be met with some vocal users who are genuinely experiencing worse output, but are not generally using a worse product.

Ah yes ! Should have included.