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I'd say you're auditioning to be my new mom anyway.

True. It's bad that these books are usually read by only young people. I remember reading Steppenwolf for the first time since teens and only then I realized how funny it was all around. Dostoevsky's The Devils is hilarious too, being very dark at the same time.

The same goes for basically all higher culture. Popular culture is usually unfunny because humor is considered a commercial risk.

It meant an upper middle class urban citizen, while "Kleinbürger" was their lower middle class counterpart. Buddenbrooks was all about Bürgers, their history and lifestyle. Mann was a member of that class or even of its upper crust, the patricians.

In every organization mature enough busywork will surpass real work for two reasons.

First: it cannot fail an so is not a career risk to anyone involved.

Secondly: because it doesn't produce anything meaningful it is trivially easy to manage and organize. Just like stacking boxes. No risk of missing the original mission or getting unexpected results.

In any organization old enough the main activity is the management and busywork is ideal to its needs.

We are all waiting for plot twist that these actually work better than human made ads and the weirder they get the worse humans can compete with them.

By always talking only about non specified "problems" and getting people not to expect any further information it is easier to hide when it's a suicide.

See them discuss about how much someone of them gets paid or taxed, if he has medical help if needed or if he can afford to live where he's living now.

He referred to the Thirty Years War where instead of doomscrolling the peasant especially living in southwestern Germany would get his war news by getting killed or starved and his home burned down.

All of this is very easy to filter out while browsing the internet. Not when you are speaking with actual persons. Believe or not, there are still people who watch television and believe in old media.

Television teaches them that the proper response to someone disagreeing is to get angry and shout when the opposing party tries to explain their point of view. Something that is useless or even technically impossible in anonymous net forums.

If you look at the old media, important decisions are mentioned but completely ignored after someone has said something offensive or an accident happened somewhere.

Social media is people and people are the problem, not technology or anonymity. Everyone who has spent Christmas with relatives knows this.

Probably there not enough content. Just the same repackaged in human or machine produced slop.

People are addicted to YouTube but I think the key to the healthy watching habits would be restricting the screen time.

Someone knowing about things he's interested in has few problems separating the new and informative content and if he had, say, two hours a week for watching he'd probably enjoy what he sees.

Two hours is just an estimate I came up with, it can be an two hours a month or hour a day. The important thing is that YT just doesn't create enough real new information and after that it is just slop and brain rot, regardless of your habits and filters.

Generating stuff is very cheap compared to building and training the model. When you have your model done you're incentivized to use it as much as possible. Maybe even considering the sunken costs.

Dostoevsky's Memoirs from the House of Dead is a good companion to Gulag Archipelago to show how things got worse into the full medieval sadism in less than a hundred years.

Besides the gulag is a blueprint to basically all the forms of how totalitarian societies treat their subjects, especially if you can see the pattern working in less cruel and plausible forms.

You should always read only books you enjoy.

Even if you think they're shallow you will realize the deeper stuff in that made you be interested in them you later. Your subconscious knows better.

A couple of says ago there was an excellent comment here on Hacker News about that you shouldn't read only in bed but allocate proper not tired time for reading. Otherwise you learn to associate reading with sleeping and drowse off after a few pages.

The sudden all encompassing popularity of smoking is one of the most astonishing things in modern history. I can think nothing that would show better the power of advertising.

Everyone knew from the start smoking is unhealthy, or at least not healthy and addictive. Nicotine probably happened to help with the new kind of stress and frustration the higher tech world caused and so it kind of answered to a real need.

Now when pretty much nobody smokes anymore, at least nobody who don't belong to underclass, it is weird reading. I remember a film of some kind of an underwater station by Cousteau and people where smoking there! A place where air for breathing is sparse if anywhere.

And when everything is a text file you have (optimally) a human readable single source of truth on things... Very important when things get complicated and layered. In GUI stuff your only option is often to start anew, make the same movements as the first time and hope you end with what you want.

And machine readable. You can parse csv file more or less easily but try the same with some forgotten software specific binary.

The most important thing is not to have a purpose. Machines will always outdo you in optimizing for a goal function.

Don't follow rules and if you really need to, make your own and never tell them to anyone. Keep people guessing and change your mind often. Never ask opinions. They are useless and if you never ask people think you know better.

What you know you think and feel are not what you think and feel but dead remnants of your past thoughts and hunches. You have no personality but an ever evolving process that changes instantly to fill the areas you think are not you or your interest.

Your command and understanding of the grammar of your native language puts a hard limit to how well you can learn other languages. This has not been stressed enough and schools have all but given up trying to teach children grammar because as natives they more or less get along without it.

How many pages of search engine results you need to reach the correct definition of "c"? I mean the "blue wobbly thing with mermaids in it".

- AI, find me a monastery to buy!

- OK, I suppose you want one in US. How many monks do you want?

- Well, ten would do.

- I found this one. It looks good but has only five monks.

- I like it. Are the monks righteous enough?

- My AI brain didn't find any transgressions, at least mentioned in news.

- I'll take it!

I've never understood what is so special about Starbucks. Visited once, the one near the Canary Wharf underground station. I saw it as pretty much an ordinary cafeteria.

Maybe it is the baristas. I sent my girlfriend to order - I usually do - because I avoid interacting with people trying to sell me anything for the same reason I use adblock while surfing and don't own a TV set. If buying coffee is anything like described in this conversation the experience would probably have been a lot more negative. Seeing someone acting as a friend for tips.

On a same trip we ate in KFC - my first and last time. I was like woah - who on earth would actually choose to eat this crap given about any choice... Compared to that the Starbucks coffee was ok, maybe a little bland.

Of course we didn't order any pint sized sugary things Americans seem to prefer because we enjoy being skinny and looking good.

I don't like naming things after other things. Names should be self explanatory or random codes.

The solutions requiring constant internet connection are pushed by states and companies because they help cutting costs and gathering information. However, the users are often more vulnerable to the risks if the technology fails but have relatively little say.

The solutions that do much the same but require internet connection only once a day or even once an hour would be much more resilient and safe but currently there are few incentives for providers to develop and offer them.

The extreme situations like war or dictatorship are good awakening calls but it is easy to see there are lots of risks involved even if things would go rather smoothly otherwise.

One more reason to resist the fragile lifestyle that requires constant internet access. Even if you don't live in a totalitarian country where shutting down the net would be easy and probable.

Some time ago someone posted in Twitter a letter of Theodore Kaczynski giving life advice, one point being not to use internet for more than one hour a day. Too bad I couldn't find it anymore.

Maybe the German, French, and Russian classics from around 1830-1950. The material that was considered the backbone of modern literature. At least War and Peace was mentioned in the list.

They might be a bit heavy reading but pretty much understandable even for less educated reader. The literature before that is written for people who know the Bible, Homer, Ovid etc, classic philosophies and European history thoroughly. For others it looks like nonsense or they might read it but not really get much out of it.

People who cannot learn hard things don't have time, or they think they don't have time. Actually they try to fake their way through because they believe it is impossible or at least too late to sort things out properly.

The so called geniuses seem to have rather lax lifestyle, like free evenings to really make their homework. When you constantly think you're in hurry you've pretty much lost the game. You're just trying to get by and learn very little.

And on the other hand you need nature relative near where the life can move back to the burned ecosystem.

If you only have a one plot of original nature as a kind of museum and that burns then it is goodbye.

Never seen any of Avatars but I see nothing that would interest me. I've understood they're stories about some imaginary creatures. Why should I care?

The best in YouTube are probably classical music master classes that give you an incredible insight on music. No hope seeing anything like that on television. Instructional videos are good too. Like installing stuff on computer and fixing bicycles.

Personally I never watch anyone speaking. Seeing a talking face somehow creeps me. Maybe its a bit sensitive but I see watching anyone eye to eye as a game of social dominance.

Now nobody willing to keep his job could afford flirting with hot supervisor and admitting mistakes. If they even spoke a common language, I mean.