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marcd35

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agree with all the above. i usually throw on brown noise/moving water youtube videos since the frequencies cancel out most distracting noises. one of my fav ambient music channels is obsidian soundfields on youtube.

another trick recommended by Huberman is wearing a hoodie and reading in front of a blank wall. this will will restrict your visual field and not get distracted by passing cars, light reflections, etc.

i think the biggest "trick" to follow through with reading is the screening process at the outset. ask yourself - why do i want to read this? what do i hope to learn from it/get out of it/etc? am i reading it just because other people are talking about it? answering some of these questions should help you follow through when you 'get stuck' or lose interest, which you can then review the initial reasons why you picked it up in the first place. should also make it easier to put down/ DNF

I agree with this point. There is absolutely a 'left behind' gap that is under-explored.

My last job was a cable technician - making house calls to fix wifi, satellite tv, phone issues. Mostly elderly residents. The majority of them all were computer and phone illiterate. They were slow adopters to the fast-moving technology and many of them did not know how to operate their devices after we (UI/UX/hardware/software engineer 'we') removed them.

I wonder if this also has contributed to the elderly lonliness problem - sure its probably mostly related to physical companionship, acceptance of aging, etc, but the world that they knew (in general and the technological world they grew up in) is no longer recognizable.

about as much as all the people who signed the petition to stop/slow the rate of ai advancement - nothing other than pointing to it in the future when all has gone to shit and say, "told you so"

not OP and not sure of the book but if you're interested in material like this, check out Derek Sivers' work - usually revolves around stepping outside your comfort zone, exploring new ideas, etc.

https://sive.rs/n

I think this decision is more defensive than "losing touch with their customers." The winds are shifting in other countries that are cracking down on social media use for children. Discord does not want to get caught in the shit storm of legal issues if they fail to comply. This is a proactive measure.

Systems Thinking 6 months ago

HN comments: 53

Comments on actual blog post: 0

Why are people so afraid to leave replies on the author’s OC

Claude Opus 4.6 6 months ago

Doesn’t this just exacerbate the “black box” conundrum if they just keep piling on more and more features without fully comprehending what’s being implemented

Thank you for the blog post! I live in New England and always had the winter blues, always just assumed it was because of the weather but never acted on it.

About a week ago, there was a reddit post claiming it's actually geographically impossible for anyone where I live to produce enough Vitamin D naturally from the sun alone, due to the shorter days and lower angles throughout the day. I had no idea.

something about giving full read write access to every file on my PC and internet message interface just rubs me the wrong way. some unscrupulous actors are probably chomping at the bit looking for vulnerabilities to get carte blanche unrestricted access. be safe out there kiddos

funny story - I had a job recently that installed DirecTV setups for mostly retirement communities. On almost every service call, I'd show up and 95% of the time, without fail, they'd either be watching Fox News, CNN, or CNBC. It was quite depressing to see 24/7 news stations had completely consumed their lives and became the majority of topics of conversation while I was there.

I eventually quit the job. I decided I didn't want to be a part of making our society worse by installing these devices that were causing manufactured outrage, hate, and selective truth telling.

Soon after I left, I found a book while thrifting that came out in 1978 called "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" by Jerry Mander. I laughed at the title and couldn't believe someone was already arguing for the detriments of TV before I was born. It's very well written and the points he makes are still relevant today.

From the wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimina...

Mander believes that "television and democratic society are incompatible" due to television removing all of society's senses except for seeing and hearing. The author states that television makes it so that people have no common sense which leads to...being "powerless to reject the camera's line of sight, reset the stage, or call on our own sensory apparatus to correct the doctored sights and sounds the machine delivers".

Mander's four arguments in the book to eliminate television are:

1. that telecommunication removes the sense of reality from people,

2. television promotes capitalism,

3. television can be used as a scapegoat, and

4. that all three of these issues negatively work together.

Qwen3-Max-Thinking 6 months ago

i'm no expert, and i actually asked google gemini a similar question yesterday - "how much more energy is consumed by running every query through Gemini AI versus traditional search?" turns out that the AI result is actually on par, if not more efficient (power wise) than traditional search. I think it said its the equivalent power of watching 5 seconds of TV per search.

I also asked perplexity to give a report of the most notable ARXIV papers. This one was at the top of the list -

"The most consequential intellectual development on arXiv is Sara Hooker's "On the Slow Death of Scaling," which systematically dismantles the decade-long consensus that computational scale drives progress. Hooker demonstrates that smaller models—Llama-3 8B and Aya 23 8B—now routinely outperform models with orders of magnitude more parameters, such as Falcon 180B and BLOOM 176B. This inversion suggests that the future of AI development will be determined not by raw compute, but by algorithmic innovations: instruction finetuning, model distillation, chain-of-thought reasoning, preference training, and retrieval-augmented generation. The implications are profound—progress is no longer the exclusive domain of well-capitalized labs, and academia can meaningfully compete again."

Bye Bye Gmail 6 months ago

are you only using the web based version?

A dedicated client like Mozilla's Thunderbird might be helpful for de-cluttering.

Notion Mail also seems like it has potential - ability to group together certain types of mail.

Someone already recommended Google Takeout to back up all your mail, then finding a business email host that can easily import your data

Proof of Corn 6 months ago

Why wouldn't they be able to eventually set it up to work autonomously? A simple github action could run a check every $t hour to check on the status, and an orchestrator is only really needed once initially to set up the if>then decision tree.

I really appreciate the still images at the end of the Mandalorian episodes. I'm not sure if they were used for set design or created afterward, but they are really stunning and gives you more time to appreciate the world building, costumes, and creativity that goes into production.

Also a huge fan of that channel. I think he came back recently to do some more episodes. There's a new channel I found that offers similar reflections upon cinema - willbryanfilms - definitely worth checking out!