npunt

The ubiquitous availability of smartphones also limits kids freedom. It creates a very particular style of interaction with peers where quitting means you are left out. That means kids are subject to apps that prey on insecurities, have extremely addictive properties, force feed constant doomerism messaging on them, etc just to stay connected. Another way to look at it is it’s a tax on the joy and freedom of being a kid.

This is a freedom-from / freedom-to distinction. Once you look at kids as a social group rather than as a single individual I think you can come to very different conclusions about what is on balance healthier.

Another detail worth mentioning via Taniwha [1] was Supermac had an engineer on set and configured the graphics cards to run the monitors at 24hz so they wouldn't have any banding when filmed.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25392870

The Helm is great. I'm not sure it really solves the wrists problem, at least for me since for how I use it the height of the laptop makes a huge difference in ergonomics. The MacBook Pro is already tall, and the Helm makes it taller, creating pressure on the wrists. Meanwhile I don't have this problem on my carry everywhere MacBook Air since it's so thin.

Context: measuring productivity at all is hard. It was hard when computers were introduced into the workplace, when the internet was introduced, etc.

I worked with a journalist who covered tech in the 80s & 90s and she remembered that studies then didn't show improvements in productivity with the adoption of computers, despite people feeling as though they were more productive.

Reminds me of this Jeff Bezos quote:

"The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it."

Another thing that this does not measure is philanthropic effectiveness. If there are lessons to be learned in terms of what kinds of philanthropy works better than others, then those learnings may cause other philanthropic endeavors to have greater success. I've had a bit of experience working with several big foundations and seeking out effective ways to spend lots of money is an extremely hard problem and they're all aware of it, and they treat each investment as an experiment.

Of course, the effectiveness of each type of investment is not fixed, and will inevitably drop off. I believe the whole 'just buy malaria nets' first-order thinking was part of discourse for a while before people wised up.

Iirc yes. Viral persistence and viral reservoirs are the terms to search for

Got a firsthand experience with this. I was dropping off my girlfriend and we stopped to talk in the car, with all the windows up. Over the course of the conversation we got more and more agitated at each other until I had a thought and pulled my Aranet out from my backpack. It was >3000ppm CO2. We opened windows and within 2 minutes all the agitation went away.

oh say more?

It’s very obviously AI, several tells:

‘isn’t just / it’s also’ AI-ism should at least turn your AI radar on, then you get this weirdly formal structure that sounds like a trying-to-be-relatable press release:

“This shift eliminates A, thereby enhancing B, improving C, and facilitating D. The benefits? Better U, smoother V (hello, W), improved X, and potentially Y—freeing up Z.”

Question to self interjection, chipper ‘(hello, W)’ aside, topped off with a zero spaced emdash. 10000% AI, stylistically this isn’t text tuned to an HN audience, comments never sound like this. What’s funny is the paragraph it’s quoting has nearly the same style, the LLM probably picked that up.

Not trying to call anyone out, just pointing out the stylistic tells we should all be aware of.

A kind request - please try to write HN replies without AI, but if you're going to, please at least edit out any "it's not X its Y" or "isn't just X, but also Y" AI tics. A lot of us come here to get away from talking to AIs all day.

Bingo. Cook is the heat shield now

Phone screens are larger, higher res, pinch zoomable, and have backlighting that creates uniform contrast and readability in nearly all lighting conditions.

Yea the context I usually lead with is the problem and the intended or likely trajectory of the feature, not the noise like you say. I think different folks just like different things.

Funny, I always try to lead with context when handing off product/design work, but I've often experienced devs saying 'please just tell me what to do'. No such issue with AI coding tho, it works great there.

Yep, I was surprised to learn that too.

Was just looking at this. What keeps me from buying is the screen is just too small. I'd love to slap this magnetically on the back of my iPhone and have it on the go as a focused reading device but eyes after 40 aren't so happy about reading super tiny characters.

My two wishes are: to size it up so it is roughly the width of a modern smartphone (2.72" -> 2.8") and decrease bezel size. At these small sizes, even 1/2 to 3/4" screen size increase is a big deal in area gained, which leads to more comfort reading and less line scanning.

Hope they'll ship one with the size up 4.7" ED047TC1 display [1] instead.

[1] https://github.com/Xinyuan-LilyGO/LilyGo-EPD47/blob/esp32s3/...

Can we all band together and agree to flag articles that are so obviously AI written to be engagement bait and devoid of anything meaningful to discuss?

To use an AI-ism: HN isn't an AI blog dump, it's a community.

Just want to say I appreciate the effort that you put into this. I know HN sometimes doesn't vote up the big posts but if they're well researched and follow a thought through to a conclusion, I think they're a valuable addition to the discussion. cheers

Important subject

Uses slop AI art

Fastest way to make something into a farce.

This is cool! Is there an index of these ported games / OSS ports?

Even has a wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_astronaut

Joel's post was the genesis https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...

Salient indeed!

If it's a constant offset like you say, and given academia publishes and industry often doesn't, that might suggest it's dependent on the rate of advancement in academic research. Not in this field so I may be wildly off.

I feel like AI coding is accelerating everyone's work toward greater solution complexity and I think it's pushing people to build defenses and be more averse to someone else's complexity rather than being impressed by it. Bigco's are probably well behind the curve on this and are still impressed by complexity, but for people on the receiving end of AI stuff either directly via your own hand or indirectly via others, it seems like complexity is not as impressive as it once was.

This argument at its logical extreme would be that we should grow slop in vats because that takes less land to feed people.

Agree that climate and biodiversity are two very important factors, but there's others. Health effects (e.g. quality-adjusted life years) being one, soil health & resilience another. Monocropping pesticide-laden foods is not some ideal state.

Cracks in the voice are so visceral. One I love is in the Rolling Stone's Gimme Shelter, Merry Clayton is just about screaming and her voice cracks and they kept the band's cheering reaction to it on the record [1]. Truly a case of the subject matter trying to break out of the medium.

Related is that a lot of cultures embrace intentional imperfections in art for spiritual reasons, as it conveys authenticity and humility in the face of perfection. E.g. Persian flaw [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimme_Shelter

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_carpet#cite_note-68

Sure the first first ones, but hedonic adaptation happens pretty quickly. If you watched a movie in the theaters and then got a VHS copy to watch on your TV at home, you'd notice the difference, especially if it was a well-worn copy. I remember being so excited about laserdiscs because they overcame the VHS noise.

We all want what we don't have. Back in the day we were desperate for a clearer picture and found these artifacts annoying. We longed for an alternate reality that was as crisp as our own. Nowadays folks that didn't experience the pre-digital era want aesthetics that embrace the imperfections that today's visual culture glosses over. They want reminders that life wasn't always this way.

Time to wheel out one of my favorite quotes about the signature of a medium:

"Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them." - Brian Eno

Cool man, but it might surprise you to find out that people knowingly opt into receiving this stuff and actually consent to it.

Consent is more than pressing 'Allow' on a notification pop-up. It's often not even informed consent, as those pop-ups are usually a part of some onboarding flow where users are just trying to get to the value the app promises and pressing 'ok' to everything.

Even if people do indeed want notifications at the time of the ask, one doesn't really know if the message provider will wind up spamming, that's a matter of trust. And once opted-in, even if the users no longer want notifications, a lot just don't know how to turn them off. People are often incredibly accepting of sub-par experiences like this because of the friction and capability demanded of them to opt-out. My parents get tons of spam notifications that would pass your test of 'knowingly opt into receiving' but that when asked they say they do not want.

Finally there's myriad dark patterns that tons of apps use, like changing and resetting notification preferences among others.

I'd hazard a guess that observed opt-in rates far exceed users actual desires, so I wouldn't put much stock in them. I do agree that there are some people that like them tho!

Fwiw I've worked on both the delivery side (OneSignal) and developer side (Margins) so I've lived these choices and trade-offs. My believe is in terms of power dynamics, senders generally don't deserve their power to interrupt and should not possess that power. At best, they offer opportunities, which ideally are verified somehow prior to being presented to users. I'm happy that devices and ecosystems are moving in the direction of triaging and filtering sender content, as power needs to lie in the user's holistic, most pre-frontal cortex driven expression of their desired experience, and not just one moment's opt-in button they pressed.

Thank you for writing the article, good discussion points.

The generations system in III was amazing. I didn't care that the art wasn't top notch, I loved the game and seeing the story over three generations. Decades later I wound up making a storytelling game mostly based on it.