Seeking the Productive Life: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure | Hacker News Reader

Seeking the Productive Life: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

writings.stephenwolfram.com

99 pointsBluestein13 comments

As mentioned, Wolfram livestreams some of his working sessions on Twitch, he calls it "Live CEOing". I put it on sometimes in the background while remote working; it does a great job emulating the in-office effect of having an interesting conversation nearby to tune out, which I find helps me focus.

https://twitch.tv/videos/2151617315

Surely you mean tune in and out of?

(In fact, there's an inmense archive of his "second", "public", screen ...

... he records and archives it).-

Also, incredible: He has filed and accesible works from when he was 11 years old.-

Some people are just born with an innate gift for meticulouness and organization, I guess.-

I am sure that correlates greatly with success, the ability to be so tidy, thoughtful, organized.-)

I’m not so sure it correlates, although I can see where you’re coming from. I know plenty of people who don’t get jack done because they’re so busy being tidy, thoughtful and organized.

Past submissions on of this post:

Nov 2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33437911

Feb 2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26045380

(Frankly, I was kind of surprised this had not been posted before.

... Thanks for pointing those out).-

Still worth the re-read for me, and I thank you for it

One thing I remember liking in this post was his personal homepage (a little further down). There has been a recent HN discussion of Glance, a personal dashboard, but Wolfram's seemed more effective.

... also, his personal video recording, "one man" setup is great.-

... and his use of "standing desks" long before they were a thing, which evolved into a "outdoor walking laptop" and everything.-

Overall impressive.-

If I could visually persist 3 lines of a terminal in my vision, and then otherwise use the functionality of a cell phone with ear buds with microphones, I think I could do 60% of my job while walking around in the forest behind my house. Most of the time I wouldn't need the terminal.

Do my cohorts, who have drifted into positions of tech lead, and then onwards as technical mentors to younger dev teams, find the same? I know I betray my communication style by admitting I don't need to see the screen; I prefer to see their world through a mental model built by words and sensing body language through tones and pauses. I'm not even sure I'm in the right line of work most days, at this point.

He has found the ultimate hack in living in a modern capitalistic economy. Have a private company which has a cash cow and allows you to work on whatever projects you want and has less than a thousand employees.

Even valve is somewhat similar and they produce some of the most interesting, unique things without having to bend a knee for shareholders.

Mathematica is an amazing piece of software that will get better with LLM integration. Hopefully they can innovate on that feature set while he is focusing on the computational universe. Mathematica is the jarvis/iron man engine.

(2019)—Would be curious to see how his setup has changed post-LLM.

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