Irritation Is Inspiration

My problem is I feel like my irritation is with things that are out of my control. People not caring about quality when they produce things that I spend good money on (and have no abilities to turn into a new manufacturing startup or something). Software (Adobe, Blender, Davinci Resolve, etc) that has a feature that doesn't feel like it makes sense or something that just doesn't seem to work. Another thing that I have no real knowledge about. I'm a programmer but I don't think there's a good reason for me to write my own 3d software or image/video editor.

Side note, I've never looked at this person's "AI Powered Podcast" but how do they even know they're getting real information about Indian History? I was talking to ChatGPT last night about whether or not it was possible to adjust the level of the water in a toilet bowl and it confidently told me I could and how to do it. I kept discussing it with it and, at one point, it slipped in a comment about how it's controlled by the level of the trap in the back of the toilet. I said "So it's NOT possible and you've just wasted my time?" and it was like "Yep, sorry about that"

Same night I asked it something and provided it a link to read and I asked a question about it. It indicated it had gone to the page and, I assume, consumed the text on the page. It answered the question but then said something that made me realize it might be wrong. I asked it to tell me where it saw that and it told me it wasn't actually on the page.

I ask because it sounds interesting to make an "AI Powered Podcast" about things I'm interested in. I frequently want to listen to a podcast while mowing my grass or something and struggle to find interesting, long-form things about the specific topics that I'm thinking about. (Radio astronomy, weather, astronomy, music, whatever) So I'd love to do this but I trust AI outputs so little...

Interesting idea. But that lecture mentioned typos. Now I am irritated the author built "a software" to reply to emails.

See also “pain is information”.

When it’s pissing you off stop. Take a beat and think about whether you can go around instead of through. Or whether it’s worth going through once in a manner that makes it easier next time. Walk around the lake, or build a boat. Walk around the wood, or build an path and turn it into a road by increments.

TLDR - you are probably blinded to your biggest irritations, and they just might be ingrained into society to such an extent that we think nothing can be done about them. Just turning on the light to see them and asking the right question is just the 1st step.

I think the real challenge is that what bothers most people are actually minor irritations. We don't notice the big thing shouting at us that it's a problem.

This was my experience which lead me into neurotech/sleeptech.

I'm a lifelong insomniac. I was going through sleep labs as a kid. I had done all the CBTi (though I don't think it was called that in the 80s), sleep hygiene, etc. etc. I'm quite healthy, just crap sleeper.

I was almost 50 when at 3am I thought to myself "I don't care if I sleep, I just don't want to be tired anymore".

I thought that was an interesting thought. Poor sleep had been ruining my life for the most part of 5 decades.

So I started looking into the latest in sleep research (I had worked in healthtech at Australia's science and technology research agency), and it all seemed very much the same as what I'd heard before. I started tracking everything, trying to figure out if I could build some sort of algorithm that picked up a signal of what I was doing when I had good sleep vs bad.

This was completely the wrong approach. My irritation wasn't truly that I couldn't sleep enough. That was part of it, but the bigger irritation was that I was always tired. Even though I asked the right question, the global mentality was "you need to sleep longer".

That was until I discovered research in slow-wave enhancement, which increases the synchronous firing of neurons which are the defining marker of deep sleep. This is tapping into the restorative function of sleep, not focusing on sleep time.

So I think that finding the irritation that may be hidden from you is step 1. But beyond that, who else has had the same irritation, and what have they done about it. Why did their solutions not work. Then, why do you think you can do it better?

If you're curious about what we're building, you can check out https://affectablesleep.com

Makes me think of the head of a web agency in my town who was offended that my son was playing video games in emulation on a laptop in a setup that showed the wrong aspect. I gave a talk in NYC and then came back to give it in Ithaca and he pointed out that I made a common Excel mistake on one of my charts.

Sometimes I get irritated by the tiniest UX bug like when a dropdown doesn't close unless you click outside of it. It’s dumb. But it sits in my brain all day. Eventually I realized: these moments are design feedback, whether I like it or not. I started keeping a dumb little “annoyance log” just for fun. After a while, it turned into a surprisingly useful list of product ideas. Not saying every irritation is genius, but some of them are definitely signal. You just have to catch them before they fade.

spite driven development