abhaynayar

Interesting. I remember reading the book "Life 3.0" years ago, where one of the first things the fictional AGI does to make money is perform tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk while pretending to be human.

Gem of a blog for me personally. This is the rare signal amongst the noise for me on HN. Went through a bunch of his other articles and realized his brain and way of thinking works in a similar way as mine but a bit different and further "ahead" in ways I'd like to be, which is supremely useful and entertaining and satisfying.

I haven't really listened to him much, didn't really like his style, just one or two of his sleep science episodes but I thought it was well-balanced and at each topic he added caveats etc. and always made sure to tell people to not just blindly trust the science but see what works for you. Can you point to any examples of him grossly misrepresenting the science on these issues. My personal hunch is most people don't watch the long-form stuff and only hear this second-hand in a short-form context where a lot of the details are stripped out.

Just because something is hard doesn't mean it's worth doing. Evolution selected impatience for a reason. Of course, the flip-side is fake supernormal stimuli like screens, etc. that does more harm than good. The new environment we live in is incompatible with our old brains. But that doesn't mean you literally do nothing. It's ok to not meditate--figure out the right balance for you. I believe before meditating try getting rid of things like junk-food, doomscrolling etc. What's the point in meditating 15 minutes a day just to be distracted with cheap dopamine several of your waking hours.

I have destination dispatch at my office, and while I don't like my personal user-experience of it, I can't imagine what would better suit a building when you have so many elevators in the same place i.e. in my case 10+ I think?

What I find annoying though is you clunkily go click a floor then clunkily wait then clunkily walk over to the elevator assigned which may or may not be on the other end of the space. Also another interesting thing I've seen is that it seems in my case the distance from destination selection and elevator assigned seems to reduce at times when the office is emptier so that too seems to def be accounted into the algorithm.

As usual, people will buy the iPhone cause it's the iPhone. I don't think Samsung will be stealing any customers as such.

Thanks for the perspective. Yea you're right, I think different platforms have different effects on people. As an example quitting TV shows was difficult for me, whereas most people I've talked to don't even think of TV shows as a necessary bad thing.

On HN/LI, at least for me I really don't find them disruptive or time sinks. LinkedIn seems boring, HN doesn't have infinite scroll, and again most articles don't really interest me that much.

I don't use Reddit exactly because I feel the posts evoke an emotional response from me and I tend to stay there. Haven't used it in a long time, same with other infinite popular scrollers.

Anyway, my core point being for the platforms that do trouble me in my experience going all-out helped. If I set a time limit or time window or use grayscale or all those hacks it doesn't work. All those are more like gateway drugs. So if HN/LI does truly provide more noise than signal I would personally cut it out but that's not the case for me at the moment.

Yea exactly. That's why I allow it. Because apart from the obvious networking benefit and a few sane people I follow who post good stuff every now and then, I basically don't doom-scroll it. So the utility at that point crosses whatever 5-10 minutes of cringe AI slop I quickly scroll past.

I knew someone would nitpick on that. Could've worded it better. But like I expanded later in the para, an absolute for platforms where I feel my brain hijacked. To make clearer, 0 minutes for those things (example-Reddit, IG, etc.). Instead of something like X minutes of screen time where I'm allowed anything. Because for the things I allow, like LinkedIn, I don't find myself using them much at all even though I have full freedom, but the utility at that point crosses whatever time is spent on cringe posts.

And allow me to return the nitpickiness as well. "That sounds closer to the opposite end of the extreme." - I don't see how that's closer to the opposite end of the extreme? Are you saying only watching YouTube channels which you've subscribe to (despite being subscribed to dozens I only see maybe one new video pop up every few days) and spending some time on TWO work-related social-media is the opposite end of the EXTREME? How?

In terms of solutions on an individual-level: after a lot of trial and error I feel like what works for me is an absolutist cold-turkey-approach. I've pretty much banned all consumptive screen-time except some things like Hacker News, LinkedIn, YouTube (only existing subscriptions, no recommendations or shorts etc). Things I know I won't spend more than 15-20 minutes on and are not highly stimulating and made to high-jack your brain. Initially, I used to allow myself some leeway as in screen-time i.e. should be less than X duration, but it never worked.

The withdrawal-symptoms of going cold-turkey are intense but you get over them eventually and then once you've powered through a few weeks, and you try and go back and look at any type of "content" you see how much trash it all is. Even the "good ones" or things you tell yourself is "educational". Another important note is to have some replacements in place so that when you start seeing that new void of so much time on your hands, you don't feel empty/hollow but as a reminder to yourself that you had so many cool things to do.

Something I realized with the new LLM tools is that learning how to type plain English words fast i.e. without capitalization or punctuation, and even typos is not that big of a problem anymore. And so it follows that code-specific typing is even less important if you can just type in normal words fast and then just check it's output. Although yes for stuff this small i.e. super small terminal commands I feel there does still exist an advantage.

Also, another observation I've had is sometimes I just don't feel like speaking, so voice as input to LLMs is really not an ALL time replacement in my personal opinion. In fact, I find myself preferring to type fast and with typos in lowercase much more than anything else.

Oh interesting. I was about to say that's not what banter means, because in my mind I always thought it's just a casual fun back and forth conversation not necessarily skirting that boundary of teasing. But then I checked the definition and teasing is a part of it. Every day you learn something new.

Due to multipolar traps (large-scale, multi-agent versions of the Prisoner's Dilemma) i.e. when individuals in a competitive system are forced to take actions that benefit them in the short term, but degrade the system for everyone over time.

But where does AR fit in? Doesn't this just need voice mode?

What a hook of a first line!

BTW, does anyone recommend doing a masters degree in bio-stats or not? Or something similar, bio-tech-like?

Lmao. Yea I played it once and lost a day. I knew I had to uninstall ASAP else my life as I knew it would never be the same. Never touched it since.

If his monetary value to the company was as said why would any other metric like complexity even remotely matter or need convincing assuming the main goal of the company was to make money.

Money would matter even more than the interpersonal stuff in most cases but on top of it even the managers treasured him so there should've been even less of an issue of communicating value.

Getting bored is totally understandable though given his calibre but that's a separate issue from how the company evaluates performance.

I mean what do you want the author to write, cooking recipes? Where is he "pushing" it? Writing a substack related to the theme of the book you're writing is, apparently .. bad? Even if true, are we we not supposed to market things at all. Sure, there's a line after which shilling becomes distasteful, is that really the case here or is it an overreaction?

I've been able to quit short-form content, but does anyone have any tips on how to quit long-form content like YouTube or Netflix?

I've been able to quit short-form content, but does anyone have any tips on how to quit long-form content like YouTube or Netflix?

Also, why is this flagged?

I mean I always knew Google could read all my files, but seeing it give an AI summary for every single freaking (PDF) file I open on my Drive is insane. Last I checked couldn't turn it off. It's insane. When I get some free time, I'm probably moving on to Protonmail or something. I'm always a defaults kinda guy, I don't care much bout privacy and such (I'd rather live frictionless) but this garbage useless AI bullshit is getting on my nerves. I don't need you to summarize all my private and sensitive documents. I know how to read.

I mean sure, for LLMs, but:

> It is going to have competition in the future and will lose customers.

Is that not true for everything.

Several things can be true at once.

Reminds me of this [1] article, quoting Seinfeld, "In the seventies, this is the tragic turn of American culture. And this was explained to me by Mario Joiner who cracked this puzzle that I could not figure out what the hell happened. That money became everything. What happened because it was not like that in the seventies. In the seventies, it’s how cool is your job? How cool is what you’re doing? If your job’s cooler than my job, you beat me."

I too wanna work on cooler stuff. Sooner rather than later.

[1]: https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2024/05/seinfeld-on-when-mo...

Thx for the info. I think I'll def start going to some irregardless of whether I do the molly thing..

But I was curious, is the sociability and confidence (?) u get thru the molly thing.. does it stay with you..??

I don't really think the reward is worth the risk in my case if it's just a temporary feeling akin to drunkeness (albeit ofc different/better in terms of quality)..

What has been ur experiences.. does the feeling leak out into the days/weeks/months that follow??

How do you get into raves, and how do you take "Molly" and connect with others who have taken "Molly"? (Speaking as an electronic music super-fan, but curious about having never listened to it outside of my personal-devices per-se).

So relatable, and so well put!

How can I use this information to MY advantage? Do I started going into something to do with AI chip memory-stuff? If so, how? But just on a software level cause hardware is hard.

Interesting, because I've been thinking about group sizes and their effects on social dynamics.

However, I guess it depends on the goal? Like in medium audiences, WHY be the facilitator for others? I mean it's a good thing to do if there's such a person or maybe if you're the host, etc. But in my opinion in most cases the point is to contribute to the conversation.

For large/presentations- fact versus emotion thing seems arbitrary. In most "social" situations emotions triumph regardless of size. But again there are factors other than size that would factor more into this. I don't disagree with anything- more like all of it could go either way and it's fine.

It's great to do what he's doing, but I just had a qualm with pinning this on AI- based on my experience repeatedly trying to make AI work every time a new model comes out, what I've realized is it requires a huge amount of pre-existing knowledge and context/harness engineering to get useful outputs consistently over a long time. Even then it's not like AI is replacing you more like it kinda helps a bit if you put a lot of effort into covering all its mistakes. I do agree there's a huge benefit in using AI as an alternative to search, research, prototyping though.

Even after adding all that up maybe you save some time. 10%-20%? Maybe? You do save a lot of cognitive load as well and it feels good but a lot of the times you pay the price later when you don't understand the code/project as it gets more complex and you need to debug it when the AI can't anymore. The point is there's just not enough to replace and even if the research angle saves you some time or cognitive-bandwidth why not just use that time to do something else? Like more work or more life.