blackbrokkoli

Hard agree.

But I feel like the author is "criticizing me" (not personally of course) because of the complexity that comes after the initial writing-down, since that is still part of my note-taking system, no?

Honest question, do you think that's something that can be achieved?

Personally I find that without at least some Spaced Repetition (or similar methods) there is no way to remember quotes, github repos or word definitions I jotted down once.

Very open to suggestions, though :)

What exactly is the point of this article except the author flexing with (honestly kinda shallow) knowledge of chess engines?

Yes, the game is evolving. Two hundred years ago the queen could sometimes hop like a knight, depending where you played. Somewhere around hundred years before that, game description went from beautiful prose like "The white king commands his owne knight into the third house before his owne bishop" to much drier abbreviated form. And some decades ago computers began to become serious players.

All of these changes are interesting, worthy of discourse and not always for the better, but what is the authors actual point? Vague moral panic?

You are telling me single-minded, rote-learning based play is something that came about with engines and not with say, chess being used as a proxy fight in the Cold War or during the rise of the idea of actually treating chess players like athletes instead of calling them gamblers (like in Morphy's time)?

And how is chess like poker because of that? Because you can cheat and computers are good at it? I mean I can also use a modern tech to cheat at football, F1 racing, solitaire or coin-flipping..

Maybe someone can enlighten me what I am supposed to take away from this...

> Get what works for you.

Yes, I agree. What works for me however is a fairly complex system (although the complexity is hidden in everyday usage) that took me several hundred hours to build, write and refine.

Taking notes is not so hard. Feel free to use any paper in your reach or any software capable of storing text. The hard part is actually using these notes. Getting something out of them. Relating them to other notes. Actually thinking "hey I have note for this?!" months later and executing on that thought. And then still have an input mode so casual that you also still input notes into your system.

Of course you can elect to care or not to care about that, same as you can elect to not care about properly sharpened knifes, identifying birds by sounds or child rearing practices.

But as with most things, if you care to do it well, it's anything but trivial.

I don't think the final edition is going to be made by going to Export To PDF in Google Docs. He seems to be mostly using it as a paste dump, then refining it into chapters, dumping it down, formatting slowly. For that, Google Docs really seems as good as any, no?

I mean, not denying it's dangerous, but stuff like piling up sandbags on top of a critically flooded dyke and lots and lots of related flooding work (picking up people from rooftops, rerouting traffic, ...) is a reality that many people living near the North Sea cost regularly participate in, as I can attest from personal experience.

I like the distinction between tools and products here.

If it's a product, by all means think about brand including a creative name. Might be vaguely related to the service, like YouTube, or completely wild, like Starbucks.

If it's mostly a tool, being descriptive is just good SEO. You are not ever becoming a "household name" with a recognizable name when you are just supplementing a library supplementing a framework (or similar), and there is no reason to strive for that. "Django REST framework" shows up naturally when I google "django rest" and that just benefits both sides.

If you are in between the two, opt for the middle: TweetDeck, MailChimp.

That's my two cents anyways..

You are right of course, I got a bit lost in the rhetoric there. The sentence you quoted was meant less literal but more as an indicator of excessive use.

Although I got to say, personally I go to great lengths to avoid my days being started or ended by Google News, group chats, like counters or other corporate packaged emotions-in-a-box...

Eh. Some solid points in there, but I feel the overall conclusion may be a little too..diffusionist.

We should absolutely keep a critical eye on pop science, check for bias and straight lies. We should absolutely be aware of the concept of Moral Panics and see our own opinions in light of that, yes.

But does that mean technology addiction is actually confined to the small realm of literal digital gambling?

Since this discussion is already chock-full of metaphors, let me make one as well: I am currently in Italy, where a good dinner is usually accompanied by a good wine. Say I am an alcoholic - would this kind of drinking I just described be the core of my addiction? No. Would it, in itself, be even negative? No. Would it be a good idea for me, the alcoholic, to refrain from all drinking, including this? Absolutely fucking yes.

Just because technology can't be called "universally bad", just because this kind of addiction is new and hard to measure (no pendant to measuring tobacco residue in the lung etc.), does not mean it does not exist.

If I may paraphrase the Wikipedia definition here, addiction is strong behavioral urge despite negative consequences.

So, maybe smartphones do not alter the literal (biological) attention span. But what about your ability to do deep, concentrated work? Mine definitely got fucked, and I can point at root causes.

So, maybe we haven't established causality between screentime and depression. But I will tell you what you can't do when your first and last interaction of the day is checking notifications: Quiet and serene self-reflection, or any other kind of self-therapy approach.

Maybe my anecdata is an outlier, but I can certainly correlate less screentime with happiness, monetary success, romantic satisfaction, sleep quality and psychological health quite clearly, down do an amount of screentime way below what's considered average.

/rant

This was longer than expected, maybe my point is just: Absence of proof is not proof of absence.

That needs context.

In 2021, the company was subject to a massive lawsuit and PR disaster after PornHub failed to remove a video of a rape for over 10 fucking years. Not rape as in "sex that turned out to be not consensual after examining the fine points", no. Dragged into a van and gang-raped is what we are talking about.

The victim's story finally got picked up by NYT [0] after the victims pleas, legal attempts etc. to the company fell on deaf ears for, again, over a decade.

After this became widely known, they reluctantly made the change you are talking about.

So yeah.

[0](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra...)

Which one? Turing himself revised it, like, four times. The version where humans can't tell which one chat member is non-human has been beaten several times (with tricks like mimicking a 13 year old foreign boy, iirc). The version where you replace an arbitrary member of a chat with a human is something mostly about speech pattern matching and plausible speech, can't imagine that GTP3 or whatever comes next is too bad at that. If you do it like in Ex Machina, as in chatting in person it's mostly about building a very expensive robot that overcomes uncanny valley.

I think the sad state is that the Turing Test is too diluted to be useful as a marker...

There is a well documented story of someone loosing his whole firms Google account because a decade before he was privately associated with a developer who years later decided to write scam software. This does not shock me, at all.

But it's really your own fault for not having high reaching contacts into Google's upper tier!

The nature/nature discussion is definitely still on and riddled with over-confident takes made in the past that now seem silly.

I would very much refrain from using the phrase "given the fact" here, and a video titled like a Buzzfeed article might not be the best evidence either

I am not sure I follow. Obesity is much, much more prevalent in countries where food (and unhealthy food) is widely and cheaply available. Governments engage in "prohibition" of specific foods all the time, and I find that mostly commendable.

> People burn themselves with kettles, that's still a kettle problem.

> So, what?

Soo I demand that my government thinks about this problem and regulates it, which indeed it does. I would guess that an average Western country has north of fifty regulations directly related to burn hazards of household appliances.

So yes, these are indeed very good examples of government regulation preventing hurt, pain and death.

Thanks for the in depth answer!

re "Pretty much all drug problems are created by prohibition itself"

Isn't the US opiod crisis (not heroin specifically) massively driven by the fact that it is fairly easy to get lavish subscription on legal pain killers?

I mean I give it to you that suburbian moms on Vicodin won't roll up to a gas station with a semi-automatic, but they still OD, and that's still a drug problem.

Not denying your experience in any way, just want to remark: I heard (and felt) similar takes regarding a lot of "negative" properties from a lot of different people. Height, weight, race, gender, hair color, stutters, country of origin and even really specific stuff like big ears.

Might be helpful to consider that most people feel like they have two strikes against them already (some of them being more right in their assumption maybe).

Deadly crashes are not uncommon on half that speed, and risk does not grow linearly.

Thank you for your detailed feedback :)

Thank's a lot!

I mean our southerly neighbors were nice enough to share some of the mountains, leading to things like Schluchsee[1], which is definitely the most aesthetically pleasing battery I have seen far.

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

Regarding numbers like CO2 emission per MW that is definitely true.

However, the highly destructive, scary and dangerous trash that it does produce is like a comical epitome of the kind of visible pollution the first generation green movement was fighting. There is a reason that dystopian sci-fi trash heap illustrations always feature a leaking nuclear barrel.

Combined with the fact that Germany is just (fairly) densely populated everywhere, criticism of storage solutions are not about endangered desert lizard species, but about radiation spikes in elementary schools.

I'm both German and would like to re-establish nuclear here as a necessary evil, but I get the contra points. I hope this gives some perspective :)

Yes, definitely. But then the next task is just to solve the incompleteness problem on the level of the higher algorithm, because there must always be incompleteness.

Hofstaedter discusses this at length in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach if you are interested in this topic.

This reads like satire.

Why is the Reddit co-founder giving out elaborate think pieces on hypothetical blockchain games? Doesn't he have a company to run?

This article completely fails to mention who would pay me and generally does not seem to understand that money can't just magically generated but is a tool of wealth transfer?

"alternative to universal basic income"...now you are just fucking with us. Even without the wild economic mechanics described, the gaming market may be big but not that big.

Most interesting to note here is the Reddit chairman engaging in crpyto-bro theorizing, me thinks.

Great mirror to the comment one thread up selling /r/conservative as an example of most reasonable right-leaning people jsut discussing and getting unfairly hated by the rest of Reddit.

Honestly, if I learned one thing about self-transformation it is that it's quite personal, so I don't want to call the author wrong per se, but the article does not reflect my experience at all.

The times when I experienced the most drastically successful change when I realized that there really is nothing stopping me from entirely changing my identity and self if I so desired.

Obviously, this only works for things actually intrinsic (you cannot hit your target weight over night, but you very much can be a person who cares about their body starting right now and never go back) but holy shit, if you actually believe in your ability to do this, it is god damn effective.

Again there are shitty strategies for this (extrinsic goals, perfectionism, diet books, goals without systems) and it requires a healthy foundation of internal self-confidence that might take half a lifetime to build, but I still don't see the kind of defeatist attitude of the article helping anyone.

If you are part of a marginalized group, it is both nice to the individual and productive for societal-level integration if you find yourself represented in media, especially if it's a generator with a promise of "generate anyone".

No one here is mandating shit, GP asked a friendly question in a most respectful manner, which prompted an informative answer from OP even. If such interaction generates such an allergic reaction in you, the problem is not with the grandparent comment.

Reminds me of the Hedonistic Treadmill - whatever your environment, your brain adapts as the baseline and everything slightly below it is now disappointing while everything above it slightly elating. Usually this concept is used to explain why lottery winners do not seem to be all that much happier than the rest of the populace, but it applies here to:

Whatever is required to get media is the normal: You build little rituals around it, you have tiny little traditions in the friend group.

For some guy this is "getting into the old family beater to drive to the VHS-rental", for another gal it's "the Netflix ba-doom sound while settling into the couch" and I am sure they both could write a nostalgic blog post about it 15 years later.

On the one hand, this is aligned with the articles premise that we maybe have not actually moved forward in an emotional sense, but I also like the other, maybe Stoic side of this - the outside world and its offers matter way less than what you make of it in your head and heart :)

I like Shikantaza, although I can't claim to actually do it daily. It translates to "just sitting" and is a form of meditation consisting of, well, just that. It is mostly based on a single text telling you how to sit and how to balance not-falling-asleep and not-actively-thinking. That's all. There is no extensive literature translated to death and no startup trying to sell you something, but yet you are right there with the core weirdness of meditation and paradoxes like thinking non-thinking. Love it.

Wild take. Not only completely untrue, but also very amusing in its implication that there is overlap between the people preferring a totalitarian Germany and the people who would want compulsory vaccination.