elefantastisch

Yes, people have been saying "beware the influence of technology on children" for decades, maybe centuries. That doesn't prove that the warnings are false. And even if the past warnings were false for past technology, that doesn't prove that the current warnings are false for current technology.

"People have been saying that forever" is not a rebuttal of "TikTok is bad for kids". It's not even close. It's basically DH2 on Paul Graham's disagreement hierarchy: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

I'm reminded of xkcd's train full of people all thinking the same thing: "Look at these people. Glassy-eyed automatons going about their daily lives, never stopping to look around and think! I'm the only conscious human in a world of sheep." (https://xkcd.com/610/)

We do not have access to the internal experiences of other people, so we should not presume to judge them.

There's a lot of good stuff in the article, but there's no need to perpetuate this absurd "world of sheep" perspective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norinskaya

Or a random Kazakh football coach:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Finonchenko

Or a library in Scotland that's planning to close:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedburgh_Library

Wikipedia has been capricious for years about what can stay and what must go.

I think there is a lot of overlap in what you're saying and what the article is saying. In both cases, coffee is a means to an end. In contrast, at the beginning of the article, the coffee was the end for the author, not the means. Getting a perfect cup of coffee was the goal, not because it produced gratitude, mindfulness, and existential affirmation, but just as a goal unto itself. This is apparent in the author's realization that the time and money he was spending on coffee wasn't worth it. It was, of course, worth it for the goal of getting the best coffee money can buy, but that isn't actually a meaningful goal.

Your goal is also clearly not to find the best coffee money can buy. Yours is more like experiencing a simple honest pleasure, and fine coffee helps you do that. I don't think that in any way contradicts the author's realization that for them, bonding is the goal, and cheap coffee helps them do that.

I think in many ways the conclusion is the same... don't make things an end unto themselves. Optimizing a thing is a great goal in terms of being specific, measurable, attainable, and all the other things people tell us our goals should be... but if it doesn't actually mean anything, then it doesn't matter if you optimize it. Don't lose sight of what's actually meaningful because you're optimizing some clear metric.

I don't know if I'm making any sense, but I'm really glad you shared this because I think it's a great alternate perspective that still echoes with the same underlying meaning.

But of course that isn't what the original post is about at all. So I might TLDR more like... "Bonding with people over shared experiences is more important than the experience itself."

I've noticed this before with restaurants. I used to really enjoy trying lots of new restaurants, finding the best... until I realized all I ever talked about when eating out was the food. Much better to just go to Applebee's--where the food is clearly no draw--and focus on enjoying time with someone.

I think what the original post is really trying to point out is the various ways we get fixated on optimizing what should really be the background (the coffee, the meal, etc.) instead of the real meaningful experience (the time with significant people).

The implementation confuses me though.

It's not clear at first that all "games" (though I would think it's rounds of a single game, not distinct games) are available rather than this being some kind of daily challenge.

The instructions are very drawn out and repetitive. There's no reason the Welcome, Background, and Rules couldn't be on one screen. The Mission page should just be merged with Rules.

The time limit seems pointless given that you get to see the text before the game starts. You could just write your text in Notepad using as much time as you want. I would either get rid of the timer (greatly preferred) or stop showing the text in advance (if you must).

It's not clear what other rules (AI?) are being used to judge whether a response is valid, so when you get marked invalid even though you're using all the required terms, it's not clear what you're supposed to do to make it valid.

It would be nice to be able to review the Background section of the instructions while writing.

After completion, you see your response compared to a target, but you can't see the original anymore to compare target vs original to see how the target improved on the original.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop_shipping

If you want to create a successful business, you should focus on creating value, not extracting money.

Tech companies need to prove they can limit themselves to using data for the purpose for which it was requested, then we can talk about whether or not I'll give camera access.

Bite-sized pieces, sensible order of presenting concepts, everything you need is in the browser.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53799686-anxious-people

There is a similar phenomenon in chess where grandmasters can very quickly memorize a board position from a game, but are basically no better than any random person off the street at memorizing the position of pieces placed randomly in a way that would never occur in a game. They aren't actually memorizing the position of pieces, they're memorizing the game state in a way that makes sense to them and lets them re-create the position of the pieces.

So, practically, a good way to train your memory is to learn more about the area in which you want to be able to remember things.

I don't think this helps with the concrete example of "something someone told me in a conversation" though. It might help with "something I read from a book" though because you could encode that information better if you know more about the subject.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Airways

Something else to consider is that weights scaling linearly may not make sense.

More importantly, criteria may overlap. In the example in the article, I suspect technical ease and scaling ease are highly correlated, which effectively means you're double counting.

Basically the technique only works when you have fully independent criteria which cover the full spectrum of what matters and which can be weighted objectively using a scale that represents true relative importance.

No affiliation.

I tried to go to billing, there is nothing in there at all. I went to my user profile, and there's a tab "payment options" that says I have no credit card added but doesn't give me the option to add one. There's also a tab "add credits" which lets me type in an amount to add and apparently click "pay now" despite not actually requesting any payment information.

Finally I discovered by clicking around on everything that if I go to "services" there's a message to add a payment card. I click the button to add details and I'm given a prompt to accept terms and conditions and provide... not credit card details but a link to a social profile? Apparently this is some sort of fraud prevention thing? You want to see who I am? I have no idea what this is, but at this point, I'm frustrated with the user experience, don't see any path forward to actually trying the service, and don't trust you with any more information. No paid service I have ever used has asked for a link to a social profile.

I'm really sorry. I wanted so much to try this out and love it, but the experience around actually getting set up to try it is so frustrating and confusing right now that I'm just done.

I hope these are just growing pains that will be worked out because I think the concept here is great. I'll come back some day with an open mind and try again. I wish you nothing but the best in this journey.

Josh W Comeau: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/

BJ Fogg's writing is much better organized than Guise's. Between Tiny and Atomic, I find Tiny covers much more conceptual ground on human behavior. The interplay of motivation, ability, and prompts is relevant even for behaviors that aren't habits. Also, Tiny covers much better the "why" and "then what" of these small habits.

Another book I would recommend that ties in nicely with Tiny Habits is The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal. She covers a lot of ground on the topic of why we do or don't do things. I think it could be a helpful debugging guide if you're struggling with a habit or behavior and need more depth than Tiny Habits.

Between all of the books mentioned though, just to be clear, Tiny Habits would be my pick if you were only going to read one. It's much more than just "make a habit of doing something really small". It's changed how I work on my own behavior and how I manage my team at work.

I want to be able to browse a curated collection of the web around some topic. I've come across a handful of really, really good tech blogs over the years. I'd like to be able to flip through them in one place. I'd like to be able to peruse my collection of in-browser games.

I want to get faster access to sites I use often. This might be seeding the autocomplete algorithm in the address bar, some kind of launcher, etc. I don't know what form this would ideally take, but it's a use case I want for bookmarks.

I didn't specifically want instant noodle reviews. I just wanted sites about instant noodles. If they happen to be reviews, cool. If they are photo galleries, that's cool too. Message boards, also cool. But I don't want articles or encyclopedia or dictionary entries about instant noodles. I want full sites, or at least large subsections of sites, where the primary topic is instant noodles. This is what directories list. Sites where you open the site and ask "what's this site about" and the answer is clearly "instant noodles". Not at the page level, but at the site level.

Consider the difference in results between Google and what you might expect if directories rather than search had remained the primary way of finding things on the web. A search for "instant noodles" assumes you either want to buy them, find recipes for them, or read about whether they are healthy. But a directory topic "instant noodles" would find sites about instant noodles. And sure enough, if you hunt through search results, you can find things like https://www.theramenrater.com/ which definitely fits the bill, but it takes some hunting. It's a "page four" type of result (in reality, it was on page five).

So, yes, this is a general topic and you get general results... but that's not how directories worked. A directory listing for "Instant noodles" would never have included Walmart and Amazon searches. It wouldn't have included random news articles on whether or not they're healthy. And in the days of blogrolls and web-rings and such, once you found one site, you usually had a way to get to more human-curated related sites without even returning to the directory.

Not denying there's some rose tint here, but there's a big difference in how human-curated topical browsing differs from search.

Like, here's a site that (among other things of interest to fans) chronologically orders Korean historical dramas: https://thetalkingcupboard.com/resources/sageuk-timeline/

No dark patterns, no clickbait, no videos, no ads, just a labor of love by someone with a lot of time on their hands.

The problem for search engines is that it's trivially easy to copy this list and put it up some garbage blogspam domain, but even if the content is exactly the same, I want this list, not the copy, because if I find this list, I can explore the rest of the site and find more great stuff. Even a spammer copies the entire site, this is the one I want because this is the one with a real person behind it who will be updating it, engaging with readers, appreciating the traffic they get, etc.

It starts to become clear that what I want my web discovery tool to do is less find individual pieces of good content but more find content from good creators.

I don't see any way a search engine can ever do this kind of discovery as well as a human curator.

The web has changed so much from when Google launched. Google is optimized for finding content about some keyword because there was actually a time where the was a legitimate problem. You searched "flowers" and Google helped you find the places to buy flowers online. You searched "guitar tabs" and Google helped you find where to get them. Google is still really good at this. Other search engines too. So good in fact that it's become almost invisible to us how easy this is compared to how it was in the past.

But now instead of buying flowers, I might want to know... where are the communities where professional florists hang out online and talk about their craft? The Google results for that query are pretty much equivalent to a random listing of websites. But I can almost guarantee there is such a community. Is it a subreddit? A facebook group? Some old vbulletin? A mailing list?

Or I might want to know... where are the blogs/channels of the top authorities on web accessibility? What are the best craft coffee roasters in Sweden? What are the essential reads on the history of Botswana? Who are the most consistently good travel vloggers in Spanish? Where can I get help with sourdough starter problems? I can 100% guarantee there are people out there that have great answers to all these questions, but they seem unlikely to be solved by search engines any time in the near future.

If someone can crack the problem of leveraging genuine, interested-motivated human curation to deliver results without falling victim to abusive, quick-buck-motivated spamming... they could replace search engines.

https://mathle.bykiru.rocks/

Interesting concept. I was a bit surprised the game prevented you from using symbols you knew couldn't be in the answer. Sometimes that's a legitimate strategy in Wordle.

Edit: I guess HN isn't a Wordle/Mathle fan.