jaqalopes

The idea of prompt “engineering” strikes me as nonsense. I’ve spent many hours on Midjourney, and it makes some astonishing artworks. But it essentially never makes what you expect. I see that as a feature rather than a bug. Instead of professional prompt engineers who somehow know the precise incantation to generate exactly the picture that’s in your head (they don’t), I think the actual future direction of this business is large numbers of people skimming through thousands of fairly similar images and varying the preferred ones over and over to inch towards the desired output. Of course, all that will be obviated when the AI itself advances by another big step, anyhow.

I am diagnosed with ADHD and despite feeling like I’ve learned a lot about my condition I found ideas in this article new and stimulating. The idea of “pathologized” inattention makes complete sense on paper—of course if you sell attention-draining digital media you would want to divert attention (heh) from any harms your business is causing.

So I grant this is definitely happening, but it begs the question of why in this environment 100% of people don’t suffer from ADHD? One reasonable answer, which I cannot prove beyond saying it matches my anecdotal experience, is that the ADHD problem is part nurture (information overload from a changing media environment that affects everyone) but also part nature (every brain is naturally a little bit different).

I have always had inattention—just ask my parents and childhood teachers. It had nothing to do with the Internet. No question the internet has posed extra challenges to my naturally weaker attention, in a similar way to how the invention of skyscrapers posed a challenge to people in wheelchairs. This analogy fails with the invention of elevators, for which the ADHD sufferer has no equivalent accommodation in our modern media world.

I wish I could invite non-ADHD-havers into my brain for a day to show them what it’s really like. Even now, as an adult with robust coping strategies, inattention afflicts me in all corners of my life. I struggle with the unexpected if it hits me when I’m focused on something, which leads to problems making friends or navigating stimulating social environments. I have trouble listening to friends or dates in busy bars or cafes, which is a related but distinct problem. When I’m trying to get into a flow at work I frequently get random, highly salient impulses to do other things that are important but aren’t the thing I need to do at that moment. Crucially I resist these urges, but they make achieving the flow I crave—and the success of my work—more difficult.

Even in current year, I think a lot of people (and certainly a lot of doctors!) don’t believe that any of this is real, and all I want from life is to take speed and scroll Reddit and Twitter all night. Let me assure you that this is not the case. If anything, the people I know IRL who have ADHD are among the most driven people out there. They almost have to be, because the minute they drop their guard their dreams start slipping away.

This is definitely the standard view among a lot of people, though I personally fear we’ll instead be saying “AI is the only story that matters” in 5-10 years if not sooner.

You can help with writing skills-wise, but the thing with essays is that they are subjective and do not have a single correct answer. I took a few STEM courses and found that it was common for STEM students to work together on problem sets because they could compare answers to figure out if and how they had gone wrong. There is no equivalent to this in liberal arts.

I guess the “study finds” part of this article is about the specific numbers of migrants and the evidence being used to calculate them. I don’t think it’s news that there was a huge amount of European migration to the British isles from Roman times on.

I think about this often with regards to my mood. Due to brain chemical imbalances I often just feel depressed. But this is tolerable and not the end of the world—the problem comes when my brain starts to invent (confabulate!) explanations for why I feel bad. Maybe it’s because this room I’m in is messy, or maybe it’s because I’m single and nobody loves me. On reflection, these “explanations” are basically always false. But they feel true, which is a trap I work hard to avoid and which I think a lot of people would benefit from thinking about.

I sympathize with this take but as someone who was fortunate enough to attend private schools throughout my education let me just say, I also have stress dreams about school. I finished college 8 years ago.

It may amuse you to know that, as a sociology major myself, I always envied my engineering school friends because they didn’t have to do nearly as much reading as me and it was possible for them to help one another on problem sets in a way that doesn’t make sense in writing-based liberal arts courses. The grass is always greener, I suppose!

I’ve been waiting for an article like this. I feel much the same way. My question for the author is, what do we do about it? I’d love to make some friends who share my worldview and go camp off-grid with them once a month to be in touch with real life. How to find those people and coordinate that trip? Therein lies the rub.

It’s easy to be a solo dropout and turn your back on the world. The problem comes when no one goes with you, and now you’re just an old man yelling at a cloud. I yearn desperately for a life where my connections to everyone I know aren’t mediated by the internet. But as long as everyone else is still on the internet, I’m pretty much SOL.

This is fun, we used to do something like this in high school called Five Clicks to Jesus, which is exactly what it sounds like.

I find this particular version a bit tedious because you aren't allowed to Find on a page. What good is having a timer if I can't go fast? Why punish me twice for reaching a dead end page by making me read the entire thing to discover that I need to go back?

I work for myself and love it but it isn't for the faint of heart. If you want to work for yourself I recommend first working for other people for 5-10 years—basically, get paid to learn your industry. Then when you can't rise any farther, that's the time to go work for yourself.

Note I'm a person who's relatively less motivated by money, and my idea of successful self-employment is to be a consultant with a very good work-life balance. If you're trying to start a billion-dollar company this advice isn't for you, but I wish you the best of luck.

On one hand, headlines like this come off as so cliche as to be a literal Twitter joke—"Oh you're depressed? Why don't you just cheer up?"—but on the other hand, I think that people dismiss the potential of cognitive techniques to help their mood and stress levels.

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, but I do have clinical depression, and I would never advise anyone that you can simply think/meditate/hack your way out of it. HOWEVER, I have been having what feels like success with the following, very simple CBT-style thought exercise:

When you find yourself having a negative thought, "respond" (inwardly) with a constructive and proportional "but" statement. Example: "[After eating a bunch of junk food late last night] I'm so unhappy about how weak and out of control I was last night... BUT I now have more information that I can use to make better decisions in the future."

The point here is NOT that you are logically convincing yourself that the bad thing is actually good. The effect is much stranger than that. Simply doing the exercise itself will improve your mood. A cynic might say "well you're just saying the glass is half full instead of half empty, but I still know that it's empty." My counter to this is, no, you've missed the point entirely. The life of every non-depressed person you know is filled with half-empty glasses. But part of the reason they are not depressed is that they are not in the habit of letting that fact get them down.

Crucially I am not advising that you ignore your problems or allow them to fester unresolved. Rather, I recommend "demoting" your bad feelings. Instead of giving them a dominant position in your awareness and decisionmaking, pull them back to a more proportional place. It feels counterintuitive, but you may find that you're actually more able to face these problems, even the serious ones, when you strive to worry less about how bad they are.

I love and agree with this article, but I do want to defend the Pomodoro method. In brief, if you already don't enjoy what you are doing for work, applying a new time management strategy to that work will not increase your enjoyment. However, I have personally thrived using the Pomodoro method to help keep myself on track and hitting goals for the work I do enjoy. In this light, moreover, I don't think the analogy to a diet makes much sense.

Still, overall an insightful and much-needed statement on one problem with the times we live in. I especially loved this line:

> These students inevitably end up as consultants or bankers or managers at tech companies, industries that richly reward people who are willing to work very hard for no particular reason.

This is the consultant training course I never received but wish I had. Even now, 8 years into my consulting career (not tech but many of these ideas still apply), I found a lot here that either confirms what I've learned the hard way or spells out something I've encountered but never thought about. This is exactly the kind of stuff I come to HN for, great share.

I literally received one of these today. When I clicked the spam button in Gmail it asked not just if I wanted to "mark as spam" but also "mark as spam and unsubscribe." I clicked the latter, and it took me to a seemingly real intuit.com url. It was pretty weird and I wasn't sure how the spammers pulled it off. Seeing this article is real serendipity.

What discrimination did he face? Surely you aren't arguing that his book—which, crucially, did ultimately sell and get published—being initially rejected by a couple of publishers constitutes "discrimination."

Books, as I said, are a business. When you write a manuscript, chances are that it will be rejected by at least a few publishers before someone decides it fits their business goals. That's not discrimination, it's how the world works. I haven't seen any data showing that the percentage of new releases by white men is somehow less than the percentage of white men in the country. What I have seen is a lot of anecdotal complaining by people who are no longer benefiting from the obsolete modes of discrimination that they formerly rode to success.

I don't consider any internet forums I visit to be actual communities.

I'm glad you got to experience this idyllic small-town community. That wasn't an option for me. My town was the poorest in my state, so I went to the best possible college elsewhere, and have since lived in other places for work. Incredibly, moving out of my shitty hometown has not prevented me from experiencing community. In fact I'd say I experienced more community in my few years living and working abroad than I ever have in America, where I now live. Frankly I'm finding it very hard to find community in a country full of people who have never left their hometowns and have no concept of people or ways of life that differ from their own. At least I still have group chats with the real friends I made from going to new places and doing new things.

I'm not a digital nomad, just a person who isn't as cynical as you.

I've known digital nomads though. One of them bought a house with the woman he met in that country and remains to this day. Maybe you should reflect on why you think so little of local people in the countries digital nomads visit that you can't imagine them connecting with or being genuinely interested in travelers.

> Communities are created over years or decades by people who stick around to plant roots and build homes, lives, and businesses

This is nonsense, community is simply about about shared experience and can absolutely happen with strangers or short term acquaintances. In fact I'd say that's the primary way I've experienced community from college onwards (now 30 y/o) and I expect many young people would feel the same.

More to the point, digital nomads often stay in a place for months on end. That's more than enough time to run into people in similar circumstances at a bar/cafe a few times and befriend them, creating shared in-jokes and opinions of your situation, passing them on to other people you meet such that they take on a life of their own—aka, culture. You need look no farther than major digital nomad hubs like Chiang Mai and Bali to see that there are extremely vibrant communities in these places, which is why so many nomads find their ways there.

I feel like I read a completely different article than some other commenters here. This article is a clear and persuasive statement on how unoriginal "critiques" of wokeness are, as well as on the irony of a white man complaining about how hard it is to get published... even though he just got his book published!

There's no question that today space is being made in publishing for "other voices." But this article in no way says that is a bad thing, or agrees with the book author's implication of the same. To the contrary, it explains in a useful way (imo as a white man who might want at some point to publish a book) what white men can do to stay competitive as modern reading audiences change. Books are a business. If you can't get with the times, whose fault is that, really?

Feels like I'm missing some context here. I guess the point is to chuckle, since this was posted in 1999 before it became evident that in fact markets are dumb and gullible and if you have a popular enough website you can own entire ones and sell access to their members with unprecedented efficiency to advertisers.

Thanks, you too!

Visiting my parents today and tomorrow then home Sunday to get ready for the work week.

All the facts here are fine but I'm left wondering, what are the stakes of "proving" how great America is? What good do all those aircraft carriers do me? Holding down the Chinese, I guess. But then, isn't holding the rest of the world down while the "American way of life" carries on the whole point of all this "greatness"?

At the end of WWII, America was the last rich country standing and proceeded to go round the world kicking out left-wing governments (unfriendly or not) and installing right-wing ones. The result was unprecedented profits and security for American corporations, and some of that wealth undoubtedly trickled down. But I'm left thinking about the cost. Is it any wonder Russia, Iran, South America, etc. would distrust us and want us out of their business?

The comparison at the end to the Mongols feels apt, since while their empire was undeniably great, it is very difficult to argue that they were a force for good in the lives of the people on whose backs that greatness was won.

The important thing seems to be heart rate. If you're a slow runner distance alone might not get you there. A series of sufficiently hard sprints and breaks that stretches over 30 minutes is better than 30 minutes of continuous jogging.

Interesting article. I agree with other commenters that change in medical science over time probably necessitates changes in the industry, but I don't think this precludes making the work of medical professionals less onerous and expensive. Prior authorizations in particular seem like a uniquely wasteful and American phenomenon, whereby time (and thus money) is burned just so doctors and insurance can try to get on the same page. That cost, we can be sure, is then passed along to patients, on both the service and insurance ends. But more interesting to me, the broad picture in this article is of a world in which insurers have steadily clawed away more and more diagnostic and prescriptive responsibilities away from doctors, because the economic logic of a world with private health insurance allows them to do so, to the detriment of doctors' lives (as the article describes) but more saliently (for an American non-doctor like me) to that of all Americans trying to receive healthcare via insurance. I think it's pretty hard to dispute this phenomenon is real and harmful. The question, which this article doesn't really address, is what to do about it?

I don't intend any criticism of you personally but I wouldn't appreciate a friend or coworker who behaved this way. Making bold, wrong statements all the time is bound to annoy people and drive them off, not entice them to tailor the conversation to your own needs. I prefer social interactions built not on hacks and manipulation, but on respect and mutual understanding.

Wonderful share, thank you. The voice of this is so pitch-perfectly 20th century American. Full of folksy little observations that are actually enormous in their scope without being remotely alienating, like this one:

"It looked like only a few of the bears knew how to use fire and were carrying the others along. But isn’t that how it is with everything?"

Judging by the name of the blog (FAANG FIRE) I suspect this person is plenty well compensated in some sort of prestigious tech job, and if that's the case, then this number doesn't surprise me at all. There are lots of trendy athleisure and technical wear companies that will sell you the equivalent of a sweatshirt for $80, that can add up quick.

Just a small contribution to the discussion: my understanding is that alcohol also had a lot to do with loosening soldiers up enough that they'd be willing to actually charge the enemy. They don't call it "liquid courage" for nothing.

So relieved I'm not alone in this. BR was top of my to-watch list after years of recommendations from friends, family, and the culture at large. And I finally sat down to watch it and it was downright bizarre. I read the book it's based on a few months prior and maybe that skewed my expectations. It was nothing at all like Dick's original story. The stakes were never explained and the visual language was incredibly gaudy and overemphasized.

Then again, I do think this is a case of the "if you'd only seen it at the time!" I saw 2001 A Space Odyssey recently for the first time, and while I really appreciated the practical effects, compared to fast paced, exciting movies made in the past 20-30 years it was boring and utterly baffling. Time passes, things change, the fact is not everything is for everyone, and assertions of "Thing X is the greatest of all time" are and always will be nonsense.