I think the „my brain isn’t the same anymore“ sensation is pretty universal.
Between addictive online media in our personal lives and AI at work, I think we’ve made mental effort largely optional.
That must be a horrible thing.
One of my favorite theories is the physical activity transition.
In my grandparents‘ generation, physical movement became more optional as work shifted from manual labor to knowledge work or operating machines and transportation became motorized.
Exercise was an ambient byproduct of daily life. Then it disappeared (exercise as a hobby was viewed as extremely weird, runners used to be arrested!) and a few decades later heart disease, diabetes, and so on became deadly epidemics.
We now know exercise is not optional for health. And we’ve reintroduced it via gyms, clubs, etc.
But that took decades. And I believe we’re now in the Mental Activity Transition.
We’ve stripped away ambient mental effort so we practice it much less.
I don’t know what the decades-long consequences of that may be, but they can’t be good.
I hope it won’t take decades for societies to rediscover its value and figure out how to reintroduce it.
I have another suggestion which doesn't contradict yours.
When I was younger I used to get bored way more often. I had to wait regularly during a week (e.g. for a bus, friend, appointment) or even at work as a software dev (e.g. compilation which used to take more time).
This was also the case when doing some physical activities which didn't require lot of thoughts.
Back then, before mobile phones with internet access, you were either reading something or alone with your thoughts in those situations. This was when I had time to think back at things that happened, processing the information I had, refining ideas etc.
Nowdays those are often situations where we ingest more information like listening to podcast, reading stuff on the phone, etc... or situations that just doesn't exists anymore having optimised our work to remove those waiting points.
I personally find myself with clearer thoughts when I break those habits and give my brain some time to be bored again.
I do think there is "lack of boreness" epidemic leaving people with way more raw thoughts and way less time to process and challenge information, leading to some form of exhaustion and lack of clarity.
I have another suggestion which doesn't contradict yours:
This is only a small part of it (tech addiction 24/7 via phone); certainly there is something bigger at play, here (e.g: "the brain isn't the same anymore;" agreed).
I do not use email nor a cell phone (several years; outgoing landline, only), so I have more than enough time to ruminate (and read a few dozen books, annually) – and yet agree very much with OC's theory on needing mental health exercises to replace our newfound AGI tools/workers.
As an extremely conversive person (unbound by a cellphone), it's become an extremely strange world, particularly when talking with strangers, even in just the past two years. It's like: everybody is just mentally exhausted, mortal.
> It's like: everybody is just mentally exhausted, mortal.
Very much this. I think a lot of it is that the "slack" of our lives is being eliminated little bit by little bit to improve "productivity", and in so doing it is making life harder, mentally and physically, in ways that we don't really grasp because we're the frog being boiled. We are more "productive" and "efficient" than ever, but we're not happier or living better lives, and a lot of that I think is due to us eking out the last bit of gain for our work lives and leaving nothing left in the tank for when we aren't working.
This three day weekend, I only really felt like I could do things today, but now I have to go back to work tomorrow. Wouldn't it be great if I didn't need 2-3 days just to become a normal person again every time I don't have to work? Wouldn't it be great if I could use at least one day on the weekend every weekend to do something of personal interest rather than mental recovery in a fog?
My favorite full-time schedule was four-10s: ten hour days Monday-Tuesday, and again Thursday-Friday.
This MT_RF schedule meant I never had to work a "Wednesday", and my Tuesdays became additional "almost Fridays".
I would often take part-time gigs on Saturdays, because my problem isn't that I need several days off in a row... it's that I don't want to work more than three days in a row.
----
The only thing I lack in my self-induced retirement is healthcare (so a big thing for this American boo)... which within the decade might require me to work some minimal job just to get benefits – I dread this day enough to avoid the topic, furtherly.
Is Trader Joes still 28 hours/week [for bennies]? I can still sort grapes, friend-uh-ly.
At early-forties, I don't think I count as "young" anymore.
Definitely: growing up without a cell phone was beautiful. I still remember driving around semi-lost, using paper maps, quite fondly (I still print directions).
My last partner (eight years my junior) "grew up on her cellphone" and it was just remarkable how fucked her brain was... at least different from my own landlined-childhood POV (e.g: attention-span; need for constant contact).
----
And yet, my brain also enmushifies (lately: increasingly).
I’m a professional theoretical physicist in my 40s and I never thought the day would come that I would realize I became shit at mental math. I can do quantum physics in my head but don’t ask me to add 17 to 34
I've also noticed that I drive more slowly/defensively, if only because I need more time to react to all these other bad drivers =P
You won't catch me (nor any of my brilliant brothers) doing math without a calculator... and I got a SAT790Math way-back-when (do they still score that way? I missed one question, only; many of my brothers scored 750+).
It is questionable what is, at present day, considered young and old (and particularly during mid-forties), as life expectancy doubled last century from roughly ~40 to ~80 years. which makes everyone in their forties old by ... olden standards and mid-life at current ones.
if we get to live through the (forthcoming or already unfolding) singularity, there's a fair chance new life standards extend to 140-180 years*, with medicine, yoga, nootropics** and all.
I doubt that's the only factor, but I agree that it's almost certainly a factor. The modern "tech" industry has filled our waking hours with unceasing demands to do something. Buy this product, watch this video, listen to this podcast, react to this social media post; even "practice self-care" has somehow turned into an obligatory virtue-cultivating task. We obviously had advertising before, but this is a different beast, something akin to living in a casino.
As Bo Burnham put it, "apathy's a tragedy and boredom is a crime".
Definitely. Much of the structure of internet media encourages constant, passive consumption. Or, to use the terms of the grandparent, we move traded ambient thinking, reflection, and imagination, which the brain is pushed into during boredom, for ambient consumption.
I think a lot of people believe that, as long as they consume "high quality" or more intellectual content, the negative effects of constant consumption are mitigated, but I think that's false. It's less about the content and more about the structure and process. If you never give your brain moments to stop basic processing of wildly different inputs and to just critically examine them instead, you will suffer brain rot, even if the content you consume is "educational".
Yes. And I'd also add that so much of it is about context and intention.
If you intentionally sit down to enjoy some low-brow entertainment (Maybe a silly action movie or a mediocre rom-com) because you enjoy that, great.
But I recently realized that there are podcast episodes from 10 years ago that I still remember parts of, but few from recent years, even though I've listened to far more podcasts (and they haven't become less intellectual).
I too subscribe to theory that "being bored" was an important part of our day to day lives. I think it gave us time to basically decompress and "defragment" our minds, and that is also when a lot of novel ideas or clarifications would come to us. Now having 24/7 entertainment at the tips of our fingers is almost completely removing this extra time from us, and there is much less processing that actually happens.
I’m a champion of boredom. I really feel it’s a life skill. Personally, I do all kinds of things to create space for boredom. But really it’s my kids where I want them to experience some boredom and structure my parenting style somewhat around creating space for their boredom. On their own, they would never be bored a moment of their life. There’s too any screens and amounts of content available and my kids don’t even use the internet/SM, yet.
Walter Benjamin basically predicted this in The Storyteller (1936) — nearly a century before smartphones:
> "If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away."
I will often experience something I call "feeling addled" when I haven't taken this kind of downtime for too long, usually after about two days. It presents as a difficulty in thinking clearly, a compulsion for easy dopamine, and feeling kind of like I've taken too much caffeine. It is disturbing to imagine that this is the constant default for many people now.
We can totally avoid (being conscious of) processing stuff during sleep too. Just take some SSRIs or smoke weed and you wake up in the next day. I think that that has more effect on people than people realize, dreaming is important but many people don’t experience that side of things any more.
I get the wildest dreams. Lately it's nonstop cardio in my dreams. It's been like this for weeks. It is not relaxing, I don't know why my sleeping self won't just rest. Instead I have to spend the night dancing or jumping from moving train cars like frogger, climbing to the tops of high places, or just straight up running at a sprint for hours.
This is my default experience. Falling asleep, then waking up an unknown amount of time later as if nothing happened. Maybe I don’t pay attention to my dreams
I don’t remember my dreams most nights and that’s always been the case. When I do it’s fairly disconnected and random vignettes without discernible meaning. So I’m missing one of the most important aspects of my life? I guess it’s possible but it’s hard to feel that way without having experienced profound dreams.
Sometimes the meaning doesn't come from you to the dream. It can be how you decide to act in the dream that will shape your subconscious and in turn have influence in your state when awake.
For example, if you have a nightmare and decide to attack the threat instead of trying to flee, then almost all fear evaporates from your subconscious.
This concept of lack of boreness along with mention of studies was covered in a book called The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter (2021) that made me think about it a lot since I came across it. Amazing to see someone organically mention their experience about something similar.
That seems less likely then people being tired and stressed from the costs of living and the increased economic instability.
We have smartphones but we're perilously few missed pay cheques away from not having a house, with a capital class gleefully telling everyone how they'll all be unemployable very soon.
It would be the greatest irony if failing to manage the economic fallout of the coming AI revolution had a larger negative impact than the benefit it brings
We might just run into the worst recession in history as the heavily skewed service economy quickly runs out of customers who can afford to pay for it
We're already several years into the worst economic depression in history. People aren't having children because they cannot afford a home. But it can get worse of course.
There's nothing extreme about my statement. People have just adapted themselves into extinction, which is what happens to you when you don't have children.
Food is cheap and plentiful, which is why people are still denying that it is the worst economic depression in history.
So you're saying the complete lack of evidence of economic depression is a mere distraction from the reality that the evidence is just hiding? Is the depression in the room with us now? Can I speak to it?
The collapsed birth rates is the evidence. The enormous disparity between worker productivity and worker compensation is the evidence. Economic recession doesn't always spell hunger, it can have other consequences.
But seeing the way you are talking, I think you will be uninterested in any and all evidence and more interested in blowing off steam on the internet.
Being bored, showering etc is well known to engage the DMN (Default Mode Network) where your brain connects pieces together from larger, more distant areas together. We as a society are missing this and its obvious.
It's possible that I'm in your grandparent's generation, or maybe your parents. I'm 65. I don't want to derail the conversation, but I do want to correct the bit about "exercise as a hobby was viewed as extremely weird, runners used to be arrested!". In the '70s at least, running was extremely normal. Endurance bicycling was normal. For instance, starting in 1979. I bicycled all over the South: FL GA NC, at least. These were then as they are now quite provincial from the POV of alternate ideas. 10K runs were a thing, with thousands of participants. As were Marathons. Cross country running was a popular high school sport.
If you want to talk about work, well I'm adjacent to 5th generation farmers. Self driving climate controlled machinery is a thing now, but! hard to imagine I know, people had tractors back then too.
So, plausible as it might sound to ascribe some of the causality to flow from "the physical activity transition", I don't think it holds up.
I think the physical activity transition they are describing would have been closer to the end of the 19th century when mechanization really started to take hold (e.g. the car)
I can't remember which decade he's talking about or verify his claims, but in Shoe Dog the creator of Nike talks about how running for exercise was viewed as very weird in the last century, and he implies that Adidas pretty much singlehandedly changed public perception on this. Not that nobody did it, but that it was considered very weird and rare.
He was only talking about running, not exercise in general, but I seem to remember Schwarzenegger reflecting similarly about the public perception of weight lifting
I'm about 5 years younger and yes running and exercise was popular in the 1970s. Maybe not quite like today in terms of people really spending a lot of money on gyms, personal trainers, and expensive bikes or equipment, but certainly not considered weird.
>I think the „my brain isn’t the same anymore“ sensation is pretty universal.
I disagree with the premise that you're propping up with the exercise example; I disagree that humans are thinking less because of mechanisms available in society.
if anything I think people are thinking more than they ever have, and that has triggered a lot of people into overthinking themselves into a quagmire of inaction , judgement, and group-think.
Telling codex how to program a feature is a much different, much easier type of thinking than back in the olden days of a year ago, when I had to get everything to work myself. I can't imagine that's going to be great for my long-term brain health.
This only holds when you keep the task fixed and compare with and without AI. But because AI changed expectations the difficulty of work we supervise today is much higher. My theory is that AI runs our brains just as hard as no-AI, maybe harder. That is if you want to have high quality outputs, not for slop.
Certainly, AI is allow us to 10x our code, but also 10x our mental work. Steve Yegge calls this the AI Vampire[0] and it does effect us, more so than TV or old school social media ever did.
My father went through a stroke a few years ago, and is now always online. He blames the stroke for his brain fog, but I still feel that the modern day dopamine addiction is a huge factor.
But this quagmire of inaction, judgement and group-think is older than technology though. Just because social media wasn't available before didn't mean there weren't "mechanisms" of society to channel those impulses into. So why do you think people are thinking more than before and why this quagmire is a modern invention? Like how are we measuring what people are thinking and what people are not thinking?
I understand its your subjective opinion but I would like to know what basis your claim stands upon. Just like more easy information so people overthink?
Yeah I think this is also true. Maybe "thinking less" is the wrong framing. Whether it's an excess or a deficiency of thinking, there's definitely a lack of straining cognitive activity.
It might be reading books, pondering deep ideas, painting a landscape, doing software engineering, or solving crossword puzzles.
But all of those are happening much less due (in my opinion) to the factors I described.
The neurologists and neurotherapists for a family member who is a stroke survivor have been pretty consistent in saying that cardiovascular exercise and regular social engagement seem to be the most promising activities to stem cognitive decline.
Yes, I think both things can be true. And also, we haven't had decades of mental activity being mostly optional, so we're not yet seeing the consequences nor science of long-term impact.
In the 1950s, many doctors were convinced that exercise was actively harmful and running was dangerous.
Quick example which just happened, my adult son is starting a new job and was looking at the bus schedules to work out what time he would need to leave the house. One bus runs "every 15-20 minutes" and he has to transfer to another bus that runs on a schedule. So he wanted to know what time he had to be at the first bus stop to be on time to work in a worst-case scenario. This problem he presented to Gemini because he just didn't want to think about it.
I look at ads on TV for AI platforms and the examples they show, of course they are a bit contrived, silly, or funny for effect but they always make me feel a bit uneasy... like why do you even have a job if you're using AI to do everything while you just dance around your desk or spin in your chair?
For public transit in my city they have an official website where you can type in where you are and where you want to go and it plan it all for you. Can choose from arrive asap to picking a time when you want to depart or a time you want to arrive. This has been operational since 2002.
More recently Google Maps has the same functionality and it will work in many cities across the world.
I think their broader point is that it's becoming common to reach for an AI chat to solve problems that should take a few seconds of thinking to solve. Notably this kind of thing is not a search problem, since you presumably already know the schedules for both busses and just need to come up with a reasonable allowance for schedules not lining up properly.
I have bad news for you: for the majority of the population mental effort was always a foreign concept. That's exactly what got us in this mess in the first place.
Not sure if always but probably there's a rise of anti-intellectualism in general since I'd say the 2000s. I remember being amazed by how intelligent adults were when I was little. Always doing cross-words, sudoku, reading books, discussing the classics, etc. But now those same adults don't read anything anymore, and just spend their time watching netflix on bed. The same adults that used to correct my vocabulary, grammar and ortography, somehow forgot the meaning of slightly obscure words and don't remember if a certain word was written with an "s" or "c" for example.
I think the anti-intellectualism crisis gets mischaracterized. Common rejection of experts, academia, and empirical findings is certainly a part of it, but I tend to see more of an issue with targeted, self-serving ignorance, particularly among the elite.
You have extremely intelligent and influential people balking at, say, the undeniable net benefits of universal healthcare, renewable energy investment, and cash payment UBI.
Worse, they use their intelligence to attack interventions that run against their preconceived notions. Milton Friedman was not an idiot, and yet he and his acolytes did (and do) untold damage in anti-intellectual perpetuation of their outmoded ideas.
The common thread between that and skipping conversation for Netflix is disengagement with cognitive load that doesn't immediately benefit you. They both suck, but I think that one hurts more, and hurts more.
This second thing (either slightly different from anti-intellectualism or maybe a different form of it$l) is quite odd. I wonder where it comes from. Sometimes it feels like we have a strong bias toward surprising effects, to the point where we’ll start treating the first “possible, counter intuitive hypothesis” as if it ought to be the default assumption. I wonder to what extent that’s a natural thing, or to what extent it is the result of consuming pop-sci content that has to start with “Rebel scientist overturns conventional wisdom…”
This is the anti-intellectualism I'm talking about. You're disagreeing based on vibes and not facts. Disagreement shouldn't even come into the conversation; falsify the net positive effects.
The research is clear that most of the negative effects that most expect cash payment UBI to have don't ever actually appear. Employment goes up (except where recipients use the flexibility to return to school), productivity goes up; the money doesn't get "wasted" on drugs, and it doesn't pump landlord pockets. Giving people the money necessary to participate in the economy increases participation in the economy.
No, I'm not disagreeing based on vibes. I'm disagreeing based on my deep understanding of business and economics.
You're assuming you already know what my objections are and defending against them, when I haven't even said anything specific. Now _that_ is anti-intellectual.
The research isn't clear. It's near impossible to model the effect of UBI on the population at large by running a study with N people who know they're going back to normal at the end of the study.
Many have attempted to "give people money" before. It has invariably failed and resulted in inflation.
I know what the common objections are, and I actually addressed the one you mention: in actual UBI pilot programs, there was no resultant inflation.
If you have objections that weren't among the ones stated earlier, you can state them now. If you think that there are better examples of the results likely to be produced by a non-pilot UBI program, you should detail their circumstances and how they're more applicable than the pilot programs, instead of waving vaguely at instances where "many have attempted to 'give people money' before", as if that's a panacea. Because it's not; it's precisely the vibes-based anti-intellectualism I spoke of.
The issue is that you probably can't, because UBI's efficacious nature has been proven rigorously. It would be nice if we could just get on with implementing it.
I don't think that's true. Even if you think about what was considered junk entertainment decades ago, they still required much more cognitive effort.
Reading about a celebrity breakup in a gossip magazine requires more cognitive effort than hearing about the same breakup in a gossip TikTok:
-You consumed the thing for minutes at a time vs. seconds at a time and your brain had to actively decipher something, not just passively perceive.
-You had to read and couldn't do it while also doing something else, which meant you were more focused.
-You couldn't swipe in a split-second and have another equally stimulating thing that might be completely different, which meant you were more intentional about your mental context.
The medium in which we consume something absolutely matters, independent of what we decide to consume.
I mean, I’d argue that the overwhelming majority of the populous is not doing physical activity as they should. Even in a future with gym “for the mind”, I also assume attendance to be low.
We have 'gym for the mind' now in the form of puzzles (eg crosswords, quizes). It's a different sort of complexity to writing assembly or proving mathematical identities ... most people weren't doing those things though. I'm more concerned that as a species rigorous education is giving way to machine-learning.
I'm pretty sure you can get your brain back. You just have to stop having Internet at home/on your phone.
2003-04 I moved into student housing that didn't have Internet access provided. My first hard cutoff after years of being basically constantly online. Getting it hooked up would have cost me €130 plus a per-minute charge, and I declined. I got bored enough to play through Diablo II with a melee-only sorceress, and then I started buying/borrowing and reading books. Hadn't read in years; couldn't focus on the book long enough when Computer With Internet was there calling to me. Computer Without Internet wasn't nearly so enticing. 2 years later I moved into an apartment, got broadband, and reverted to my netbrained zombieism. I once again no longer remember how to read. I bet I could rediscover the skill a second time, but how could I convince my wife to let me get rid of the Internet at our house?
That's because the folks who are unemployed, unfortunately, are largely those who already were further down the curve. We're destroying the minds of those who were supposed to move society forward and gaining nothing elsewhere.
I struggle to understand this. I use AI quite regularly and find it frees up hours of my day to do consequential “understanding” work that previously got eaten up by there literally not being enough hours in a day to solve my own problems and understand others enough to help them solve theirs.
We know already what's happening after decade of optional thinking: electing dumass Presidents, walking the same path than Germany about 100 years ago, cut scientific research, social nets, etc.
We know already what's happening with optional thinking.
But historically, I don't think people engaged as much intellectually or mentally as much as we do today. And I'm not just talking about people who need to do it at work, but even "mundane" things like watching TV or Film.
Heck, I have non-stem friends for which "pop culture" activities like wordle, pub quizzes, and film/TV are the most engaging thing intellectually. I'm not sure what they would have done if they live in the past. Would they find something else?
>I think the „my brain isn’t the same anymore“ sensation is pretty universal.
One would hope so, but there are countless people that believe this can't ever be the case, and it's just lack of personal motivation that's the problem.
Yes, this is a big issue. I really think these things are basically like cigarettes used to be when they were ubiquitous.
I'd have a hard time blaming someone in the 1930s for being addicted to cigarettes. Everyone constantly smoked everywhere and their harm was rumored, but not proven.
Try to quit smoking in that environment: the thing you're trying to get away from is inescapable and it's not even clear why you should quit. They might blame themselves for not being motivated enough.
We're in that exact environment for the things I describe above.
I think they exist already... Crosswords, sudokus and puzzles have long been popular. Has the world also forgotten the brain training craze of the naughties?
Additionally, everyone seems to have forgotten that covid can leave lingering mental symptoms for years after “recovery”. I wonder how much of the mental fatigue/ brain fog that people blame on tech is actually from covid…
It's not just COVID, either. You can get brain fog effects from a variety of things. The first and biggest is sleep apnea (woefully underdosed).
Plenty of things can develop as you grow older. Some of them may have been present all your life and you only start to notice them when your body is a little less resilient. Food sensitivities, for instance -- eat the wrong thing, trigger a major release of histamines (which trigger both the stomach acid and a whole-body response). Too much of that releases other neurotransmitters, too, and you can get Depression and Fatigue too. (And then try changing the whole way you eat while at the bottom of a depressive slump where all the easiest foods are the likeliest triggers!!) Autistic people (plenty of us in tech) are especially predisposed to many of these inflammation-related issues.
If you're brain fogged, see the doctor... and be prepared for a long slog of self advocacy, and maybe shopping around.
I think running down the road is still suspicious and to get you stopped by the cops (not arrested per se I’m not sure that ever happened…) which is why runners wear a uniform.
There are some occupations (artist, author, founder, scientist, etc.) that are popular forms of escapism because they look so self-actualized. From the outside, it looks like:
1. They only work on what they like.
2. Their work exists for its own sake, not to accomplish some other motive (e.g. the painter's paintings exist to be enjoyed as paintings. It's not graphic design, which exists to sell something else.)
In practice, that's usually not true. A founder deals with compliance forms, a novelist only writes a vampire book because that's what the market wants, and the scientist applied for 27 research grants this year.
When it comes to work, humans seem to need to believe that perfection exists, that there is a situation in which all of our problems would be solved.
I've been lucky enough to have had multiple situations where I reached the exact career goal I set a few years prior. The career that seemed like the situation where all problems would be solved. I was (and continue to be) happy with my career, but as soon as you live in yesteryear's idealized reality, you realize that even within that exist some annoying things and you idealize the next thing.
I saw a cartoon that captured this pretty well; a pianist who looks pensive, thinking "I don't enjoy this at all". The caption is something like "how to know you're a professional".
Everybody runs this risk, but "creative" jobs probably more so. Not being able to enjoy what you're doing even if you're successful. It may be because there's always a pressure to improve. But it could also be because the inner motivation that used to drive you has been replaced with external rewards. C. Thi Nguyen calls it "value capture".
I agree with the author's friend in that it's up to each of us to find creativity, it must come from within.
So what? Yes, when you acheived your dream, you need a different dream. That is not a fundamentally bad thing right? The fact that you find your current "dream" reality annoying is a sign that you have become and yes it is okay to dream again but that doesn't mean your previous dream was wrong or faulty or unrealistic.
Thinking perfection as a real thing to achieve is not good but striving an ideal version of you is how you grow. Your ideal version changes as you grow its natural.
> a novelist only writes a vampire book because that's what the market wants
Not exactly. If you're in it for the money, don't be an artist (because it's not very effective). Having established that you're not in it for the money, don't slavishly follow the market, what's the point of that? But respect your audience, of course, and try to get them to part with their money on your terms, which is the fun of the whole thing and why you're not working in real estate instead.
Many working novelists have described being pressured by their publishers to write whatever the publisher believes will sell, and many have given in to the pressure because ultimately they need to eat. Arthur Conan Doyle famously kept writing Sherlock Holmes stories despite hating it, because the public and his publishers demanded it. The foreword to Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard Of Earthsea talks about how she was convinced to write a children's/YA book despite not really wanting to.
The post you're replying to maybe overstated things, but was much closer to reality than your post.
"Hating", no. He wanted to write books like The White Company. He could have done! But Holmes was more popular, so he asked a higher price, got paid, and continued with the Holmes. This is like a dialog with the public. It's not that he had instructions such as now make Holmes a vampire and was compelled to obey. The level of his obedience to the public was modulated by his level of liking money. Less money and more freedom was an option. I can't find the Le Guin foreword, but I wonder in what way she was convinced.
But anyway, no, you are not on rails in your creative "job", and it is self-directed, unless you think you're compelled to make X amount of money and thus have no choice but to write loathed vampire books, without even the option to go and work more happily in a factory.
I always wonder what the rationale is inside Apple to sell a separate cleaning cloth.
There’s no way this is even a drop in the bucket for their business, and neither is this some strategic judo move where they can undercut a competitor’s business.
It’s specifically advised for use on the nano texture displays, where the wrong material could rub away the special surface etching they use to get the glare resistance.
They list it as compatible with everything, because, well why not.
As someone who actually has the nano texture display and has actually used Apple’s cloth and regular microfibers:
the main difference seems to be that the Apple cloth will clean finger grease out of the nano texture. With a normal microfiber you have to spend five times as long, spray windex, and rub really hard.
I have the nano texture on an iPad, and I wasn’t too concerned about scratches, but after years of using both I still don’t have any
IKEA recently changed their microfibers to be more like the special Apple one, and they work now too
As someone who actually has the nano texture display and has actually used Apple’s cloth and regular microfibers:
the main difference seems to be that the Apple cloth will clean finger grease out of the nano texture. With a normal microfiber you have to spend five times as long, spray windex, and rub really hard.
I think the difference is that you read the code and get curious about it rather than glancing at the output and immediately telling it what to correct.
I guess you're right that food is historically speaking extremely safe. I guess with this specifically, the issue is about how connected one company can be to the whole food supply.
A farmers market stand may not have perfect food safety either, but their outbreak would be limited to the few people who bought something on the farmers market (or maybe a cafe/restaurant or two that they supply).
Most likely, any harm wouldn't even be traced back to any individual salad because the sample wouldn't be big enough to form a pattern people would notice.
But because they supply so many salads to everywhere, it's a major issue that affects the whole food system.
I guess it's similar to an AWS outage. Companies constantly have outages, but an AWS one takes down half the internet.
Not a surprise this is launching now. John Ternus is taking the reigns as CEO in a week and was previously SVP of hardware engineering.
I can't hate a direction where Apple becomes more about building great computers rather than trying to force more and more subscriptions. I do wish they would fix many of the long-standing OS and native app problems.
Not a surprise with John Ternus taking the reigns as CEO in a week, who was previously SVP of hardware engineering.
I can't hate a direction where Apple becomes more about building great computers rather than trying to force more and more subscriptions. I do wish they would fix many of the long-standing OS and native app problems.
I do worry that at this point it's no longer just Apple's problem to solve. They need to figure out a way to take the rest of the industry with it. Maybe if their standards are high enough everyone else will look bad by comparison.
My daily driver personal machines are incredible pieces of kit, but everything is always getting worse because majority of software is some SaaS living in the cloud, or even if on-desktop is constantly updating slop.
Why does it take 10 seconds for my streaming music app to open when my machine is 10-20 cores, 32GB+ RAM, high bandwidth NVMe storage, and I am connected to gigabit fiber internet? The thing is autoplaying videos, and has about 10 different panes clearly owned by different product managers that hate each other. Half the time its pushing me some pop-up dialog I don't care about.
I agree with you, but I also think sadly most consumers don't really care about this. The reason the internet is in the state it's in is because most people tolerate it.
Most people simply don't care about using well-made software so long as it gets the job done because they don't even look at other options. I suppose this is how carpenters feel when they see ubiquitous IKEA furniture.
I don't think polishing macos more will win more users, Windows is a flaming garbage heap where virtually every built in program is broken and people keep using it. Making macbooks cheaper and more accessible will do far more.
I think that undermines a lot of benefits of entrepreneurship - the learning of many different skills, network, etc. and also just the adventure of starting a company.
It’s like saying most people will never be professional athletes so we should discourage sports.
Or most people live in their home country, so we should discourage young people from taking backpacking trips.
We seem to have become a culture where we unrealistically believe we have a solution. The big issue with many who label themselves as entrepreneurs is that often the problem doesn't exist. You end up networking with people who are less aware and also don't recognise that the problem doesn't exist and then motivate you even more. Then you have funders who rarely have expertise so they will believe you when you say it will change the world which basically all the time it won't.
Now I'm not of the view people shouldn't try to change the world but why should that be fixated on a business, why not a community effort, why not research, why not charity based, they all provide you with a range of skills. We have got a saturation of those starting businesses in every industry (especially mine which is quantum computing) and most have a poor idea or a repetitive idea or an idea that so unthought out it can't go anywhere.
(I will say less should go backpacking. Travelling on the whole now has become a distraction from life instead of a discovery. You are better taking that year or 6 months and spending it on something you love to do. That will show you who you are more than visiting some of the poorest nations on earth.)
I agree that a lot of entrepreneurship is misguided. And I totally agree that research, charity work, or other stuff can have many of the same benefits.
What I think is important (and why I think entrepreneurship is directionally good) is open-ended exploration and taking initiative to pursue one's own projects. I don't care about the specific direction, but about the idea of proactively trying to shape reality by following one's interests.
I think what you're describing with backpacking is true for most. If the point is to check off a list of Instagram picture spots, then it's more of an exercise in consumerism. If it's to deeply engage with other cultures, languages, and people, that's different.
I guess it's similar with entrepreneurship. If the point is to inhabit the founder personality archetype you see on social media, that's different than to be genuinely solving interesting problems.
reply