Time is the greatest resource, but energy management is your greatest goal. You will always run out of energy before you run out of time.
If you have a life where you pursue autonomy, the development of your capacities, and a sense of meaningfulness in what you do, you'll be able to withstand and enjoy much more than you think. If you don't pursue these things, everything will be harder.
Simply spending your time with more intentionality and being conscious of each moment changes so much.
It's easier to find satisfaction in goals outside of your own self, because they introduce a finite boundary whereas the self is infinite in its desires
Try to picture what a confident and well-adjusted person would do in the same situation, to determine if you are currently acting out because of trauma or fear.
If you have a habit, ask yourself what it will look like if it continues uninterrupted for decades. Conversely, try to picture what a habit you don't currently have could do for you over the same timespan.
The point is more that it doesn't matter in the way the person wanting to be remembered would want it to be, or in the way the person wanting to be forgotten fears it to be.
Reference books are the one thing it's a good idea to spend money on, because flipping back and forth through a digital copy is still a miserable experience
If they can make flipping a finger pinch worth of pages somehow doable that would be killer. Some sort of wide-pinch gesture with a semi transparent overlay of the page you are going to flip to with your current pinch width.
A foldable reader with readable panels on each sides when you open it. You can flip pages either way. Pen for annotation if possible. Create/edit your own documents. An icon tap to overlay another document (a note, book page, research paper) so you can add to it or copy from it to the underlying panel.
A reader mode (distraction free) when simply reading. A document mode when you are doing something that requires writing (including simple annotations).
I like books and flipping through them. However if you can blend a book reader with a great note taker that would be ideal.
Funny enough VCRs had this decades ago, the double-fast-forward skipped forward a few minutes. Why e-readers can't do this with a similar symbol to skip forward 25 pages is a mystery to me.
If you already know the product you are buying down to the model, Google isn't tailored for you. It's meant for people who have a vague idea and then pick what's at the top of the search results. This is why SEO has grown to be an entire profession.
I think that's a very narrow interpretation of what a search engine does. Or a narrow interpretation of what the GP was doing. Probably both.
You can look at it as GP having a vague idea of how much he wants to pay for this product and where to pay for it, but Google failed to help him find clarity. Maybe the GP could have done better by searching "cheapest" or "sellers" or something like that, but one thing I've learned about modern search engines is that providing more query details nets you less applicable results.
It's like every search engine takes all keywords with an "OR" mentality when it really should be an "AND".
And a lot of this does come down to the advertising model. I wouldn't be surprised if this benefits google because having to try 3 or 4 search queries to find what you want puts more advertisements in front of you, and increases the odds you'll click on one.
Google still has powerful boolean operators. If you use those with intentionality, and pick the hidden 'verbatim' option, you'll have a decent chance of finding what you need. However, these are all vestigial features that a minority of users employ.
The vast, vast majority of users are funneled into product choices. In a way, it helps to see that as the core function, and everything else as a secondary funnel towards that primary funnel. The search engine is designed to work so that people use it, but the end goal is for ads/SEO to be effective for the great mass of users that are particularly vulnerable to them. The GP was looking for price differences, which is something many websites base their business off of, but that's still a tiny portion of the whole and not something Google needs to optimize for compared to the misleading but lucrative results the GP had to sift through.
Google is an ad company that produces a search engine, rather than a search engine that features ads. Although it may have been the latter in the olden days
This is a similar reasoning to claiming that college is not useful because people such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or the Zucc did not need it to do well. It's a form of cargo culting.
What if you no longer need meetings? Take accounting software for instance. This function will probably go from an entire team of accountants to one of the C-levels just triggering the right software at the right time as part of their normal duties.
The software just isn't there yet, but we have some inkling of what might be possible in just a few years. Perhaps a closer analogy would be human computers. You would have meetings with them back in the day to set out calculation tasks, but now they are so reduced away that their existence is in itself something that has been forgotten by most. Employees just perform the duties of the human computer throughout the course of their day without even thinking that they replaced what used to be an independent function.
If software engineers end up automated away before truck drivers are, (not a completely harebrained concept given that one type of AI is doing better than expected and the other worse), it will put a hilarious spin on the "truckers should just learn to code" concept.
One aspect I find interesting about HN is that most of the posters there are involved in adtech, data-gathering, FAANGs, or adjacent businesses, whilst reaping very high rewards for their troubles. At the same time, they have an enduring interest in adblocking, freedom, liberal or libertarian values and so on. This creates a situation where their economic wellbeing and working life is directly aimed towards enforcing surveillance capitalism and authoriarian tools, while at the same time they receive enough resources to avoid the brunt of the consequences, and their mental landscape deals with the cognitive dissonance to maintain an identity of progressiveness.
It directly mirrors the feudal system with a tiny portion of the population living in unimaginable luxury and employing another much larger but still small portion overall to keep the hierarchy running. In other words, billionaires supported by well-compensated SWE vassals who devise ever more sophisticated tools to extract value and data-powered obedience through surveillance from regular workers.
I'm grateful to have served a career that has mostly kept my conscience clear.
I began life as a NOC operator at a regional ISP, when ISPs were merely an on-ramp to Al Gore's Paradise in the Cloud.
I helped many employers and clients connect to the Internet somewhat securely. If the Internet is evil then so am I. I've never worked for FAANGs or adtech or data-gatherers.
Late in my career I came around to academia. Worked for a NASA-JPL project at a university. Now I work for an online program manager.
The data we collect from students is protected by FERPA, and I'd say we make an effort to collect as little as possible, and the students offer it all voluntarily. Win/win.
One thing I notice from the community is that for previous generations (let's say pre-2005) it was significantly easier to make a great living as a programmer without engaging in shady nonsense. My post was very critical, but to some extent it's hard to escape the logic of the times when you have to navigate them.
> One aspect I find interesting about HN is that most of the posters there are involved in adtech, data-gathering, FAANGs, or adjacent businesses, whilst reaping very high rewards for their troubles. At the same time, they have an enduring interest in adblocking, freedom, liberal or libertarian values and so on.
I think attributing features of the community as a whole to individuals within that community like this leads to incorrect assumptions. The HN community is varied. I suspect if you were to put an HN reader who strongly values user freedom and privacy and an HN reader working on adtech in the same room, we would not agree on many of these topics.
There are a ton of profiles I've seen over the years. A few seemed to have lifestyles so independent and idiosyncratic that they'd put the Unabomber to shame. Many were involved in fascinating and helpful projects. But I find the assumption that the overall tone is of venture capital, digital nomadism, gentrification and so on to be fairly sensible as well as the idea that as whole the community greatly contributes to increasing authoritarianism.
One aspect I find interesting about HN is that most of the posters there are involved in adtech, data-gathering, FAANGs, or adjacent businesses, whilst reaping very high rewards for their troubles.
That seems quite a strong statement. Has there been some sort of survey that motivated it?
(Full disclosure: I've been here a long time. I make my living from building tech. I have no interest in doing that kind of work for any employer at any price, nor in running my own business interests that way. I'm well aware that this probably leaves lots of money on the table in both cases and I have absolutely no problem with that. And my cognitive dissonance can look at itself in the mirror just fine when it wakes up in the morning before browsing an adblocked version of the web over breakfast.)
Do "most" posters at HN work at FAANG or in adtech? There's a lot of those people here for sure, but I can't believe they're anything close to the majority.
I don't have actual stats of course but intuitively if you tally:
- All the FAANG/FAANG suppliers
- All startups or established projects that involve data gathering, advertising, SEO, skinner boxes, dopamine response, parasocial relationship manipulation, optimizing time spent on controlled platforms and products
- All projects that facilitate the above as suppliers or second-order businesses
- All gig economy/surveilled/taylorized work facilitators
- All coding work that involves ranking and surveilling people for life altering services such as loans, insurance, healthcare
- All coding work done to optimize the wealth of the noble class (themselves the main beneficiaries of surveillance)
...there's probably not much left. Even if you maintain a strict definition and include only direct adtech shenanigans I wouldn't be surprised if that were a huge number in and of itself.
If someone works for a surveillance company in a non-trivial role, they are furthering the progress of surveillance. They can't wash their hands of it.
The end result of their work is to increase the power and success of a surveillance company, one of the most successful and powerful surveillance companies in the world if not the most, so how could they possibly not be involved or morally responsible? They don't exist in a vaccuum where their work is magically independent of their employer. This is typically the sort of cognitive dissonance I'm trying to highlight.
Can you imagine someone saying "Nah I'm not responsible for what the Russian army does, I'm just paid by them to help with logistics"?
Logistics is in direct support of, and enables, Russian military action in your example. Designing a propeller for a flying vehicle does not further surveillance.
If I lay out the reasoning more precisely and in the simplest terms, maybe it would then be easier to identify which part might be the stumbling block here.
1. An employee of Google makes propellers for Google.
2. The sum of their work benefits Google, either in profit, new assets or some other way, because Google isn't employing them just for fun
3. As an adtech company, surveillance and datagathering are at the core of Google's activities and modus operandi.
4. The growth in power and reach of Google thus directly implies increased surveillance
5. As per 2., The employee currently dedicates their working life to making Google more successful and powerful
6. Therefore the employee furthers surveillance and datagathering, even if their contribution might be small
Perhaps the product this engineer works on does not pan out, maybe he unwittingly makes the company weaker by siphoning capital on a project that eventually fails. This seems to be a common case at Alphabet.
It could also be the case that reinvestment of capital from the engineer's efforts is in a line of business orthogonal to surveillance. Indeed a company making flying cars and engaging in surveillance is clearly already not contributing 100% of their working capital to expand their surveillance capabilities.
> This creates a situation where their economic wellbeing and working life is directly aimed towards enforcing surveillance capitalism and authoriarian tools
Adtech doesn't have to be surveillance capitalism
If we're talking about personalized adtech, sure. But if we're talking about just adtech in general, not necessarily
If you provide infrastructure or support for something, and that something is almost exclusively surveillance and data-gathering based, that's not so great either.
By news they mean users who film themselves talking about news topics in a particular way that is adapted to the platform
There is a particular "informational" style that these users adopt for these videos that is increasingly popular as a Zoomer-friendly news source. Of course, in practice the content often has the same informational quality as rumors or bar discussions shared among friends, because that's exactly what it is just with a parasocial instead of a social relationship.
Essentially instead of consuming news directly, they get a curated, (in both a positive and negative sense) orally-transmitted version of it from a source they find enjoyable to listen to in general
By news, I didn't mean it had to be political. Much of news is political of course, but far from all. What I'm saying is that looking on the platform and seeing how Zoomers consume news, it has that fireside chat quality where news are filtered by an approved person much like in traditional settings.
If you have a life where you pursue autonomy, the development of your capacities, and a sense of meaningfulness in what you do, you'll be able to withstand and enjoy much more than you think. If you don't pursue these things, everything will be harder.
Simply spending your time with more intentionality and being conscious of each moment changes so much.
It's easier to find satisfaction in goals outside of your own self, because they introduce a finite boundary whereas the self is infinite in its desires
Try to picture what a confident and well-adjusted person would do in the same situation, to determine if you are currently acting out because of trauma or fear.
If you have a habit, ask yourself what it will look like if it continues uninterrupted for decades. Conversely, try to picture what a habit you don't currently have could do for you over the same timespan.