As someone who thinks a lot about how best to use one's limited time; is child-free by choice; and, who is also interested in the societal value of good parenting... this article drew me in on a number of counts.
The concept of time dilation explored in the article is fascinating. But I think it's possible the author has some wishful thinking about how experience and memory works. Or perhaps is using a plausible formulation as a reverse justification for his own life choices.
Here is how my childhood memories feel to me. Ages 0-14 are like an opaque tunnel, through which my brain and developing body was shot, like a cannonball, in an instant. I have some fragmentary memories of having gone through that tunnel, but they are mere fragment. My 14 year old self, somehow and miraculously, ended up on the other side of that tunnel healthy and of sound mind.
Age 14 is around where something resembling "the recorded video of my early memory" begins. I have clear memory of various episodes from ages 14-18, and this was also a period of intense individual development for me. This was where all my inclinations, passions, and life goals started to come into focus. That turned into full-blown adult individuation in college, where my goal was to pull away entirely from societal/parental expectations and live my own life. In other words: pretty much everything I associate with my adult character had its seed-like start in my age 14-18 period, exactly the period where I was pulling away from my developmental dependence on my parents.
My childhood before then is a blur. That might be a depressing thought for parents -- that this kind of blurred and fragmentary memory of childhood is possible, given that parents often describe this period as one where they are "making family memories" -- but I don't think I'm the only one. Importantly: this doesn’t make early parenting meaningless. Good parenting is ethically and developmentally important even when it doesn’t leave the child with later-retrievable episodic memories. But I don't think the point of parenting is to create said memories. It's to create a healthy child who can develop and individuate on their own in adulthood.
The article talks a lot about childlike wonder, and seeking that in adulthood. I'm all for that. But what's strange is that OP seems to believe the only place to find that childlike wonder is in parenting of your own children. I am sure parenting can be one such way to regain childlike wonder, but surely not the only one. People can reclaim their childlike wonder in sport, art, hobby, play, and travel, among other things. What's more, I know many parents who haven't the slightest bit of childlike wonder when they interact with their children. Or any other children in their family. So I'm not sure it comes as naturally to everyone as OP seems to think it does.
Two adult thinkers on how adult humans spend their time that have interesting thoughts on childlike play are John Cleese and Alan Watts. Cleese discusses it in the context of creativity in his wonderful lecture, summarized here:
And Watts had this to say about it: "... if you don't have a room in your life for the playful, life's not worth living. 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.' But if the only reason for which Jack plays is that he can work better afterwards, he's not really playing. He's just playing because it's good for him! Well, he's not playing at all! You have to be able to cultivate an attitude to life where you're not trying to get anything out of it. You pick up a pebble on the beach and look at it: beautiful! Don't try and get a sermon out of it."
That's cool. I've wanted to track my movie watch history for awhile but just couldn't find the right software to do it. I really dislike Letterboxd. I also agree with your point that having a software engineering (programming) background makes projects like these a bit easier to prompt for in a direct way.
Digitizing my physical bookshelf was one of the first fun “vibe coding” projects I did with ChatGPT4o in 2024.
First, I took photographs of all my physical books simply by photographing the bookshelves such that the book spines were visible.
Then passed the photographs with a prompt akin to, "These are photographs of bookshelves. Create a table of book title and book author based on the spines of the books in these photographed shelves." ChatGPT4’s vision model handled this no problem with pretty high accuracy.
I then vibe-coded a Python program with ChatGPT4 to use the Google Books API (an API key for that is free) to generate a table, and then a CSV, of: book title, book author, and isbn13. Google Books API lets you look up an ISBN based on other metadata like title and author easily.
Finally, I uploaded the enriched CSV into a free account of https://libib.com. This is a free SaaS that creates a digital bookshelf and it can import books en masse if you have their ISBNs. You can see the result of this here for my bookshelf:
There are some nice titles in there for HN readers! My admin app for Libib (the one at https://libib.com) is more full-featured than the above public website showcases. It's basically software for running small lending libraries. But, in my case, the “lending library” is just my office’s physical bookshelf.
I also added a Libib collection there that is a sync of my Goodreads history, since I read way more Kindle books than physical books these days. That was a similarly vibe-coded project. But easier since Goodreads can export your book collection, including isbn13, to a file.
As for my actual physical bookshelf, it is more a collection of books I either prefer in print, or that are old, or out-of-print, or pre-digital & never-digitized.
I liked the Libib software so much I end up donating to it every year. I originally discovered it because it is used for Recurse Center’s lending library in the Recurse Center space in Brooklyn, NY (https://recurse.com).
Also, Libib has a Android, iPhoneOS, and iPadOS apps -- these are very basic but they do allow you to add new books simply by scanning their ISBN barcode, which is quite handy when I pick up new items.
I did enjoy reading the OP writeup, it’s a fun idea to vibe-code the actual digital bookshelf app, as well!
This reminded me of another discussion on HN a few months ago. Wherein I was reflecting on how the entire culture of internet standards has changed over time:
"In the 80s and 90s (and before), it was mainly academics working in the public interest, and hobbyist hackers. Think Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, IETF for web/internet standards, or Dave Winer with RSS. In the 00s onward, it was well-funded corporations and the engineers who worked for them. Think Google. So from the IETF, you have the email protocol standards, with the assumption everyone will run their own servers. But from Google, you get Gmail.
[The web] created a whole new mechanism for user comfort with proprietary fully-hosted software, e.g. Google Docs. This also sidelined many of the efforts to keep user-facing software open source. Such that even among the users who would be most receptive to a push for open protocols and open source software, you have strange compromises like GitHub: a platform that is built atop an open source piece of desktop software (git) and an open source storage format meant to be decentralized (git repo), but which is nonetheless 100% proprietary and centralized (e.g. GitHub.com repo hosting and GitHub Issues)."
From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42760298
Yes. And honestly though, this is the sort of thing that makes me generally proclaim that Free Software and Open Source won.
It was extremely unlikely that it would be some kind of free utopia; but also, it's extremely remarkable what we've been able to keep generally free, or at least with a free-enough option.
A cool thing about Doug Lea's java.util.concurrent (received a 10/10 rating here) is that its design also inspired Python's concurrent.futures package. This is explicitly acknowledged in PEP 3148[1] (under "Rationale"), a PEP that dates back to 2009.
I just did a small programming side project with a friend in Elixir and I was pretty impressed with the language, especially how it approaches functional programming, concurrency, parallelism, and “programming in the large” (e.g. networked systems and clusters).
I still think there’d be some sort of mental hurdle for me to consider using it for a project of the kinds described on WeUseElixir (vs my go-to language of Python).
But simply toying around with a concrete example of a concrete “word count” program scaled up to multi-core and multi-node made me “get” Elixir a lot more.
Also, I highly recommend this podcast interview with the author of “Elixir in Action.” He does a really nice job describing what makes Erlang and Elixir unique vs other commonly used backend programming languages.
Have you tried the codecrafters exercises, you can build a shell and a redis cache in it. It's not even that hard when you have a nice planned laid out like they do
What are your primary use cases of the Daylight DC-1? I am curious as a reluctant iPad Pro M4 user who thought he'd use it for reading and annotating PDFs but finds himself sucked into streaming apps and YouTube instead a bit too often.
I would say coming from my cell phone at least, I would describe my usage as far more intentional than it was on my phone. I used to wake up and immediately start scrolling on <application of choice at the time, recently bluesky>. Since I've relegated my phone to the sock drawer, I actually find myself waking up and getting out of bed, starting my day, and then going on my tablet.
Honestly, a large percentage of my time on my tablet is using bluesky and youtube, but as I said, it feels much more intentional than on my phone. I don't get sucked into rabbit holes. I check on my friends, check out my subscriptions, and then move on (to be fair on the youtube side, I also use newpipe to block all recommendations, comments, etc so it's much easier for me to avoid the rabbit holes because of that too).
Another very large portion of my usage is in handwriting notes, and medium to long form reading. I don't find myself annotating PDFs, but that is not really a workflow I have sought after.
If you are really worried about using youtube and other vices, the DC-1 may not be for you. Other e-paper devices (particularly E-Ink TM devices) are going to struggle a lot more with youtube than the DC-1 does. Youtube in here is not as overstimulating and addictive, but it is still very much available and usable.
Simple and Universal: A History of Plain Text, and Why It Matters
https://amontalenti.com/2016/06/11/simple-and-universal-a-hi...
You might enjoy it!