Author: harold

It’s a nice book.

It was entertaining? I don’t know. I jumped on it without social media, without reading any piece on it.

Entertaining but also bland and AI-designed or something quite mechanical about it. I don’t know. Maybe it’s the current day setting with current dystopia. Watching something that is pretty much exactly what we’re living might not yield satisfaction like that.

Now imagine the same settings but it’s the start of a new year. The major phone company is bigger than ever. But for some reason, at the end of January, the sales are gone. Exactly zero new phone is sold. Not one.

Same thing in February. No one really knows why.

The company doesn’t freak out yet, they’re filthy wealthy with a treasure chest in billions. But they start investigating after the board asks for answers and more money.

See? A lot more exciting to think about human intelligence than human impulses.

chillin chillin

January to June: heavy isolation

June to October: ???

October: Hung out with a bunch of people without masks, twice. It felt outstanding.

November to December: heavy isolation

It’s been rough. The good thing is that it looks like I never got COVID-19. Never lost my sense of smell, never felt weak and actually increased my lung capacity, if anything.

Unrelated, I’m probably seven Spider-man movies behind at this point.

“> I have 8+ hours a day screentime on my iPhone.

For a long time I thought that my constant internet use was a symptom of my disinterest in other things, but more recently I’ve come to realize that it is, in fact, the sole cause of said disinterest. The quick dopamine hits you get on the internet have subconsciously convinced your brain that the internet is what matters, and that everything else (i.e. your life) is simply a distraction.

Don’t take my word for it. You can test this hypothesis in ~2 hours. Hide and/or turn off all of your electronics, and wait. You’ll sit on the couch, you’ll eat a snack, you’ll find that your phone has magically appeared in your hand (how?!?), but just put it back down. As you try to go 2 hours without any passive entertainment, and I can almost guarantee that you’ll discover that your mind will begin to show interest in things like hobbies/reading. If you can’t get online, a book sounds pretty nice.

There’s the rub–if getting online is an option, it’s always the best option. The only way to do other stuff is to carve out time where getting online (or, for me, passive entertainment of any kind) is not an option.

Fun fact: If you can forego passive entertainment for the week, you will see all of that junk for what it really is, to your horror and eternal benefit.”

It’s funny how much we try to convince ourselves that we are not totally addicted to the quick rush of excitement from the internet. And that we can’t even see that the only solution is to simply put it away. Which is really hard to do with a phone, because we lie to ourselves that we need it in our hands or close by, “just in case”.

I’m still off Twitter. I’m scared as hell to go look at it and feel the horror this comment is talking about. I do feel the benefit though.

“My theory is that our current collective obsession with trends is a response to the massive unpredictability of technology, finance, and health over the past two years, and the fact that the world is so different from what it used to look like.”

On the year of garbage internet trends.

“Netflix, YouTube, Spotify, Facebook and many other popular sites operate on similar feedback loops that push more of whatever is being noticed,”

My theory is that the current ultra heavy centralization of computing —two platforms, five apps— and massive usage of algorithms have pushed people to see and tap on the same things more and more.

Which means that there’s less and less serendipity. Less obscure stuff popping out and floating for a while. It goes from 0 to 1 million in a couple days now. Rinse. Repeat with a new video, a new person.

And I think, it exhausts all of us. Because meaning disappears and we still need that mf.

“Listening to audiobooks at 3x speed is born out of a flawed model of learning — and it’s the same one that underpins our modern education system. The assumption is that people can acquire knowledge as if it’s a substance they can pour into their minds.”

Interesting essay on learning.

“The meaningful parts of a culture, like books, only show up when you give them time. They hide parts of their personality and only reveal themselves once you stop, slow down, and commit to them for a little while.”

You have to slow down to appreciate context and truly absorb new knowledge.

This is why you should always try food you previously didn’t like again. Take your time, and try again. Maybe the context this time will make you understand this taste.

And then you might even like it.

“Let’s start with how you don’t learn to think. A study by a team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The investigators wanted to figure out how today’s college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it, the researchers asked? The answer, they discovered—and this is by no means what they expected—is that they don’t. The enhanced cognitive abilities the investigators expected to find, the mental faculties that enable people to multitask effectively, were simply not there. In other words, people do not multitask effectively. And here’s the really surprising finding: the more people multitask, the worse they are, not just at other mental abilities, but at multitasking itself.”

On how to think better.

Human beings born in 2000 are as stupid/intelligent as the ones born in 1942 or 1980.

The idea that in a few generations, the human brain would be SO much better at cognitive tasks, is a bit laughable if you understand evolution (hint: it takes thousands of years for things to actually change in flesh and then abilities).

Human beings don’t multitask. We serialize at high speed, giving the impression that we are multitasking. But we all know that we’re not. We’re quickly rotating tasks and the faster we do it, the worst we do said tasks.

The pervasiveness of tech and the cyberpunk “culture” always makes it like since broadband internet and apps, we are so much smarter. But we’re not. We still have the same number of synapses and same brain weight as people in the 1600s.

We just play more now.

Due to hardware failure, things being spread out across three devices and decidedly capricious operating systems, I’m stuck not making progress at all on music stuff. Very frustrating.

On the other hand I keep practicing instruments.

Dreaming of running a VM with audio stuff and never ever having to update it.