LeftHandPath

> stimulatory addiction

This really seems to be it, for me. There's a "high" that comes with being productive. Multitasking lets you trick your brain into thinking its being productive, giving you the high without actually doing the work.

> What is really concerning is when I am watching something I actually want to pay full attention to on YouTube/Netflix, and I find myself opening a fresh tab to load up a second video before catching myself and realising it's ridiculous listening to two videos at once talking over each other.

This is so relatable. A lot of times I open up a window to get started on a project, and within 5 minutes I've absentmindedly opened youtube/reddit/discord/hn/wikipedia and started my way into a wormhole that will take at least an hour to get out of.

I have noticed it as well, but I haven't gotten to the point of doing anything about it yet.

If I'm playing a video game, I have to be listening to a podcast. If I'm reading a book, I have to check the news every few minutes. If I'm writing code, I have to turn on some sort of background noise. The only times I'm productive are when I, by some accident, get past the initial discomfort of doing only one thing, and get lost in the activity before I have time to think about it.

It's definitely a bad trait, but I didnt cognitively realize that until this thread made me think about it.

This is why it's important that the set of drivers killed in AI accidents will be different. The ones killed in accidents up to this point are the ones being reckless (and sometimes, the people they inevitably hit).

The ones killed in accidents involving self driving cars will include people who drove responsibly or even defensively in the past. They will also be among higher income earners for the first few years, while self-driving capabilities are still too expensive to be included in the average car.

Moreover, people like to think they're in the set that wouldn't get themselves killed by their own driving, regardless of how poorly they drive.

I think this is the best argument for why self-driving cars are much further away than we realize. A fully autonomous vehicle that is perfectly suited for modern city roads is a long way off. A human is still required. In this case, it seems best that the human remains in total control so that they remain in total dedication to the task. For the same reason that some aircraft autopilots shut off when they notice a problem, so that the pilot has to take full control and becomes more aware of problems like if the plane is consistently pulling left or right.

The ideal is that the car helps, but does not take total control. The car keeps you in your lane and automatically speeds up / slows down with highway traffic. It warns you when you turn on your indicator while a car is in your blind spot, and applies the brakes when it detects an imminent collision. But the car should not make turns or apply gas or allow the driver to dedicate their attention to something besides the road. It should augment, but not replace, human abilities.

It was something that I got preoccupied with when I was writing a lot back in middle/high school. I tended towards past-tense, but I noticed that a lot of young adult novels were first-person present, e.g. Hunger Games.

I agree with the core point of the article, but I agree with your points as well. The conclusion of the article is definitely wrong.

I recently buddied up with someone who has a CS degree to try and make a desktop app, as a side project. I asked if he is familiar with MariaDB and whether or not he's used C++ ODBC.

Our discussion quickly turned into choosing libraries / existing code. He uses Spring and Hibernate and was bewildered by the concept of tying columns to application variables "manually". After I told him I have some CentOS servers where we could put a shared database, he bought a Windows Server because he "needs a GUI". He added, "Ideally, after it's setup, we'll never even have to remote in to it." For the actual desktop application, he wants to use Electron.

It seems there are two distinct branches of computing emerging - one where performance matters, and one where it doesn't. Performance will always matter in places like the stock market or on IBM mainframes. In the consumer-facing world, All that seems to matter is perceived performance. Slack and Discord seem fast, when you watch how quickly a new message pops up on your laptop screen after you sent it on your phone. They seem egregiously slow when you open up task manager and see just how much overhead the chromium-based engine adds -- but most people won't care.

Applications made for "consumers" tend to be made like a cheap car - corners are cut, the end result isn't pretty, but things in the category are what makes up 90% of ordinary use cases. Slack isn't meant to be open on your work machine while you're compiling code in the same way a Prius isn't meant to chauffeur top-level executives. It doesn't mean that the Prius is bad or unimportant - it will do far more for more people than the entire lineup of many luxury car brands.

But I am damn sure that I'd rather be engineering a Bentley than a Prius.

Edit: In the metaphor, luxury and performance are sacrificed, not efficiency. I probably should've used Fiat Chrysler, but unlike Fiat Chrysler, consumer-facing software has its place. I just don't enjoy working on it myself.

To be fair, stifling web apps sounds like an anti-google move, not a pro-apple move (unless they've explicitly stated otherwise, I'd assume this is the reasoning). That said, I have been able to install some of my own websites as apps on iOS after adding PWA support. I am not sure how much their support differs from the Android implementation.

The biggest reason I haven't jumped ship to Android over the years is that the App Store has always been inherently curated, and typically more secure than the Android store.

The iPhone has been pretty good for security / privacy as well - I remember an article that made the front page here about how an accidental usage of the phone's GPS was still stopped when not allowed in the user's settings, and still triggered the location use icon in the status bar.

Much like how Standard Oil actually lowered oil prices while it dominated the market -- sometimes, a monopoly is benign or even benevolent towards consumers. Meanwhile Amazon is an example of a more predatory organization, as evidenced by some of Bezos's responses in the recent congressional hearing.

Monopolies like Amazon should be torn down for the consumer. Monopolies like Apple should only be torn down if they are using their market dominance to extinguish competition that would otherwise force them to improve.

My university is a mixed bag. We had an ethics discussion in a 101 course that seemed beneficial. However, the other "ethics requirements" seem like a way to shove political propaganda down the throats of students who would have otherwise avoided it by their choice of major.

Requiring CS, CoE, and EE majors to take courses on the humanities - without making any statement about the merits of those courses - the sort of thing that the university decides based on its political and financial goals, not based on its desire to create stronger CS professionals. A course with a title like "CS Ethics" sounds much more relevant and beneficial than "African American Womyn's Studies", which is the sort of thing I would have to take to satisfy my university's ethics requirement if I hadn't satisfied it with AP testing.

Is that really exaggerating? Those are both legitimate examples of the words they used. Working at Facebook shouldn't mean that some official in the EU gets to know what kind of insurance I opt for or how much I make, or generally dig around my personal communications without warrant based on the use of arbitrary phrases (speaking hypothetically; I don't work at facebook).

I'm still surprised it was so politicized on places like Twitter. Colbert, Trevor Noah, Seth Meyers, and others all roasted him for it and called the drug dangerous[0]. Meanwhile some center-left leaning places like the Hill were actually defending trump for it[1].

Drugs should not be politicized. The right should not have been so blindly faithful in HCQ, and the left should not have been so pessimistic about it. I'm sure both sides have done this in the past and I'm sure both sides will do it again in the future - but we need to work on this, because wanting a drug to be ineffective for political reasons is dangerous for society.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpSK_IKm4eM

[1]: https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/491665-if-only-hydrox...

I agree. I’ve been in the DDG camp for a little while, but I finally had to switch back to google as my primary search engine on my laptop - fixing searches was taking too much time. That’s after two or three months of using DDG and Bing exclusively

I mean, it's more like saying that Nevada is west coast. It's definitely west --- but there's no coast.

Czech Rep. is as far east as Austria, and I dont think anyone would question Austria being part of traditional central Europe. I'd think that Hungary and Poland are usually considered the same - just depends on how strongly their cultures were affected by the old iron curtain.

> Cynical answer though

Honestly I don't think it's that cynical - it just makes sense. There are the people who can and will do that stuff - and do it happily - and they would presumably be the easiest to hire as junior devs. Google views it as a stepping stone towards their next product launch, and the programmers see it as a stepping stone to a more enjoyable job.

And then the inventors and entrepreneurs create their own projects, and typically both produce and earn more than they would've at the company.

It kind of works out in everyone's best interest (although I'm sure the Google hiring managers sometimes regret missing out on the guy who invented New Cool Thing, and the guy that invented New Cool Thing is probably still a bit miffed that he couldn't land or get through an interview for a job he/she was clearly qualified for).

I am definitely against the newest measures taken by car companies, e.g. Porsche completely covering the engine (and voiding warranty should you access it) save the oil reservoir, on the newest 911s.

There is also something missing from my metaphor which is that even when the parts no longer exist, the car can still continue to run until it breaks down, rather than being remotely killed due to an external signal separated from the car itself (e.g. servers shutting down and triggering some switch in the code).

There are a lot of cars that were maintainable, and built to be maintained, that can’t be maintained anymore simply because the manufacturer went defunct and there are no more parts (e.g. Saab, Datsun) or because the cost of manufacturing more parts for a car with a dwindling owner-base began to outweigh the profit, and thus, there are no more parts (e.g. older Ford models).

Unless the car is built primarily with 3rd-party parts (from manufacturers like Bosch, Brembo, etc) - which is something that consumers usually hold against a car, like how many people are upset that the new Toyota Supra is actually a BMW - then the problem is almost completely analogous to the shutting down of remote servers; if the manufacturer goes defunct or can no longer make a profit by continuing service, the car’s life has perished.

And in fact, the only way to avoid this is super conglomerates and monopolies - Lamborghini parts should always be available, because they come from the Audi parts bin, which comes from the Volkswagen parts bin.

I’ve been harassing my dad for ages over his purchase of a WiFi-enabled LG fridge.

Neither of us know why it’s connected - but it is, and it proudly displays a WiFi icon with a backlit LED right above the water dispenser.

The only thing you can possibly gain from a WiFi-enabled fridge (it has no voice commands, no screen, etc) is just being monitored and/or hacked. There is literally no benefit to the consumer from having WiFi on that device.

Reminds me of a lot of the ire that I had for GDPR when I first read it (vague wording, general legislative over-reach, potential for arbitrary enforcement, and shoving it all through due to popular consumer sentiments that aren't necessarily directly related). And like GDPR, it will hurt innovation, although that detriment is difficult to measure.

Actually, it doesn't necessarily have merit. It just seems like it does, because people will assume that almost any vaguely-worded paragraph that's supposedly about them must be true.

See the Barner / Forer Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect

I guess I've been lucky to avoid literally any of this at work. However, one of my classes at university has each student rate other students in their group with arbitrary personality factors that seem like they should be subjective.

For instance, the model (we take quiz to evaluate how well we use it and how to rate each other) relies on things like "is late to meetings" or "does not fully consider everyone's ideas" to judge a student as being an underperformer. The most problematic was that it made us choose whether we are "details" or "overview" in terms of what kind of work we complete, with no room for being able to handle both (you are either the person who types individual sentences at the whim of your 'leader', or you are planning the entirety of the project and doing none of the grunt work). Speaking of 'leader', it also asks us to rate ourselves as leaders (good, mediocre, bad), and to state what kind of person we want to be led by.

I'm expecting our responses to be used to assign us to groups and given roles in each group, but we will see.

I just get annoyed when I'm stuck taking a survey that - by the nature of the questions on it - is almost certainly dubious.

This is what I was thinking as well, until I saw the “.dev” in the URL.

I've been using duckduckgo and bing for a while now. Google is just a fallback.

I’ve dealt with this as well, particularly with programming. At least with programming, what I usually wind up doing is raising an issue on Github about the feature I’m trying to implement or the bug I’m trying to solve. It helps me actually start working, keep track of my thoughts, and define the problem well enough that I can ultimately begin working on it.

With other things, usually it’s best to run to google, or send an email to your boss or professor, or just pull out a notepad and start jotting things down. Sometimes it also helps to take a quick break - exercise, take a shower, etc - and then come back.

Although the irony is that I’m typing this comment out as a form of procrastination when I should be pulling out my laptop to do some remote work...

The verbal voice in your head is rationalizing. Don’t think. Just do.

(If you want a good resource that synthesizes a bunch of modern psychology research relating to that suggestion into a single, entertaining non-fiction book, see “Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior” by Leonard Mlodinow [0]).

[0]: https://psychcentralreviews.com/2016/subliminal-how-your-unc...

It’s so amazing how making it easy to get started is basically priming your brain to complete the task.

I’ve gotten fit by hanging up a chin-up bar on a spare door frame. When I had a trainer, I was always amazed at what I could accomplish - even on days when I swore I felt dead in the morning - just by getting there and starting. I’ve gotten good at coding by keeping my IDEs of choice in the taskbar and working on small tasks during downtime. I study better and more often when I leave out my notebooks and calculator.

The lower you set the barrier to entry, for a given activity, the better a chance you give yourself to actually complete that activity later.

The Financial Times article provides a little more depth. It mentioned that Google has already decided to delay the rollout of any general-purpose facial recognition tools, in anticipation of malicious use. The FT article also calls his comments a "call for a moratorium", which is quite different than a call for heavy long-standing regulation.

His comments seem a little more driven by things like the use of cameras to identify and locate Uighur Muslims for the purpose of locking them in concentration camps in Xinjiang, where over 1.8 million Muslims are already detained [0,1], than the more civilian uses of unlocking cell phones and bank accounts.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/technology/china-surveill...

[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/fa6bd0b0-1d87-11ea-9186-7348c2f18...

You're exactly right. It's even in the article:

> Postmates told the team at Hardena that the only way to change the prices would be to become a member, which meant accepting delivery orders and paying the company a percent of their profit. The listing is still live, and still reflects the 2001 menu prices. Grubhub, Doordash, and Postmates did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

(In this case "a percent of their profit" is actually 30% of each delivery order's total revenue.)

But the article states that the delivery drivers are paying $nothing and driving off, leaving the restaurants with a loss of $CorrectPrice and leaving the service with a marginal loss.

Which is why the restaurants are pissed, and why these services (GrubHub, Door Dash, Uber Eats) are losing 9-figures or more every year.

At that point, the restaurant is left with 100% liability for the cost of the raw ingredients and of making the food. The courier can leave (wasting their own gas money), but the 3rd-party delivery service is entirely removed from the situation (they lose nothing by not paying, as the customer and their driver will almost definitely blame the restaurant).

It is currently being addressed in that way, but it is ruining the reputations of these local restaurants, and burning through their cash.

I am not sure where I heard it, but I keep coming back to the quote "There is no algorithm for absolute truth". People who aren't in-the-know about AI tend to lend it much more credit, when it comes to its ability to accurately measure something, than is due.