4,462 karma · joined June 9, 2013
I use a Hario Switch to make coffee. It takes 3:30 to brew, so I pour the water and then brush my teeth and prep while waiting. Async coffee! I’m out the door as soon as the coffee is in the mug and get to the train station about 2 minutes before the train arrives.
- have a short window to get to the train in the morning - want coffee on the train - don't particularly like drip machine coffee - want the water boiling when I wake up so that I can make coffee and get out of the house as quickly as possible - am more morally opposed to waking up five minutes earlier (pushing my wake time into the 4 o'clock hour) than I am to having a smart device.
I couldn't find a kettle that runs on a timer, and just taping the switch in the "on" position and hooking it up to a plug timer felt unsafe, so getting a stupid wifi kettle and using their stupid app to set it to auto-start was the best option. It's on its own network, though.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/nati...
I decided that I wanted to change about three years ago.
The first thing that helped was finding a book that I really wanted to finish and that I saw as a challenge. I tend to be motivated by challenges. Instead of “I want to get back to regular reading”, it was “I want to finish this one book no matter what”.
Second, I bought an e-reader that let me set the margins and text size to old man settings, such that there are only a few lines per screen. My mind wanders easily, especially when it feels like there’s an ocean of text on a page, so less text and frequent page turns helped me keep my momentum up and avoid constant wandering and re-reading.
As much as we all hate commutes here, getting a job that has me back in the office has had a silver lining in that time on the train is scheduled, routine time where I can’t do something else. I made the decision that it would not be dead time, so I religiously put my phone in my bag, get my book out, and focus on it for the 40 minutes until my destination.
I am a relatively slow reader like you, but much like exercise, sticking to a routine has meant slow but noticeable improvement. I think of myself as a book reader again, and I’ve made it over the hump where sustained concentration feels effortful. You can do it!
I think part of it might be an innate feature of LLMs, but Claude seems extra prone to it lately. I ran the same query about the same codebase with Codex, and it gave me an answer that was about 1/4 the length and made me realize that it really wasn’t all that complex.
If nothing else, it’s good training for my own writing. I’ve been working on making myself be more straightforward and concise, and Claude’s writing is a good example of how cleaner prose is a functional choice, not just a stylistic one.
And I have a central floater, too! Also sucks. Sorry you’re in the same boat! Helpful optometrist tells me that vitrectomy is the only real solution and the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Another thing to accept and move on from.