krrishd

> Imagine a 12-16 year old happening upon HN and becoming a regular. Do you see this person coming away with a positive view of higher education and being encouraged to pursue it? Or are they more likely to develop a cynical, contrarian view?

This precise thing happened to me years ago, and yes I did develop a cynical/contrarian view about it. I still went to school, but in net think I benefitted from not taking it too seriously.

But I don't think HN made me an outcast; I was on here because I was already an outcast and it was a place where there were other people into similar things that I was. I feel the same way about your broader point; I think the cynicism/isolation comes first (even if the internet might reinforce it).

I wouldn't personally buy an NFT for those purposes, but tons of NFT owners buy them to be able to use them as profile pictures. Yes, you can put any arbitrary JPEG as your pfp including an NFT owned by someone else, but it'd feel the same as wearing replicas of branded clothing (and people mostly just don't).

That might not seem as meaningful as hanging them in your house, but I've watched it become that meaningful for a ton of people (as "irrational" as I think both NFTs and Hallmark cards are).

Ah, thanks.

What's the context of this?

Not to suggest that this is the best way to do it, but that’s already happened on Ethereum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization)

I don’t disagree with you, but I think the only fallacy here is that it’s an extremely zero-sum way to look at things.

Are we perhaps better off for many — maybe even all — of our status quo legal contracts not working like software programs? Sure.

Is there a class of legal contracts — either already in existence, or made possible by crypto — that’d make much more sense if ran like software (with different requirements/constraints than the error tolerance you described)? I don’t see why not, and why this would be mutually exclusive with the first premise.

TIL, thanks for the explainer.

The fascinating thing about this spatial audio wave to me is that it was basically available almost a decade ago (because "binaural audio" has been available and fairly trivially usable for a while now).

I remember one of the first apps I downloaded on my iPod Touch in middle school (~2011) was a "binaural audio" app that catalogued spatial audio experiences (+ voice-acted stuff like getting a haircut, etc).

Reminds me of David Chapman’s “ Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution”

https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

Totally agree on Jai Paul, I'm a big fan as well :)

pretty cool, i’m tangentially reminded of https://jaipaul.bronze.ai/

> This version of Jasmine by Jai Paul is created using the BRONZE AI engine. On each listen, Bronze performs a unique and infinite playback of the piece.

Bronze is a new technology that allows music creators to utilise AI and machine learning as creative tools for composition and arrangement. Bronze is also an audio file format which will revolutionise music playback, enabling artists to release non-static, generative and augmented music.

Posted this here a few times already: http://write.itskrish.co

its defining features being:

1. you choose a fixed duration of time within which to journal (i choose 15 minutes even though it is initially tough to spend all of)

2. if you stop typing for more than a few seconds within the duration, you lose your writing

These constraints basically force me to dump anything and everything on my mind for the sake of continuous typing (to not lose what i've written), and I've been successfully doing it at least 1-2 times a week for a few years now. All your entries are also saved locally in-browser only, with the option to export a savefile.

OTOH, i think you can actually measure the quality and accessibility of tooling based on how abundant the long tail of mediocrity/low-quality output there is.

in music’s case, one of the replies to this comment describes decline in musical complexity/sophistication, which i’d personally attribute to democratization of the tools (which are also much more powerful, allowing kids w computers to do what took whole teams and studios full of equipment before).

so i think only seeing high quality UIs in the wild is more of a mixed bag than is intuitive to us — a world absent of shitty soundcloud rap is a world with worse music tooling.

> Some people around me felt that my experience bootstrapping my last business should be enough to close seed funding, but the only thing that helps close funding is the fear of missing out on your deal. I witnessed this first hand after we launched to #2 on Product Hunt. We got some good inbound investor interest, but I couldn't create the pressure needed to close funding - there was no forcing function like the demo day.

TIL, makes a ton of sense but for some reason not the most obvious thing to a non-founder / VC.

Not management consultants specifically, but I get the vague sense that it'd go not too different from this Deloitte situation: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/30/1017086/cdc-44-m...

The Gervais Principle (which this article is a riff off of) covers what you’re looking for (and what the author here left implicit): https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

specifically the “Sociopath” as described in the Gervais Principle == the elite

Yeah: I'm not religious, but I really enjoyed his writing style & his angles on things as simple as "rules" or even children's fairy tales. Definitely spurred a lot of re-thinking of my own biases/priors, and anything that has that effect is usually at least fun to read.

I think people can pick up the gist of his rhetoric via secondhand sources (eg. "Chesterton's Fence", or simply the idea that Christianity is good), but I think the actual writing and style of his arguments is like 70% of the magic (and more interesting to me than even the substance he's trying to get across).

I stumbled upon it this year via a random link to a specific page in this online version, and basically just felt compelled to read it start to finish: https://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Gilbert_K_Chesterton/Orthodo...

Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton

I mean smartphone apps are literal brain plugins designed to minimize choice in favor of passivity, where the passivity serves no other "value system" besides profit. Disciplined adults can maybe resist control; kids are super malleable and we leave them to faceless algorithms that tune themselves to the basest versions of our nature (a "base" we've probably spent our entire existence attempting to rise above).

The internet (maybe best framed as instantaneous "world connectivity") might not be inherently bad, but "consumer tech" leans towards exploiting / re-centering our "nature" + breaking down taboos in exchange for the "new market" that always emerges as a result. “Make something people want” (even if there may have been good reason for that want to go un-served).

I imagine this playing out on the level of individual adaptations / boundaries – from building personal discipline (hard) to just having enough of a life to be offline more than online – rather than any macro improvement. New tech (eg. Urbit) might do it, but I think it requires both utopian and revolutionary (tear-the-whole-thing-down) thinking, both of which are vastly more likely to (catastrophically) fail than succeed.

All that pessimism aside though: anyone can still choose to personally resist that pull instead of accepting it as inevitable, as challenging as it might be for some. And maybe you're perfectly fine (maybe even better than you'd have been otherwise) in that regime anyway, who knows?

yep, i'm usually into dark mode but this one wasn't really working for my eyes right off the bat

Sure, but J.P. Morgan being inherently political doesn't mean it's a net positive for them to start to take public stances on cultural issues, and it only serves to conceal their real political impact.

I think there's a strong argument to be made that –– even given your premise of all startups being inherently political –– we're better off for them focusing on their tangible contribution to the world and not obscuring it with politics-as-PR.

And if their "contribution" has a primarily negative impact, political or otherwise, it's arguably even worse to be a culture in which they can reach for cover under cultural politics unrelated to their bottom line.

“On average, UX changes have a smaller impact on quantitative metrics [since 2006]”

does this actually imply UX advancement any more than the possibility that people have become more familiar with/adept at using UIs since 2006?

Am I the only one that finds this astounding? Not to mention the inability to take an aux cord.

It's one thing for phones to have these lock-in properties, but not being able to aux in audio into a speaker feels wild to me.

i've found it helpful realizing that in procrastinating, my mind tricks itself into the nice, subconscious feeling of passing on the task to someone else who's more likely to do it.

basically worth reminding myself when i procrastinate that i'm passing the baton onto someone with no more interest/discipline than i have right now -- so if i'm passing it on, why wouldn't he?

i agree 1000%, and i don’t think anything i said contradicts what you’re saying :)

my point wasn’t meant to be about employment, but about having something important to do/contribute, should have caveated that it wasn’t just about “jobs”

> For example if we had perfect AI-robot slaves we'd all be jobless. Would it be a problem?

i mean, it almost certainly would be, right? feel like we very instinctively/subconsciously derive our self-worth from what we're worth to our society (which tautologically comes from the share of responsibilities we take on).

maybe the jobs wouldn't resemble anything like those of today, but i have no doubt we have an innate need to be doing things that

1) are necessary/valuable to other people

2) visibly satisfy 1)

this is great, thanks for sharing —- really solid frame, feels clarifying of my concerns here

I don't disagree, but the implication of it not being at least possible without tremendous effort vaguely concerns me. Just wanted to explore the hypothetical.

I also mean the question narrowed down to social media, too, though. I do wonder about the future of social interaction (maybe covid has me too pessimistic).

i mean i agree -- for context, i've been in read-only mode aside from here for a bit now, but i wonder what the remaining venues for social interaction will be in our internet-dominated culture, especially post-covid.

even as i quit everything personal, it's still functionally the mode through which many of us now work. slack is social media, whether or not they or our employers would cop to that.

maybe i'm extra pessimistic, but it increasingly feels like the internet is also becoming a mandatory component of having a social life (i'm in my early 20s, grew up on this stuff, etc).

just can't shake the feeling that to recede from it could be futile, if only because it's becoming equivalent to receding from society itself. and the idea of not even having the option to is mildly uncomfortable.

The fascinating thing about this spatial audio wave to me is that it was basically available almost a decade ago.

I remember one of the first apps I downloaded on my iPod Touch in middle school (~2011) was a "binaural audio" app that catalogued similar spatial audio experiences as this app (+ voice-acted stuff like getting a haircut, etc).

The integration of motion tracking with that technology is a really cool level-up, though. Really cool example of new tech unlocking an interesting combination with stuff that's already been around.