cbare

What would it look like if social media were optimized for flourishing rather then engagement?

Bring your own filter/ranking algorith?

I wonder if there's not a fundamental conflict. Social media is essentially _addictive_ media. The most pro-flourishing move you can make is to disengage from social media.

One of the beautiful things about coding is the immediacy of the feedback. Screw up and your program crashes. Get it right and the machine does what you want. Tests turn green - that's nice. Subtle bugs can be deceptive, you might be thinking. True, but lots of bugs are not at all subtle.

When you get good at coding, you get a lot of positive reinforcement coming from a machine rather than other people. What that does to our psychology seems worth considering. Might we also have the same feeling of "I'm usually right!" and might that feeling transfer to domains where it's not backed up by any real learning?

My favorites that I read this year were:

- Playground by Richard Powers: the ocean reminds us that we, along with our obsessions and rivalries, are small - Orbital by Samantha Harvey: a book were not much happens, but a lot goes on below the surface - Hum by Helen Phillips: looks at an AI controlled near future through a different lens - Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow: sex, lies, and video games

Ha, I think that happens regardless of the tech you use. Just blame time.

It's very plausible that anxiety causes heart disease, anxiety causes insomnia, and insomnia leads people to use melatonin. Same with diphenhydramine, overactive inflammatory response causes allergies, allergic people take allergy meds, and too much inflammation contributes to dementia.

Association studies too easily get interpreted as X causes Y. Maybe that's true, but not necessarily.

Yep, I agree with ya. Whoever moderated that away is lame.

The US has the strongest university and research system in the world. Wrecking that will be one of the worst acts of self-harm ever.

Yeah, sounds like the problems are more due to monorepos rather than with GitHub actions. Seems like the pendulum always swings too far. Overdoing microservices results in redundant code and interservice spaghetti. Monorepos have their own set of issues. The only solution is to think carefully about a what size chunk of functionality you want to build, test, and deploy as a unit.

I found it quite worthwhile to ask GPT4o to give an english summary of the paper linked in the Wikipedia article, _Bekräftartekniker och motstrategier - sätt att bemöta maktstrukturer och förändra sociala klimat_, which translates to _Techniques of Suppression and Counterstrategies: Addressing Power Structures and Changing Social Climates_.

Recognizing and pushing back against the dark patterns of group dynamics is super important.

That this resonates with a bunch of hackers is kinda funny - code is such an ephemeral medium.

I also view coding as essentially creative.

Programming was mostly a hobby in the days of 8-bit PCs. It was a profession for some decades. Maybe it will be a hobby again in 5 years. Like gardening, sailing, fishing - professions at one time, now hobbies.

On the other hand, the arrival of futuristic capabilities like computers speaking human languages is what drew me to technology in the first place. Luckily, you can choose to look forward and backward. You don't have to pick only one.

...also, great scrabble word.

I don't know what the optimal population is, but here are a couple of arguments against the "ever greater" thesis. Diminishing returns kicks in at some point. The economic value of human life is subject to supply and demand. Where there excess supply, life is cheap and not in a good way.

I tried to do a similar thing, but in New Zealand, for engineering or ML engineering roles, without success. The folks I know of that pulled it off either knew people from previously working together in-person or were special in some way - PhD in valuable niche, wrote a book.

Fuck that guy Marl.