ryanjamurphy

Just jumped to HN to share this post and saw that OP had raced me to it. Stéphane's reflections are heartfelt and well-written and, despite his melancholy, compel me to join him and keep building, too.

The bit about the pigeon's name was funny, too!

I love myNoise and hope it continues forever. Guess I'll donate again soon!

> They buy DSS (decision support service / software) from vendors, usually marketing groups

What are these platforms, exactly? I've heard about them but have never come across them.

We've used them to generate stories about our kids and their favourite characters, too. It's a great use case — your approach sounds excellent. Good luck to you!

Would love to do something similar. Have you written about the technicals/set up somewhere?

Would love to hear a few of the consistently-high-quality writers you're thinking about.

I have a pet theory that volume is required for quality, but would love to be wrong so that I can feel less bad about how much I publish!

There's an ethical/moral-luck dilemma at the heart of this.

If a AAA-tier podcast on the subject you want to listen to a podcast about exists (and you know about it), then that's probably a better (and obvious) choice for your listening time.

However, if you want to listen to someone discuss or explain something and you don't know about a AAA-tier podcast, it's possible that a generated podcast is better than nothing.

On the other hand, it's also possible that the generated podcast will miss or hallucinate a key detail, and herein lies the dilemma. Is it better to listen to something that might get something wrong, or not to listen and perhaps someday to learn about the subject through some other form that is less likely to include mistakes?

> But it’s also a bit quaint, these days. To your typical 21st century epistemologist, that’s just not a very terrifying dilemma. One can even keep buying original recipe JTB [...]

Sorry, naive questions: what is a terrifying dilemma to 21st century epistemologist? What is the "modern" recipe?

The important thing I take away from this comment is that before you choose what to read, it's crucial to be able to identify which readings contain the most useful and valuable takeaways that are worth the effort of reading them. It's true that modern mental models of reading and writing train us to only seek out the stuff that's easy to read, but the real problem is that there's so much to read that we have to prioritize, leading to a tendency to read the easy stuff because it's a guarantee you'll get something out of it. Then there's a sort-of market dynamic leading to the success of the easy stuff and the dismissal of the hard.

If that dynamic means that we miss out on the readings that are truly transformative, we've lost. So perhaps the strategic differentiator between readers is to actually have a really powerful theory of prioritization, and useful mechanisms to prioritize (such as the curated references of a good university course or a social network that shares only the most important resources, regardless of how difficult they are to understand).

I've recently heard #1 and #2 succinctly said as "Inspiration follows action."

Thanks for this recommendation. I've tried SteerMouse and other alternatives in the past and haven't stuck with them (can't recall why exactly) but would dearly like to get away from Logitech's software.