scottrogowski

This sort of thing has not been at all uncommon for Google over the past few years. I’m looking forward to the day when they no longer have this level of power to make or break tiny companies. With any luck, they will either stumble with LLMs and become irrelevant or emerge as only one of several companies and be forced out of their monopoly.

I think this is a more compelling idea than people in the comments are giving it credit for

> The problem is that you can easily come up with 100 different hypotheses for what’s going on. Ok, so you run 100 different studies to test each one. But studies take a long time to run — let’s say 6 months per study. Congratulations, you’ve just locked yourself into 50 years

This is a major problem with science whenever you have less of a theoretical foundation. Compared to physics or chemistry, we know very little about nutrition or sports science. Because of this, the search space is very large. One could argue that given the number of surprising results (and difficulty reproducing those results), medicine and psychology also fall into this category.

> A riff trial takes advantage of the power of parallel search. Some riffs will work better than others (or at least differently), and parallel search helps you find these differences faster, especially if the differences are big.

What if we did more to encourage people to track and report their personal experiments? If even 10% of everyone on a diet (any diet) just tracked what they ate, what exercise they did, and how much weight they lost, and reported it to a centralized database, scientists could then look for patterns in that data and do formal studies based on suspected patterns.

We could do similar things with longevity/happiness. Look at the "Harvard Study of Adult Development" but imagine it was spread out over 10s of thousands of diverse people instead of just 300 upper-class American men? The data quality wouldn't matter much if all you are doing is searching for patterns to do follow-up studies.

This is actually really helpful. I'd be concerned that deleting the browser would result in other apps breaking but that's probably a risk worth taking.

I'm currently reading Digital Minimalism from Cal Newton and have started preparing for a 30-day digital declutter. So I was really excited to read this title and immediately disappointed after clicking - the Cat phone has a web browser. If you have access to the entirety of the internet in your pocket, it is hard to limit yourself and no little trick or hack is going to actually help - in my experience.

I'll go ahead and take advantage of this post to ask, what do other digital minimalists on HN use for their phone? I'm looking for something with messages, maps, a camera, and WhatsApp with no access to a browser or an app store. The most difficult item on that list is definitely WhatsApp. Unfortunately, if you travel a lot (which I do) it's not really optional. Outside of North America, EVERYTHING happens on WhatsApp. I've started looking into custom Android ROMS but that feels like an extreme step for what must be a common problem?

The two are very similar. I wrote the first version of this almost 10 years ago and only became aware of the existence of Sourcetrail while doing the rewrite a few months back.

On the surface - there is a difference in languages. Sourcetrail explicitly supports C/C++/Java/Python while Code2flow supports Python/JS/PHP/Ruby.

I would love to give code2flow the capability of Sourcetrail but would need to feel very good about it making money before I devoted that time to it.

Wow. Seeing your open source project while scrolling through hacker news is something that really brightens your day. I’m happy to answer any questions people have.

Yes. This is a "Very Online taxonomy".

While I think it's useful to think about mechanisms of collapse, the author seems to have a clear bias towards the belief that collapse will happen which feels very non-objective.

In my experience, the vast majority of people I interact with (maybe 90%+) fall into the author's categorization of "radical denier" or "partial denier".

I don't think there's anything "radical" about the belief that while things will change, society will go on. But calling the belief radical and suggesting that this is a belief only shared by Very Evil People (e.g. Koch Brothers) is a disingenuous straw man.

For the record, if I had to put myself into this unscientific taxonomy, I might be somewhere between a technological and economic optimist.

Oh man this brings back memories.

I must have been 6 years old. My dad came home with a computer that they were getting rid of at his work. He set it up that night and, having never seen a computer, I wanted to play with it. Well, for some reason, it had Kid Pix installed. I remember drawing something with a couple of green lines and a few rabbit stamps for good measure. As I recall, I then insisted that we had to print it and wouldn’t take no for an answer.