wubrr

That is a pretty convincing and intuitive take, thank you.

> What does reading a great novel or starting a garden specifically accomplish?

It accomplishes many things - specifically granting entertainment, pleasure, etc that practitioners like.

> It seems to me that you are starting from the viewpoint that everything has to prove its worth before you accept it

I'm starting with the viewpoint that there are literally thousands of various different practices out there have have existed for a long time and have been practiced by many people. Many of these are complete bullshit. How do you filter out the good from the bad/useless?

> even if millions of people before you have found it fulfilling and worthwhile

Millions of people have found many many different things fulfilling and worthwhile over the ages, some of these things we've since realized are bullshit/bad. Do you accept every single belief/practice based on how popular it has been?

> If you had never read a book before, and someone was trying to convince you to try it, what could they point to that would fulfill all your criteria?

They could say: it's entertaining/interesting/pleasurable, they could say that knowledge/insights are contained in books, that different/interesting perspectives and other people's thoughts are contained in books (which are objective facts), etc. Saying 'it makes you smarter' is vague and unconvincing.

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So many allusions and claims such as your 'yes' in this thread, and yet, not a single actual link/reference to anything actually scientific/verifiable...

Maybe you should actually share a link if you're so sure, instead of crying about being antagonized?

There is a lot of scientific research/results based on actual measurable results and biology which supports the benefits of strength training. Can the same be said about meditation?

Many things have been practiced/studied for thousands of years - that alone isn't interesting or valuable imo.

What are the objective benefits of meditation - what is the exact/specific process and what specifically does it accomplish?

I can see how being in a silent reflective state and similar practices could have various effects and benefits (not that I know specifically what those are) - but what separates me zoning out in the shower/on the bus from actual meditation? How is 'guided' meditation when you're actively listening to someone else even the same thing?

Whenever I ask my meditating/'spiritual' friends about these things the response is basically vague undecipherable gibberish and allusions that it is unexplainable to someone like me who is not ready to accept the truths lol.

The more explicit/detailed your plan, the more context it uses up, the less accurate and generally functional it is. Don't get me wrong, it's amazing, but on a complex problem with large enough context it will consistently shit the bed.

It's ability to test/iterate and debug issues is pretty impressive.

Though it seems to work best when context is minimized. Once the code passes a certain complexity/size it starts making very silly errors quite often - the same exact code it wrote in a smaller context will come out with random obvious typos like missing spaces between tokens. At one point it started writing the code backwards (first line at the bottom of the file, last line at the top) :O.

You can run a web UI locally, without exposing it to the public internet, and access it remotely via SSH.

> which works equally well on everyone’s machine

Why are you so sure it runs equally well on everyone's machine? Even big popular TUIs like Claude Code do not really accomplish this.

I've generally had better luck when using it on new projects/repos. When working on a large existing repo it's very important to give it good context/links/pointers to how things currently work/how they should work in that repo.

Also - claude (~the best coding agent currently imo) will make mistakes, sometimes many of them - tell it to test the code it writes and make sure it's working - I've generally found its pretty good at debugging/testing and fixing it's own mistakes.

Gemini weirdly messes things up, even though it seems to have the right information - something I started noticing more often recently. I'd ask it to generate a curl command to call some API, and it would describe (correctly) how to do it, and then generate the code/command, but the command would have obvious things missing like the 'https://' prefix in some case, sometimes the API path, sometimes the auth header/token - even though it mentioned all of those things correctly in the text summary it gave above the code.

I feel like this problem was far less prevalent a few months/weeks ago (before gemini-3?).

Using it for research/learning purposes has been pretty amazing though, while claude code is still best for coding based on my experience.