I read/listened/sampled a lot this year but a few have reached out into my life and changed me at least a little bit.

- In Defense of Food - Michael Pollan. A brilliant "not diet" book about not eating crap and enjoying chocolate cake with your friends. I followed this up with Ultra Processed People to arm myself with the facts to defend not eating the junk people call food.

- The Dispossesed - Ursula Le Guin: recommended in previous year's HN what did you reads. An absolutely triumph for how it manages to portray a believable anarchist society.

- Adult Children of Alcoholics: useful to the multitude of us who grew up with an alcoholic parent(s). I used this to identify the common patterns I share with others who grew up like me. You are not alone!

- The Invention of Clouds (not finished): I really like the context of "dissenting science" which the author conveys brilliantly. Turns out Dark Academia and Bro Science are not new.

- The Art of Frugal Hedonism: Irreverant although it comes off a little pious. This book has helped me accept that I have enough stuff already.

Can't speak for OP but I largely spend it reading (and web). I bought a kindle recently because I found the ipad/iphone were too distracting to reliably avoid web surfing instead of a book. I view the switch to long form content as a form of information dieting in the same way as a switch to whole foods.

> LLMs struggle with simplicity in my experience

I think a lot of this is because people (and thus LLMs) use verbosity as a signal for effort. It's a very bad signal, especially for software, but its a very popular signal. Most writing is much longer than it needs to be, everything from SEO website recipes, consulting reports, and non-fiction books. Both the author and the readers are often fooled into thinking lots of words are good.

It's probably hard to train that out of an LLM, especially if they see how that verbosity impressess the people making the purchasing decisions.

> I think a lot of this is because people (and thus LLMs) use verbosity as a signal for effort.

It's also one of the main use-cases for non-programmer use of the models, so there are business-forces against toning it down. Ex: "Make a funny birthday letter for my sister Suzie who's turning 50."

HN is too boring though. Often I come here and there is nothing clickbait enough to get me to read it and I go elsewhere. It's great.

OTOH HN is all about the comments. And without reading you don’t know which ones are good.

I often spend way more time on those.

Each one 3-5 lines. Hundreds of comments in a near endless list.

I don’t think HN is that different compared to other social media

There's also the very real trap of traditional forum comments being ranked higher in your brain's algorithm for "relevance" since you can explain it as reading alternative perspectives. There's real FOMO in reading news without having comments for me sometimes, because what if there's a perspective that I'm completely missing here?

Of course, long term I know time spent this way is mostly wasted for the value I get out of it.

HN is yet another infinite scroll feed.

It’s no different than traditional social media, except in intensity. It’s less intense, because of its text-based format as opposed to video, the clickbait-resistant culture, and the fact that while it’s very large, it’s not infinite. You can consume the top page under half an hour and there are only so many stories posted here a day.

Depending on where you are in the AuDHD spectrum, you can be as addicted to HN as a teenager with 7hrs daily Instagram usage. pg acknowledges this.

If HN was boring, it wouldn't have a "noprocrast" setting.

This forum is addicting to a lot of people. There are also clickbait titles (though less than elsewhere), heated debates, even flamewars in the comments.

I disagree. Debate, karma, religious tech wars, replies. All fun. I spent so much time here in the early days that I noticed my personality change. I'd been debating online so much for a few years that it was seeping into the real world me. I couldn't let people be 'wrong' without correcting them and, even if you're right, that's an annoying person to be around (I see the irony of this comment).

No smartphone can match the bottom tier super-zoom camera I have for bird photography. Even with the frankly microscopic sensor on the super-zoom the power of depth-of-field on an adjustable zoom lens is amazing.

Text size is also contingent on the basic technologies of the time. Ancient texts by the length and cost of parchment, and anything before the printing press by how easy it is to copy.

Maybe its only now that we are less constrained by technology that we have to really focus on our mental faculties as the limiting factor for writing.

This whole argument would be dead in the water if society had de-carbonised 20 years ago instead of now. This stinks of the personal responsibility fallacy of carbon emissions when the real answer is to do the boring job of making energy production cleaner and doing a better job at moving people around.

Well said. Moralizing energy consumption is inefficient and no way to run a market. It'd be better to pass regulation that internalized the externalities in the price of electricity so that it captured the societal costs of emissions.

This should be seen as the opportunity of a lifetime. "Invest in infrastructure to power this awesome new technology" is obviously a more compelling story than "Invest in all new infrastructure—the plan is to use it less"

Bingo.

Playing whack a mole with individual behavior while the elephant in the room is energy production and transportation remains asinine as always.

Not sure why you got down voted for this. The opening paragraph of the article reads as suspicious to the observant outsider:

>The rationalist community was drawn together by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog post series The Sequences, a set of essays about how to think more rationally.

Anyone who had just read a lot about Scientology would read that and have alarm bells ringing.

Asterisk magazine is basically the unofficial magazine for the rationalist community and the author, Ozy Brennan, is a prominent rationalist blogger. Of course the piece is pro-rationalism. It's investigating why rationalism seems to spawn these small cultish offshoots, not trying to criticize rationalism.

"Unofficial?" Was that a recent change? But my point is that because the author neither can nor will criticize the fundamental axioms or desiderata of the movement, their analysis of how or why it spins off cults is necessarily footless. In practice the result amounts to a collection of excuses mostly from anonymees, whom we are assured have sufficient authority to reassure us this smoke arises from no fire. But of course it's only when Kirstie Alley does something like this we're meant to look askance.

Even a marginal familiarity with the history of Scientology is an excellent curative for the idea that you can think yourself into superpowers, or that you should ever trust anyone who promises to teach you how.

The consequences of ignorance on this score are all drearily predictable to anyone with a modicum of both good sense and world knowledge, which is why they've come as such a surprise to Yudkowsky.

You can say all of this of drug-oriented seekers of superpowers, too. Trust the SSRI cult much?

It just seems to be a human condition that whenever anyone tries to find a way to improve themselves and others, there will always be other human beings who attempt to prevent that from occurring.

I don't think this is a cult thing - I think its a culture thing.

Humans have an innate desire to oppress others in their environment who might be making themselves more capable, abilities-wise - this isn't necessarily the exclusive domain of cults and religions, maybe just more evident in their activities since there's not much else going on, usually.

We see this in technology-dependent industries too, in far greater magnitudes of scale.

The irony is this: aren't you actually manifesting the very device that cults use to control others, as when you tell others what "specific others" should be avoided, lest one become infected with their dogma?

The roots of all authoritarianism seem to grow deep in the fertile soil of the desire to be 'free of the filth of others'.

The phrase you failed to find is "crab-bucket thinking," but the one you really should have paid attention to this morning is "take with food."

I am interested in your ideology and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

It's been 17 years since the series was written and rationalists haven't become a cult with Yudkowsky as leaders, so it's safe to say those were false alarms

Not with Yudkowsky as leader, that much is true.

Most science runs on BS with a cursory amount of statistics slapped on top so everyone can feel better about it. Weirdly enough, science still works despite not being rational. Rationalists seem to think science is logical when in reality it works for largely the same reasons the free-market does; throw shit at the wall and maybe support some of the stuff that works.

You can treat climate change as your personal Ragnarok, but its also possible to take a more sober view that climate change is just bad without it being apocalyptic.