angg

> Everyone who consumes these systems has the same thoughts.

Do they?

From what I can tell most people using these apps seem pretty fine with having their algorithm determine everything they consume. You must remember, a majority of US teenagers went out of their way to download TikTok, before short-form content was forced into the existing platforms.

I think we can boil this down to a single question: If tomorrow, YouTube offered a toggle to all users to completely remove shorts from every feed in the app, what would most people do?

I think many here on HN would immediately choose to disable shorts. But what about the majority? Would they disable?

I think the answer is so obviously no. Despite all the disdain and regard for short form content as slop by the mainstream themselves.

I think your viewpoint is the correct default opinion to have. It prevents belittling thy neighbor & delusions of grandeur. But at a certain point you have to drop the optimism. These platforms do work for the masses. Unfortunately.

This comment caught me off guard and I couldn't believe this to possibly be true but as it turns out, yes, drive-thru speakers used the *literal same physical membrane* to act as both the speaker and microphone, and this was apparently widely commonpractice as recently as the 90s.

And they literally just used off the shelf, bog standard stereo speakers to use as a mic. Insane.

Given that such a mic would be several feet from the driver and poor audio quality could directly result in daily lost revenue for this business that sees revenue 100x to 1000x more than even high end audio equipment during this time period every month, I would've assumed they would've at least used a special membrane or more optimal type of speaker, but apparently not.

Sidenote: Obviously I used an LLM to research this (not to write, this is all certified organic human-generated text), and I just gotta say, isn't it absolutely delightful to be able to satisfy such random, obtuse curiosities like this one on a whim? This kind of question would've normally required a fair bit of googling to confidently validate, to the point I most likely wouldn't have even attempted to do so.

> I miss the time when computers did what you told them to, instead of trying to read your mind.

amen

Always loved brow.sh as a concept, love this even more. I can easily see myself practically using this in a pinch as a clever little hack when I'd rather not mess around with X or RDP.

> https://www.gibney.org/a_syntax_for_self-tracking

Loved reading this as I have been on a similar self tracking journey of my own.

I am curious about your thoughts on mobile support? Specifically, have you implemented anything to make adding/editing events while away from your computer easier? Or perhaps you feel it is not important for your use case?

Personally, I've found that being able to log an event in an instant, or just on a whim, is invaluable for capturing the sort of data I care about tracking the most (like what I just ate or my mood), and I find too much friction causes many events simply go unlogged as they almost always feel too unimportant or mundane in retrospect to keep a mental note of and track later.

I started out with a text file system similar to yours but I've since begrudgingly resorted to google forms for most of my tracking needs. It's nice that I can arbitrarily add and remove fields while still keeping everything relatively structured and parseable, and it does have (albeit inferior) revision history. But I dislike not having ownership and control over where my data is stored and absolutely *dread* waiting for the form to load every time I want to log an event, especially on mobile.

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