borepop

>No one should just go sit with zero context and no support.

C'mon now. It's not hang-gliding or dropping acid, it's sitting quietly in a room. Not everything in life should be treated as if it's horrendously risky or can't possibly be understood by people exercising common sense.

Nor, in my opinion, do the agglomeration of various meditative practices and teachings, no matter how old and "sacred" they may theoretically be, necessarily have anything all that critical to add to the subjective experience of simply sitting quietly. Just like the practices and teachings that accompany many organized religions, a lot of meditative lingo and theories about meditative "progress" is, IMHO, horseshit peddled by people who have decided to make a living selling said horseshit or have defined themselves by their unquestioning acceptance of said horseshit.

edit: I should add that I can recognize that, as others discuss in this thread, deep meditation over long periods may trigger various psychological issues for some people. However, it's also true that, for example, eating food can be extremely problematic for some people who have serious eating disorders. That doesn't mean that the mere act of eating, which most people manage to do just fine, somehow needs to be guided by some deep tradition, and I don't believe that sitting in meditation needs such guidance in general either. For most people, meditation is a very gentle, mildly restorative practice that aids mood and focus, not some metaphysically shattering cataclysm.

I too thought this was an important issue that seemed to be missing from the article. That and the risk of burns.

There's nowhere left near me at all that sells the New York Times, which was the paper I liked to read in physical form. Used to be a fun weekend ritual to pick up the Sunday edition from the coffee shop down the street and sit around reading things and doing the crossword, but I can't find it anymore. I'm not sure if it was covid that killed off the distribution or just the economics of print.

Sometimes I find these kinds of link submissions pretty baffling. "Here's a nearly 30 year old article about a dead comedian!"

Thanks, I guess. But also: why?

Why this arbitrary New Yorker article, as opposed to any other article written in the last three decades?

Nothing that Christopher Hitchens ever said struck me as remotely insightful. Characterizing one of his reductive proclamations as a "razor" does not make it more useful or accurate.

Also Francis Fukuyama: history ended in 1992.

As opposed to CEOs and upper management, who are all lovely people and want nothing but the best for their employees, and are definitely not motivated by short-term gains.

Don't Look Up, currently out on Netflix, seems to owe a fair amount to Idiocracy. And/or to the ways in which American culture morphed into Idiocracy over the last several years.

Right but the ostensible hook for the reader's interest is the moderately banal design of the corkscrew. Which, to anyone with any sense of perspective, is not a particularly compelling problem.

Indeed, I would rather have a banal corkscrew than have to read a totally banal essay. At least the corkscrew does not falsely purport to impart wisdom to me.

Or just https://vcvrack.com/ ? I don't understand the impulse on HN to make everything as technical as possible.

>Why is there even a counter?

Yes! It makes no frickin' sense in an age of internet booking, and this is why I, too, use Hertz Gold. As much as Hertz was raked over the coals in that recent Twitter post (seemingly justifiably), I have generally have pretty good experiences with them and hope to never again stand around at a counter having a moronic experience instructing somebody else to re-type all the information I've already typed in when I made the reservation in the first place.

My stepfather (a retired professor) is endlessly fascinated by these kinds of questions. If you ever ask him at dinner "so what are you working on?" the result is often a half-hour-long explanation of how many polygons could conceivably fit into some other polygon, if it's not about how many numbers could be derived from some other set of numbers. I've never been able to understand any of it, but it makes him happy.

That's interesting, thank you. Funny how ugly the product is, I almost prefer the goofy kid car phone.

Holy shit, I have wanted exactly this product (minus the "child" styling) for years for my actual office, as a productivity tool. I just want to be able to take and make calls on my phone without being dragged into a vortex of tangential nonsense.

Agreed. The tone of the HN comments section is occasionally somewhat more contentious now than a few years ago, but it has not generally devolved into the sort of partisan pissing match/bad-faith clusterfuck seen elsewhere in the interwebs. To some extent I attribute that to the fact that valuing science and reason can be a helpful quality in moderating the tone of interaction, even among anons. Which is really a lucky thing.

This is the second HN thread I'm reading today where somebody's response to an article is "this is not a solution for me personally, so therefore it's not a good idea." Seems like a strange way to interpret information.

I responded to the parent comment so I won't belabor it, but I think this take on the article is faulting the author for a claim she never made. The article never even mentions schizoaffective disorder and makes no attempt to propose a cure for mental illness. Discussions about useful approaches for dealing with relatively mild depression are not a criticism of people who suffer from more serious conditions.

It seems like you're suggesting that if the "lifestyle"-type techniques described in the article aren't a solution to your specific situation, then it's condescending and useless to describe those techniques. I don't agree, and I don't think the author was proposing to lay out some universal program for eliminating all forms of depression. She was merely describing what was helpful for her.

Obviously people who have more serious conditions may need different interventions, and needless to say there is a whole pharmacopeia of chemical tweaks to be explored above and beyond lifestyle modifications. Those are also valid and valuable.

Agreed. I've tried several times to use Discord and find the entire experience to be a clunky, spammy mess. The interface is awful.

It feels like the author has a notably loose idea of what the "this" is that she's been through before. She's applying lessons she feels she learned through personal trauma involving her son's autism to the analysis of a global pandemic.

I appreciate the general notion that we should be skeptical and that experts can be wrong, but I'm just not sure what the one situation has to do with the other. She could just as well have written the same style essay about why, since her son had autism and was not well understood, the earth is also flat and climate change is a hoax.

Personally, I've always found the underlying structure of Crime and Punishment extremely tedious, never mind how any particular line or paragraph is translated. Obviously that makes me a philistine, etc., but there is some classic literature that I just find to be an utter slog, and that's one of 'em. Proust is in the same category for me. I think Dostoevsky's short fiction is wonderful.

I enjoy some self-help books because they seem to articulate an underlying gameplan for pursuing whatever one considers "success," which are ideas my parents and school only taught me implicitly or inaccurately. My parents' advice to me as a kid was "do what you love and the money will follow," which is not true, and/or "join the Navy," which I had no desire to do. So I've ended up trying to find my own way in life, however imperfectly.

Essentially, a lot of these books are about executive functioning skills, the meta-level planning and goal-setting and failure-analysis efforts that are necessary to make progress in whatever field. I think it is also true, as other commenters note, that to some extent they fill an ethical or existential void left by the decline of religion.

Unhappy humans have been speaking to other humans for thousands of years without anybody setting up arbitrary "trainings" about it and meaningless certifications that allow us to pretend that we can stave off the psychological chaos involved in being alive.

I think it will be okay. And even if it's not okay, it already wasn't okay in the first place.

See also Anne Lamott's theory of Shitty First Drafts.

There are many ways this can occur. Think of intimidating, racist language being used to discourage minorities from voting, for example. Or a public official whose expression of obnoxious views about women prevents female employees from feeling secure in the workplace.

The overall tone of the comments here seems to regard speech as an obvious, unadulterated good. I think the reality is actually much more complex.

>The slider interface on the second prototype is very appealing as a UX

Man, particularly for drums that seems so cool. Obviously you can nudge things off the grid in Ableton or whatever DAW, but just to be able to move the sliders as it plays in real time and figure out where things feel right seems like a lovely way to work.

Fumpster Dire seems like it would be a good band name.

Sounds about right to me. I can't stand this guy.

Normally, yes, and as was mentioned higher in the thread this initial figure is referred to as an "anchor," meaning that it has the psychological effect of implying that anything higher than that number is somehow a real concession on the buyer's part, when the reality is that the opening number could have just been higher. It's rather like when a store says "this is normally $500 but now it's on sale for only $250" instead of just pricing something at $250 in the first place. Getting to Yes, also mentioned above, is a useful book on negotiation.