ryanjamurphy

Just jumped to HN to share this post and saw that OP had raced me to it. Stéphane's reflections are heartfelt and well-written and, despite his melancholy, compel me to join him and keep building, too.

The bit about the pigeon's name was funny, too!

I love myNoise and hope it continues forever. Guess I'll donate again soon!

> They buy DSS (decision support service / software) from vendors, usually marketing groups

What are these platforms, exactly? I've heard about them but have never come across them.

We've used them to generate stories about our kids and their favourite characters, too. It's a great use case — your approach sounds excellent. Good luck to you!

Would love to do something similar. Have you written about the technicals/set up somewhere?

Would love to hear a few of the consistently-high-quality writers you're thinking about.

I have a pet theory that volume is required for quality, but would love to be wrong so that I can feel less bad about how much I publish!

There's an ethical/moral-luck dilemma at the heart of this.

If a AAA-tier podcast on the subject you want to listen to a podcast about exists (and you know about it), then that's probably a better (and obvious) choice for your listening time.

However, if you want to listen to someone discuss or explain something and you don't know about a AAA-tier podcast, it's possible that a generated podcast is better than nothing.

On the other hand, it's also possible that the generated podcast will miss or hallucinate a key detail, and herein lies the dilemma. Is it better to listen to something that might get something wrong, or not to listen and perhaps someday to learn about the subject through some other form that is less likely to include mistakes?

> But it’s also a bit quaint, these days. To your typical 21st century epistemologist, that’s just not a very terrifying dilemma. One can even keep buying original recipe JTB [...]

Sorry, naive questions: what is a terrifying dilemma to 21st century epistemologist? What is the "modern" recipe?

Thanks for this comment. I think I found the article: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1821936116

Layperson coverage: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/09/study-shows-t...

I suppose the extreme version of the parent comment's vision would be to develop entirely new neurological circuits that can process, interpret, and integrate some arbitrary new source of data in the world. I agree that that's kind of unimaginable now, but give infinite monkeys infinite typewriters and one of them will probably hook up the company's sales data to a new section of cortex just to see what would happen.

I read a more interesting takeaway, perhaps: that we can — and do — develop new "senses" for any given signal we can perceive. A possibly-shoddy example of this is what social media does to us: the social networks provided everyone with a novel social sense, and indeed everyone who uses social networks perceive and attenuate to that sense in different ways.

This has practical implications: given that we don't have infinite cognitive capacity or even much moment-to-moment bandwidth, we should be careful about which of these digital senses have our attention.

There're obvious links here to "augcog" (augmented cognition; [1]), but also I feel like Ackoff's five assumptions about "management misinformation systems" are relevant somehow[2].

Interesting to think about!

[1]: Especially DARPA's work and similar — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_cognition#DARPA's_Au... [2]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2628680

The important thing I take away from this comment is that before you choose what to read, it's crucial to be able to identify which readings contain the most useful and valuable takeaways that are worth the effort of reading them. It's true that modern mental models of reading and writing train us to only seek out the stuff that's easy to read, but the real problem is that there's so much to read that we have to prioritize, leading to a tendency to read the easy stuff because it's a guarantee you'll get something out of it. Then there's a sort-of market dynamic leading to the success of the easy stuff and the dismissal of the hard.

If that dynamic means that we miss out on the readings that are truly transformative, we've lost. So perhaps the strategic differentiator between readers is to actually have a really powerful theory of prioritization, and useful mechanisms to prioritize (such as the curated references of a good university course or a social network that shares only the most important resources, regardless of how difficult they are to understand).

I've recently heard #1 and #2 succinctly said as "Inspiration follows action."

Thanks for this recommendation. I've tried SteerMouse and other alternatives in the past and haven't stuck with them (can't recall why exactly) but would dearly like to get away from Logitech's software.

I am also curious about this!

Wish I could recommend one but I don't frequent YouTube, sorry!

> It can be the great filter that leads to the Fermi paradox.

I'm increasingly of a similar view — that the great filter is something we're already past, due to the incredible combinations of constraints that led to where we are today.

Another infinitesimal probability may be the development of abstract intelligence. The conditions that led to our brand of intelligence being an evolutionary advantage seem particularly unique: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK210002/

It doesn't respond to the 2016 address, but this site [1] has a table of many of Christy's claims and evidence against them.

A central graph in the 2016 address (found on page 2) has numerous visualization issues (e.g., misalignment of the lines on the graph to exaggerate differences, no uncertainty ranges are provided, averaging data sets in the curves, leaving out data) [2].

[1]: https://skepticalscience.com/skeptic_John_Christy.htm

[2]: https://skepticalscience.com/climate-models-intermediate.htm

Related: The Verge's DNA time capsule [0].

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/c/22173998/dna-time-capsule

The count depends on if you include the cat: https://obsidian.md/about

Apple Mail's not quite as customizable, indeed. Maybe close though.

I made a table comparing different email services on the MacPowerUsers forum a while back. It's in need of updating but might be handy: https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/icloud-mail-fastmail-gmail-...

This is well-said. We're looking for what the best guess should be, but we still need to test the guess.

Huh, this is a good tip. I've always provided a rich description of decorative images, because I didn't want screen readers to "miss out," but apparently that was a bad idea!

I am suspicious of this project: the real goal is clearly to get people to clean their desks. And it is effective!

Yeah, I think you've hit the bullseye on a sweet-spot for newsletter content. You can glean a lot, quickly, from a photo of someone's workspace.

Congrats on the success!

I like "IANAP." Folks should always try to engage professionals when they can. Articles on the internet help you to know what you don't know, but if you think something might be an issue for you, connect with experts on it.

Re: visualization — it's a problematic trope that imagining success helps. Apparently visualizing failure, and especially the consequences of failure, can be more motivating. Andrew Huberman provides a pretty good summary of recent research on the subject.[1]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1F7EEGPQwo&t=3573s

Admittedly I can only speak to the merits of Kumu. I was never really trained in system dynamics, more systems thinking, so that plus the wild expense of most SD software means that I have never really given them a chance.

The other reason I can't compare them is because once I tried Kumu, I never looked back. Kumu is wonderful. It looks simple enough, but once you dig into the advanced features and the extensive documentation, you can really learn to do amazing things with it. I've used it for many years now for many clients.

But see again point 1. It isn't made to be a systems dynamics modeling tool, so simulation and analysis features you might expect to find might be missing.

My suggestion is to choose a problem to work, create a free model, and start messing around. My guess is that you'll find Kumu great for initial sketches and non-dynamics models, but you'll probably want to go elsewhere for simulation work.

This is a fine perspective to have, but it is also possible to procrastinate on things you do want to do. That's what I have been trying to personally address, anyway.

Author here.

I hear ya on the rendering. This systems sketch was by me, for me, but I published it with minimal effort just in case it might help someone else. It probably would've been better just to publish a link to the model than to embed it, though.

As for the content, it's ad hoc, albeit not entirely without evidence. It's based on a bit of self-study (e.g., autoethnographic observations of my own thoughts and behaviours and passive reading of the psych literature on procrastination).

The centrality measures shouldn't actually be there... Long, boring story short: they're an artifact of some systemic leverage analysis [1] I was doing on a more involved model[2].

Last, I'd love to see those cognitive models. From what I've found, we understand a great many of the pieces of procrastination, but it still takes work to put them together for any one person's situation.

[1]: http://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/2888/ [2]: https://embed.kumu.io/fc78b8660224a57734e0bb6c52cebbd8#anxie...