the twenty-four hour news cycle's unyielding need for urgent content has broken many people psychologically and we need to 'deprogram' them.
i've often thought about making a site that lets you easily do side-by-side comparisons of news sites on different timescales (1 week, 1 month, 1 year) so you can pull it up and show them "see all this stuff that you feel like you NEED to consume? like it makes you a better informed member of society? how much of it actually mattered and how much of it was just there to hook you in the moment?"
I just wanna throw in that Tangle News[0] strikes a pretty good balance here. Their core offering is detailed breakdowns of what is generally regarded as the top four stories of the week, one a day from Monday through Thursday, which is usually more than enough space to keep you "up on current events", and they usually (though not always) tend to give enough space to let stories develop before summarizing.
The objective here feels like a good candidate for people to vibecode into their homebrew rss readers, in a composite feed. The marked source feeds then get hidden behind a minor effort gate. You still keep your unmarked and “safe” xkcd or whatever feeds as siblings.
A well informed population is important. The problem is they're not well informed they're well-hooked to whatever exaggeration and drama the news can whip up.
The invented news and invented intensity is the problem.
our brightest phds are attacking attention from all fronts (ads, social media, news), but the news one in particular is particularly insidious because for years you were told that watching the news made you a good, responsible person. but back then the news was just one or two 30minute blocks on TV and the newspaper.
People that get sucked into social media srolling for hours know that they're not doing something good for themselves, people are guzzling from the fear-monger newshose and they think they're doing something "healthy".
“ but back then the news was just one or two 30minute blocks on TV and the newspaper.”
There was all kinds of quasi-serious news-adjacent crap like 60 minutes, 48 hours, etc. The big difference was none if it was data driven and backed by algorithms that are constantly tuned for max engagement.
that is really interesting idea. I'd be really happy to read such a site, as I very often wonder if current hype/prediction will be relevant in the future. But I always forget to check being flooded by more hype.
I think AI discourse is revealing some new contours to the information bubbles that we all live in.
folks in the US have been pretty aware that bubbles based on political opinions -- we're all surrounded by news from "our side" yet we know the other side exists in some other bubble. but for AI, we're all either surrounded by pro- or anti- opinions and its a little shocking to learn that theres a parallel internet with the opposite stance. especially shocking when you find somebody that lives in teh same political bubble but opposite AI bubble.
I started writing up a giant response to this about how all of LLMs are spooky action at a distance but for better or for worse, that doesn't make them any less useful, and a few paragraphs in I suddenly noticed what you actually wrote. Well played :)
Same as programming, I feel like the underlying tension is between math lovers who want new math to be done vs those who want to be the ones to DO the new math.
Both groups love math, but the later group is in a real bind because they have confounded their career with their hobbies/passions.
The “old way” would be lots of debate (both bike shedding and useful) among engineers during design phase, and then you’d implement.
Now it’s shifted so there are no design docs and there is only the generated prototype. People trying to do their design review while there’s already a functional-ish prototype and it goes nowhere. There’s an anchoring effect in place because the first thing already exists and management says “this seems to work, just use it and move on”. The result is that useful debates about substantive issues don’t happen and bikeshedding is all way get to do
This is so accurate. I am a fairly senior individual contributor and its been more than a year since I saw a good design doc or quality design discussion. Before you can even question the design, someone has generated a 50k line prototype and already made up their mind because of all the “you’re absolutely right..” and “X is exactly what you need..” from AI.
This very much. First thing built is what get approved. Even if it will generate 10x the workload down the line, because today's quality bar is very much demo level.
And then you get paged at 2am because prod is down and the support channel is more active than the team's one.
A working prototype like that is good if the debate is “is this possible?”, the problem above is more for problems where it’s possible and we’re arguing which path to take
The distance between substantive issues vs bikeshed sized issues is non-linear and ill-defined. Sometimes: yeah, we're just bikeshedding. Other times, it's important to suss out unshared implied context that doesn't match between various stakeholders and will have outsized ramifications later. What's new is the speed of executing changes. If there was no substantive debate about what programming language to even use so everyone is equally happy (read: sad), so what? Have the LLM rewrite the entire project in another language over the span of a couple of days after that discussion is had because the language used has specific shortcomings that have been unmined.
it's also why you shouldn't hold equity in your own company any longer than necessary (e.g., an apple employee shouldn't tie up the majority of their networth in apple stock).
stock options/rsus are a great example of some sort of cognitive bias (maybe it's the endowment effect?).
give somebody $1000 worth of shares in their company, and a lot of folks will hang on to them. but if you gave them $1000 cash to invest, they almost certainly would not choose to dump all of that money into their own company.
Tax-law also makes is sticky: StockX -> Money -> StockY means a portion of is lost as capital-gains tax on the money step. StockY might be better... but is it something that will perform better-enough to be worth the switching costs? (At this point logarithms and spreadsheets start getting involved.)
In contrast, starting with Money and then choosing between StockX or StockY is an easier choice.
I like creatine when I’m lifting because it reduces soreness. For some people that effect helps them push further and train harder, for me it’s just proactive pain relief
There’s a human connection element to old radio that streaming will never replicate. And I worry that it’s gone from modern automated radio too.
It used to be if you were driving down the road and heard a song you liked
Hearing a song you liked on the radio hit harder then playing it yourself because you knew that there was another human nearby at that moment in time that had picked it out and played it. You were physically tethered to them through invisible waves through the sky. Lonely road trips felt less lonely. Late night work shifts felt less alienating because there was somebody ELSE working late.
It absolutely does - allegedly there’s 6 million listeners to the biggest breakfast radio show in the UK and 4 million to the second biggest. That’s 10 million in a country of about 55 million adults.
In the 90s I knew a guy in high school who walked around the school in a black trenchcoat with portable speakers tucked inside that were continuously playing Western movie themes. I can only imagine how that bit of creativity would go over these days.
I suppose it was rare enough and somewhat fun in the 90s. Maybe that guy was doing this for others to enjoy as well, or to appear singular (whether it worked or not).
Nowadays it wouldn't appear particularly exotic (portable speakers are ubiquitous) and people playing loud music (from speakers or phones) seem to do this for themselves without caring about the surrounding people, that's just highly egotistical and self-centered. It's usually not music I personally like too.
That's not fun, it's just annoying. There's already too much noise in our cities.
But if you do it right, playing (singular) music for others, reading the room and all, I'm sure it can still work.
Sometimes, but not too often, in Berlin of all places you encounter someone biking around with a massive speaker attached to their bike blaring (obviously) techno
Not always a bike. Sometimes just a trolley or a handcart or a custom jerry-rigged contraption.
In the US "boom boxes" went out with the 1970s. They need to get with the times.
Okay, in all seriousness: boom boxes were a thing in the 1970s and early 1980s. There are still people who use the latest generation of them, but thankfully not nearly as many. These days people cranking music in a public place are generally doing it as part of a group that all want to hear the same thing. (and in back then the group wanting to hear the same music was the common case)
When I opened https://radio.garden/ and spun the globe the first time, I tuned to a radio station somewhere in Africa, and it gave me tingles to think that in Lagos at that same moment, some bus driver was surely listening to the same music.
Never in my life has radio in my country played music I wanted to listen to. The first thing I did when I bought my first car was disconnect the antenna entirely.
Yes, and I agree with a sibling comment that livestreaming is the modern equivalent, if not in ease or quality but in spirit. It's also why, despite having many movies in my library, I enjoy turning on TCM to watch old classics. I know that thousands of people at any given time are probably watching the same piece of history I am, right then.
You can still listen to the radio while driving, many people still do that, I still do that. I agree though that in essence streaming is a very alienating experience.
Many people do, but I don't get it. The typical station has a tiny playlist that they have had on repeat for a decade now. I haven't turned the radio on in years, and never was a regular listener, but I can still tell you what song will be next if you turn it on (for the stations that are played most often in public)
Yeah, but most current corporate radio sucks. It’s not a human broadcasting and allowing their idiosyncratic tastes to sneak in. Nationwide each station is just shuffling one of three or four playlists of inoffensive songs picked because nobody hates it (but nobody loves it)
I don't know. I mean if that is the criteria then livestreams surely fix this because there is another human at that moment in time also and you can even interact with them. Or do you like the passive interaction that they should just play music and shut up
This still exists today. When a new song gets released on YouTube for example a group of people close to it in latent space gets it recommended. By seeing a recommendation of a song in your feed you are part of a cohort of people with similar tastes.
That is the core issue. Only a preselected cohort are exposed to new media. That limits common experiences to digital islands rather than shared among the masses.
i've often thought about making a site that lets you easily do side-by-side comparisons of news sites on different timescales (1 week, 1 month, 1 year) so you can pull it up and show them "see all this stuff that you feel like you NEED to consume? like it makes you a better informed member of society? how much of it actually mattered and how much of it was just there to hook you in the moment?"