If you need help with YouTube, like I do, here are some extremely helpful uBlock Origin scripts to hide Shorts: https://github.com/i5heu/ublock-hide-yt-shorts

Stepping further down the "better personal health" path, there's Outlive by Peter Attia. Stepping further down the "addiction to convenience" path, there's Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke.

Both excellent books and perspectives worth reading. (Both audiobooks are great too.)

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Arguments based on human nature are nearly always awful.

...

It's human nature to care about yourself, but it's also human nature to care about others.

Different norms develop around different aspects of our nature.

You can't then use human nature to explain why it's okay to violently enforce social norms related to property,

but an unworkable injustice to violently enforce social norms related to charity.

...

While it might be human nature to consider the wood I chop mine, and the wood you chop yours,

it's probably not human nature to consider the wood as belonging to an entirely made-up legal entity

that neither planted the trees nor cut them down.

The fact of this weird arrangement, which goes against the self-interest of every woodsman,

does seem natural to a lot of people, points to the core of the problem with appeals to human nature.

...

The human nature being appealed to is shaped by the system it's being used to defend.

"Average" doesn't necessarily mean half way between two extremes - the average human might actually be all of:

- extremely vulnerable to manipulation

- struggling with impulse control

- prone to making bad financial decisions

- the elderly / kids (<16/>60)

Based on age demographics, rampant consumerism and social media addiction, especially in those age demographics, I'd be more inclined to guess the average human is all of those things.

Obviously UBO isn't a first party feature - but if only Firefox could generate as much traction about ad blocking as they did with tabs.

I still haven't done it, and my reflex for listening to something - even after my listening backlogs emptied a few months back - suggests I'm essentially addicted. Especially considering how much better I feel when I don't take my airpods out with me.

So, time to deal with that I guess. Thanks for the push.

This pulled me into a tangential thought:

Has anyone else noticed that a lot of people just CAN'T be wrong? They might be contrarian, cynical, narcissists, experts in their field, experiencing PTSD or other emotional disregulation, extremely online, ... Then the team-based things: political entrenchment, [colour]-pilled, conspiracy theorists, religious, Collingwood supporters (kidding) ...

Finding people who are genuinely interested in learning about things that might change their views in substantial ways is very hard. Even when you find people genuinely interested in learning, it's so common to see evidence take a back seat to political or religious views. It makes you feel crazy sometimes.

I think I got about a third of the way through. I knew (debatably) what inheritance was, that a Dog is an Animal, etc.

School, university, and 10 years of career later across multiple stacks and companies, there's still a heap I don't know, but you can drop me in a lot of codebases and I'll figure it out.

> So go ahead and buy that Java/Ruby/Javascript/PHP book; you'll probably get some use out of it. But you won't change your life, or your real overall expertise as a programmer in 24 hours or 21 days.

True, but it DID change my life.

Almost 1000: https://github.com/Overv/VulkanTutorial/blob/main/code/15_he...

(From Chapter 15 of the Vulkan Tutorial from vulkan-tutorial.com)

It's rare that I come across a product I have literally zero complaints about, or any feedback to offer. Even my concern that it was tied to an app that might disappear one day is of course covered by the fact that it's all just MIDI files on a card.

Thank you so much for making this, it's basically a perfect product for me and I love it. No notes.

Space travel seems to be one of the more harmless ones, but I agree it's frustrating to see people implicitly or explicitly skip over things like near-light-speed travel as solved problem, then reject arguments from others as "not thinking big enough", etc.

In general, divorce from reality doesn't seem to be related to intelligence at all in my experience. I'm sure there are plenty of times when my wishful thinking gets in the way too.

This part, at least, is satire, right? The rest I largely agree with :-)

Each person that put in the effort is one additional review point.

Thinking, Writing, Editing, Proofing, Publishing, Distributing, Selling...

At every step, a human had the opportunity to say "no, this is bad". And the fact that they didn't is a vote of quality and reputation.

These days presumably every step can be automated without a human in the loop at all, and it's up to the buyer to discover "no, this is bad", but at that point their money is already spent.

Might be time to go back to a second, air-gapped machine so I can actually use all the software I paid for.