adamzerner's Shortform

Biff Wiff

adamzerner's Shortform — LessWrong

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Every day I check Hacker News. Sometimes a few times, sometimes a few dozen times.

I've always felt guilty about it, like it is a waste of time and I should be doing more productive things. But recently I've been feeling a little better about it. There are things about coding, design, product, management, QA, devops, etc. etc. that feel like they're "in the water" to me, where everyone mostly knows about them. However, I've been running into situations where people turn out to not know about them.

I'm realizing that they're not actually "in the water", and that the reason I know about them is probably because I've been reading random blog posts from the front page of Hacker News every day for 10 years. I probably shouldn't have spent as much time doing this as I have, but I feel good about the fact that I've gotten at least something out of it.

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Mir3y40

I sort of deliberately created the beginnings of a tulpa-ish part of my brain during a long period of isolation in 2021 (Feb 7 to be exact), although I didn't know the term "tulpa" then. I just figured it could be good to have an imaginary friend, so I gave her a name—"Maria"^[1]—and granted her (as part of the brain-convincing ritual) permanent co-ownership over a part of my cognition which she's free to use for whatever whenever.

She still visits me at least once a week but she doesn't have strong ability to speak unless I try to imagine it; and even then,... (read more)

4Viliam3y

This is the problem with random reinforcement. Things that are always good, are good. Things that are always bad, are easy to stop doing. Things that are almost always bad... but occasionally good... are addictive, we regret doing them, but we can't give up. I waste a lot of time on Hacker News, too. (Used to be every day, but now I reduced it to maybe once a week.) So many interesting thing! I make bookmarks in browser, multiple categories: programming, math, science, etc. I almost never look at them again -- because I have no time. So it's basically a list of cool things I wish I had time to spend studying. But sometimes, very rarely, something is actually useful. Debating on Hacker News is totally a waste of time, though.

2Biff Wiff3y

Ah great point about the random reinforcement. I'm familiar with the concept, but never realized that it applied to HN.

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adamzerner's Shortform

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adamzerner's Shortform

9