For me, it's the realization of how much filler (tangents, embellishment, hyperbole, pretentiousness, ego, straight up BS, etc) is in long form content that makes it's really hard to make a commitment to anything new. Once you see it, it's ALL you see. I was rewatching some Feynman lectures this morning, and I couldn't get past it anymore. What I used to find engaging, was a major distraction. And the more I learn about stuff, the quicker I see when it's happening, even subjects I'm not familiar with.
Pop-sci / self-help I feel is particularly egregious in this regard. Like you could take the entirety of many self-help books and summarise them into a few bullet points.
Though having said that, if the ultimate goal of writing is to transfer one person’s experience of human thought to another, then the filler often makes sense. They’re trying to take you on the same mental journey that they went on. At least that’s the good-faith interpretation.
I think filler is also akin to the difference in experience between listening to an audiobook at 1x speed vs say 3x speed. The slower pace gives your brain time to work.
But I totally agree, once you know a bunch about a subject the filler becomes unnecessary.
1) The problem with teaching is that "filler" often isn't.
Teaching is art and not science in spite of what so many tech folks think. If I'm teaching a hard subject, I don't know a priori what will click with each student. I'm trying to give you multiple tools for you to try to use while working on problems to get you to your next level of understanding. Some of those tools are idiosyncratic to my experience and not in the textbook. Most of my suggestions are going to wind up being useless to a particular student, but I'm hoping that at least one of them connects properly.
For example, the biggest complaint of linear algebra students is "This is boring and doesn't have any use." Well, I can talk about how its used in graphics, but the mathematicians will call that filler. I can talk about solving differential equation systems for the engineers, but the CS students will call that filler. The instructor, of course, thinks all that stuff is filler and would rather get back to teaching the subject, but understands that getting people interested and enthusiastic is a part of the teaching process.
2) The "filler" part of "traditional" media is completely different for each person while "social" media filler is useless to everybody.
This is something that so many people don't seem to grasp. Each individual will fixate on and take something different from a book or lecture. That's good. As long as each part of media resonates and has a purpose with somebody consuming it, it's not "filler".
The problem is that "social" media rewards behaviors that create useless "filler". So, social media is in a war--people get more sensitive to ignoring useless filler; the social media sites ramp more aggressive garbage; people get more sensitive; lather, rinse, repeat.
The problem is that your social media "useless filler" pattern matcher learns to be super aggressive and classifies anything that doesn't immediately engage with you, personally and immediately as garbage. That's fine when doomscrolling; that's not fine when reading a book or listening to a lecture.
That's not to say that there aren't poor lectures or poor quality books. There very definitely are. And you should definitely leave those behind.
However, you need to turn those super aggressive filler filters off when an author or lecturer is genuinely trying to engage you in good faith. If an author or lecturer did the work, is well-prepared, and is making solid points and progress, you need give them the leeway to do their job.
"seeing" is a pretty vague word. It has like 3 different meanings just in the context of discussing aphantasia. They are seeing something, but they're not seeing it. You see?
I do think that my body is tensed up, but I think it is constantly tensed up. Or at least others say I am tensed up. I wonder if I have this constant tension then and I feel this constant sense of dread and anxiety and that is why I can't recognize change in my body, or emotions having physical meaning because it is just constant low grade tension?
But the tension is everywhere not necesseraily pointed to a specific location.
Like I don't ever feel what I think is "good". I feel like there is always something that I should be doing, solving some problem that is on back of my mind. I can try to make myself forget about the problems I have to solve temporarily, but mostly it doesn't work.
But it is always the same, constant feeling of pressure and inability to relax, while my therapist seems to assume it comes on and off and in a specific body part.
Less party partisan stuff being sneaked in then (I think it's the parties themselves sometimes doing it now), but more meaningful discussions on politics, especially/primarily having to do with how they crossed with tech.
But everything crosses over with tech: finance, the current state of the market, importing and exporting, taxes, surveillance, censorship, encryption, copyright, patents, freedom to tinker, wars, weapons, government contracting, military contracting, corporate structure, etc. etc.
There wasn't this random immigration outrage bait pointing out 1 of the 80 people in a particular month who were shot by law enforcement for no good reason, but there was plenty about immigration because techies are immigrants and hire immigrants, and outsourcing, and working with a remote team in the middle of the night, etc. etc.
The only thing that was absolutely deemed "politics" and excluded eventually was discussions of women and black people in tech.
AI is just the new Rust, is the new X in javascript, is the new concurrency/Erlang, and so on. All of those things are still important; none of them went away or are going away.
I think heavy moderation serves to keep some variety, and to simply throw away the 9000th iteration of the same thread that never goes anywhere. AI stories aren't bad; it's the same AI stories, again, that are bad.
I started coming here in the early 2010s, and honestly I like its mix now better than the late 2010s, when SaaS was stagnating and every new company was Uber/AirBnB for X and people were trying to hype crypto constantly. It's still worse than the early years though.
We live in a society, the government provides (or provides permission for) roads, utilities, housing and a boatload of other rules & regulation to protect people.
Virtually any discussion around anything will always lead back to politics because it is the central body that allows us to live the lives we want, this is why voting is important!
It's like returning the shopping cart at the grocery store. Other people have more work to do because you chose to do less.
The action may not matter, you are free to choose, but not doing it does make you a bad citizen. Personal importance doesn't factor into it, this is an external designation.
> Other people have more work to do because you chose to do less.
Not voting in America does not increase the burden of other people. My state has voted the same in Presidential elections for two decades. Local politicians almost always run unopposed and I don't think anyone in my lifetime has won here without an endorsement from the party in favor, so they are picked behind closed doors. Our state governor elections can swing, but ultimately one vote is a vanishingly insignificant portion of that.
I vote every year out of habit, but putting the "I VOTED" sticker conspicuously on a trash can probably makes more of a difference than casting my ballot. The two party system is designed to give people an outlet for feeling like they made a difference without any risk of change for the people in power. See how people like Musk and Zuckerberg cozy up with Trump just as easily as Obama.
I would be more amenable to political discussions on HN if they weren't almost guaranteed to turn into flame wars. But as it is, every single thread I see on current events in the US turns into an absolute train wreck. No insight is generated there, just culture warriors flinging hate at each other back and forth through the comments. I flag such posts because they are so reliably low quality, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
> AI, politics, and discussing how HN isn't what it used to be. That's all that's here now. HN isn't what it used to be.
Are you spending your time patrolling /newest and upvoting good submissions, then? There are relatively few people doing this and it's easy to have an outsized impact.
I’m guilty of some political debates here no doubt but man it seems like there have been a lot new accounts lately coming in red hot and starting fights
The negative-attention seeking assholes (often teens) used to only get "attention" from people in the vicinity. Now they can be anywhere, and get a reaction from everyone.
Every single word around actual intelligence has been hijacked by the industry. Everything should be prefixed with "Artificial", like vegan food that mimics other food. Or just use more accurate words. Or make them up if they don't exist.
Every thing I used to come to HN for (learning, curiosity, tech, etc) has been mostly replaced by an artificial version of the thing. I still get tricked daily by titles I think are referring a real thing, but turn out to be about AI.
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