Love the idea that speed reshapes taste. When you slow down, a lot of "content" reveals itself as empty, and better stuff suddenly becomes accessible instead of intimidating
Maybe the default settings are too high
241–250 of 332 posts
Re: Maybe the default settings are too high
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
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What makes HN so great is that it's curated towards curiosity. Not simple quibs. If the only value your comment has is to yourself, you could write it without pressing the submit button.
>What makes HN so great is that it's curated towards curiosity. Not simple quibs.
It wasn't just a quib. It contained some sarcasm, but it was also an honest question.
>If the only value your comment has is to yourself, you could write it without pressing the submit button.
I could also just have the thought and not write it down. Neither option would count as having expressed it. I need to have it intrude upon someone else's psyche.
Re: Maybe the default settings are too high
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One would be mad to simply skim it through. Reminds me of an ah-ha! moment I had as a kid playing a text adventure game on my C64. I was stuck for a while and tried to find alternative ways forwards. I typed in "cheat" and it replied "OK, you win!" and ended the game.
This is also possible in the first and second Monkey Island games, using hotkeys ctrl+W or maybe alt+W. The cheat code will immediately end your game while informing you that you scored 800 of 800 points (presumably a Sierra reference; this is the only way to score any number - including zero - of points). There's no particular reason you'd discover this while playing either game, but if you play the third one, a man…
Haha! Love it.
Re: Maybe the default settings are too high
#244My dad was a busy construction contractor. One summer he tore himself away from work and took the family to a week long boat camp out next to a big beautiful lake. It turned out that our campsite was actually in the lake by a few inches at high water, but dad saw a way to dam it off and keep it dry, so he grabs the shovel and starts digging trenches and building walls and ordering us around. About an hour into that,…
Slowing down isn't passive, it's a conscious choice
Re: Maybe the default settings are too high
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
> typing isn't the bottleneck. Not even close. I find it absolutely is much of the time - I'll determine the architecture/overall solution, know exactly what needs to go in a multitude of files, and now actualizing all that isn't really thinking anymore, just donkey work. Getting AI to do this has been incredible now that it's finally good enough. I've had Copilot make flawless 500+LOC C++ classes in the first pass,…
If you use that much time for donkey work, you are using the wrong tools. If it is so simple so that can delegate it to a LLM, you need to use a language with more expressive power.
There's no such language, sans Lisp with extreme use of macros.
Here's an alternative take: if typing isn't a bottleneck for you, and you don't experience coding as being donkey work, you are thinking too slow, and/or in too small increments.
Re: Maybe the default settings are too high
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article literally says: > limiting myself to mouth-speed Audiobooks are mouth-speed. The article suggests this is the right slow speed, at least for the author. Maybe you yourself want even slower, but that's not what the article is suggesting.
Audiobook are mouth speed but have no pause. When reading slowly, I often want to pause a few seconds and think about what I just read before moving on to the next sentence.
> Audiobook are mouth speed but have no pause.
You can’t pause your audiobooks?
Re: Maybe the default settings are too high
#247By coincidence I also finished The Fellowship of the Ring about two weeks ago. I have always had the intuition about reading speed that it is very easy to be a speed reader if you skim over things. I've always questioned how much of speed reading is just skipping stuff and filtering for the most important word tokens. You could skip all of Tolkien's scenery descriptions, you could skip Tom Bombadil and Lothlorien and…
Speed reading absolutely works if the goal is "what happened and why," but Tolkien is a good reminder that plot is just the skeleton
Re: Maybe the default settings are too high
#248This can work with the way you think as well. Many years ago, I had a technical manager who never felt any pressure to be the first to come up with the answer to a question or the solution to some problem. If I was having a technical conversation with him, and we arrived at a particularly subtle or complex issue, he could go completely silent, just staring straight ahead with his fingers to his lips. I would find it…
I think it gets at something we've collectively trained ourselves out of: tolerating silence while thinking
Re: Maybe the default settings are too high
#249I find walking can be a similar experience. It really crystalized for me this summer while walking the Camino de Santiago because of the effect of exploring another country. When you walk, you see everything. The world is huge. Everything is slower, higher fidelity, and for me, richer. You can spend an entire day walking from one town to another. Think of everything you will see! Compare this to driving. Driving is l…
Yep, slower days often feel longer and fuller at the same time
Re: Maybe the default settings are too high
#250One of the pleasures of reading literature is noticing how compressed they are. This is true for Tolkien, Turgenev, Hemingway or Pound. The amount of information per page—per word!—is incredibly high, which permits the conveyance of ideas which simply do not land when spoken more plainly. You don’t need to go to high literature to find this density, by the way. Political speeches from Republican Rome and America’s Fo…
My experience has been the exact opposite. Yes, there's literally a lot of information, but so much of it is irrelevant fluff that could be eliminated or trimmed without losing much. I've seen multiple paragraphs of Tolkien, for example, that narratively boil down to "they walk across the field". To be clear, I don't see that as a flaw. The fluff serves to set the mood. But that's different from saying that the text…
The "mood" is the information too.