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Seeking the productive life: Some details of my personal infrastructure (2019)

writings.stephenwolfram.com

61–70 of 110 posts

Re: Seeking the productive life: Some details of my personal infrastructure (2019)

#63

If you showed this to an advanced alien civilization I think they might consider his life one of enforced torture, if they themselves aren’t already living it. The Clockwork Orange eyes held open forced to watch screens device comes to mind.

But his clockwork orange pays so much better!

Re: Seeking the productive life: Some details of my personal infrastructure (2019)

#64
post #3

Part of my solution to this is to identify what parts of a project can be done from my phone and then intentionally avoid doing those on the computer. - Writing correspondence, essays, docs, todolists? The voice-to-text feature works great on iPhones. - Reading blog posts or articles? Extract text then run it through the iPhone's screen reader. - Moving trello tasks around? Do it through the phone app. etc.

I’d be curious to hear what you’re using on iPhone for voice-to-text. I’ve tried a few things and the results have been pretty awful for me.

Oh just tap the little mic button next to the space bar with any app. It works great (admittedly a white, American male here).

Re: Seeking the productive life: Some details of my personal infrastructure (2019)

#65
post #49

Quoted post unavailable.

Please let's not do Wolfram Derangement Syndrome in HN threads—if not for Wolfram, at least for ourselves. This was already a cliché a decade ago. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Understood.

BTW - as always - thank you for keeping HN threads focused and useful.

Re: Seeking the productive life: Some details of my personal infrastructure (2019)

#66
post #9

> I have systems that keep all sorts of data, including every keystroke I type, every step I take and what my computer screen looks like every minute Yikes? He's smart, so I'm sure he's protected it adequately, but auditing the surface area of this much software seems insane.

I run my own personal infrastructure. Most of what it takes is to research secure setups from the beginning. You don't have other users so upgrades aren't painful. Frankly what I find most difficult is dealing with aging hardware, but this dude probably had the money to buy everything new.

Re: Seeking the productive life: Some details of my personal infrastructure (2019)

#67
post #14

I've always found Stephen Wolfram's thoughts to be overly self indulgent, and this is no exception. But it is illuminating since it reveals what I most loathe: the productive life. Being productive is not a good. It leads to wanting to attach a computer to oneself while going on a walk outdoors!

This is a common sentiment on the Internet. But when I look around at the people I know, none of the people who are anti-productivity are people I admire. In fact, the pro-productivity people do much more of everything with better outcomes. - The pro-productivity people are more involved parents and family members - The pro-productivity people are more involved in hobbies - The pro-productivity people create many mor…

> Work is not a thing I do for money alone. I feel happy and fulfilled when I do it. It is fun!

I really wish I could get into this mindset instead of dreading work. I find no fulfillment from work, in fact the most fulfilled i've felt was when I had no obligations to anyone or anything (taking a break from work)

Re: Seeking the productive life: Some details of my personal infrastructure (2019)

#68
post #9

> I have systems that keep all sorts of data, including every keystroke I type, every step I take and what my computer screen looks like every minute Yikes? He's smart, so I'm sure he's protected it adequately, but auditing the surface area of this much software seems insane.

Not really. I keep even more than that. And at a finer grained resolution. And have done so for almost two decades. It's all put on to a write-only-by-the-capturing-device/read-only-by-other-device secured storage system.

Curious why you do this and what you feel like it adds to your life?

Re: Seeking the productive life: Some details of my personal infrastructure (2019)

#69
I love this essay so much. It was the inspiration for my Dogsheep project - https://dogsheep.github.io/ - because I wanted to build a much less impressive version of a subset of what Wolfram had built, and a Dogsheep is clearly a less intimidating version of a Wolfram!

(Also it meant I could call my search engine Dogsheep Beta, as opposed to Wolfram Alpha - and I enjoyed that pun so much I spent quite a significant of time writing the software to support it: https://simonwillison.net/2020/Nov/14/personal-data-warehous... )

Re: Seeking the productive life: Some details of my personal infrastructure (2019)

#70

Has anyone found those funny glasses to be effective at preventing carsickness?

Yes. Completely prevents my kids carsickness— they threw up most car rides over 1 hr unless instructed not to read or look down(had to look straight ahead)
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