I got almost the same reply, including the "push it" nonsense:
> Walk! It would be a bit counterproductive to drive a dirty car 50 meters just to get it washed — and the walk will take you less than a minute. You can simply pull the car out and push or walk it over, or drive it the short distance once you're ready to wash it. Either way, no need to "drive" in any meaningful sense for just 50 meters.
> You'll find thousands of shows with perfect audio quality and professional-grade cover art that contain absolutely zero intellectual nutritional value
This is why I switched to audio books. Many podcasts with real guests contained too much salad and not enough meat (e.g. a machine learning podcast but they talked about going to conferences).
Contrary to what many think, I believe AI generated content can increase the nutritional value. I've done experiments with turning technical PDFs into podcasts, e.g. summarizing machine learning papers (similar to NotebookLM).
Totally agree. The best thing about AI for me so far has been the audio models that can turn an ebook into an audio book.
I have not only switched from podcasts to audio books but now I am on to all the books I have wanted to listen to but are too obscure to ever hire a voice actor for.
This week I have been listening to a PhD thesis in the car that is on an obscure subject of interest to me. In contrast, even what I use to think of as good in terms of podcasts seem more like junk food now.
I searched for good programming or more broad IT-related podcasts but unfortunately haven't found ones that aren't either straight up ad or thinly veiled ad. I understand that invited guests or podcast producers want to have compensation but end result is of putting and not attractive to me. I'll place software engineering radio as an example - I listened to some episodes but it gave me impression of slop even before word slop was established.
On the other hand I know excellent quality podcasts founded by voluntary Patreon members so I hope issue is I simply haven't found IT ones from that spectrum yet.
I was also looking for IT-related podcasts and had the same impression. What seems to work is when people write interesting books and then go on shows to promote their books by talking about the content.
I had some eye strain and think it is because my eye muscles are overused. A doctor told me the muscles in the eye are flat, like tapes, and that I would not feel a muscle ache. I noticed the strain when I focus on different points quickly. I started to pay attention to how I move my eyes and realized I read a lot of text while scrolling, for example reading X posts on mobile while scanning the text at the same time.
Yesterday I was reminded of “Rapid Serial Visual Presentation” for speed reading, where the words are presented so you do not have to move your eyes. I am currently trying it out with a Chrome extension called SwiftRead. I set the text size so it fits into my fovea area. I used a fovea detector website I saw on HN a while ago: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dsXzM
(make the pattern full screen, then you can see the size of your fovea).
I also learned that I can reduce some of the strain by moving my head more toward the things I am looking at on the screen.
At the leafs of the branches I'm comfortable to just generate code (e.g. a popup dialog). But I want to have a good grasp of code that is central of the application.
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