This resonated a lot with me. I am also addicted to being useful and find that off days where my output and usefulness isn't where I'd like it to be really tank my self esteem.
I do think it can be a double-edged sword that often leads to burnout. Respecting your limits and occasional therapy seem to help, as does ensuring you're in as stable and supportive environment as possible so your efforts are sustainable and "heroics" don't get normalized in your org. I wish I had a full solution but have yet to find one in my career that works :)
Also linked in his guide (which I missed) and [here in a separate HN post](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46317546). I think this other author's post is a lot more detailed and arguably more useful to folks reading on HN.
> Communicating with Voyager 1 is slow. Commands now take about a day to arrive, with another day for confirmation.
I found this a bit silly given the headline: "well duh, that's the theoretical limit barring fancy quantum entaglement nonsense or similar!"
TIL all electromagnetic waves, including radio which Voyager 1 [uses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Communication_system), travel at the speed of light. For some reason I always thought we had satellites doing some slower process or needing to somehow "see" light photons coming back from the probe to achieve near-lightspeed communication.
There's some thoughtful comments here already, but I wonder the same thing constantly as a fairly addicted user of YouTube who wants to avoid short form video altogether.
I think Premium users tend to be the most affluent desirable group for ad targeting (similar to iOS users on other platforms) and even though YT Premium lets you avoid ads on YouTube, I suspect one's activity feed/"algorithm" on YouTube factors a lot into Google (and others'?) ad targeting. The same eerily effective feedback loop for getting TikTok and YouTube suggestions works better with short-form video, so even if users aren't seeing ads, YouTube still has an incentive to have people use it. So, there's money to be made in dialing in your "algorithm" from using YT Shorts even if you're a premium user.
I'm sure the other stuff about KPIs for increasing usage of shorts to compete with other media sites is accurate too
I think you're advocating for better mental health care and rehabilitation of addicts, which I agree with. However, the idea that addicts will destroy their lives regardless of whether they stop using, or are forced to stop using, their drug of choice is an extremely dangerous statement. Many addicts get better by changing their environment and quitting/going to rehab/etc.
Furthermore, heroin != vodka in terms of how addictive it is for the average user, and that's partly why only one of them is legal for recreational use.
Controversies about decriminalization aside, harm reduction exists as a studied component in addiction, public health, and psychology circles for a reason.
The important question isn't raw numbers, it's which destroys a greater percentage of lives out of those who consume it. If heroin were as widespread as alcohol, would it still be true that alcohol destroys more lives? We obviously can't know for sure without trying it, but preliminary results aren't promising.
For all of the naysayers in the comments, I think the author has hit on a palpable societal trend, at least in the US.
My leading theory is that the pandemic supercharged a lot of folks' individualist tendencies and/or nihilism, and we're seeing the decline in real time. To claim that the author is simply missing the incentives, bureaucracy, or other structural mechanisms behind enshittification, is missing the point, and they even allude to these towards the bottom of TFA!
Poking holes in the examples is similarly missing the point, but I know we love correcting people on the internet. Cunningham's law and all that...
Notepad++ was a life saver in my early days of needing to open and edit large files without having the tech literacy or familiarity required to use an actual IDE. I was a Windows "tinkerer" for a long time before learning programming and getting into engineering, and I suspect I'm not the only one on HN who got started that way. It's probably the first editor I used with line numbers, tabs / multiple view panes in one window, and customization options.
I can't say I use it as often these days, but it's still installed on my PC at home and it's a reliable tool that I think back on fondly. Without it, I might not have "leveled up" to more advanced tools later on.
For anybody who's wondering, Nintendo doesn't _actually_ own Pokemon (a common misconception), but has a major stake in "The Pokemon Company", which does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo#Subsidiaries
As such, I wonder if this structure makes it harder to sue over IP infringement. I agree with others here that patent infringement is a seemingly odd pick, but perhaps this also has to do with character design patents, since Palworld didn't explicitly use Nintendo's IP?
Should be interesting regardless to see what happens
That is a fun fact! Doubly so, because according to Wikipedia, Pokemon is the highest grossing media franchise on the planet, with some estimated $98.8 billion in revenue. Second place is "Micky Mouse & Friends" at a measly $61.4 billion.
I do think it can be a double-edged sword that often leads to burnout. Respecting your limits and occasional therapy seem to help, as does ensuring you're in as stable and supportive environment as possible so your efforts are sustainable and "heroics" don't get normalized in your org. I wish I had a full solution but have yet to find one in my career that works :)
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