There're also performance issues. Building muscle memory (which means offloading tasks from working memory, leaving it open for learning) can't happen if you're constantly trying to figure out when the system is going to actually respond to your input.
We largely abandoned an unbelievably efficient form of human input in favor of big fat dumb slow touchscreens. Can you imagine where we'd be as a species if we got our shit together 25 years ago and standardized a few of the most important keyboard shortcuts and layouts and that was the default everywhere? I won't advocate terminal-only, but even classical GUIs with windows and icons and all could have been much more efficient if keyboard input and navigation was given priority instead of the comedy of using a pixel-precise indirect pointer to fart around a virtual screen select some button when...there are buttons under my fingers.
We did standardize a lot of keyboard shortcuts and layouts. And it was fairly widespread, even, with both Windows and macOS retaining some bits of it (sadly, fewer and fewer with each new update).
This is so true. The most frustrating thing in the world to me is waiting for the UI to catch up to my actions… that should just never happen in 2025. Not only is it frustrating to wait, but as you elegantly stated it forces the menial task to enter working memory.
Win32 would buffer keystrokes so that a sequence of commands wouldn't be lost even if the UI took long to respond (e.g. if a dialog took long to open), but that has mostly been lost in the era of web apps and other similar bullshit.
Modern web (and web-like) apps all too often don't even bother supporting keyboard for anything other than text field input. What I find especially infuriating are the dialog boxes where the only thing you have is a textbox and a button, and yet you cannot press Enter to submit the dialog once you finish typing - nope, you have to reach out for the mouse and click that button.
This is why I commonly have a trackpad in addition to a mouse when I use Windows. Literally, mouse on right, trackpad on left. It's much faster to use the trackpad for annoyances like these. I also find that trackpads are ten times better for scrolling.
>once the euphoria had worn off the market consensus was that the stock just wasn’t worth as much as the price it had been selling for at the height of the mania.
I've seen too much in the past 4 years to think that euphoria is anything but a convenient and incomplete explanation for things like, "Cisco's price hit its high 25 years ago and never since." More is happening, driven by the fact that there's more ways to make money on the movement of a stock than it going up significantly in price over time.
Tangentially-related: the recurrent corneal erosion that I've been managing (painfully and unsuccessfully) for a decade has finally seen some measure of remission after I started self-treating with Fingerprick Autologous Blood. It's what it says on the tin: I use a blood testing fingerprick to draw a few drops of blood, which I insert under my eyelid. Blink. Done. Not even a month and half with a bandage contact lens helped as much. It's a little frustrating that years of dealing with far-flung ophthalmologists and expensive eye ointments that make things worse (Muro 128 costs more than printer ink) could have been preempted with a application of a substance that's already inside me.
It was mentioned on a reddit thread that I can no longer find, which prompted me to look up studies. I don't think that the mechanism is fully known, but apparently the research that has been done was prompted by the success of designer drugs that are derived from a patient's blood, as a way to make a similar treatment more accessible.
I think I've read that true endurance and strength of your heart is built running over one hour at a time and in my experience that seems true. Our bodies are so lazy and don't make changes until they absolutely have to. I run 7 miles every Sunday or so. I based that number on that and this paper which shows mortality vs. distance run per week. People that run too much have mortality like a sedentary person!
In common use, the (and watch this) is left unsaid and implied. I.e. the speaker is really excited to immediately do something that's a terrible idea, without even stopping to explain.
"How the heck are we going to get the alligator out of the pool?"
I dunno about even that. Forgive my example (though I love bringing it up, since so few people seemed to have grokked it in the time since initial release): in the video game Bioshock: Infinite, one of the later levels sees you transported into the far future of 1984. The game's setting, a flying city named Columbia, which was characterized by its almost cartoonish levels of capital-A capital-P American Patriotism, had featured in its original Gilded Age incarnation many of the ills of turn-of-the-century American society, including racism, an exploited working class, religion-driven insularity, and a predilection for violence. However, it had also presented an enthusiasm for the new and curious, an ambition for high living standards, and other cultural accoutrements that are usually associated with forward-thinking societies.
By this late-game level, however, the city has descended into dystopia. Why? Well, a three-quarter century game of telephone. The ideals of the city's original founder, already imperfect, were further transmitted imperfectly to his successor and her charges, whose personal traumas further warped their interpretation of Columbia's intended values, and the actions taken in their name. That repentant successor, having lost control of the city's populace to a revolutionary fever, sends you back to the past just as Columbia's weapons begin to level New York City (a caricature of America destroying its real-life historical "center").
It's a metaphor, of course.
It's easy for the soul of an idea to get lost in translation. It's easy for principles of one era to be an ill fit for another. It's easy for the original ideas and principles to be fundamentally flawed in ways that no one could or was willing to admit to.
"Running with it" can be dangerous. (Ask us how well Cold War politicking has worked out for us post-9/11.)
I think, at all turns, you must be asking yourself why you're doing what you're doing, and if it's actually effective. If it's actually good. I don't know that Jobs ever predicted that the bicycle for the mind would be beholden to OTA updates or have a commensurate attack surface exposure, but we have to deal with that reality, regardless.
Your father sounds similar to mine: high-achiever, running every which way. Question: how was his sleep? My father's career was in a field that required annual physical fitness certification; his diet probably could have stood to include less salt and sugar when I was very young, but he cleaned it up, especially by the time he was diagnosed with T2. Something his job also required, however: early mornings. Late nights. And, evidently, not enough time to stop for a moment and determine if he might have sleep apnea (he did).
So, I think it's a three-part issue. Diet (sugar), obviously. Exercise, too, and whether or not you're getting it regularly throughout the day, every day. But I think it all goes to shit if you're getting bad sleep, especially if that "bad sleep" is "miniature bouts of asphyxiation." It completely screws with your body's ability to regulate itself, hormonally, and to recover from the day's damage.
Agree about sleep. He managed a newsroom and “put the paper to bed” so he worked from 7pm to 4am. I’m sure it didn’t help. For myself, I’m physically built very differently (leaner) and I don’t care much for sweet tea, so I’m lucky I guess. But as an achiever, sleep is always my battle. Comes and goes!
Good salespeople are trying to connect customers with solutions that provide them value that they otherwise wouldn't have access to (generally because they weren't aware of it). Obviously, in practice, the line between that and the more negative experiences can be fuzzy and vary by one's perspective, but unless you have someone in-house who's dedicated to searching for new solutions... And then, they turn into a sort of salesperson themselves, with ambiguous allegiances. At least someone from the outside is someone you will always be skeptical about.
Not that this is a new idea - when was the term "rat race" coined? - but I imagine that part of the issue is people who are so caught up in their unexamined expectations that they don't have the wherewithal to question them. You then factor in that the examining and decision-making is taken up by people with a lot more money or political influence. Such is the genesis of, say, white flight (and maybe even "manifest destiny"). Doesn't absolve participants of culpability, but helps us to understand the how and a bit of the why.
