[HN Gopher] Seeking the productive life: Some details of my pers... ___________________________________________________________________ Seeking the productive life: Some details of my personal infrastructure (2019) Author : pcr910303 Score : 133 points Date : 2022-11-02 15:57 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (writings.stephenwolfram.com) (TXT) w3m dump (writings.stephenwolfram.com) | adamredwoods wrote: | Previously (still a good re-read!): | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26045380 | | I have the problem of flat surfaces, I've been trying hard to | figure out a better way for incoming papers (bills, to read, to | investigate, to shred). | dang wrote: | Thanks! Macroexpanded: | | _Seeking the Productive Life: Some Details of My Personal | Infrastructure (2019)_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26045380 - Feb 2021 (63 | comments) | reidjs wrote: | 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. | sokoloff wrote: | Writing an essay via voice-to-text on my phone sounds like one | of the most painful things I could voluntarily subject myself | to. | | Siri can't even get simple text messages write (pun intended) | madars wrote: | The great thing about text editors, and to a large extent | also paper, is that they give you random access - you can | easily see the whole document and make edits at arbitrary | points. It's incredibly ergonomic (there is a reason why | books overtook scrolls!) and I doubt voice-driven editing can | come close. At the same time, audio is easy for creating | conversational-style pieces (e.g. podcasts) but a good final | product must always come with timestamped transcripts (how | else would one grep and/or skip?) | Calamitous wrote: | 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. | reidjs wrote: | Oh just tap the little mic button next to the space bar with | any app. It works great (admittedly a white, American male | here). | dmje wrote: | My intuition is that all of the benefit you get being outside and | walking is probably lost by strapping a laptop to yourself and | being on calls the whole time. Call me old fashioned but I'm | outside to look at the sea, hear the birds and be very definitely | away from my tech. | surfsvammel wrote: | For the last year or so I have scheduled my two status meetings | back to back in the mornings. That means I have 90 minutes of | walking in the forrest in the morning (30min before the | meetings and then 30min each for the two meetings). | | I have two teams reporting to me, and each have a 30minute | morning meeting where we decide what needs the team attention | during the day. There is also room for small talk to keep it a | bit social. | | Those meetings do not need screensharing very often. When they | do, we can manage to look briefly at a phone screen. | | It has been wonderful and it is something I would miss if I | ever had another job. I encourage the others in the team to do | the same thing. | | Walking in the forrest have two benefits; less risk of getting | hit by a car, and, it's more quiet of a background for when I | unmute. | | Highly recommended! | oangemangut wrote: | What about for other users of the forest? Hopefully you're | able to stay well away from them so as not to disturb the | peace and quiet of the forest for work. | holler wrote: | > Walking in the forrest have two benefits; it's less chance | to get hit by a car, and it's more quiet of a background for | when I unmute. | | More than that, it's very cathartic and peaceful. I used to | live next to a big park on the Puget Sound and I would do a | similar routine, in addition to occasionally taking a stroll | through the park (effectively a forest) at lunch. | | It had a very calming effect, def miss that! | gigel82 wrote: | Those monitors trigger me. Uneven heights, one is tilted, there's | a gap big enough to fit a hand through, and they're miscalibrated | (different color temperature). | quijoteuniv wrote: | What a guy! Yes, I believe the point is to find what keeps you | motivated and works for you. One of my favourite hacks/ritual is | making a lot of Mate tea in the morning, drinking a cup, and | taking a 1 liter thermo to work. Mate is the best kind of energy | drink available and you can pretty much drink as much as you want | with no sideeffects (except an extra trip to the toilet). This | way I avoid bad coffe at the office. On weekends i drop the Mate | tea and prepare myself some descent coffee as a treat | mxwsn wrote: | I love mate, but just one extra toilet trip is a substantial | underestimate for many.. | [deleted] | m463 wrote: | title should probably say [2019] | gordon_freeman wrote: | Everything he does I see his keyboard or monitor in the | background. I don't know why he is so much into 'productivity' | that even for walks he has to be in front of his machine and | working? Why can't he just enjoy walking to relax a bit outdoors. | I think walking is as much for mental well being as for improving | physical health and decoupling from work and digital life is how | I'd like to relax. | elzbardico wrote: | For people like him, working is the supreme form of relaxation. | | I can't relate, it is not my cup of tea, but I can understand | it and refrain for judging. | testfoobar wrote: | Hi this is Stephen Wolfram. Let's talk about my favorite topic: | Stephen Wolfram. | gjvc wrote: | 100% | | Also, don't mention the Rulians. | zabzonk wrote: | no idea why this was downvoted, except possibly by people who | don't know about wolfram | dang wrote: | For starters, it was snarky, a shallow dismissal, a personal | attack, unsubstantive, and an internet trope. | | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html | SkyMarshal wrote: | It's honestly just a boring comment. Yes we all know Wolfram | is self-indulgent and overly long-winded, nothing new there, | no need to belabor the obvious. | | The question is whether there's anything of value to be | gleaned from his novella-length blog posts. If you think not, | then just downvote or flag article submission. | | But if you actually read the whole thing and found specific | things of value, and want to summarize them here, then by all | means I hope you're upvoted a million times. | deathanatos wrote: | > _The question is whether there 's anything of value to be | gleaned from his novella-length blog posts. If you think | not, then just downvote or flag article submission._ | | Flagging, I've always felt, is sort of heavy-handed for "I | disagree with". I use it for spam and the like. | | There is no "downvote" feature, for article submissions. | Which is why it is disappointing when low quality reads | like this makes it to the front page. | [deleted] | dang wrote: | Please let's not do Wolfram Derangement Syndrome in HN threads | --if not for Wolfram, at least for ourselves. This was already | a cliche 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 | testfoobar wrote: | Understood. | | BTW - as always - thank you for keeping HN threads focused | and useful. | caust1c wrote: | > 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. | kodah wrote: | 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. | justinlloyd wrote: | 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. | timdavila wrote: | Curious why you do this and what you feel like it adds to | your life? | prashp wrote: | Is Gwern [1] actually Stephen Wolfram's alter ego? Two sides of | the same coin | | [1] https://www.gwern.net/ | yayitswei wrote: | Has anyone found those funny glasses to be effective at | preventing carsickness? | jeliotj wrote: | 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! | xmprt wrote: | Being productive is good but only as a means to an end. If | you're using your productivity to get more done then that can | be dangerous. But if you're using it to get your work done | faster then it's actually quite useful. | hooverd wrote: | Productivity people remind me of that one KRAZAM video [1]. | | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U | prottog wrote: | > Being productive is not a good | | Perhaps you mean that being maximally productive -- that is, | seeking productivity over all other goals in life -- is not a | good? Because productivity is definitely a good. Without it, | all crumbles away to the natural state, which is chaotic and | for human purposes "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". | jeliotj wrote: | No, I meant what I said exactly. The product might be a good; | that can be debated. But the action itself is not | intrinsically good. | | What makes an action good? It always or necessarily produces | good things. Very few actions are good in themselves. | | As to the Hobbes quote: too much for now! I'm at work. :) | renewiltord wrote: | 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 more things | | - The pro-productivity people lift more, go outdoors more, | travel more | | It appears, empirically from my sample set, that being pro- | productivity correlates with spending one's life meaningfully. | Having chosen to model myself on those I know like this, my | life has gotten better. | | This class of advice (anti-productivity) therefore appears to | me to be in the same class of advice as other Internet advice: | "kick your kids out at 18 to teach them personal | responsibility", "don't take on debt", etc. | | To make it worse, you only have to scroll approx 1 page down | before you have a picture of Stephen Wolfram outdoors. | | The separation of work and play that so many online commenters | form is perhaps key to this whole thing. Work is not a thing I | do for money alone. I feel happy and fulfilled when I do it. It | is fun! | yamtaddle wrote: | > The separation of work and play that so many online | commenters form is perhaps key to this whole thing. Work is | not a thing I do for money alone. I feel happy and fulfilled | when I do it. It is fun! | | That's not "online commenters". It's like 95+% of people who | work for a paycheck. | BaseballPhysics wrote: | > But when I look around at the people I know, none of the | people who are anti-productivity are people I admire. | | It's interesting to me that you think the opposite of "pro- | productivity"--which I define as people who are constantly | engaging in life hacks to increase their perceived | "productivity", and thus treat productivity as some kind of | end unto itself--is "anti-productivity". | | Could we agree that the healthy thing lies somewhere in the | middle? | cableshaft wrote: | > The pro-productivity people are more involved parents and | family members | | I haven't seen this amongst several people I know as pro- | productivity. The productivity tends to be hyper-focused on | work and side hustles/creative, and family/parental duties | seemed to be neglected as a result. But I couldn't find any | data on this with a quick search, so it's just conflicting | anecdata to your anecdata. | | Your other bullet points do align more with my experience, | but not this one. | ativzzz wrote: | > 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) | n4r9 wrote: | Having read that blog post as well as others like [1], I'm | not convinced Wolfram has the time to fulfill those bullet | points in a fully engaged manner. He appears to be constantly | working (or at least be available for calls and meetings) | from waking up at 11am to going to bed at 3am, with a 2-hour | dinner break. | | I dunno, he's clearly not your average Joe. I also enjoy my | work but it's more stressful than going for a walk or playing | the guitar. At work there are expectations and deadlines, and | I have to plan and manage my time, and update the right | people when there are delays or scope changes etc etc. Going | for a walk you can just be whatever you are in the moment, | you don't have to do or be anything that's asked of you for a | few hours. | | [1] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal- | ana... | iamdbtoo wrote: | > It appears, empirically from my sample set, that being pro- | productivity correlates with spending one's life | meaningfully. | | I think many people have wildly different ideas about what | makes a life meaningful and even more about what is a | productive use of time. | latenightcoding wrote: | Most people don't have his potential. Yeah, I'm aware he pushes | a lot of crackpot science, but he is still exceedingly | brilliant. For the average folk, this is a horrible way to | live. | _boffin_ wrote: | I find that you're projecting your thoughts and lifestyle onto | his lifestyle choice. Just stop as it does nobody any good. | | What's wrong with attaching a computer to oneself while walking | outdoors? Does he have the same intrinsic motivators as you? | Probably not. Does it matter? Probably not. | | What about people that go outside and just read? Is that not a | good life? | yamtaddle wrote: | He's the one who posted it online. Fine if others post that | they think it's bad, and why. Laudable, even, if you suppose | he posted it to communicate some message and others find that | message to be harmful or misleading or otherwise bad. They | _ought to_ post what they think is wrong with it. | _boffin_ wrote: | Much more eloquent than what I said | bpodgursky wrote: | Do you think the world is worse for Stephen Wolfram having been | productive? | idoh wrote: | I took it more along the lines of "this advice is not | generally applicable" as opposed to dunking on Wolfram. | agnos wrote: | This. I felt an almost cringe-like reaction from reading the | article. It reminds me of Goodhart's Law: when a measure | becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. At some point | being productive becomes the end goal and no longer a means to | an end, and you've lost touch with the beauty of just going on | a walk in nature. | 0000011111 wrote: | What a fascinating person! Personally, I prefer to run 10 miles | on a trail in the morning then go to work and grind. Vs trying to | combine exersize and work. | diordiderot wrote: | Rucking (walking with weight on your back) is actually really | really good for both cardio and strength. | | Once you get older and the knees start wearing out it's a great | alternative | simonw wrote: | 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... ) | rcarmo wrote: | Regardless of opinions, the sheer volume of his output is a tad | overwhelming. I do wish he had taken Mathematica down a different | path (just imagine if it was truly broadly available at non- | insane pricing as a local native app, almost as a stupefyingly | flexible Jupyter), and I find the Wolfram Language too unwieldy | for some things, but if you can see past the self-branding and | unusual viewpoints, Mathematica is prety awesome. | | I once had a bit of fun with it on a 20-core Raspberry Pi | cluster, and sometimes I think it would have been amazing to run | some ML workloads on this kind of environment: | https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2016/08/10/0830 | taeric wrote: | I'd say it is more flexible than jupyter. I really think many | folks are hidden from a lot of magical computation you can do | with computers, by not having exposure to some of tools like | mathematica. | hirundo wrote: | I share the dream of being able to walk through the woods while | working online, but there's no way that Dr. Wolfram's approach | would work for me. I just can't walk smoothly enough to read | comfortably from a screen, particularly not while avoiding roots | and rocks. A gimble stabilizer could help with the text but not | the refocusing. | | So I'm hoping that AR glasses will do the trick before long. If | they can project non-jiggly text into the world so that I can | rapidly context shift between them with little refocusing, and | let me input by wiggling my fingers, I'd pay a lot for it. But I | guess lines of code per hour will decline with speed. | JohnJamesRambo wrote: | 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. | AtlasBarfed wrote: | But his clockwork orange pays so much better! | 1970-01-01 wrote: | >But one inevitably needs some flat surface, if only just to sign | things (it's not all digital yet), or to eat a snack. So my | solution is to have pullouts. If one needs them, pull them out. | But one can't leave them pulled out, so nothing can accumulate on | them. | | This is a great tip. Get a desk with pull-outs. I have them on | the left and right. They're 1/2 an inch think and strong enough | to leave a heavy book, laptop, or whatever until you're done. | When both sides get pulled out, some paper-heavy task is | occurring, such as taxes. | kkfx wrote: | I give up filesystem taxonomies to end up in org-mode/org-roam | managed time-organized notes, with files attached and retrievable | in a classic search&narrow UI (org-roam-node-find) with eventual | quick search (via counsel-rg on org-roam-directory, where in that | case notes are like files metadata) or queries (org-ql on drawes | properties and tags who are ensured a bit consistent via | templates (org-capture, yasnippet etc). | | This extra layer was a game-changer for me, I hesitate for long, | but finally switched few years ago and so far prove to be | flawlessly. I still miss fancy UI/ML tools, but anything is at my | fingertips locally, I can make quick slides if needed directly in | org-mode, I can click code-executing links (elisp:), running code | blocks (org-babel) and anything is integrated to a level NO ONE | modern software can reach due to modern systems archaic, limited | and limiting designs. | AtlasBarfed wrote: | Another Wolfram article written about how much Wolfram Wolfram | used to Wolfram new Wolfams. Now with more Wolfram | Mister_Snuggles wrote: | I've read this before, but took the opportunity to read it again. | | One of the things that impresses me the most is exemplified by | these two examples: | | > [...] including for example the issue of my elementary school | magazine from Easter 1971. | | > [...] school geography notes from when I was 11 years old, | together with the text of a speech I gave | | When he was 11 he had the foresight to realize that he might want | to refer back to this stuff and decided to keep it and store it | somewhere that it could be found again. When I was 11 I'd have | likely thrown it out during the end-of-year desk/locker clean out | and not given it a second thought. | | While I don't necessarily aspire to his level of productivity, | I'm very envious of how meticulous his record keeping is. | Whenever I try to get organized like this I quickly get | overwhelmed and give up. | aliljet wrote: | Wow. Reading through Wolfram's post, I stopped and decided to | listen to one of his livestreamed software design sessions. Who | knows what the right model is, but it's very very clear from at | least this video (https://youtu.be/y_M7qtfjjjs) that he's deeply | technical and incredibly actively involved in development. I | really want to know how effective he is as an organization's | manager and not their product manager... | ninotheopsguy wrote: | An important point not to forget is that he runs an 800 employee | profitable company with no outside investments (not to mention | his academic work) | zorrolovsky wrote: | That was a great read. It got me smiling!. It's not often that | you find fellow control freaks in the wild. Stephen Wolfram's | personal infrastructure sounds overall great, but it crumbles in | the sound department. If you're going to be on calls for hours | every day, for everything that is holy please get a hands-free | set up. The most ergonomic object is no object at all. | | I use a Scarlett 212 mic and sound card paired with a decent pair | of speakers and my working room works like a charm. Everything is | set up so if I start a call any device I can walk though the | office and have a conversation with someone like they're in the | room. 10/10 would recommend. | germinalphrase wrote: | Are you using a single mic placed on your desk? A wireless lav | mic? | | I imagine you can hear your partners quite well, but _I_ want | to be heard well also. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-11-02 23:00 UTC)