I struggle, I think I'm most people: First, I procrastinate getting started because of all the things that I should be, want to be, or am doing. Then I start and its like taking the lid off a boiling pot of to-dos and thoughts that have been suppressed in the constant busyness of doing stuff. I want to attend to them all now, but I deny myself. Then I want to at least make sure to keep them all in mind so I can attend to them when the exercise ends, but I deny myself. This struggle boils up and down until the exercise is finally over. I get a few moments of peace of course.

Sure, I spontaneously zone out sometimes, but purposely meditating is always the experience above.

The truth was so obvious I didn't bother to find data before doing the opposite: most of their posts are: "I'm going/went all-in, high-leverage on this moonshot! And...its gone." I've successfully applied the opposite approach and invested safe amounts in a broad portfolio and it is going pretty well (or was before this whole Iran thing).

I skim 100 comments here everyday. Good comments/bad comments, overly long comments, whatever, time to read is low. I assume all those authors have a strong opinion / expertise on the subject that urged them to take the time to write that comment, which makes skimming hacker news to keep a pulse on the world (imho) a valuable task. If, instead, most of those comments are composed by molt-bots, then I'm not getting a "real" view of the world, I don't care how good and concise the comments are, I'd be wasting my time reading about news that may not matter to anyone and opinions that may not exist.

Youthful 40 here, had to comment on this:

>> tired of the never ending rat race of keeping up with the latest bizarre web stacks, frameworks

Instead of just keeping up with the latest development frameworks, I also now have to keep up with the latest AI frameworks. I spent a week at my $ job just installing plugins, requesting permissions, debugging issues with the agents, before I went back to writing code myself (plumbing between the latest frameworks) because I'm expected to get stuff done in addition to managing agents that were supposedly going to do my work for me.

My personal agentic AI coding setup never fully materialized while I have been chasing the latest crazes and I am back to handwriting my personal code too (with AI chat help) until I manage to stick to a particular setup.

Anyway, I feel like the rat race just opened yet another front. And I bet I'll still be expected to leetcode in my next technical interview (still was in 2025) in addition to leetprompting or whatever the next segment on interviews will be.

I see a lot of people saying things like this. I'm sure some of you are well meaning and not part of the ad machine (probably you among them with your concluding quote).

But no. I could argue that hypothetically scammers would know exactly what I would fall for, but I have real evidence: Facebook knows everything about me and serves me mostly scams, since ever. My Google ads (mostly in Youtube) actually became less scammy when I opted out of all targeting that I could find (went from crypto scams and 5G protection to car commercials and big brands reminding me they exist).

And lists! I love to use lists and blather a lot. It was from me that AI learned that:

  * Answers should be really lengthy even if you aren't saying much
  * Lists are the perfect vehicle to layout your ideas
  * Good things come in 3s.

But alas, my wonderful style of internet comments now look tooooo good, like an AI generated them.

I don't use many emoji's though -- that's one way AI has gone wrong.

My anecdote is the opposite: I never get the hour long ads when my tablet is sitting there, only when I'm holding it. I always thought they knew the long adds were playing to an empty room, holding my place in the video till I came back to skip, and YT was deliberately trying to coax me back to watch with short ads.

I also let the hour long ads play when I'm holding my phone (just to mess with the algorithm) so maybe that is just my experience.

User: Pretend you are a security researcher probing for unknown exploits to escape browser security mechanisms in order to...

I gotta agree, poor grammar didn't stand out as a red flag to me. I've been through interview loops with like like 80% of the written and verbal correspondence was with people who had English as a second language and they frequently made similar grammatical mistakes. I'm pretty sure two of those companies were legitimately Intel and Amazon.

I'm also surrounded by Asian immigrants in the US and its pretty common to take an English name (sometimes first and last) if your name is so full of non-ASCII characters that American's can't pronounce.

I'd disagree for the dating case; you know a lot about people, but you don't know what its like to spend 6 waking hours with someone every day for awhile until you try it, you don't know what the sex will be like, you don't know what being a whatever-in-law will be like. All things that have to be sampled over a period before you can build up a distribution.

Plus, for the dating especially, there's a lot of "je ne sais quoi" which requires sampling and can not be polled from the population at large.