OK, this is awesome, I had no idea they met. Big Campbell + Star Wars fan here, always assumed the influence was abstract. This was a great historical read.
One thing a high school teacher told me and that I carry with me more and more nowadays is that you need to classify what you’re reading before you read it. Not everything is news. There’s always a mix of real information, FUD, and gossip. If you treat all of it the same, burnout is inevitable.
You need to train yourself to scan and decide which discussions are worth going into and which aren’t.
This applies to any kind of forum or group chat.
If I’m happy? I see HN less as a place for joy and more as a place to know what’s going on. It’s still useful. There’s a lot of BS mixed in, and that’s just part of the deal. It’s not a defining part of my happiness or my life, almost like a newspaper.
I just ignore the sloppy posts, be it AI or non-AI related.
Of those options, paying for search seems like the cheapest.
A VPN might win on price (sometimes? kagi is just $5/mo), but relocating countries to get better results when searching for code related stuff feels a bit over-optimized. And as we know, premature optimization is the root of all evil.
I was very disappointed with Supernova in the East. What started as a telling of the Pacific War from the point of view of the Japanese empire morphed into the usual "war is bad but American soldiers are heroes" that's very common for this period.
I tuned out when he spent 30 minutes describing a famous photo-op of General MacArthur going ashore to the Philippines. That is the complete opposite of the original promise of the podcast.
Your comment makes sense to me and it feels like a Windows trade-off: optimizing for the average user while eroding power-user controls; Mark Russinovich has talked about the need for explicit, advanced modes instead of burying power-user behavior behind heuristics in one of his videos about what he would change in Windows.
Google could benefit from the same idea: an expert mode where explicit signals override inference with genuinely usable advanced search features (language, filters, etc) as first-class tools.
Japan is an entire situation to me as well, Google completely walls off results in Japanese, even when I specifically want it. Sometimes I need to search things in English, but on the Japanese web and for that I think VPN might be the only way.
I run a small personal VPN, but not one of these company solutions, might be time to do that.
(in Brazilian Portuguese)
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