Tag: Attention
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Blind to the solutions we were never taught to see
Programmers are trained to see everything as a software-shaped problem: if you do a task three times, you should probably automate it with a script. Rename every IMG_*.jpg file from the last week to hawaii2025_*.jpg, they tell their terminal, while the rest of us painfully click and copy-paste. We are blind to the solutions we…
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The secret to being happy in 2026? It’s far, far simpler than you think … | New year | The Guardian
In the end, though, there is a consideration even more fundamental than any of these, which is that it’s not clear what life is really for at all, if it isn’t for doing more of whatever makes you feel most alive. It’s notoriously easy to slip into the unconscious assumption that any such aliveness is…
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Tired of the wellness industrial complex? Six rules to ditch – and what to do instead | Well actually | The Guardian
As well as no phones at the dinner table or in the hour before bed, he tries to spend every Saturday entirely screen-free. He has yet to achieve 52 consecutive weeks, Emanuele admits – but the intent is important. “If we rely on our own willpower, we’re going to fail … You have to create…
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Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection
Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection — Read on www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/
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Molly Cantillon on X: “THE PERSONAL PANOPTICON. A few months ago, I started running my life out of Claude Code.
This is the default now. The bottleneck is no longer ability. The bottleneck is activation energy: who has the nerve to try, and the stubbornness to finish. This favors new entrants. People who question unquestioned assumptions because they don’t know any better. The founders who sprint through walls and will their dogged pursuits into existence.…
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These College Students Ditched Their Phones for a Week. Could You? – The New York Times
By midweek, students said they felt more immersed in the world around them. They met up to hand-write letters to family members and discuss “Self-Reliance,” the poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson. (“Oh what is Heaven but the fellowship / Of minds that each can stand against the world / By its own meek and incorruptible…
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The Score by C Thi Nguyen review – a brilliant warning about the gamification of everyday life
For Nguyen, wonder, absorption and play are central to human flourishing. Metrics are a kind of invasive species threatening to replace our weird, delicate joys with the dumbed-down epistemic fundamentalism of league tables and graphs. — Read on www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jan/06/the-score-by-c-thi-nguyen-review-a-brilliant-warning-about-the-gamification-of-everyday-life
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The Goon Squad, by Daniel Kolitz
From these companies’ perspective, the ideal consumer would do literally nothing but goon, lose at gambling, and maybe watch other people play video games. You can try to fight this. You can read a book, pet a dog, buy a stupid box to lock away your phone. You can make a joke about the box,…