I believe that we'll see a lot of "x is good for your brain" news (with X just being any activity that doesn't involve a screen), now that attention spans are so short and everyone feels like their brain isn't the same anymore.
The same way we got gyms when people realized physical inactivity is super unhealthy.
Mean sure, but doing just that misses the learning and specific attention part. Going from "bird" to species, learning about morphological, vocal differences is going beyond "being a little more active and interested in your surroundings". It's really engaging every sensory and cognitive system in concert.
That said, collecting plants or beetles is probably equally beneficial. Geocaching comes to mind too.
Although, I wonder if looking up may contribute, given old people tend deform and bend forward with age. Could affect blood or lymphatic circulation.
What if we took the idea of two minutes of hate session from the dystopian 1984 and made it available all the time. Everyone could carry in their pocket their own personal two minutes of hate that they can have any time they want as often as they want. Orwell never dreamed so high
We all have that already, it's called smartphone sadly.
It works with whatever political direction you lean on, which stance you have on two or more genders, which religion you love or hate, which gaming platform you prefer, how old you are and many more "divide and conquer"-topics.
It'll be difficult to replace because it's so effective already...
What percentage of people are neither of the simple common XY nor XX chromosomes?
It's about as many people as there are with red hair. If you don't include chimerics it's about 0.25-1.7%, if you do include twin chimerics it's 8%, not including mothers micro-chimerism.
Probably shouldn't be having those Kenyans (Kalenjin) competing in marathons either. Completely unfair advantage.
That's great! I think anything that's not passively consuming a screen will be known as "good for your brain", the same way that regular food has become known as "health food".
Eschewing eating ultraprocessed, factory-made food is now seen as a deliberate health choice, even though it used to be the default. I think the same is happening with the brain.
Reading a book is now seen as some erudite choice. Having a hobby like knitting, birdwatching, etc. will be some kind of "good for your brain" activity. Things that used to be the only option are now "healthy choices".
Funnily enough, my bird watching does in fact involve a screen — the electronic viewfinder on my camera[0].
Jokes aside, there is a very definite difference in how my brain "feels" when I'm walking around, camera in hand, looking for things to photograph. It's like I'm in a different "cognitive mode", for the lack of a better term. It's not just about being present and in the moment, but about seeing the world around you from a different perspective.
multiple times in the last few months I've done a thing and then a week after having done it, felt like it was something I'd have to be crazy to attempt, even though I did it and it went fine and it wasn't even that wacky. Because you get in a different mindset when you're actually doing something than when you're sitting at home wasting time on RuneScape*
* probably one of the less bad things you can do on a screen, since it predates the everything-for-attention era
RuneScape is certainly far from the very worst of the internet, but it's still wise to be wary of Skinner boxes. Of course I don't follow that advice either.
I think it is slightly different than that. I think it is more about active brain activity versus passive. Learning how to play Riichi Mahjong (e.g.) would likely show a similar effect. A lot of people push brain puzzles as a tool against dementia, etc. but it is only helpful when learning a new puzzle type. Once you over learn it, our innate pattern matching takes over and you start playing on auto-pilot, it stops "rewiring" your brain. Just sitting on the couch binging streaming or swiping through shorts is likely to atrophy your brain.
Obviously being out in nature has other mental health benefits. The key thing is to keep learning and stay curious. Drive to some new nearby town on a weekend and learn about its history. Learn a new hobby like full f-stop photography or learn how to bake or cook (learn all four base sauces). Take up board games and explore all the different kinds of experiences they provide today.
Oh please, this is Internet nonsense. Google tells me:
> Psychologists and neuroscientists find no structural decline in the human brain's ability to focus. Sustained attention limits remain largely unchanged.
I and pretty much everyone I know has repeatedly mentioned how difficult of a time they're having reading books, code (software eng. friends), or even watching the first half of a movie without feeling the need to open their phones and scrolling Instagram.
This is all very anecdotal (and thus not quantifiable) - but I find the need for others and I to check their phones far more distracting and frequent than the need for getting up and stretching your legs and/or getting snacks during a movie.
Yep, I would say social media, especially in us Gen Zs, has made us more cynical and worried about the state of the world, apart from the obvious attention span problems.
We live in India, so for example, the rise of online (and offline) hatred towards us has definitely had an impact.
Did Jev take off briefly and stopped getting talked about a few days later? Yes.
But that doesn't make it a failure. In the era where we have:
a) an AI hype cycle where the benchmark of "successful product" is ChatGPT, Claude Code, etc.
b) a social media environment that only rewards the most-engaged content
It's easy to declare something "fell off" because it didn't immediately revolutionize how everyone does their daily work.
But by that measure, nearly everything is a failure, even if it creates great businesses. That's especially true for infrastructure that runs in the background.
The author ironically thinks people talking about a product is more indicative of its success than its success – which is hype, the very thing he railed against.
They literally raised $870 million this month. It's like people think the hype cycle = success of business for some reason. I'm sure a couple of months later, they're going to release something new, hire a lot of PR, and the same people will be "man, Jev had fallen but this new [xyz] brings them so back! [xyz] industry will now be dead!"
Likewise, I switched over about 20 frustratingly buggy llm judgement calls that were using Luna (should the model use X tool, should it trigger deep research, what topic is the question etc.). I had spent days tuning the prompts to get somewhat decent results - meaning correct maybe 70% of the time.
I told an agent to test switching those all over to Jev. Came back a couple of hours later, thinking of this as an experiment, no major expectations, to find that they were all giving 100% accurate results in 800ms median time.
So it got adopted in a couple of hours work, it's live now, working very well, and I haven't had to think about it for the past week. That's the definition of a successful product.
EDIT: I should note two things
- there was actually one non English case that didn't have such high accuracy, now that I think about it.
- I assume a big part of why I got such good results was that I'd already spent ages tuning the prompts for Luna
OpenAI has a decisions API now so you didn't even have to migrate to Jev at all. Personally I'm using the open weight D3 decision models which work great and work locally on everything from phones to beefier computers due to the range of models they have.
It's still a pretty new field but Jev handily beats Luna-decisions on the Artificial Analysis Decision Index on every metric (price, latency, and accuracy)
I already have openrouter wired in so it was about as easy either way. Anyway I'm always happy to switch even a little bit of the stack away from OpenAI.
E every 2 weeks we have a new hype cycle so all in according to how stuff already works I don't see something special here. I use jev, but it does not solve all my problems.
-If the AI part is so important, why doesn't the company use OpenCode/Kilo etc. and fund it via OpenRouter? That way you could even level the playing field by giving everyone the same access to the same models.
-I believe some of this is temporary. Just about everyone is now constantly using AI, so I believe we'll soon care more about someone actually being able to explain how they'd go about something and why rather than just "can you produce code that does this"
-The idea of "applications are a numbers game" and spewing hundreds of resumes everywhere is dying. I know extremely highly qualified people whose resumes never get looked at and recruiters who never look at applications. Everyone is making application materials with AI and HR teams review them with AI. I believe we'll enter an era that's much more manual and high touch.
> If the AI part is so important, why doesn't the company use OpenCode/Kilo etc. and fund it via OpenRouter? That way you could even level the playing field by giving everyone the same access to the same models.
The post said it's a risk and liability. I assume they mean the applicant may use the AI credits for malicious purposes like hacking or other illegal things and get the company in hot water, their accounts and subscriptions banned or sued or similar.
Why you can just setup an account, or give interviewee a credit to spend on OperRouter.
Or you can have internal infrastructure to host some models and langfuse there to inspect what they were doing actually.
Yeah I agree. The exact mechanics are fungible, but the point is that it’s definitely possible to give applicants AI access without giving them a seat on the enterprise plan.
But you could also just pay them cash. There are hiring processes where the take-home assignment is of such a size that the applicant gets paid for it. If you can't figure this out for the sake of maximizing the potential applicant pool then you likely don't think it's that important and critical for the company.
Yeah exactly. Reimburse $20 for whatever AI paid plan if applicants don’t have one. Many will anyway, and one can’t expect Claude Max and Free users to compete for the same job.
> why doesn't the company use OpenCode/Kilo etc. and fund it via OpenRouter?
Because 90% of IT departments' eyes just glazed over. Assuming you're interviewing at a company big enough to have one.
> Just about everyone is now constantly using AI,
As far as I can tell, this is only true in California. There are plenty of managers at every company who have to do the dance and pretend everyone uses it, I'll give you that.
I feel that beyond the proper social events (e.g. dinner parties, hangouts etc.), another important part that has declined is the little social stuff.
Having a chat with the butcher, barista, etc. or just bumping into people you know and talking for a few minutes is pretty uplifting when it happens regularly.
I feel like the containerization of life erodes this.
I find this page super interesting because it's what you'd expect from a B2B SaaS vendor, not from Apple. You'd never see them build an "iPhone vs Samsung" page, for instance.
A smartphone is also a tool. If you could have a smartphone without all the compulsive checking, endless scrolling, etc. it'd be incredible.
But the smartphone bundles the productive (but not addictive) capabilities with addictive, anxiety-causing wastes of time. The latter consume the vast majority of time spent on phones.
LLMs have the same problem: they bundle so many capabilities that they enable our worst tendencies. I can use it in a precise manner and reserve the decision-making, cognitively demanding work for myself. But realistically that's not what most people are going to do, and even those with the best intentions will frequently produce AI slop because they're in a rush or whatever.
-fewer people are asking questions because they’re asking AI instead or AI obviates the question by solving the challenge immediately.
-Asking a question is less likely to get you good answers because fewer people know the answers (or give you an AI response you could’ve generated yourself)
This could be great for documentation. Screenshots in docs are frequently useless because they show me a screen and say "click X" where I still have to search X visually. And I could just to dhat in the other tab I have open.
It doesn’t make sense that you have to read a whole article and then still search for the buttons in the UI afterwards. And with longer articles, you always have to keep the article open next to your product to follow the whole flow.
I believe the “vibe-code an xyz replacement using AI” works well for personal or small internal projects because you can build the 20% of features you actually use.
I’m much more skeptical about a tool being replaced at scale because AI code tends to be way more brittle as you accommodate more use cases.
The data model you can vibe code for the 2 integrations you need won’t work when you need to support 200 integrations.
The same way we got gyms when people realized physical inactivity is super unhealthy.
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