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Cognitive Decline or Sanity Incline?

https://mdelcaro.substack.com/p/cognitive-decline-or-sanity-incline
14•fathermarz•1h ago

Comments

hyperhello•49m ago
What I think this was intended to say was that a lot of nonsense work can be done by AI, so let’s eliminate the nonsense work. Valid, but consider that you may be protected too by the amount of paperwork it takes to hurt someone.
Supermancho•6m ago
> this was intended to say was that a lot of nonsense work can be done by AI, so let’s eliminate the nonsense work

I'm not sure this makes sense, since there is no getting away from "nonsense work", which is shorthand for low value return on time and cognitive overhead.

I understood the post to mean something different...with my own added context.

The digital age has increased the complexity of life and various processes by orders of magnitude. Programming is at the forefront, having had to deal with implementation for decades. The complexity necessarily grows every day, as the easiest problems are solved first, before tackling more nuanced or difficult ones (very different). Understanding how to identify these, track the tradeoffs, and choose specialized approaches, grows in every vertical. There are many subjects that a person can study for their entire life and not fully comprehend the totality. We have been living in a time where specialists must be increasingly specialized, for decades, due to the breadth of human knowledge and social progress.

One of the best ways to deal with this complexity, has been to be smarter. Have a better memory. Have high cognitive function. This leaves an ever-growing amount of the population in uncertainty. Families all have (or had) a "smart" resource they tapped to answer the tough questions and find paths through seemingly-intractable legalities, kafka-esque bureaucracy, medical emergency, financial advice, et al. AI has given many of the less-gifted (majority) a "wise" resource that seems to be informed enough to provide solutions and even offer opinions that can be reasoned, for some value of "reason". AI has also granted easily accessible automation. This will make the situation worse. A form of specialized logical processor would have been necessary at some point (mentat or AI). It came earlier than many expected, but this is the form and it's here now.

VCFundedGenYer•49m ago
> I look at Apple crushing decade old bugs and technical debt

Specifics on this? There is zero evidence of this.

badlibrarian•45m ago
I have a business. Sometimes I buy things on Amazon. At tax time, I search for the big business items and categorize them in QuickBooks until I give up.

You know who doesn't give up? Claude, who doesn't seem to realize how shitty and slow QuickBooks Online is. It's even happy to click 19 times to do a split because I dared to add a router and shampoo to the same Amazon cart in a weak moment of convenience one night back in February 2025.

Some so-called skills are worth letting atrophy. Whatever I used to do with a janky browser plugin and two monitors full of Excel windows at tax time is one of them.

TacticalCoder•31m ago
> Whatever I used to do with a janky browser plugin and two monitors full of Excel windows at tax time is one of them.

Yeah the amount of time the taxman has wasted in my life is beyond belief. I automated a lot of it myself over the years but now having the help of LLMs to fill the bullshit, pointless, Brazilian (the movie, not the country) crap to please mister taxman is a godsend.

xnx•5m ago
AI's superpower might be it's ability to serve as versatile and easy to use interface on top of systems with terrible UI, inconsistent data, etc.

Total Annihilation, rebuilt for modern computers

https://nanolathe.gg
211•jttnr•3h ago•87 comments

Cartographers of North Korea

https://cartographers-nk.wonyoung.so/
50•edent•1h ago•4 comments

Chapter 1 of Ways of Seeing by John Berger

https://www.ways-of-seeing.com/ch1
44•rafael859•2h ago•6 comments

Be The Onion's Hero for Once

https://mailchi.mp/email.theonion.com/archivehunt
121•mooreds•1h ago•5 comments

NYC's "Click to Cancel" rule is now in effect

https://www.nyc.gov/main/click-to-cancel
218•gregsadetsky•3h ago•86 comments

Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]

https://teorth.github.io/tao-web/slides/math-2-0-caltech-2026.pdf
248•Anon84•7h ago•297 comments

Artificial Insanity

https://richwhitehouse.com/index.php?postid=78
22•leglock•1h ago•13 comments

I guess I'm using WebP now?

https://anderegg.ca/2026/10/08/i-guess-im-using-webp-now
38•Brajeshwar•2d ago•24 comments

apsw: Another Python SQLite Wrapper

https://github.com/rogerbinns/apsw
41•tosh•4h ago•11 comments

LineageOS 24.0

https://lineageos.org/Changelog-32/
378•timschumi•14h ago•159 comments

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Vex in NixOS

https://blog.kammel.dev/post/nixos_vex/
14•datosh•1h ago•0 comments

Akhetonics Photonic Computing: 1,000x Faster CPUs

https://medium.com/@timventura/akhetonics-photonic-computing-1-000x-faster-cpus-b9e91c470079
43•peter_d_sherman•3d ago•24 comments

Shape-sensing sheet digitally tracks its own movement as it bends and twists

https://news.mit.edu/2026/shape-sensing-sheet-digitally-tracks-movement-bends-twists-1008
19•bookofjoe•1d ago•0 comments

Playgrnd – tiny tools for making weird, beautiful things

https://www.playgrnd.tools/
37•eustoria•4h ago•6 comments

How I reverse engineered a commercial spatial audio effect

http://epestr.com/blog/reverse-engineering-a-commercial-spatial-audio-effect/
65•epestr•5h ago•25 comments

The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME

https://disconnect3d.pl//2026/10/02/dont-put-tilde-in-your-path/
187•arusekk•8h ago•121 comments

The RAM shortage is bringing back DDR4

https://www.theverge.com/games/1009140/ram-shortage-intel-amd-ddr4-comeback
249•1potato•1d ago•260 comments

I paid people to try and follow my README

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/10/i-paid-people-to-try-and-follow-my-readme/
342•edent•9h ago•179 comments

I'm sorry, but you still have to think

https://itsallaboutthebit.com/i-am-sorry-but-you-still-have-to-think/
258•drogus•6h ago•97 comments

Valen's Memory Safety: A New Kind of Borrow Checking

https://verdagon.dev/blog/valen-group-borrowing
118•verdagon•9h ago•71 comments

FlowCE: Calculus on your TI-84 Plus CE

https://tommyb3ll.github.io/FlowCE/
3•jgx0•1d ago•3 comments

Weave (YC W25) is hiring ML, AI, product, & design engineers

https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/weave-os
1•adchurch•9h ago

A Cray-1 supercomputer replica from 30 "obsolete" Mac Minis

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/a-cray-1-supercomputer-replica-from-30-obsolete-mac-minis/
46•pseudolus•1d ago•20 comments

Show HN: BetterWispr – Free, open-source dictation for Mac

https://betterwispr.com/
121•kartik017•9h ago•76 comments

A city-building game in which the city would prefer you didn't

https://housing.over.pizza/
521•JumpCrisscross•1d ago•173 comments

3rd Yandex Cloud Data Center Was Hit

https://status.yandex.cloud/en/incidents/2136
516•defly•13h ago•621 comments

Build your own decision model

https://nishtahir.com/build-your-own-decision-model/
446•softwaredoug•22h ago•102 comments

Nitter: Update Oct 10th seeking funding and legal help

https://nitter.net
397•ForHackernews•10h ago•201 comments

IRCv3

https://ircv3.net/
297•basilikum•10h ago•256 comments

Plumbers, chains, and famous painters: The history of the pipe operator in R

http://adolfoalvarez.cl/blog/2021-09-16-plumbers-chains-and-famous-painters-the-history-of-the-pi...
50•sinnsro•2d ago•3 comments