Social Media Damages Your Brain

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• Social media damages y...
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[@Euphorya]

"Hey Johnathan, what do you think about Carbon?" 15mins later.... "And that's why we don't have peace in the middle east!".

[@TheShitpostExperience]

He does seem either missinformed or to live in a bubble though. There's big things being built worldwide that aren't the sphere, like the james webb telescope, a lot of solar and wind farms for transitioning to renewable energies, china did a huge increase in it's high speed rail, there's high speed rail being built across europe improving connection between countries, etc. There's not much going on in the US because everything taht was highly needed to be built already has, and the things it need now (like public transport systems across the country, single payer universal healthcare, and many other things most modern countries have) are being held hostage by a political struggle. Also the sphere was a terrible idea, and I wouldn't even considerit a big mega project, it's objectively a negative value infrastructure. Also when was the last victory of the US in a war is kinda dumb, as years ago it shifted it's focus from winning them, to keeping them on just so the military industrial complex can keep on making money. The US could easily stop the situation in gaza, or stop russia in ukraine, but why shoudl they? they make money from selling weapons to israel and ukraine, and the US isn't really affected by it, at least by the people at the top of the ladder.

[@weetabixs]

@@TheShitpostExperience yeah, that was an annoying part of his argument, says he doesn't like people talking about stuff they know little about then proceeds to talk about a bunch of stuff he clearly knows little about. There is also a loss of knowledge on certain types of large scale building projects since we haven't had projects for those former experts and workflows to keep in practice. I think a big part of how the topic was argued by Johnathan and Prime is by them drawing from only what the popular media feeds them; like the sphere is eye catching and is one giant advertisement, but most public works and transit projects aren't interesting enough for the media to have any reason to report on them other than to the people who it will directly affect. I didn't like how it ended with prime supporting his argument to the extent he did, it just made them both look very ignorant about how ignorant they are to many of the topics that aren't programming.

[@ch3burashka]

Trying to watch TV with Prime must be hell.

[@3_smh_3]

the irony of being a Netflix Engineer.

[@CascadiaNow69]

It would be GOOD if he didn’t fuckin yell randomly for no reason

[@hastyscorpion]

What do you think the point of reacting to a video is? if you want to go watch the video, go watch the video. If you want Prime's commentary on the video com here. He isn't going to just play the video. There is no point.

[@GameOn0827]

Imagine watching the directors commentary version of a movie and getting upset that the director is talking...

[@XDarkGreyX]

Uhm.......

[@ult1873]

Damn! "Your brain falls into optimization patterns" seems like a cool way of thinking about it

[@ThePlayerOfGames]

Or a cool way of not thinking about 'it' 😏

[@nhinged]

That's why we find things cool Efficiency

[@clerooth]

That idea reminds me of marshall mcluhan's "the medium is the message" the way that media changes our optimization modes is more important than the content we consume.

[@moonasha]

36:25 this is some of the most important life advice right here. I think I heard it from the Japanese, that, if you're unmotivated to do a task, you tell yourself "I'll do it for 5 minutes and then stop". The time is so short you can trick yourself into doing it, and by that time that 5 minutes is up 9/10 times you'll want to keep going.

[@indiesigi7807]

Yeah, whatever you feel just start doing it. You'll get sucked right in.

[@defeqel6537]

another is the "make it easy to do the right thing, and difficult to do the wrong thing"

[@nullset2]

"Social media rots your brain" says the streamer on social media, reacting to the streamer on social media.

[@Kycilak]

The irony... Andd also the irony in me writing this comment...

[@TomNook.]

Tell me you haven't watched the video without saying you haven't watched the video. He's discussing about the points raised by Blow, not agreeing with it.

[@carlphilippgaebler5704]

"If you're asking how to start, you're not a programmer" I... Can kinda relate... Like, I never set out to Become a Programmer. I just, at age 10-12, knew that my TI-83+ could do programming so I read the manual because I had to know how.

[@yusthavinfun]

i feel like it's such a gatekeeping comment though. We're in a constant flow of evolution. every language is basically the best and worst thing ever at the same time according to different people. Some see clean code as gospel, or OOP as the main standard, and then you go over to theprimagen and he's memeing it. There are also like a million and one courses and so many differnt things. It can easily become overwhelming. Having said that, yeah you do need to do some research yourself, but going to someone who clearly knows their stuff and asking for a bit of help to find the right start between the dozens of them should is not something to be shunned in my opinon

[@warpspeedscp]

@@yusthavinfun a person who is likely to have a successful career in software engineering is usually asking a new question every time, or asks once and just googles first from then on. If you see a person who just keeps asking about the same things multiple times, or asking how they can learn x for every new thing, they're probably not going to do as well, an may as well use their time more productively.

[@Nina-cd2eh]

@@warpspeedscp But like everything else, this is a skill you build. When someone doesn't know where to start, they don't know where to start. Nobody ever does, and the reality is, this field is overwhelming for anyone on the outside. Despite what people tell you, programming is not just for the few or the smart. For some people this isn't a hobby, it's just a job that pays the bills. For some people, this isn't a "career" but simply what you do as a job. There are plenty of unmotivated, uninterested devs that are doing just fine, where nearly all of their knowledge is incidental to their current employment, and they couldn't care less about anything else. Saying "I don't know where to start" already puts you ahead of surprisingly many, just because you have even that small interest in it.

[@Alaestr]

I get the sense that Prime has his heart in the right place regarding this topic. Especially clear when he sort of opposed putting down the people who ask questions. It’s an interesting phenomenon that jblow criticizes people for the short attention span driven by dopamine addiction, and at the same guy has a ton of ignorant takes regarding new breakthroughs in different fields of science he didn’t have enough attention span or grit to actually get to know. As with most of jblow’s takes he really gets influenced by his biases and I get a feeling that he rarely critically approaches his own views. What I find terrifying is that jblow’s is very ignorant about his own ignorance - he lets his ignorance freely shape his views and he rarely questions the validity of his reasoning. Prime has a little bit more humility regarding what he knows and what he doesn’t know, so he approaches most of these absolutist statements with more caution which I find more palatable because it doesn’t sound like ramblings of an angsty teenager. ‘“I don’t remember the last big building built in America”. And there it is, apparently the world and the science only happens in the USA. It’s one of the most prevalent type of blindness I find in the video, which is: there’s more to the world than USA. Amazing feats of engineering are being made in the Middle East, there are genetic breakthroughs made in china, there are societal breakthroughs happening in Africa and Asia almost yearly. There are medical breakthroughs happening monthly. The last one that made to big new being a covid vaccine which used a new approach to making vaccines and no joke saved hundreds of millions of lives. In our time, it’s not possible to keep up to date with the whole world, it’s simply too much information. But the belief that things are not happening in the world or there are some phenomenons in the world without actually doing the proper research is not only ignorant but it’s just plain stupid. The same goes to this topic of screen time, etc. Prime, why not have a look at that mythical research you were referencing. Why not spend some time on stream even to teach people how to find high quality research and how to critically review it. Why not open some books about drivers behind motivation, dopamine circuits, etc. It’s easy to make blanket statements when you don’t actually engage in the complexity of the problem.

[@defeqel6537]

Heck, what about KZbin? It's pretty amazing by itself, not to mention all the infrastructure around it, worldwide.

[@judedavis92]

“Social media - Propagating shallow news at a high speed” - Mr Blow (Vim btw)

[@user-lz2oh9zz4y]

It is funny because he uses Emacs

[@RandomNoob1124]

Blow always speak fax and his work speaks for itself, he’s not a fraud yapper dev 🙏🏾

[@friedrichmyers]

I use Emacs. You should try it. It is better than anything in the market. I used vim but now after using emacs, I don't even use the vim keybindings in emacs

[@sebastienpautot]

Sounds more like the MGS2 plot than a JBlow quote

[@BrunodeSouzaLino]

Also Blow: is only relevant because of social media.

[@BrunodeSouzaLino]

Social Media is a children's idea of what social interactions in real life might look like.

[@kuhluhOG]

and some people (even as adults) put that way into practice IRL as you can imagine, it's not fun to be around them

[@BrunodeSouzaLino]

@@kuhluhOG Pretty much considering the people that created social media were social outcasts for the most part.

[@hotgoosezion547]

The point you make around 2:15 was something I had experience with just today. A couple days ago, in the video about a company making their own database solution, you talked about reserving memory space for header content. Today I was having issue with figuring it out the type of data I sent from my server to my client, and realized I could just send the data type along with the data itself. It saved me a huge headache, even though it took me quite a bit to realize it was something I could do!

[@BX9-rr9bz]

a 1 hour reaction to a 17 minutes video 👏

[@Slashx92]

Professional reactlord

[@sdstorm]

Kinda makes me want to shut it off and just go to the original video.

[@elliottalderson6443]

Propagating less shallow news at even higher speeds.

[@joedartonthefenderbass]

@@sdstorm mfw when the reaction video is full of reactions 😢

[@marcsfeh]

Peak youtuber ratio

[@Billy4321able]

I think it's always important to remind yourself that experts aren't omniscient. If your doctor tells you that what you're experiencing is impossible, find a new doctor. Anecdotal experiences don't amount to data, but they also don't disappear when you look at a graph. If you think someone is wrong about what they experienced, even if it is fundamentally misaligned with reality, it's important to interrogate why it could have happened and present a solution rather than just tell them they're wrong. The ophthalmologist that said eye damage was impossible should have instead asked what else was in the chemical mix. You can't make a positive claim with how little information was presented, so saying something like, I'm not sure, would have been more honest. Similarly telling someone that their drug use can't have affected their memory is just absurd. With how little you know about them, and how little we know about brain chemistry in general, you can't make such an accusation.

[@riley1636]

It's probably people who take it in denial, or if it actually doesn't affect them, just projecting their own experiences onto prime. Or they're making baseless claims, who knows.

[@chris94kennedy]

yo i quit social media almost 8 years ago now. It has advantages and disadvantages. But at least it's not damaging my brain, i let the drugs do that

[@aurele2989]

hot take lmao

[@JeremyAndersonBoise]

One drug or another

[@j-wenning]

42:20 To say "we kidna haven't been doing that much for 30 or 40 years" is such a head the sand take. We've continuously done a ton of shit and made incredible advancements in basically every STEM field over the past half-century. The only thing that's changed is the daily news cycle that has practically numbed us to anything that isn't social outrage

[@CaptTerrific]

While the news cycle may have something to do with it, I imagine that's more a symptom of the same underlying cause vs. the cause itself. What's really changed is that advances in arts, sciences, and engineering are a lot harder to immediately see and understand without deeper knowledge. Looking back at the 20th century, you can see a horse/buggy --> car, the advent of skyscrapers, the invention of the transistor, even electrification, and realize "holy smokes, look at that difference!" without knowing anything about the fields - they are leaps of progress prima facie.

[@tbqhwyf]

Maybe you did, I sure didn't though

[@defeqel6537]

Internet itself, with its various ways of doing physical signalling between machines, is a marvel. AI/ML are pretty amazing for all their limitations. We have luxury cruisers bigger than the ancient wonders, etc. We put robots on another planet to give us information about it. And yes, big and weird buildings are constantly being made too.

[@FrijolesForSale]

Prime giving some of the best advice that I have ever received to this day. Glad to have ever discovered this channel.

[@imsidi]

This video was confusing to me. He makes very good points about "spending more time passively consuming content than doing something productive" and "arguing about things you have no experience or knowledge with," but points like "humanity hasn't made anything as beneficial lately" are so downright odd because we have stuff like the James Webb Telescope, HIV cure advancements, rovers on other planets, reusable rockets for space, stem cell research, solar-powered energy, and so much more.

[@loopingdope]

Skipping the AI, I see

[@nhinged]

​@@loopingdopefr God in technology just casually being missed

[@geoghs02]

​@@loopingdopeof course, they were listing benefits to humanity. Artificial Idiocy is not a benefit.

[@loopingdope]

@@geoghs02 source: you

[@paherbst524]

You're the kind of guy I'd want to be a men's group with. Most people don't like thinking about what makes them tick.

[@noelguiavieira]

It kind of boils down to the following: 1. if you want to achieve greatness, start by rejecting mediocrity (regardless of where it comes from) 2. commit to putting the "flight hours" hard work to build and foster a culture of greatness 3. only with an amplitude of experiences comes the authority to eventually share informed opinions

[@JeremyAndersonBoise]

This is a compelling perspective, and well-stated.

[@fernandopaiva96]

I think that is very nice of Prime to carefully consider each argument Blow says, and I respect him for that, but honestly Blow just talks a lot of shit.

[@woofcaptain8212]

He just speaks his thoughts. Everyone is full of shit it's just some people share it more than others.

[@lydianlights]

@@woofcaptain8212 you know, this is actually good perspective, haha

[@cassiusbright1062]

@@woofcaptain8212 Some people have the sense to know they'd just be talking shit and know to keep their mouths shut.

[@sutirk]

@@woofcaptain8212 statistically, everyone is wrong and dumb in most subjects. The problem is when people are confidently wrong about things

[@TomNook.]

Nope, a lot of good points by Blow, and Primeagen also made some good points

[@CaptTerrific]

41:30 I've never heard so many dumb takes in a row, from both Blow and Prime. The former showing complete ignorance of the incredible advances we've made in engineering and materials sciences over the past decades, and the latter responding to his statements instead of fundamentally questioning them... and then both making absurd statements about architecture, showing a misunderstanding both of the rapid changes in design we've experienced in the past decades, as well as the social and economic drivers of the giant structures (cathedrals and skyscrapers) that they're hyperfocused on. It's the same pattern of thinking that drives well meaning people to want to return to "great" periods of the past.

[@altrag]

"I don't know the last truly big structure that was created in the United States." They're created practically every week in _some_ city somewhere in the US - we call them skyscrapers. The first "skyscraper" in the US was built in 1885 - not even 150 years ago. And it was a whopping 10 stories tall. Today a 10 story building is bog standard and most major downtown cores average closer to 25-30. The reason we don't build anything "truly big" anymore is not economics or even design philosophy - its physics. We _can_ build bigger if we really want to (eg: Burj Khalifa) but the cost per floor after a certain height starts going exponential. Unless there's another revolution in building materials similar to what the invention of high-strength steel and concrete did for us back in the late 1800s, we're pretty much capped out. Of course there's other ways a project can be defined as "big" aside from physical size. But.. we've be doing those. The JWST was only launched a couple of years ago. The Artemis program is in full swing. The NIF in California finally hit the fusion breakeven point barely more than a year ago. The US has been involved in the LHC at CERN as well as ITER in France. The list goes on and on (I know that's all science-focused. What can I say I'm a science nerd!) The only area the US has really fallen behind on in terms of "big" projects is infrastructure. That's kind of been a dirty word in politics (at least at the federal level) for several decades now. Hopefully things will improve with Biden's infrastructure plans but given that such projects are typically 5-10 years in the making and the presidency is up for grabs in November against a guy who will absolutely kill any infrastructure plans if he wins for no reason better than spite and ego, its anyone's guess how far that will go. Yet even with that political risk at the federal level, we've got the high speed rail line in California that's picked up some infamy over the past couple of years but will be a major boon to the state and to American engineering experience overall when its completed. We've got the less well-publicized but arguably more interesting Brightline system in Florida, who are looking to expand into other states in the next few years as well. Quite a few absolutely massive solar and wind projects that the government doesn't really like to talk about due to the idiotic politicization of the technology. None of that is enough to raise the US out of the "falling behind" category (especially in comparison to China), but "falling behind" is not the same as "stopped" - big things are still happening, even if they aren't happening as frequently as we'd perhaps like them to. And of course we've got Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and their ilk fast-forwarding us toward commercialized spaceflight. They might have some personality traits we abhor (or idolize, for some people) but that doesn't take away from the accomplishments they've made. Amazon by itself has revolutionized the entire concept of logistics, and their innovations have stretched far beyond their own corporate borders. They built the AWS platform that runs a large portion of the global internet at this point. Hell the platform we're all watching this on - KZbin - is a "big" project in terms of what it accomplishes for the US and the world.

[@tbqhwyf]

Skyscrapers are really dumb though

[@altrag]

​@@tbqhwyf They're not "really dumb". We often use them in really dumb ways, but the buildings themselves are amazingly useful. You _could_ have apartments and commercial space in the same building and completely invert the "really dumb" idea that we're moving people too far just to pack them into tall buildings. We just don't, often for much of the reason a lot of our other land use is really dumb - zoning laws. There's been a decades-long belief that separating residential and commercial is desirable. And it was, for a while. It's only been few years the demand has shifted, primarily due to increasing concerns around climate change and/or gas prices depending on your political leanings. But regardless of any of that, they're still absolute marvels of engineering. People from the 1800s would have been just as shocked to see a 30-story office tower as they would have been to see an iPhone.

[@tbqhwyf]

@@altrag you don't need an apartment complex to be a skyscraper to have commercial space in the building. Cities all over the world have short houses with small businesses located on the first floor Pretty much the only advantage of a skyscraper is land use, but the US isn't a small country to warrant their need, and if you guys do ever run out of them, you should just demolish the parking lots

[@altrag]

@@tbqhwyf > you don't need an apartment complex to be a skyscraper Never said you did. Missing the point. The reason why skyscrapers have suddenly become labeled as "bad" is because they tend to be packed into downtown cores and zoned exclusively for commercial. That means people have to travel sometimes ridiculously long distances to get from where they live to where they work and back. If those buildings had mixed commercial and residential, that problem is alleviated. Not completely fixed I'm sure, but it would go a long way. Going the other direction and forcing commercial into low- and mid-rise buildings on the other hand would mean _more_ travel time. If you're taking a bunch of 30-story buildings and replacing them with 6-story buildings, you now need 5 times the land area to house the same number of people and businesses. That also means 5 times the travel distance between those people and businesses, especially if you still insist on separating residential and commercial and forcing the suburbs where people actually live even further out into the boonies. Keep in mind there's also an opposing effect: It's much better for businesses to be situated near other businesses. Obviously businesses in general aren't going to bother weighing the environmental or social impact of commuting (which they generally don't pay for) against the benefit of proximity to other businesses (which they often do pay for, one way or another. Think things like couriers that would have to travel much further if businesses were 5x spread out). Just like us people demand social improvements without considering the commercial impact, businesses demand commercial benefits without considering the social impact - it lands on politicians and policymakers to balance those two sets of demands. And that balance shifts over time as public opinion changes. There was 60-70 years of "suburbs are the best!", from both sides of that balance. Businesses got the proximity effect and people got their single family mcmansions. Now the trend is toward more integrated living as traffic gets worse and environmental concerns grow deeper, so things are _starting_ to get better. I live in a reasonably progressive but not first-in-line city, and the past couple of years have seen quite a few notices of various buildings being rezoned from commercial to mixed-use. If my city's doing that it likely means both that some of the more forward-leaning cities have already been working on it for a decade and that the concept is solid enough (politically) that the stragglers will slowly follow suit over the next decade or two.

[@Nina-cd2eh]

​@@altrag Skyscrapers might be engineering feats, but they're still dumb. That density should have been spread around as it always has been in many parts of the world, and not concentrated as the result of suburban sprawl. That belief of separation has never really been prevalent amongst engineers. It never made any sense financially or otherwise. This has only been a thing mostly in america, mostly driven by NIMBYs obsessed with "property value" and racists that didn't want "urban people" in their neighborhood. Nowadays, actual empirical economics are a bigger factor towards better urban development, and it's most definitely not climate nor gas prices. Mixed-use development is just better in every way. It's highly entropic meaning LESS travel time and better quality, and MORE financial sustainability for both housing, businesses, and the people that live there. And also much happier places to live in, in general.

[@CaptTerrific]

55:00 if that's Blow's good observation, then were his other statements about everything from the military to science/engineering to architecture demonstrative, or ironic? Both? :D

[@Gokuroro]

When Prime started talking about HTMX I decided to take a look into the documentation for it. A few lines in there are some bullet points saying "Now any element, not just anchors and forms, can issue an HTTP request; Now [...]" (you get the point) and I read it as if it was written by him.

[@TJackson736]

HTMX is Prime Driven Development

[@TamasBoros_P]

I have to agree with that it was not acid that did damage to that memory, and however I agree with the reaction, I think there are still much more possible explanations to what happened (as people normally do not get damaged memory from tripping). - LSD is a serotonergic antagonist - it directly does not do physical damage on a cellular level. And the dose is so low it is almost impossible to measure its toxicity on any organs. If the acid trip caused your memory issues, it can be becaused it has caused a permanent change in your perception and how your entire brain as a construct works. In that case it can be some trauma running in the background that blocks you and has this symptom or something similar. Or maybe this is when years of smoking hit your conciousness on your memory loss. Or the lack of sleep. Or combinations. However, I find this scenario not likely. - When that trip happened (around 20 years ago) the illegal drug market was full with blotters containing not acid, but bromo-dragonfly, DOM, DOB or some other analogic phenetylamine - yet sold as acid. There were even some deaths caused by the dragonfly sold as acid. Now, phenetylamines (like another popular analog molly) can have serious effects on memory long-term and can cause brain damage. I find this a more likely scenario. Either ways, I feel really empathetic towards this experience - using too much pot fucked up my life as well.

[@almicc]

For architecture, especially in the US, the trend has forced construction companies to do exactly what was asked for the cheapest possible price. It's up to the buyer to provide "pretty" designs, which are going to be nothing but extra cost for zero functional gain. Or worse, the building is designed to be pretty before its function, and so you end up with tremendously expensive and long projects because the engineers are forced to solve much harder problems. Thankfully, at least around where I live, designers are starting to give a damn about the look of their buildings and houses, so places are actually starting to look nicer.

[@AlbertCloete]

I think one thing to consider with the cathedrals, and other older mega projects, is that lots of it required throwing human suffering at the problem. Which we're not willing to do anymore. Most people lived in squalor when the cathedrals were built. Now, we'd rather have everyone live in a relatively nice house with good amenities. Rather than have a few central buildings where we spend all of our effort on, to the exclusion of other development.

[@DominikPlaylists]

No. Cathedrals just took a long time to build, sometimes well over 100 years. How about you compare skylines of 1924 and today of say Las Vegas, Shenzhen, Dubai, Panama City, Warsaw, Singapore or New Cairo.

[@Nina-cd2eh]

A lot of those places, very frequently, were symbols of power. Who could build cathedrals, but the richest org in the world, that everyone chooses to kneel to and give their money to, as the supposed saints ordained by God? It's most definitely not just "people were more motivated" or something as simple like that. Even nowadays, most "mega projects" are pet projects by tasteless billionaires. Case in point places like the entirety of Dubai if not the broader UAE.

[@defeqel6537]

Yep, something like 15 000 dead for the Panama canal IIRC

[@DominikPlaylists]

@@Nina-cd2eh I was talking about Panama City, not Panama Canal. I think not many people died and they were all compensated. Just like all the other cases.

[@DominikPlaylists]

@@Nina-cd2eh I'd say in Shenzhen it was a lot more motivated people, and if billionaires, it was motivated billionaires, not pet projects. Even in UAE, it is Abu Dhabi that is the center of power, not Dubai.

[@ColaKingThe1]

1 hour reaction to a 17 minutes video, good im in the right place

[@maxlee3838]

The family that plays together stays together.

[@hikemalliday6007]

I like this channel dude has solid takes

[@brentsaner]

SemVer actually *does* recommend v1.0.0+ as "production ready". Second question in their FAQ.

[@gro967]

This video is the best example why developers should stay in their bubble. I never heard someone so unqualified and uninformed about economics and society pretending to have any idea about it 🙈 I hope everyone who can think for themselves is able to quickly realize how wrong and unscientific the bs is that Blow is trying to convince us about.

[@drj-pp8hw]

"therapy is useless"🙄🤡🤡

[@mememayhemofficial3573]

@@drj-pp8hw it is, studies show talk therapy does bery little, for men especially

[@indiesigi7807]

@@drj-pp8hw here's some medicine, it has 30% chance of helping you hahaha.

[@Nina-cd2eh]

@@GIGADEV690 You sure love to talk about things you've never experienced yourself. Literally just saying things just to say them.

[@Nina-cd2eh]

He really strikes me as the kind of person that thinks that, everything he believes is objectively true just because he thinks he has "sufficiently" reasoned into them with his totally-not-self-inflated galaxy brain. He's not always wrong, but man some of the stuff he says...

[@raidtheferry]

Thx for linking vid in description. Too many ytbers don't at all

[@tolstoievski4926]

When you have a shitty health, starting the task isn't sufficient to increase your motivation.

[@kuhluhOG]

especially mental health but that's where self-discipline comes in (with exceptions of in case you have certain illnesses)

[@Frostbytedigital]

I disagree. At least for my own experience. I had 0 motivation and a horrible sense of not being good enough to start learning to code anything in my 30s with no degree in the worst health of my life. But once I started I did feel motivated to continue even when it was hard and I had health concerns preventing me from spending sufficient time learning. After 2 years and multiple surgeries I was finally in better health and still a fairly mediocre programmer. But with my sunk cost motivation and more time to learn I finally got to be a slightly less mediocre programmer and now I've been a faang sde for 5 years.

[@mememayhemofficial3573]

@@Frostbytedigital dang we went from 0 motivation mediocre programmer to faang developer real quick

[@Nina-cd2eh]

When you have shitty health, doing that becomes doubly/triply important. Building disciplinary habits is probably the main thing you should be concerned about if you're actually struggling. As someone dealing with executive dysfunction, the only way I can do things besides medication, is to literally trick my brain into doing things without thinking about them. Want to brush your teeth? First step is getting to the bathroom. Set that as a goal, find an excuse to do that, and now brushing is fewer steps away. And keep doing that until you do the thing, and keep doing that day after day. Discipline is a muscle. The more you exercise it, the more natural it feels to do things you'd otherwise struggle with.

[@kuhluhOG]

@@Nina-cd2eh I don't anybody here talked about if you should or should not be doing it. OP just said that starting a task (regularly) does not necessarily increase the motivation of it if your health is shitty enough.

[@nb6175]

Reading books, non-fiction and fiction, feels so good for getting a much deeper understanding and involvement in a thing, be it narrative or factual. I have consumed no format of media that is more fulfilling and satisfying and euphoric than reading a good book. No game, no film, no documentary, has touched what a good book can do. Even the best screenwriters are themselves voracious readers and would choose books over films if they were forced, any day of the week.

[@anandmahamuni5442]

I disagree on the films part, good Cinema can totally do weird shit that is just impossible to what a common man's imagination can build from just a few words.

[@CielMC]

49:20 Doesn't help the "it's not capitalism" case, but China built the big ass bridge that connected Hong Kong, Macau, and Mainland China, as well as high speed railway. I used to need 2h just on the train alone, to go back to my mainland home, but with the railway it's 2h from A to B, one house to the other.

[@rapzid3536]

J-Blo must be living in a different universe than me to say that in the past 30-40 years nothing is going on with technology. He's 12 years older than me but I can assure the young'ns that software quality is massively better now than it used to be. Our white plastics used to turn yellow because.. That's how it worked back then. We had TVs with such a low resolution you wouldn't even believe it. My first "internet" experience was text-only Usenet. Speaking of plastics, these new(or newly affordable) high quality, fiber-reinforced plastics are amazing. We were flying an un-manned helicopter on freaking Mars. We can stream HD video back from Mars!

[@krityaan]

41:30 This is the first step of - "In my day everything was so much better" delusion syndrome. No advancements in material science? Your LEDs can FOLD. Solar cells are dirt cheap and getting thinner. Carbon fiber composites are revolutionising manufacturing in every sector! What amazing buildings in construction? Burj Khalifa, Taipei 101, Tokyo Sky Tree, The Shard and Freedom Tower were all built in the last 20 years... Could go on about examples of arts museums, corporate headquarters or bridges built in the last 10 that are marvels. "What new sources of energy technology"? Solar generation capacity by itself was near 0 GW in 2005, and now it's above 1000 GW. Sorry we didn't do fusion though, turns out using the Sun was cheaper anyways. We wouldn't have space without SpaceX? India sent a mission to Mars, Russia and China have demonstrated lunar launch capability, the Europeans rendezvoused with a comet (!!!), and NASA impacted an asteroid. The Ariane 5 that launched JWST wasn't built by SpaceX, but hey, I guess launching satellites into LEO is the pinnacle of space pioneering. But hey - you can just Google things and figure out how civilization is in extreme decline by reading AI generated slop and keeping your head under the sand - Ironically raging against social media when their own conclusions (arrived at through social media mind you) are so at odds with reality.

[@krityaan]

"when was the last time the US succeeded at a military objective?" You ever heard of ISIS? That massive fundamentalist state in Iraq and Syria that declared war on everyone and started perpetrating terrorist strikes. I wonder where it went. Remember 1991 when Iraq with the 4th largest army on earth annexed Kuwait? I wonder why Kuwait is independent, I thought the US lost.

[@krityaan]

Incredibly ironic to say people on the internet's arguments are misinformed - when his own observations are so deeply misinformed.

[@AndersHansgaard]

Memory. Very interesting to hear your story. I used to be at that same step down from photographic memory, but that seemed to normalize when I was between 18 and 20. And I didn't start drinking until I was 17, didn't do it much, I occasionally smoked weed, but again not that much. I did get a life at around that time, and a career in the internet industry, so I blame having a life and a job 🤣 No, seriously: I suspect that it had to do with developmental stages for my part. Anyway, thanks for another interesting watch ✌

[@kwuite1738]

Prime: There is all this scientific literature agreeing with this concept... But I'm not convinced.

[@defeqel6537]

There is scientific literature for the 6000 year old world from the bible. Not all scientific literature is equal

[@kwuite1738]

@@defeqel6537 How did you end up on a programming channel if you can't tell the difference between modern science and science from "6000 years ago"?

[@defeqel6537]

@@kwuite1738 no, we literally have modern scientific literature about "young earth", which is exactly why simply saying "we have scientific literature" doesn't mean anything. Heck, some clownsters got Mein Kampf published

[@kwuite1738]

@@defeqel6537 Meds, now.

[@blackt0wer]

Deleted personal social media accounts, been using just business accounts for a while now and never happier.

[@Drazzz27]

youtube is my social media

[@monolith-zl4qt]

@@Drazzz27 i'm a black belt social media addict and gotta say youtube is the worst of them all

[@yndihalda]

​@@monolith-zl4qt Curious, why do you say that?

[@Yoru05]

@@yndihalda brainrot shorts , i didn find a way to disable it , jist use new pipe and import yt data my exporting

[@musashi542]

@@yndihalda it really is , this website is a time sink and i cant get out .

[@adam7802]

One thing I've come to learn over time is using the internet is fine, just minimise social media. Most of it is just junk food for the brain and unconstructive rubbish.

[@cameronisfail]

Your brain will organize itself to meet your physical requirements, It’s not damage. All you need to do is change your actions and your brain will follow. 🥳

[@timrim9405]

When people are talking about working hard vs working smart they often talking about the situation when you have to choose because you can't fully optimize both things. It's like working on relationships and contacts and thinking about your health in long term vs simply grinding with work as much as possible... And for many people this comparison excludes laziness because laziness is not smart.

[@sub-harmonik]

much of the hallucination for me during lsd trips were based on losing memory/losing track of what was happening in the short term (at most after 3-5 seconds). kind of difficult to explain I stopped doing it because I felt like it was altering my sober state of mind too much.

[@Slashx92]

Prime with the bots comments is an indication of his success

[@Mikey-Plays-Bass]

Regarding being a frequent flyer on the Timothy Leary express I have to add another subject to the experiment, with a slight variation. It's me I'm the subject and my experience supports what prime is saying. My only variation from primes experience is I didn't start dropping until 17, by which point I was already bored out of school. {Short story} I made a deal with my AP bio teacher freshman year. The deal was simple. The terms were that I wasn't required to do homework the entire year. The teachers terms were it all relied on the final exam. No matter my average over the year for other tests, everything rode on that one exam. I took the terms and commenced with a 98 average. After that, sometime during the end of my Jr year I started dropping acid every weekend, and molly sometimes. It's worth noting that I hadn't even smoked a cigarette prior to that year. As the tripping escalated (upwards of 4-5 times a week using more acid per trip with a nap here and there) my retention dropped sharply. HOWEVER, while I believe that there was a cost in retention, there was (in my experience) a gain in perception. I found it easier to look at a complex problem from various levels, instead of focusing on single components. In other words, I was able to see more moving pieces and how it all might effect the outcome if that makes sense. Just a comment that'll die on the vine.

[@Oler-yx7xj]

Prime is so wholesome

[@brando8314]

If watching TV rots your brain, then it could follow that watching two family members interact should, in theory, rot your brain as well. Unless it's the commercials. I bet the rot comes from commercials.

[@RobertFletcherOBE]

My experience has been that there is a place for most people who are in programming, the problem is when they get promoted beyond their capabilities. Acting like everyone needs to be as good as the top 10% is utterly unrealistic and completely ignores the amount of productivity someone with even basic programming skills can bring to the table. I can guarantee if we fired the lesser 90% one year, the next year the same people would be looking down their noses at the remaining 90%

[@AlexKadeby]

I felt way too good about predicting "TheBlowagen"

[@GabrielSkyz]

Gossip is about story telling. You can boil Shakespeare down to just a gossip teller, even.

[@andyborch9886]

Man, what an awesome way to play Elden Ring with your kid!

[@codecae2]

Shortened attention span being related to social media is correlative at best -- particularly when considering the hypothetical comparison between books and social media. Books are great, but they're inefficient. If you don't want to read a book because it requires too much attention, it's likely because there are more efficient ways to gain the knowledge that the book provides. It just so happens that the internet is one of those more efficient methods. It's not that your attention span is to blame and that social media is the cause. Rather, you don't need to read a book to find answers. The correlation comes from the fact that social media resides on the same platform as our source of valuable information. If a person stops engaging in social media, it's not necessarily the case that they will abandon the internet for books.

[@defeqel6537]

Our nutrition has likely gotten worse too, as has our general fitness levels: way too many correlations here to eek out a cause without an actual RCT

[@jordinkolman]

That acid guy… I’m a huge believer and advocate for responsible medicinal use of THC and psychedelics. People who think those substances have no negative side effects are huffing the most copium

[@hamm8934]

Just kept thinking of Theo over and over again in this video

[@another212shadow]

Mark Twain: "What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so."

[@jelliott3604]

Spent the evening before my last uni exam tripping my nuts off on a mix of amphetamine and mescaline reading Dostoyevski "Crime & Punishment" and listening to Lard "They're coming to take me away" on a loop. Happy Days! (2.1 degree was sewn-up, 1st out of reach, nothing in play)

[@75hilmar]

Your temperature is room temperature

[@Kira_x86_64]

My thoughts on the "If you have to ask then you are not going to be a programmer" is 1) It is very absolute and I am sure there is someone who will be an amazing programmer and have to ask multiple times, but 2) One of the most fundamental skills of programming is the ability to look something up, to read up on it, to google and to RTFM. At the end of the day if you are asking the question "How do I become a programmer?" you are expecting the answer to come to you instead of you finding it.

[@Mikey-Plays-Bass]

@51:40 It sounds like he is referring to "Hedonic Adaptation" either knowingly or unknowingly.

[@BudgiePanic]

5:03 Jonathan Blow disagrees

[@kenneth_romero]

i think the funniest thing too is that reading books was also considered brain rot back in the day. i mean during the 1800s and early 1900s. Since you weren't doing anything "productive".

[@wily_rites]

Would love to chat with Mr Blow about the guna, I'm aware that he is interested by zen philosophy, this very subject is a superb way to introduce the concept of guna, this is a classic example of why raja's guna can be really destructive. Zen's origins are found in sanskrit, and the guna are part of the sanskrit grammar.

[@bkr_vids]

24:00 -- I don't know what that ophthalmologist learned or was smoking, but I used to work in optics, yes IT CAN do that at THAT percentage!! You're def not imagining things prime.

[@Byron804]

Oh man, I really wonder what J Blow's opinion is going to be on this topic, surely it will be something really positive and hopeful!

[@kennethhughmusic]

Africa here and I can confirm that every 60 seconds a minute passes

[@rajarshikhatua100]

I was watching the background game this whole time

[@KoopstaKlicca]

19:10 got my father abandonment issues acting up

[@SimonJackson13]

"AI 5G melts brains to achieve profitable input."

[@k98killer]

The Cantillon effect is the root of all evil.

[@bartonfarnsworth7690]

came for the tech discussion, stayed for the Africa facts 10:03

[@drd2093]

That’s 20/10 vision lol

[@rapzid3536]

Have you ever talked about the factors leading you to have a very different experiences in those two React projects? One was a good deal bigger, but it sounds like they were both quite big.

[@craneology]

Prime needs to man up and beat the Beast Clergyman for his boy. Elden Ring is a work of art.

[@another212shadow]

I know Capn Crunch (John Draper), and too much acid is a thing.

[@terry-]

Great!

[@BundesNachrichtenDavid]

39:40 I very much agree that community is missing to an extreme extend for many people. But I think therapy helps to go out and find it yourself. If your therapist is any good lol

[@brandonw1604]

Had a buddy that helped me move from ND back home to FL. He drove the moving truck so I could drive my family in our vehicle. Anyone that doesn’t have friends like that, feel bad for you.

[@Sainicooldude01]

41:10 Atomic Habits mentioned.

[@sub-harmonik]

jblow is the best 'old man yells at clouds' content because he's got cred and is often actually correct

[@NopeNopeNope9124]

You really are a yap god

[@stegwise]

i think what he's saying is that there is a tendency for people to want to construct orthodoxies and that if you let them you can end up being the Pope of this very specific little church where all you do is spend your time making pronouncements and issuing fatwas to a community who could be experiencing the world for themselves and creating a collaborative vision that enriches all the members.

[@ripplecutter233]

KZbin is the only social media I have left

[@Nerdimo]

18:53 don’t tell me Prime’s kids will beat him to learning Python

[@user-sq7ry5vx7t]

The argument about the decline of society, art and engineering always dodging the way society is currently organized to reward all the different aspect of those is precious. The red scare that still runs deep in your country's blood contaminated many others through globalization and altough everyone dances around politics and its effects, talking about it still feels dirty and preachy and communist, doesn't it? The lack of political imagination will be the death of us, exactly how it was manufactured to be.

[@mrjed]

He's right about fads but life is life, this isn't idiocracy the movie. This is essentially a statistics and visibility issue. Being able to see a growing mass of; essentially lummoxes, is both disheartening and uninspiring. However I think if someone is sensible enough to choose programming in these days; you're likely a large step above what is going on. Continue to grow and keep writing code everyone

[@madebyjonny7637]

there is some irony listening to this, considering the subject

[@Axorax]

I don't have a brain to get damaged. Get rekt

[@cmelgarejo]

the blow-a-gen lmao

[@yelmak]

Yo Prime, you're on PopOS but have you tried NixOS???

[@lydianlights]

Let me just preface this by saying I don't disagree with every point he's trying to make. I also think our obsession with social media is unhealthy. However, for him to argue that we haven't built anything amazing in modern times is just so blatantly ignorant (whether willfully or otherwise). Taking the Golden Gate Bridge as a specific example -- just go to the wikipedia page "List of Tallest Bridges". Almost every bridge on that list was completed in the 2010s or 2020s. His entire mindset of the decline of society is built on incorrect assumptions and preexisting bias. You know why you don't hear about amazing architectural achievements nowadays? Because they are commonplace and mundane. He even supposes that we have forgotten how to do these things, which is just absurd. 46:07 We, in fact, are. And that makes it hard to take anything he says seriously. In fact, it is so utterly the opposite that it's hilarious. We are living through a time of UNPRECEDENTED innovation. The world is changing on levels comparable to the industrial revolution _right now_. Somehow the irony is totally lost on him of the fact that he is on a global stage talking about how social media is destroying society, while also talking about how much we have stagnated in 30 or 40 years. As for my opinion: social media is CLEARLY not making us a less productive society (which is what he wants to argue), but I do think that social media is making us a less happy society. All of the problems with social media are... well... social. Pressures to turn your human experience into a marketable commodity for others to consume, amplifying the most radical and controversial ideas while more nuanced discussion is ignored, and yes maybe even the obsession with fleeting trends and fads.

[@Mel-mu8ox]

A constant consumption of entertainment rots your brain. Constant entertainment, means your not using other parts of your brain, your not learning, your not self reflecting, your not taking care of your responsibilities. Your avoiding those things. (I know some ppl will say they watch learning content for entertainment, however if your never implementing the concepts, your not really learning anything)

[@defeqel6537]

I agree with Prime in that passive consumption is the issue, but another issue is sticking to the same type of activity in general

[@Mel-mu8ox]

@@defeqel6537 Very true. Getting stuck doing the exact same thing everyday, no matter what it is takes its toll.

[@bdontech5984]

The only social media you need is develow

[@hyquiemistheg.o.a.t1671]

31:35. Is that really bad though? I;e someone with 0 experience goes into programming ( for my sake let’s say traditional education) they get a bunch of stuff shoved through and now they got to understand and pass at the same time. The person understands theoretically, but actual hands on how it looks isn’t explained? Does that make them a bad programmer at heart or do they need just more practice?

[@brod515]

I also woke up today at 5:00 am... but to watch the Lakers dissapoint me.

[@4videovideo]

When I delete reddit off my phone, after a few days I start reading books and enjoying my own thoughts more. Done it a few times.

[@thisbridgehascables]

Social Media is a distraction. Yet, also I believe a lot of KZbin Channels are equally useless even in the coding and tech sphere. You can easy get trapped into an endless loop of commentary on trivial topics or on some new JS Framework or programming language.. lol not talking about Prime here.. As someone who’s been coding since the 90s .. it’s weird how many inexperienced programmers talk in absolutes.

[@defeqel6537]

You can include Prime in that, even if one can occasionally get some good insight from his reaction videos

[@oso1248]

The reason watching television rots your brain is because watching television requires minimal brain function, the visualization is done for you; reading a book is better because it requires you to do the visualization, moderate brain function… which is why writing a story is better than reading one, that requires you to create something from nothing that can be visualized by others, maximum brain function. Watching television is akin to paying someone to go to the gym to workout for you. The sphere is an ephemeral neon god erected through the purpose of the modern mind. If you want to understand a society, look to what they build. Some build to last for millennia, some build to last for a lifetime. Vision.

[@adamsribz]

You've used monads, but what do you think about gonads?

[@Dayal-Kumar]

99% people don't engage in social media, they just consume. So, prime arguing for the 1% is nonsense. You have to argue for the 99%