Maybe I am misunderstanding the study but I don’t understand why reading a magazine or newspaper is counted while reading an article on one’s phone is not.
I think more interesting is reading a book on a phone doesn't seem to count, which his the main way I read.
Further, reading on tablets, computers, or smartphones was not explicitly included in examples, making it unclear whether this behavior would have been classified as reading for personal interest or technology use.
You in fact are misunderstanding the article, reading on an electronic device is included reading for pleasure - it is one of the three categories listed parenthetically as that.
Quote: The study focused on two activities: reading for pleasure (reading a book, newspaper, magazine, reading on electronic devices and listening to audiobooks) and reading with children.
From the linked actual journal article I thought this part should be limited to e-readers
> ATUS asked participants to recall all their activities over 24 h, beginning at 4 a.m. on the day prior to the interview and ending at 4 a.m. on the day of the interview (Figure 1). Activities were coded using a standard lexicon, verified by two coders. We focused on two reading outcomes: (1) daily reading for pleasure, classified by ATUS as reading for personal interest (e.g., reading a magazine/book/newspaper, listening to audiobooks, reading on a Kindle or other e-reader; Table S1); and (2) daily reading with children (e.g., reading to or with household or non-household children, listening to child read, helping child read; Table S1).
The situation gets pretty muddy fast. I don't think many people are doing long form article reading on the internet because it's so incredibly painful. Most news sites are loaded with so many pop ups, sticky elements, and reflowing UI that it's almost impossible to read anything beyond a couple of lines.
I look forward to the people who always claim “taxation is theft” to comment on a single man deciding to strong arm a company into giving 10% to the government.
I’m a big fan of the “just take a day or two to do nothing but think” part. We should cherish the fact that we are alive, and being without distractions just experiencing life is very valuable.
But I don’t get the second part. Do we really need to be so goal oriented in tech specifically? I mean maybe if you wanted to go from being a programmer to a professional wrestler, I could see it. But if you’re just trying to keep your career going, just do what’s useful at work / school right now, and explore what interests you.
Different strokes and all that. Some people are really goal driven and NEED that north star to aim for.
I'm not in that group. I just go with the feels and flow and if something interests me, I go there and investigate if it's fun.
If I had followed my "plan" from a decade+ ago, I'd be a middle manager / scrum master in a small/medium company with an ulcer and SSRIs. Maybe next in line for regional manager.
Had an opportunity to do something different and more varied, took it. Haven't regretted for a second.
I’ve got a new project I’ve been handling with Claude code. Up until now I’ve always pair coded with AIs, so I would know (and usually tweak) every bit of code generated. Now with the agent, it’s easy to miss what’s being made.
Ive been trying to resolve this with things like “make a notebook that walks through this modules functions”, etc, to make it easier for me to review.
In the spirit of literate riding though, why but have these agents spend more time (tokens…money) walking you through what they made.
Likewise, if dev A vibe codes something and leaves it to dev B to maintain, we should think about what AI workflows can get B up to speed fast. “Give me a tour of the code”
> When the AI bubble pops is when you're likely to be able to realistically run good local models.
After years of “AI is a bubble, and will pop when everyone realizes they’re useless plagiarism parrots” it’s nice to move to the “AI is a bubble, and will pop when it becomes completely open and democratized” phase
“Frontiers” journals are crap, so it’s no surprise. But I don’t understand why editors let this happen. It’s similar to academic fraud: if you lie about results nobody cares about, you’ll never get caught; if you lie about big things, suddenly the hammer comes down. And for what benefit? It’s not like they walked away with a payday from splitting the open access fee. There’s nothing wrong with desk rejecting an author by saying “if your result is true, publish it somewhere better”
Despite the similarity in naming, Frontiers of Computer Science (Front. Comput. Sci.) is not published by Frontiers Media SA, but Springer and Higher Education Press. Note, however, that Frontiers Media does publish Frontiers *in* Computer Science (Front. Comput. Sci. (Lausanne)).
The issue here is that the deputy editor-in-chief of the journal is also an author of the paper. As such, the conflict of interest should have raised the bar to the acceptance of the paper.
Here is a business idea. Start a "Frontier Journal" published electronically as a pdf. Contact professors, grad students, etc for paper submissions. Publish their papers for a fee, say $100. The paper will buff their resumes and pad their egos. Send out proceedings as pdf to participants. Everybody profits including the environment. I have seen this scam play out.
Having such a paper mill paper on your CV will do the opposite of "boasting" your CV when people from your field look at it. Usually this happens at your PhD defense at the latest.
The concerning thing is that AI contrarianism is being left wing coded. Imagine you’re fighting a war and one side decides “guns are overhyped, let’s stick with swords”. While there is a lot of hype about AI, even the pessimistic take has to admit it’s a game changing tech. If it isn’t doing anything useful for you, that’s because you need to get off your butt and start building tools on top of it.
Especially people on the left need to realize how important their vision is to the future if AI. Right now you can see the current US admin having zero concern for AI safety or carbon use. If you keep your head in the dirt saying “bubble!” that’s no problem. But if this is here to stay then you need to get involved.
That's a good point and even worse we'll eventually end up with yet another issue where both left and right offer terrible options and there's no nuanced middle ground :/
