I used to love the tradition of lighting fireworks but I think the way people have been using them has changed in the last decade. Everything seems to transform into a war zone and some people do incredibly dangerous things.
Its become a dick waggling contest. It will be quiet all night and then one person sets something off. Some other person "well ill show them who has better booms" and gets a bigger one, sets it off. Next thing you know its 30 minutes of booms and pops culminating in the largest boom possible, its goddamn irritatibg
I have the feeling many more people feel similar. I loved the intentionality of sitting behind your computer with purpose back then. There was always something you’d want to do and when that was done you’d search for the next thing to do.
> But this must be the case for all competitive games right? At some point the meta has been figured out and there is no real way to deviate from that.
I think this is only true about games with too few variables (not really the case for MTG), or games where too many variables can be controlled (which various MTG formats suffer from).
Historically this has not been that big a deal for the RTS genre specifically. If you look at a game like SC2, the skillfloor to actually execute the meta builds is so high that player with good fundamentals can win with a suboptimal build, versus a player with a fully meta build executed imperfectly. Plus there are almost always cheese builds that only work if the opponent doesn't expect them - not a reliable source of wins, but sometimes all it takes to clutch a tournament series
SC2 achieved this with balance patches - Blizzard paid close attention to the meta and when it got stale/boring, they adjusted things to keep games interesting and varied. They did their best to make this the case for low and high skilled players.
To me the issue isn’t simply that you need to track the meta to be competitive, it’s that the game only worked when decks were less powerful.
When games regularly took 10–20 turns, luck evened out pretty well even if you were a bit slow out the gate. But now when your opponent is putting out threats on every single turn that need to be countered, there’s nearly zero room for unlucky draws. Given two opponents, the odds that both of them will have sufficiently equal luck to produce an interestingly competitive game has dropped below a threshold where the game is actually fun to play.
If you don’t play the meta, you get curb stomped. If you do play the meta, most of the time the outcome of the game is essentially predetermined (and obviously so) by the luck of both of your draws or by hard counter matchups. Only a handful of games ever feel like both sides have fighting chances.
Frankly, the majority of games these days could be decided in seconds by both sides revealing their opening hard and mutually agreeing on the outcome.
I recognize this too. There must be a correlation between the parents' level of education and the screen time the children have. Would be an interesting study.
I‘d wager that the correlation is with how exhausting the parent‘s job is. Screens are excellent for keeping children occupied, keeping them happy in healthier ways requires a lot of energy. After working a hard job, running a household and worrying about whether you run out of money before the next paycheck I can imagine that many parents just don’t have the mental resources.
> Screens are excellent for keeping children occupied, keeping them happy in healthier ways requires a lot of energy.
It could also be that the parent wants to be on their screen at the same time, or wants to be on Instagram later into the night. There will be some correlation with work, but I doubt that explains most of it.
Someone who is unemployed, especially if they’re poor, doesn’t suddenly have a lot of free time and headspace. On the contrary, they just got more stressed and pay even less attention since now they have yet another urgent issue weighting on their mind.
I don't know what you think unemployment looks like, but for most people it's incredibly stressful and not a time when you can just sit on your ass and watch TV all day. The benefits, if you manage to secure them - are barely enough to get by.
From a parents perspective, I feel you are incorrect.
Almost every other parent I speak to are well aware of how detrimental screen time is to their kids, and yet often still use devices when they're too tired for much else.
I have heaps of experience with Stencil and it works great until a certain size indeed. It is a great way to ship web components quickly.
Coding agents will allow us to write plain JS way more quickly but it still takes a bit more time by humans to read compared to reading something that was written with in a framework.
Until the day that I don't have to do reviews of my AI generated code, or some sort of pseudocode abstraction layer becomes available, I think there is still a place for frameworks and libraries to create web components like Stencil.
>Now the transcript happens in the background, a summary lands in my Obsidian vault automatically, and I can actually be present in the conversation. That’s 20 minutes a day I got back, every day, without thinking about it.
Honest question: Do you actually read any of these notes?
I think there is a fundamental flaw with not taking notes. I'm convinced taking notes forces you to properly consider what is being said and you store the information in your brain better that way.
Taking notes during meetings isn't to improve understanding, or to "read" afterwards.
They're a record of what was discussed and decided, with any important facts that came up. They're a reference for when you can't remember, two weeks later, if the decision was A and B but not C, or A and C but not B.
Or when someone else delivers the wrong thing because they claim that's what the meeting decided on, and you can go back and find the notes that say otherwise.
I probably only need to find something in meeting notes later once out of every twenty meetings. But those times wind up being so critically important, it's why you take notes in the first place.
Right, so it's for accountability instead. Have you considered generating stories or tasks from the notes in that case?
Still I think it's better to discuss "action points" in that case and give a clear owner to those points. This always helps me to understand who's accountable and what actions actually need follow up.
The question is, what artifact records the action points, the owners, who is accountable? And all the necessary associated information?
Notes do. Ideally there is a meeting owner who produces official notes and emails them to everyone, but frequently that never happens. And when it does happen, sometimes they're wrong and you need to correct them.
Which is why you need your own meeting notes. Plus, like I said, there are facts that come up that you want to document as well, that aren't part of the action items, but have value.
And I'm saying, a lot of the time either the company doesn't use such tracking software, or it uses it for software development but not the meeting you just had with legal or finance or design or people outside the company or whatever.
The kind of stuff stored in Jira is a very specific subcategory of all the types of things that get mentioned and decided in meetings. It doesn't cover all of it, not even close. And the person putting the information in might also get part of it wrong, that happens surprisingly frequently. It's not a substitute for personal meeting notes.
You can use an LLM to generate first drafts of flashcards that you import into, and later revise in, a true spaced-repetition system — such as Mochi or Anki.
For learning new material, make your LLM assume a Socratic position. Kagi Assistant has a custom Study model that does this. The key is causing the model to increase your friction (causing learning and memory) instead of decreasing it.
When the LLM enters the "card" into the API it would define the required information, and then every time it would ensure you cover the required information. You could tell the LLM, "make sure I remember the date of this historical event", and then the LLM would ensure you mention the date when answering the card. If you get the date wrong, then it does the API equivalent of pressing "wrong / again" in Anki.
I don’t read the notes generated by AI during meetings - but that’s not their purpose, either. The agent reads the notes, and uses that context to be better at what I’m asking it to do.
It also lets me ask questions like “When did we decide to change the login modal?” and get an accurate response.
I think it depends. Honestly, for me, the alternative to automated notes from meetings is that I don't take notes. I know, I should, but I don't. I've tried numerous times to instill the habit unsuccessfully.
Where the value for me comes from is sending them out immediately after the meeting, not archiving them in a vault I never look at. "Here's the summary of what we discussed, and the distilled action items we each agreed to take."
Like the author, I've gone out of my way to avoid hosting my personal stuff with Big Tech providers, but when it comes to work, I give in to whatever we use, because I just don't have capacity to also be IT support for internal technology. It's still uncomfortable, but I have to be honest about what I have time for.
