caveat emptor re long hashtag techniques on (ipad) safari ...
you may think safari has no effective url limit (i.e. very high) but if you ever treat a url within the url bar as editable you are at risk to be silently truncated to 4096 bytes (eg select a character in the url bar and replace it)
also re-testing potential ~buffer limits in various ways on ipadOS 26.2 safari just now slowed my safari ui down to a crawl
eg after saving example.com with ~20k #hashtag to reading list -- each keystroke in this reply was taking several seconds, so I had to force quit safari and retype to post this warning
> The product quality matters, but it's table stakes. What matters is whether people know your brand exists and trust it enough to buy it.
On a related note, my wife today suggested we buy a replacement Ninja toaster oven for just half the price I'd seen anywhere from a website odd~name.shop that I'd never heard of... the site looked normal, even slick, but a little research turns up the domain didn't exist a month ago.
Now perhaps this is a new business that failed to mention that fact, instead of an AI generated scam website, but I could not be certain without more effort than I wished to exert.
And this is a simple example of my worries from OP's line of thinking--I fear that AI will be increasingly bulldozing us past our cognitive capacity to function normally.
> My favourite was an interview with Jerry Springer. He also had a theory of what's wrong in the current world and none of it had anything to do with what he did.
FWIW, later in his life there are many findable examples of Jerry finding fault with what he did--since I recalled seeing him express mea culpas I took the time to give you this early (jocular) example from 2014 :
> He acknowledged that my way reduced the chance of failure without making the technical consequences of failure worse, but it was more important that we not be embarrassed. Now that I've been working for a decade, I have a better understanding of how and why people play this game, but I still find it absurd.
If OP's embarrassment comment and the topic of normalization of deviance interest you then you might find this soft (Social) Science Fiction short story to be amusingly enlightening...
"The trouble with you Earth people" by Katherine MacLean (1968)
> there are so many links I have saved that it freezes
If you are motivated enough to write Apple Shortcuts a useful trick for ~Find type actions that overload is to Filter them into reassemblable pieces eg
action find items from reading list filter Title begins with A
(then do B etc)
that this trick often works would be due to the internal nature of the Shortcuts implementation problems, so YMMV
OP describes this ^ long arduous process and then notes:
> Your writing can only be as good as your taste.
That is, using an LLM to help with "collecting these fragments and structuring them" might be okay--should the writer still be able to deeply immerse--but the "stitching them together and choosing the vocab and grammar" of a faux writer LLM is likely to leave a bad taste in the mind of some readers (e.g. those HN types who "kinda hates LLMs").
That's interesting because I thought the exact opposite. How could the LLM generate the notes? Those are from the person's direct observations, investigation, etc. right? So the idea would be to farm that part out? As off-putting as LLM style writing is, letting the LLM make the content seems reckless and error prone.
I do agree that the LLM style vs. the authors style is off-putting. I have used LLMs to help me write things and I do not like how its not "my" voice. I see no reason it couldnt use my voice given some of my writing samples. In any case, I've found it very easy to revise it in my own words. This is part of the "revise" stage mentioned in the process. In addition, this step is barely necessary for some things, such as technical writing.
This IRL now is very much in the spirit of Mark Stiegler's 1990 humorous thought piece takedown of the $ inefficiency of the B-2 ~stealth bomber by proposing ~everyone buys chances to down one by any means possible.
There is a proper citation below, but you can enjoy this quick read at his dusty website here :
The B-2 Lottery · Marc Stiegler · published in New Destinies, Vol. IX/Fall 1990 ed. Jim Baen (Baen 0-671-2016-3, Sep ’90 [Aug ’90], $3.50, 286pp, pb, cover by David A. Hardy) Original anthology of eight stories plus six non-fiction pieces on space and technology.
> I’ve been in software for 20 years and it’s the first time I hear “back pressure”. Am I too old already?
I first wrote code 50 years ago (I am 63yo) so yes, imo we are too old, but ...
It is worth noting that systems concepts/techniques often have analogues aka different names and histories in different fields and subfields.
If I were to "explain" back pressure to an ordinary person I might model my analogy to the logic of this ~classic joke:
Bob: Let's go to Trendio(TM) for dinner tonight!?
Carol: Oh, nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded!
Also, often a modern take-this-for-granted concept may be seen as an outgrowth of previous problems or solutions.
For example back pressure is conceptually adjacent to the clever~hack/design of random backoff in Ethernet.
Or if talking to a math geek or traffic planner you might relate it to ~modern understanding of congestion including oddities like possibly removing roads/routes to ~paradoxically improve traffic flow.
We are deep in the Information Age barreling towards Singularities, so none of us, young or old, see and understand but a tiny fraction of where we've been, are, or might be going.
Cue Calvin & Hobbes cartoon of us racing downhill in a fragile box.
Perhaps, as others have essentially suggested, merging your mind with an ~AI will help (albeit temporarily, imo). I prefer to think of us/greybeards as potentially Wise, yet, paradoxically, clueless.
Beginner's Mind, with likely no time/future for Mastery, is still potentially pleasant, and I would argue useful for Debugging.
Obviously this modern AI tsunami is phase shifting us all into debug~mode anyway, eh?
you may think safari has no effective url limit (i.e. very high) but if you ever treat a url within the url bar as editable you are at risk to be silently truncated to 4096 bytes (eg select a character in the url bar and replace it)
also re-testing potential ~buffer limits in various ways on ipadOS 26.2 safari just now slowed my safari ui down to a crawl
eg after saving example.com with ~20k #hashtag to reading list -- each keystroke in this reply was taking several seconds, so I had to force quit safari and retype to post this warning