People don't have hobbies anymore. I can probably count on 1 hand the number of people I talk to that actually have a real hobby, something they do in their spare time. Everyone’s just scrolling these days.
It comes down to your definition of hobby. For instance some people consider listening to audio books as "reading books" or riding e-bike with hardly any pedaling as "cycling".
I can assure you my "hobbies" (not sure whether reading/discussing about tech, following news, watching movies, playing (video) games, travelling/hiking, ocassionally playing table tennis or minigolf qualifies as hobbies) are pretty much same as they were before smartphones, I just have much less time with work and kids than I used to have, though at least trying to incorporate kids where possible like table tennis, minigolf, hiking, playing (video) games.
surely coding projects is a hobby surely eveyron HN is finishing all their "dream" projects that were vastly impossible to finish before AI? otherwise thats just me
I don't think it's really a golden age. Personally I find people more superficial and distracted in their hobby though. It always has to be something to be superfially shared on the internet.... some people are fine with that but I think it's a loss. Not everyone will agree but that's just different values.
OP here sorry Ive jsut always had a instincitve attraction to design even though Im just an autistic programmer. if it looks gaudy I apologise I was just trying my best to get a Spectrum 48k loading screen aesthetic, with a 4chan green text type summary vibe. It wnated to keep the data concise and minimal hence the lack of typed out prose. Its an experiment Im doing with the way I do stuff sorry if it sucks
The animations make it quite slow on my system. Maybe there's a way to figure out if users actually have webgl enabled and only then do the animations.
if added an auto low fidelity option that kicks in for visual effect if fps falls beflow 30fps ( manual toggle is top right) lmk if it doesnt work. I also dleteda buch of useless effects that were high intensity. thanks again for the feedback,
why should I employ my time reading something the "author" didn't bother writing? my attention has been stolen, sure, but if wrestle it back I'll give it to anything else
I mean I spent about an hour doing research for this and building the charts I thought it was super insightful, I based my entries on stuff Im thinking about. I mean is it crap?
Upvoted. IMHO quite shocking numbers if you think what it does with society as a whole. There will be a variation in statistical spread in different countries/cultures, I would love to see them. Where do you have the base data from?
What is more shocking what this does to people that have never been bored or cut off from media. The pure social media generation so to say.
I liked the idea attention measurement clock on the bottom of the page.
Current attention behavior with all of our devices reminds me of the The Box machine in Batman Forever, but way worse as it is perniciously unobvious to most.
If you didn't take your time and effort writing it, why should I bother reading it? I can only assume the "author" is being ironic on purpose, pushing slop claiming that machines are taking my attention.
Thank you so much for sharing this. Just yesterday, I was doing a thought experiment where I started counting the number of seconds until I get distracted or anxious and wanted to reach for my phone. Unfortunately for me, it was much less than 47 seconds, and on average it was around 20 seconds. This was highly concerning because it was something in the back of my mind that has been there for more than a decade.
You might enjoy reading The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, where he finds a tiny book that teaches him to see through playing cards by holding that moment of attention.
I always find the economics around this annoying. I’d gladly pay $17 a year — hell ten times that — to not see ads on Instagram. However, the fact that I can and would pay for that means that Meta can’t afford to lose me, because it kills the value of their audience.
You can pay and get untargeted ads. That there is no option to pay and not get ads at all is a testament that the value goes beyond the individual cost.
So yes you would in fact need to pay ten times that and then some. And by virtue of being on hacker news I'm guessing your actual ads targeting value is more like 20x that or more.
Considering that AI generated content is the new frontier in stealing our attention, this blatantly AI generated article and web design diminished the gravity of your point a little bit.
Right? It's strange to me to have an article that seems set to rail against attention span bankruptcy, but then is written by AI in a way that just feeds right back into it.
I dont know man I spent a long time on it, everyone on HN was taking the piss out of people who used LLM for coding just 6 months ago, and now you literally get fired if you dont use it. Saying "oh you used Ai to help with the design" is basically a diminishing insult at this point, you might be considered an idiot if you dont in 6 months time.
I appreciate your feedback but my point is the delineation between "hey guys screw this guy he used AI" is getting harder and harder with each passing day.
As for me, I personally have been using "variants" of AI tooling since I studied AI about 30 years ago. So i dont know man.
You say you don't know but you have people in here telling you and you're not listening. Code is for machines, words are for humans. Do you not see a distinction? Machine time is paid for in electricity, human time is paid for by our lives. Who cares if machines churn on garbage? Why should we spend our limited time on this earth reading machine output?
I contend the whole point of the short blog post is to show you the facts and figures not to waste your lifetime by having you read my scattered thoughts , but I understand your words
It's because we can't tell where your effort stopped and the machine took over. It's hard to assess the quality of something that may or may not have had any human curation in it.
Using AI is not wrong per se, but it's a fairly reliable sign that the piece might not be worth human attention.
Im getting triggered now, I used AI to help gather the data and the charts, Ill endeavour to use more manual labour with the grammer which Im basically terrible at but thank you for the (you)
I would rather read imperfect human grammar than perfect AI corpospeak. It'
s no shade to you, AI produces the most soul crushing prose imaginable. I'd rather read a teenage girl's fanfiction.
I agree. It's so grating.
"This isn't an issue—it's an epidemic. Here's the takeaway: attention span is a load-bearing element of cognition. And honestly? This article nails it."
(Not actually AI, I just made it up and tried to cram in a bunch of tropes)
AI is a uniformizer - it's suppose to make us more machine like so that we're more replaceable. People use it because there's an economic advantage, and because it provides a dopamine hit, but that's it.
A guy I knew used to write English even though it was a second language. It was charming. Now he uses ChatGPT and it sounds soulless.
People use markers of effort as a proxy to gauge the quality of a resource.
AI prose is low effort, even if your gathering of statistics and making charts was not. So that effort is undermined by the marker of AI prose which leads to an implication the rest of the data could be also, even if that is not actually the case.
People don't like reading articles "redacted" by AI because that feels disrespectful
Imagine approaching someone you wanna talk to and they just silently point to their assistant, suggesting you talk to them instead. I want to hear your thoughts from you, not filtered by some assistant/machine
I can assure you my "hobbies" (not sure whether reading/discussing about tech, following news, watching movies, playing (video) games, travelling/hiking, ocassionally playing table tennis or minigolf qualifies as hobbies) are pretty much same as they were before smartphones, I just have much less time with work and kids than I used to have, though at least trying to incorporate kids where possible like table tennis, minigolf, hiking, playing (video) games.
It's too bad, though. Regardless of what hobby you're in, it's a golden age to have it.
Is there a human-written long-form article to go with this?
Thank you for posting it.
A lot of people spend more than an hour writing a post and it usually results in a better experience for everyone.
What is more shocking what this does to people that have never been bored or cut off from media. The pure social media generation so to say.
I liked the idea attention measurement clock on the bottom of the page.
I always find the economics around this annoying. I’d gladly pay $17 a year — hell ten times that — to not see ads on Instagram. However, the fact that I can and would pay for that means that Meta can’t afford to lose me, because it kills the value of their audience.
> $233 in 2024. 13x in 13 years
So yes you would in fact need to pay ten times that and then some. And by virtue of being on hacker news I'm guessing your actual ads targeting value is more like 20x that or more.
I appreciate your feedback but my point is the delineation between "hey guys screw this guy he used AI" is getting harder and harder with each passing day.
As for me, I personally have been using "variants" of AI tooling since I studied AI about 30 years ago. So i dont know man.
Using AI is not wrong per se, but it's a fairly reliable sign that the piece might not be worth human attention.
A guy I knew used to write English even though it was a second language. It was charming. Now he uses ChatGPT and it sounds soulless.
AI prose is low effort, even if your gathering of statistics and making charts was not. So that effort is undermined by the marker of AI prose which leads to an implication the rest of the data could be also, even if that is not actually the case.
Imagine approaching someone you wanna talk to and they just silently point to their assistant, suggesting you talk to them instead. I want to hear your thoughts from you, not filtered by some assistant/machine