My intuition is that all of the benefit you get being outside and walking is probably lost by strapping a laptop to yourself and being on calls the whole time. Call me old fashioned but I'm outside to look at the sea, hear the birds and be very definitely away from my tech.
For the last year or so I have scheduled my two status meetings back to back in the mornings. That means I have 90 minutes of walking in the forrest in the morning (30min before the meetings and then 30min each for the two meetings).
I have two teams reporting to me, and each have a 30minute morning meeting where we decide what needs the team attention during the day. There is also room for small talk to keep it a bit social.
Those meetings do not need screensharing very often. When they do, we can manage to look briefly at a phone screen.
It has been wonderful and it is something I would miss if I ever had another job. I encourage the others in the team to do the same thing.
Walking in the forrest have two benefits; less risk of getting hit by a car, and, it’s more quiet of a background for when I unmute.
What about for other users of the forest? Hopefully you're able to stay well away from them so as not to disturb the peace and quiet of the forest for work.
There are not that many other people. And, it’s not like I am lecturing. I’m having conversations in meetings. I speak about 1/7 of the time.
Most of the time I’m on mute.
If I run in to someone, I politely say hello, and that’s that.
What does this mean? Is there a list of approved conversation allowed on trails? What difference does it make if they are talking to someone virtually or physically present on the trail?
I guess it depends. When you're talking to a person directly, most likely your ears aren't blocked. So you get the feedback of your voice levels, and adjust accordingly. This is really difficult to do when you have earphones in, blocking everything. Usually people with both earphones in tend to raise their voices nearly to a shouting level. I don't know if OP does that or not though.
It's more that their full attention isn't on the meeting at hand - how can it be when they're wandering some nature trail taking it all in? If I spent a week busting my ass to get some feature shipped, and in a sprint re-cap meeting all I see is my boss wandering a forest trail going "Uh-hu, uh-hu, wow there's a red-breasted warbler..." I'd become very upset.
That’s not true, you should try it. My full attention is on the call. Walking the trail, as it’s also the same trail everyday, is fully on autopilot.
Really. Your comment kind of annoys me because it seems you have no experience of this, while I have several years experience of it, yet you are sure that you know better than me what my experience of it is?
Edit: Also, my teams know about it and all agree with it, some of them do walks themselves.
Are we gatekeeping walks and meetings now? You can walk and talk and not annoy other people -- if other people are even around. You can also walk and talk and give enough attention to your meeting. Use your judgement.
I mean. This is a forrest. I barely run in to anybody. It’s not a park.
I’m on mute most of the time anyway, I speak maybe 1/7 of the time on the calls. If I meet anyone in the forrest, I politely say hello to them, and that’s that.
> Walking in the forrest have two benefits; it’s less chance to get hit by a car, and it’s more quiet of a background for when I unmute.
More than that, it's very cathartic and peaceful. I used to live next to a big park on the Puget Sound and I would do a similar routine, in addition to occasionally taking a stroll through the park (effectively a forest) at lunch.
> I have two teams reporting to me, and each have a 30minute morning meeting where we decide what needs the team attention during the day.
Why you have to talk with your team on a daily basis? That’s too frequent and into weeds. The earliest should be weekly. Delegate and plan for long term.
> Walking in the forrest have two benefits; less risk of getting hit by a car
There’s a risk with everything. You just switch one with another.
Regardless of opinions, the sheer volume of his output is a tad overwhelming. I do wish he had taken Mathematica down a different path (just imagine if it was truly broadly available at non-insane pricing as a local native app, almost as a stupefyingly flexible Jupyter), and I find the Wolfram Language too unwieldy for some things, but if you can see past the self-branding and unusual viewpoints, Mathematica is prety awesome.
I once had a bit of fun with it on a 20-core Raspberry Pi cluster, and sometimes I think it would have been amazing to run some ML workloads on this kind of environment: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2016/08/10/0830
I'd say it is more flexible than jupyter. I really think many folks are hidden from a lot of magical computation you can do with computers, by not having exposure to some of tools like mathematica.
That was a great read. It got me smiling!. It's not often that you find fellow control freaks in the wild.
Stephen Wolfram's personal infrastructure sounds overall great, but it crumbles in the sound department.
If you're going to be on calls for hours every day, for everything that is holy please get a hands-free set up. The most ergonomic object is no object at all.
I use a Scarlett 212 mic and sound card paired with a decent pair of speakers and my working room works like a charm. Everything is set up so if I start a call any device I can walk though the office and have a conversation with someone like they're in the room. 10/10 would recommend.
I use a condenser mic so the audio going out is top notch. The mic is the one offered with the Scarlett 212 bundle but you could use any decent mic.
HQ mics are great because you can fine tune the volume. It's high enough for my voice to come across strongly, but low enough to avoid background noises, people hearing themselves through my speakers, etc.
The idea behind my set up is to have a hands-free and always-on working room. I just walk in and know that everything is ready to start a call. Just click a button to make a call or accept it. No need to fiddle with headphones, adjust volumes, check if sound is working well, etc.
The only exception to this set up is when I have a confidential call, in which case I use my phone or headphones.
Everything is wired, as wireless sound devices are just not there in terms of quality and avoiding annoyances (see the HN thread called 'The first minute of every phone call is a torture now)
I love this essay so much. It was the inspiration for my Dogsheep project - https://dogsheep.github.io/ - because I wanted to build a much less impressive version of a subset of what Wolfram had built, and a Dogsheep is clearly a less intimidating version of a Wolfram!
(Also it meant I could call my search engine Dogsheep Beta, as opposed to Wolfram Alpha - and I enjoyed that pun so much I spent quite a significant of time writing the software to support it: https://simonwillison.net/2020/Nov/14/personal-data-warehous... )
Everything he does I see his keyboard or monitor in the background. I don’t know why he is so much into ‘productivity’ that even for walks he has to be in front of his machine and working? Why can’t he just enjoy walking to relax a bit outdoors. I think walking is as much for mental well being as for improving physical health and decoupling from work and digital life is how I’d like to relax.
When you've been gifted with a brain like his, I imagine the most interesting and intoxicating thing in life is to engage with your mind as much as you can.
I want to be as productive as possible while working. What I don't want is to be as productive as possible while living. So tools that integrate work into non-work aspects of my life end up turning my whole life into endless work; for some people that might be fine -- and it used to be fine for me 2 decades ago, but it's not fine anymore.
I run my own personal infrastructure. Most of what it takes is to research secure setups from the beginning. You don't have other users so upgrades aren't painful. Frankly what I find most difficult is dealing with aging hardware, but this dude probably had the money to buy everything new.
Not really. I keep even more than that. And at a finer grained resolution. And have done so for almost two decades. It's all put on to a write-only-by-the-capturing-device/read-only-by-other-device secured storage system.
You are the third person this week to ask me that. I answer reluctantly.
The rationale is, because I want to.
The system has evolved over the years, current configuration is:
Several 1080p SONY cameras with hacked firmware that stream video to a capture device. An older view of the camera rig that has since evolved again, is here: https://youtu.be/dGRDB1vVxyY
Some 4K webcams connected over USB that I don't stream. I capture one full frame every X milliseconds.
Two Kinects set to be out of phase capturing the entirety of the office as a depth map.
Two Rode shotgun microphones capturing audio and feeding it in to a Focusrite box.
Custom built USB "keyboard" with a few arcade buttons that permit "pause/unpause", "forget a little bit" and "forget five minutes."
Two LED lights to indicate recording status for both myself and anybody walking in the office.
Timesnapper on Windows, and a little custom C++ capture program for macOS and Linux that takes a snapshot of my desktop every X seconds.
All that data gets stuffed on to a secured drive on a file server. The data goes back more than a decade. Nobody has access to that data but me.
I use an NVidia Jetson to analyze everything: the desktop images, build up a map of applications, analyze people in the room, identify who they are, what clothes they are wearing, identification of activity, OCR of images, transcription of spoken word to text, identification of websites, identification of music playing, "oh hey, he's listening to the following artist, let me pull that artist's social feed and put it on the ambient screen in the hallway", which is kinda creepy when the software identifies my own music https://soundcloud.com/justinrlloyd and then stalks me and puts up my own social feeds on the household ambient screen. I also have the Jetson watching the front door via the Ubiquiti doorbell camera and can switch on the TV in my office if someone comes to the front door so I can see who it is, and also will notify me that a package is on the doorstep ready to be brought inside via the second high viewpoint door camera performing a "what changed in this scene, is that a package? That looks like a package. Package! ZOMG! Package! Package!!!" That algorithm has one job and it does it really well. Like a hunting dog staring at squirrels.
Lots of this stuff is readily available as ML models, for the most part I just strung them together with simple scripts to move data around.
I have a "virtual assistant" that I wrote, using NLP and key phrases with a speech recognition model that understands specific commands and some free form speech, an early prototype of my virtual assistant is here: https://youtu.be/uhl8wN7Uvv8 and I state for the record that it has gotten far better in the intervening years. And then a text to speech model when absolutely necessary to give me voice prompts.
This virtual assistant can control cameras, e.g. tally lights, zoom and focus, recognize the fact I am holding a receipt from a grocery store, or a book, and take a high resolution picture and tag it with meta data.
I keep a near real-time backup of my computers, and that data goes back probably three decades, any time I retire a machine I take a full drive dump and store that.
Out of office, I take a snapshot of my desktop on the laptop (Microsoft Surface or Macbook Pro), which is then automatically copied to the server when I return to the office. I built my own Sensecam-like device using a J2ME device almost two decades ago, but have since moved to using an Autographer for life logging.
This is just amazing. You've basically built your own JARVIS, and I really want to know how much you would charge to replicate this ? ... its almost impossible to turn something so bespoke into a purchasable product, so I'll never be able to walk into a store and walk out with this entire thing, but its like art, you can pay the artist to make you one thats pretty similar since they know how to do it... I suppose that does open a more interesting question for the wider audience.
I have never considered product-izing it. I have no interest in doing so even as a one-off "art piece." And I don't know your net worth, but I doubt there is anybody on this green Earth that I would be willing to work with that could offer up a dollar amount that I'd be interested in. Besides, I'm currently building a task list, https://github.com/justinlloyd/retro-chores/ so have no time for an adventure - nasty, uncomfortable things that make you late for dinner.
With regard to maintenance, I don't know, I haven't touched it in months. Maybe every once in a while I get some weird, catastrophic failure of "I can no longer talk to the ambient screen, but I am still sending commands" and then I have to spend a half-day debugging what the issue is only to realize that the CNC in the workshop stole the IP address because I forgot to lock that IP to the device's MAC when I switched out the old screen for a new screen.
Why does it have to add anything to my life? Why be the third person to climb a mountain?
I hear tell of a 19th century English gentleman who manually recorded the level of rain water and the barometric pressure in his garden, a dozen times a day, including the wee hours of the morning, waking up several times a night as though afflicted with the worst UTI possible, through all weathers, all seasons, all ills, all trials and travails, any and all privations that life could send his way, and did so for 40+ years. Obssessively and compulsively some would say. Or we may say diligently if being generous. I am sure that at some point someone asked "why do you do this? what do you feel it adds to your life?"
Feels weird that you have to defend this take on hobbies on a forum called “Hacker News”.
My father is building a small sailboat model (the Santísima Trinidad), and if someone asked “What does that add to his life?” I personally would pity that person, for its lack of empathy and views on a successful life.
People say "I am curious to know..." which is immediately followed by a request that I justify my reason for existing or doing what I do. The question says more about them than it does about me.
In questions of code and of life, we should ask "why about code" and "what about people."
__
^ ^\ / >
< ' ' ) )
(__( ) /
There is a breed of fox out there, with big bushy tails.
In which the wind pushes them backward, like big billowing sails.
They can seen where they've been, but not see where they'll be.
There are those that sail-walk North
There are those that sail-walk South
And they think they control the way that they're going for
But really they lack all form of direction, no less and no more
When one day came a fox, who was lacking a big bushy tail
It was all scrawny and thin, and made the lousiest sail
"Where do you come from? From where do you hail?"
Cried a crowd of bushy foxes, fighting the winds to stand still
As our new little fox, with a scrawny thin tail
Ambled slowly past them not knowing the question
He didn't stop for a minute, not even to rest
Just kept on walking, simply walked into the West
"What why did you do that?" asked a North-North quick walker. "Don't you know that walking Northwards is best?"
"Best?" shouted a Southward slow stalker "Everyone knows that is as wrong as can be."
"But if you walk North, or if you walk South, we know that West is not the best place to see."
"Why do you walk West? Why do you do that?" puzzled both North-South walkers.
"I don't know, I just like walking West. I came out of the East, just over yonder, and I'm heading out West, to take a quick gander."
"But what's over yonder? From where you came. And what's over yander? Is it the same?" quizzed the South-North slow and quick walkers.
"I don't know. I'll go take a look. I come back when I'm done, I'll walk back to my East."
"But what if you keep walking? What if you run out of ground?"
"Then I'll just keep walking, on into the West, my feet out in front of me, until I come right around."
* /^ ^
| ( ' ' >
\_( )__)
P.S. You and I will probably be the only two people in the world that will read this.
I give up filesystem taxonomies to end up in org-mode/org-roam managed time-organized notes, with files attached and retrievable in a classic search&narrow UI (org-roam-node-find) with eventual quick search (via counsel-rg on org-roam-directory, where in that case notes are like files metadata) or queries (org-ql on drawes properties and tags who are ensured a bit consistent via templates (org-capture, yasnippet etc).
This extra layer was a game-changer for me, I hesitate for long, but finally switched few years ago and so far prove to be flawlessly. I still miss fancy UI/ML tools, but anything is at my fingertips locally, I can make quick slides if needed directly in org-mode, I can click code-executing links (elisp:), running code blocks (org-babel) and anything is integrated to a level NO ONE modern software can reach due to modern systems archaic, limited and limiting designs.
As a person that is always thinking on the public interest, and what that means for open code, I cannot help it thinking "how long until open source overcomes his work"? A decade? 50y?
Those monitors trigger me. Uneven heights, one is tilted, there's a gap big enough to fit a hand through, and they're miscalibrated (different color temperature).
>But one inevitably needs some flat surface, if only just to sign things (it’s not all digital yet), or to eat a snack. So my solution is to have pullouts. If one needs them, pull them out. But one can’t leave them pulled out, so nothing can accumulate on them.
This is a great tip. Get a desk with pull-outs. I have them on the left and right. They're 1/2 an inch think and strong enough to leave a heavy book, laptop, or whatever until you're done. When both sides get pulled out, some paper-heavy task is occurring, such as taxes.
Wow. Reading through Wolfram's post, I stopped and decided to listen to one of his livestreamed software design sessions. Who knows what the right model is, but it's very very clear from at least this video (https://youtu.be/y_M7qtfjjjs) that he's deeply technical and incredibly actively involved in development. I really want to know how effective he is as an organization's manager and not their product manager...
What a guy! Yes, I believe the point is to find what keeps you motivated and works for you. One of my favourite hacks/ritual is making a lot of Mate tea in the morning, drinking a cup, and taking a 1 liter thermo to work. Mate is the best kind of energy drink available and you can pretty much drink as much as you want with no sideeffects (except an extra trip to the toilet). This way I avoid bad coffe at the office. On weekends i drop the Mate tea and prepare myself some descent coffee as a treat
If you showed this to an advanced alien civilization I think they might consider his life one of enforced torture, if they themselves aren’t already living it.
The Clockwork Orange eyes held open forced to watch screens device comes to mind.
I've read this before, but took the opportunity to read it again.
One of the things that impresses me the most is exemplified by these two examples:
> [...] including for example the issue of my elementary school magazine from Easter 1971.
> [...] school geography notes from when I was 11 years old, together with the text of a speech I gave
When he was 11 he had the foresight to realize that he might want to refer back to this stuff and decided to keep it and store it somewhere that it could be found again. When I was 11 I'd have likely thrown it out during the end-of-year desk/locker clean out and not given it a second thought.
While I don't necessarily aspire to his level of productivity, I'm very envious of how meticulous his record keeping is. Whenever I try to get organized like this I quickly get overwhelmed and give up.
I share the dream of being able to walk through the woods while working online, but there's no way that Dr. Wolfram's approach would work for me. I just can't walk smoothly enough to read comfortably from a screen, particularly not while avoiding roots and rocks. A gimble stabilizer could help with the text but not the refocusing.
So I'm hoping that AR glasses will do the trick before long. If they can project non-jiggly text into the world so that I can rapidly context shift between them with little refocusing, and let me input by wiggling my fingers, I'd pay a lot for it. But I guess lines of code per hour will decline with speed.
What a fascinating person! Personally, I prefer to run 10 miles on a trail in the morning then go to work and grind. Vs trying to combine exersize and work.
The great thing about text editors, and to a large extent also paper, is that they give you random access - you can easily see the whole document and make edits at arbitrary points. It's incredibly ergonomic (there is a reason why books overtook scrolls!) and I doubt voice-driven editing can come close. At the same time, audio is easy for creating conversational-style pieces (e.g. podcasts) but a good final product must always come with timestamped transcripts (how else would one grep and/or skip?)
Part of my solution to this is to identify what parts of a project can be done on my computer and then intentionally avoid doing those on the phone.
If I have access to a nice screen, full keyboard and a mouse, the only reason I need to use my damn phone is developers who prioritize their phone apps over computer based applications (see Apple Music, etc).
Right after a pandemic that disrupted to a degree multiple aspects of our life, I say this is not the right time to seek productivity. It is time to reconnect with yourself, your motivations, and your ability to build self enforcing social relations. If you have all these, congratulations, go for optimizing productivity!
Yes. Completely prevents my kids carsickness— they threw up most car rides over 1 hr unless instructed not to read or look down(had to look straight ahead)
I've always found Stephen Wolfram's thoughts to be overly self indulgent, and this is no exception. But it is illuminating since it reveals what I most loathe: the productive life.
Being productive is not a good. It leads to wanting to attach a computer to oneself while going on a walk outdoors!
This is a common sentiment on the Internet. But when I look around at the people I know, none of the people who are anti-productivity are people I admire. In fact, the pro-productivity people do much more of everything with better outcomes.
- The pro-productivity people are more involved parents and family members
- The pro-productivity people are more involved in hobbies
- The pro-productivity people create many more things
- The pro-productivity people lift more, go outdoors more, travel more
It appears, empirically from my sample set, that being pro-productivity correlates with spending one's life meaningfully. Having chosen to model myself on those I know like this, my life has gotten better.
This class of advice (anti-productivity) therefore appears to me to be in the same class of advice as other Internet advice: "kick your kids out at 18 to teach them personal responsibility", "don't take on debt", etc.
To make it worse, you only have to scroll approx 1 page down before you have a picture of Stephen Wolfram outdoors.
The separation of work and play that so many online commenters form is perhaps key to this whole thing. Work is not a thing I do for money alone. I feel happy and fulfilled when I do it. It is fun!
Having read that blog post as well as others like [1], I'm not convinced Wolfram has the time to fulfill those bullet points in a fully engaged manner. He appears to be constantly working (or at least be available for calls and meetings) from waking up at 11am to going to bed at 3am, with a 2-hour dinner break.
I dunno, he's clearly not your average Joe. I also enjoy my work but it's more stressful than going for a walk or playing the guitar. At work there are expectations and deadlines, and I have to plan and manage my time, and update the right people when there are delays or scope changes etc etc. Going for a walk you can just be whatever you are in the moment, you don't have to do or be anything that's asked of you for a few hours.
> The pro-productivity people are more involved parents and family members
I haven't seen this amongst several people I know as pro-productivity. The productivity tends to be hyper-focused on work and side hustles/creative, and family/parental duties seemed to be neglected as a result. But I couldn't find any data on this with a quick search, so it's just conflicting anecdata to your anecdata.
Your other bullet points do align more with my experience, but not this one.
> But when I look around at the people I know, none of the people who are anti-productivity are people I admire.
It's interesting to me that you think the opposite of "pro-productivity"--which I define as people who are constantly engaging in life hacks to increase their perceived "productivity", and thus treat productivity as some kind of end unto itself--is "anti-productivity".
Could we agree that the healthy thing lies somewhere in the middle?
> Work is not a thing I do for money alone. I feel happy and fulfilled when I do it. It is fun!
I really wish I could get into this mindset instead of dreading work. I find no fulfillment from work, in fact the most fulfilled i've felt was when I had no obligations to anyone or anything (taking a break from work)
When you’re like Wolfram, where you are head of a 800-employee organisation, profitable from real users, and have a long road map of where you want to take your product, then work is essentially infinite and energising.
When you get to lead the vision of your “baby”, with support from 800 people, work is completely different from your typical middle manager of individual contributor.
> The separation of work and play that so many online commenters form is perhaps key to this whole thing. Work is not a thing I do for money alone. I feel happy and fulfilled when I do it. It is fun!
That's not "online commenters". It's like 95+% of people who work for a paycheck.
This. I felt an almost cringe-like reaction from reading the article. It reminds me of Goodhart's Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. At some point being productive becomes the end goal and no longer a means to an end, and you've lost touch with the beauty of just going on a walk in nature.
Being productive is good but only as a means to an end. If you're using your productivity to get more done then that can be dangerous. But if you're using it to get your work done faster then it's actually quite useful.
Perhaps you mean that being maximally productive -- that is, seeking productivity over all other goals in life -- is not a good? Because productivity is definitely a good. Without it, all crumbles away to the natural state, which is chaotic and for human purposes "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short".
I find that you’re projecting your thoughts and lifestyle onto his lifestyle choice. Just stop as it does nobody any good.
What’s wrong with attaching a computer to oneself while walking outdoors? Does he have the same intrinsic motivators as you? Probably not. Does it matter? Probably not.
What about people that go outside and just read? Is that not a good life?
He's the one who posted it online. Fine if others post that they think it's bad, and why. Laudable, even, if you suppose he posted it to communicate some message and others find that message to be harmful or misleading or otherwise bad. They ought to post what they think is wrong with it.
Most people don't have his potential. Yeah, I'm aware he pushes a lot of crackpot science, but he is still exceedingly brilliant. For the average folk, this is a horrible way to live.
It's honestly just a boring comment. Yes we all know Wolfram is self-indulgent and overly long-winded, nothing new there, no need to belabor the obvious.
The question is whether there's anything of value to be gleaned from his novella-length blog posts. If you think not, then just downvote or flag article submission.
But if you actually read the whole thing and found specific things of value, and want to summarize them here, then by all means I hope you're upvoted a million times.
> The question is whether there's anything of value to be gleaned from his novella-length blog posts. If you think not, then just downvote or flag article submission.
Flagging, I've always felt, is sort of heavy-handed for "I disagree with". I use it for spam and the like.
There is no "downvote" feature, for article submissions. Which is why it is disappointing when low quality reads like this makes it to the front page.
Here's why I would've downvoted it: This seems to be an article on his personal blog. Seems kind of weird and not useful to make a snarky comment about someone for talking about themselves on their own personal site, when that's often exactly what personal blogs are intended to be for.
