Why a Dedicated Music Device?
Kev asks why do you have a dedicated music device. I got a HIFI Walker H20 Pro around a year ago and love using it. This doesn't even work with my Navidrome setup that lets me have music I own everywhere. I have to manually drag files onto it once I've purchased them online or ripped a newly purchased CD.
When I first got it and used it while walking the dog something just felt more restful or quiet about the time walking the dog. I figured that the feeling would pass once the device wasn't new. That my phone running a Navidrome client would feel the same. I thought that it was more about listening to music I own than the device I was using to listen to the music.
I was wrong.
The dedicated music device makes the feeling of listening to music more meaningful somehow. It can't do anything but provide music to my ears. There is no option to quickly check something, I'm truly out on my own with the music and the dog.
I use this to listen to music early in the morning when I'm reading before everyone is up and my stereo can't be used. I use it at the coffee shop and leave my phone in the car.
I still find myself stopping what I'm doing to just enjoy the music, and I don't do that when I'm listening to the same music on my phone.
I can't explain it fully, but the feeling of peace is real and I love it.
Lou also wrote about his move off Apple Music and to his own collection with an iPod.
Life at 1x
From Matheus:
I also made a rule for myself: if something isn’t worth consuming at 1x, it’s not worth consuming at all.
This echoes my slow reading notes process and thinking that if the note is not worth writing down by hand, then it's not worth writing down. I've even advocated for taking way less notes and instead doing something with the notes you already have.
Despite this, I too listen at 2x speed to my podcasts. Most of them are for entertainment, and the few that are for "work" stuff like Security Now require me to sit down later and really look at the security issue highlighted during the podcast.
I love the idea, and I'm not sure this one is for me.
We lose the ability to think
This is an excellent essay wrestling with LLM usage in academics and has lots of parallels to many fields, including the programming field I work in. I find Claude to be an accelerant for my work, but at least a few times a week it does something stupid that I know will create long-term issues. I only know this because of 15 years in the industry, because I did the same dumb stuff in the past.
I've also helped train a number of Jr Developers in my time, and I wonder if I'd get better output at first, but build more dependency hell and legacy code that no one understands. Not the type of legacy code thot someone wrote and understood it's function at one point, but code that no one understood at any point because the LLM wrote it from the beginning.