14 comments

  • datakan59 minutes ago
    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.
    • jemmyw27 minutes ago
      I can't really think of anyone I know who doesn't have a hobby. Of course, most people I've met are via a hobby.
    • nicbou45 minutes ago
      That's not my experience at all. My friends have plenty of hobbies and so do I.
    • negativezone53 minutes ago
      Or the hobby folks are all too busy with their hobbies to chat these days.<p>It&#x27;s too bad, though. Regardless of what hobby you&#x27;re in, it&#x27;s a golden age to have it.
      • ionwake48 minutes ago
        surely coding projects is a hobby surely eveyron HN is finishing all their &quot;dream&quot; projects that were vastly impossible to finish before AI? otherwise thats just me
      • vouaobrasil29 minutes ago
        I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;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&#x27;s a loss. Not everyone will agree but that&#x27;s just different values.
  • pringk0250 minutes ago
    The data seemed like it could be interesting but I found it tough to engage with the “stylish” AI prose and UI flourishes.<p>Is there a human-written long-form article to go with this?
    • ionwake41 minutes ago
      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
      • hypertexthero35 minutes ago
        It is very interesting data and looks good.<p>Thank you for posting it.
      • pentakkusu26 minutes ago
        no need to apologize, I like the vibe
      • bflesch31 minutes ago
        The animations make it quite slow on my system. Maybe there&#x27;s a way to figure out if users actually have webgl enabled and only then do the animations.
        • ionwake14 minutes ago
          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,
    • utopiah19 minutes ago
      an artisan blogpost? Is this 1999?
  • agos1 hour ago
    why should I employ my time reading something the &quot;author&quot; didn&#x27;t bother writing? my attention has been stolen, sure, but if wrestle it back I&#x27;ll give it to anything else
    • ionwake57 minutes ago
      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?
      • joenot44345 minutes ago
        I think it would have been much more insightful if you just shared your thoughts directly. I&#x27;m not interested in reading Claude output.<p>A lot of people spend more than an hour writing a post and it usually results in a better experience for everyone.
        • ionwake40 minutes ago
          Thank you for the feedback man, again I spent a coupe hours on this post, but Ill try to type more
  • wuschel45 minutes ago
    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&#x2F;cultures, I would love to see them. Where do you have the base data from?<p>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.<p>I liked the idea attention measurement clock on the bottom of the page.
  • rhipitr29 minutes ago
    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.
  • themoose834 minutes ago
    I&#x27;m building an app to help people reclaim their attention, if you are interested in helping beta test please fill in the form ! - coghance.com
  • Foobar85681 hour ago
    And the article is skimmed in ... 47 seconds.
    • hahahaa1 hour ago
      Me too but I spent minutes I said minutes reading a book today so fuck it I am proud of myself.
  • joenot44346 minutes ago
    Can you share the prompt you used?
    • int3trap34 minutes ago
      This comment feels like it&#x27;s meant to be deprecating. The content of the post is interesting regardless of whether or not it was AI generated.
    • ionwake39 minutes ago
      guys can you stop winding me up now
  • kittikitti41 minutes ago
    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.
    • hyperhello27 minutes ago
      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.
  • vitorfblima52 minutes ago
    If you didn&#x27;t take your time and effort writing it, why should I bother reading it? I can only assume the &quot;author&quot; is being ironic on purpose, pushing slop claiming that machines are taking my attention.
  • petesergeant57 minutes ago
    &gt; meta earned $17 per north american user in 2011<p>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.
    • lloeki44 minutes ago
      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.
    • Anon109641 minutes ago
      The very next bullet is<p>&gt; $233 in 2024. 13x in 13 years<p>So yes you would in fact need to pay ten times that and then some. And by virtue of being on hacker news I&#x27;m guessing your actual ads targeting value is more like 20x that or more.
    • 3962ea18007c38 minutes ago
      Watching ads is literally the purpose of those kinda apps though. What else would you do there if not watching ads? People love ads
  • rinnetensei1 hour ago
    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.
    • SoMomentary35 minutes ago
      Right? It&#x27;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.
    • hahahaa1 hour ago
      Whose point? If AI it is just a prediction of maximizing a logit.
    • ionwake1 hour ago
      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 &quot;oh you used Ai to help with the design&quot; is basically a diminishing insult at this point, you might be considered an idiot if you dont in 6 months time.<p>I appreciate your feedback but my point is the delineation between &quot;hey guys screw this guy he used AI&quot; is getting harder and harder with each passing day.<p>As for me, I personally have been using &quot;variants&quot; of AI tooling since I studied AI about 30 years ago. So i dont know man.
      • skinfaxi37 minutes ago
        You say you don&#x27;t know but you have people in here telling you and you&#x27;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?
        • ionwake15 minutes ago
          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
      • nicbou42 minutes ago
        It&#x27;s because we can&#x27;t tell where your effort stopped and the machine took over. It&#x27;s hard to assess the quality of something that may or may not have had any human curation in it.<p>Using AI is not wrong per se, but it&#x27;s a fairly reliable sign that the piece might not be worth human attention.
        • ionwake29 minutes ago
          ok thank you, ive manually rewritten the text for the blog where it was main excerpts ( not the labels eg )
  • bflesch32 minutes ago
    Amazing! Just disable the animations it makes my system really slow.
  • eager_learner57 minutes ago
    it took me 11 seconds to realize it was AI slop.
    • ionwake53 minutes ago
      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)
      • javhu43 minutes ago
        I would rather read imperfect human grammar than perfect AI corpospeak. It&#x27; s no shade to you, AI produces the most soul crushing prose imaginable. I&#x27;d rather read a teenage girl&#x27;s fanfiction.
        • trevithick26 minutes ago
          I agree. It&#x27;s so grating. &quot;This isn&#x27;t an issue—it&#x27;s an epidemic. Here&#x27;s the takeaway: attention span is a load-bearing element of cognition. And honestly? This article nails it.&quot; (Not actually AI, I just made it up and tried to cram in a bunch of tropes)
        • vouaobrasil27 minutes ago
          AI is a uniformizer - it&#x27;s suppose to make us more machine like so that we&#x27;re more replaceable. People use it because there&#x27;s an economic advantage, and because it provides a dopamine hit, but that&#x27;s it.<p>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.
      • pringk0237 minutes ago
        People use markers of effort as a proxy to gauge the quality of a resource.<p>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.
      • myzek37 minutes ago
        People don&#x27;t like reading articles &quot;redacted&quot; by AI because that feels disrespectful<p>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&#x2F;machine
        • ionwake28 minutes ago
          Im not sure if Im being an idiot but I thought it would be LESS offensive
      • joenot44344 minutes ago
        People don&#x27;t really care for imageboard culture here; talking about (You)&#x27;s can be a bit alienating.
        • ionwake27 minutes ago
          ok thanks I just thought it would be a funny injoke not alienating but its a good point