I started timeboxing this year and it’s been very helpful. Even if I’m having a bad day and I can only do one pomodoro sprint, it still stacks up, and it’s how I learned the structure itself helps me.

I track my productivity, and I get more done this way than I did flailing about for a week because things didn’t feel quite right.

I don’t personally use generative AI once I’m in progress, but it’s been an absolute godsend for me to overcome the “blank page” problem. I have it help me with an outline or to brainstorm a concept that needs fleshing out and write off of that.

The especially nice thing is I don’t really reference the outline a lot in the end. Something about the process is enough to rattle my brain into an ordered enough state to flow. Like I just needed to get concepts out of my brain and onto a page so I’m not thinking about it while trying to write.

It’s been a game changer.

I’m not musically inclined at all but seeing as how you’re the second one to mention music I’m definitely going to try it. I’ve tried so many other things to help with my listening that a totally different mode might be just the thing.

So, podcasts have been my primary vector for attacking this and it’s been brutal. It’s possible I’ve been overthinking it and maybe I should just struggle through as you say, use speed controls, pause frequently. I was doing the following:

1. Take a small segment (4-5 minutes)
2. Actively listen three times
3. Read a transcript
4. Listen a fourth time and shadow the segment out loud

Supposedly language learning research backs up this method, but maybe it was just overkill and now that I’ve done a few more months of adding vocab and grammar practice, I should just try bulk input again to build up input automaticity and simply pause/rewind where necessary.

The dopamine hit is a real thing!

I’ve barely touched songs as my comprehension is even worse, but this is an interesting approach. I’ll definitely try it. I don’t think I’ve ever tried an audiobook in Japanese of a story I know. Both seem like a good idea.

Yeah, and I also have been supplementing my reading with recorded audio whenever possible, too. My listening skill keeps lagging behind, though.

I wish dedicated listening didn’t frustrate me so much.

That’s more or less where I sit on it. I think there’s a way to create a personal shopping assistant that would save people time, but the problem is I don’t make enough money to have a comfortable enough margin for the error rate it would certainly have, to speak nothing of whether it would find the prices I’d be satisfied with. I don’t know how many people are in affordable enough living situations where using this to save time would even be responsible.

And that’s assuming the agent is working in the best interests of the user, which we all know won’t be how this works. In general, I don’t know if I’ll ever be comfortable with agentic AI spending my money without it being codified into law that AI agents must have a provable fiduciary duty to end users. As far as I know, no one’s even talking about that.

He’s kind of a JRPG traditionalist, so I’m not surprised he wasn’t big on the game.

Just finished the story demo. Really impressed with it, both gameplay and story.

Someone just needs to clone him so he can actually finish the new game.

First year recorded.

Mind explaining what features and why?

Considering we’ve already got the one former Larian employee speaking out against this, it’ll be interesting to see how many more show up off the record (or maybe on the record anonymously). I’m sure there was an internal battle over it.

There aren’t many (possibly none) with more goodwill banked among enthusiast gamers than Vincke, so I feel like we’re about to see just how far a popular figure can step into this particular puddle without coming out soaked.

Yeah, pound-for-pound, as far as collecting stuff goes, these games get crazy expensive. Some of them are more generous than others with the in-game currency outlays, but that can become its own problem with daily grinds.

There is some very high quality writing and gameplay in the genre right now. A lot of talented people are working on these games. And generally speaking, yes, you don’t need to spend a dime to see the main content.

I tend not to recommend them because you never know who has a gambling problem (and sometimes people don’t know until they are exposed to it for the first time). There’s also the other odd quirk–not just in gacha, but in live-service and other self-insert media in general lately–where character romance is omitted from the game world because they don’t want to offend insecure people. Can make things feel flat at times.

If one knows they are fine with both of those issues, there’s a lot of great content out there.

Close enough

Their reviews aren’t frequent. This is more of a “we ask around the org for what everyone liked this year.” It’s a consistently good list year after year.

I finished Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles. I’m a nerd for this game in a particular so I have many nits to pick, but I was happy with it overall. That said, I don’t recommend the hard difficulty; I didn’t get much out of it.

The voice acting, though. Wow. Chapter 1 hit hard this time, especially Milleuda’s and Ramza’s performances. Joe Pitts is excellent in this role, and you can really feel now how much of a turning point the Plateau was for the character. I appreciated the additional dialogue too, although it got oversold in the marketing. Pretty sure most of the script size increase Matsuno was talking up ended up in menus.

Not anticipating playing anything in the genre. I’m sucked into Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader currently, and I’ve got Trails Beyond the Horizon next month anyway.

Edit: scratch that, after seeing a recommendation I ended up picking up Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch to play in Japanese. I’ll be playing a little here and there.

Slightly different? Comparing a dead simple plot of employment vs. the performance of the S&P to a DID Poisson regression event study is the coughing baby vs. hydrogen bomb meme.

This Stanford study is just one in a very active field of economic research, so it’s reasonable to be skeptical, but I really hope you don’t think people make decisions based on the kind of thing in that Tiktok video.

This study controls for the post-COVID hiring spike in three ways: the researchers generated results without including the tech sector, they separated out remote work, and compared trends from 2018-2022 to those after. The hypothesis holds in all cases. The primary regression analysis also included a standard set of controls for hiring trends (such as interest rate fluctuation).

There’s enough here to find a negative correlation between generative AI and entry-level employment.

Not sure how you got to that conclusion. The survey prompt was “Please indicate whether or not you ever use the following websites or apps.” 29% responded that they do not use the platform, less than 1% did not respond. That’s 70%.