[HN Gopher] Irritation Is Inspiration
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Irritation Is Inspiration
Author : j4mehta
Score : 23 points
Date : 2025-05-30 19:35 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jeetmehta.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jeetmehta.com)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Makes me think of the head of a web agency in my town who was
| offended that my son was playing video games in emulation on a
| laptop in a setup that showed the wrong aspect. I gave a talk in
| NYC and then came back to give it in Ithaca and he pointed out
| that I made a common Excel mistake on one of my charts.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| The way you phrased it doesn't sound like irritation that
| improved either your son's situation or your charts. Sounds
| like someone who is a pedantic
| PaulHoule wrote:
| No, I appreciate his detail orientation. Wish I'd shown him
| my talk before I went to NYC.
|
| I find myself irritated by
|
| https://www.fastcompany.com/91324550/kerning-on-pope-
| francis...
|
| like Italy is hotbed of art and culture and one reason you go
| to a Catholic Church is to appreciate a beautiful
| environment. How many things has the church carved in stone
| and done correctly? Maybe 1000 years from now the tomb will
| be still like that and it will remind people that we had
| these terrible machines called 'computers' and aren't we glad
| they are all gone.
| vakkermans wrote:
| ...Who is a pedant.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| I took it as the son's web agency head
| hinkley wrote:
| See also "pain is information".
|
| When it's pissing you off stop. Take a beat and think about
| whether you can go around instead of through. Or whether it's
| worth going through once in a manner that makes it easier next
| time. Walk around the lake, or build a boat. Walk around the
| wood, or build an path and turn it into a road by increments.
| j4mehta wrote:
| Definitely! Surprise, pain, irritation - I think anything that
| causes a strong emotion in you likely means there's potential
| for signal or reflection there.
| CommenterPerson wrote:
| Interesting idea. But that lecture mentioned typos. Now I am
| irritated the author built "a software" to reply to emails.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| My problem is I feel like my irritation is with things that are
| out of my control. People not caring about quality when they
| produce things that I spend good money on (and have no abilities
| to turn into a new manufacturing startup or something). Software
| (Adobe, Blender, Davinci Resolve, etc) that has a feature that
| doesn't feel like it makes sense or something that just doesn't
| seem to work. Another thing that I have no real knowledge about.
| I'm a programmer but I don't think there's a good reason for me
| to write my own 3d software or image/video editor.
|
| Side note, I've never looked at this person's "AI Powered
| Podcast" but how do they even know they're getting real
| information about Indian History? I was talking to ChatGPT last
| night about whether or not it was possible to adjust the level of
| the water in a toilet bowl and it confidently told me I could and
| how to do it. I kept discussing it with it and, at one point, it
| slipped in a comment about how it's controlled by the level of
| the trap in the back of the toilet. I said "So it's NOT possible
| and you've just wasted my time?" and it was like "Yep, sorry
| about that"
|
| Same night I asked it something and provided it a link to read
| and I asked a question about it. It indicated it had gone to the
| page and, I assume, consumed the text on the page. It answered
| the question but then said something that made me realize it
| might be wrong. I asked it to tell me where it saw that and it
| told me it wasn't actually on the page.
|
| I ask because it sounds interesting to make an "AI Powered
| Podcast" about things I'm interested in. I frequently want to
| listen to a podcast while mowing my grass or something and
| struggle to find interesting, long-form things about the specific
| topics that I'm thinking about. (Radio astronomy, weather,
| astronomy, music, whatever) So I'd love to do this but I trust AI
| outputs so little...
| nartho wrote:
| >but how do they even know they're getting real information
| about Indian History
|
| They do not. AI and LLMs are awesome tools when they're being
| used correctly, with their limitations in mind, but for a big
| majority of people who don't have a clue about how they work,
| it's going to be a disaster. We will see more and more of this
| garbage because it's easy money. AI generated podcasts, youtube
| videos etc, until people start believing hallucinated junk.
| j4mehta wrote:
| Yeah fair point! Honestly, the low faith in AI is probably a
| good stance to have right now.
|
| The AI podcast was an experiment for me, I created it by
| feeding reference content (textbooks, primary material, etc) to
| NotebookLM. The results were _okay_, some episodes were good
| but the discussion was far too surface level, and I couldn't
| direct it towards any specific direction.
|
| The tech is evolving so fast though, so I do think there's an
| opportunity in that space to build something interesting.
| bobrobpr wrote:
| My pain comes from reading all the dumb comments on HN. This is a
| cesspool. What happened to humanity?
| esilverman wrote:
| spite driven development
| j4mehta wrote:
| facts
| Daisywh wrote:
| Sometimes I get irritated by the tiniest UX bug like when a
| dropdown doesn't close unless you click outside of it. It's dumb.
| But it sits in my brain all day. Eventually I realized: these
| moments are design feedback, whether I like it or not. I started
| keeping a dumb little "annoyance log" just for fun. After a
| while, it turned into a surprisingly useful list of product
| ideas. Not saying every irritation is genius, but some of them
| are definitely signal. You just have to catch them before they
| fade.
| pedalpete wrote:
| TLDR - you are probably blinded to your biggest irritations, and
| they just might be ingrained into society to such an extent that
| we think nothing can be done about them. Just turning on the
| light to see them and asking the right question is just the 1st
| step.
|
| I think the real challenge is that what bothers most people are
| actually minor irritations. We don't notice the big thing
| shouting at us that it's a problem.
|
| This was my experience which lead me into neurotech/sleeptech.
|
| I'm a lifelong insomniac. I was going through sleep labs as a
| kid. I had done all the CBTi (though I don't think it was called
| that in the 80s), sleep hygiene, etc. etc. I'm quite healthy,
| just crap sleeper.
|
| I was almost 50 when at 3am I thought to myself "I don't care if
| I sleep, I just don't want to be tired anymore".
|
| I thought that was an interesting thought. Poor sleep had been
| ruining my life for the most part of 5 decades.
|
| So I started looking into the latest in sleep research (I had
| worked in healthtech at Australia's science and technology
| research agency), and it all seemed very much the same as what
| I'd heard before. I started tracking everything, trying to figure
| out if I could build some sort of algorithm that picked up a
| signal of what I was doing when I had good sleep vs bad.
|
| This was completely the wrong approach. My irritation wasn't
| truly that I couldn't sleep enough. That was part of it, but the
| bigger irritation was that I was always tired. Even though I
| asked the right question, the global mentality was "you need to
| sleep longer".
|
| That was until I discovered research in slow-wave enhancement,
| which increases the synchronous firing of neurons which are the
| defining marker of deep sleep. This is tapping into the
| restorative function of sleep, not focusing on sleep time.
|
| So I think that finding the irritation that may be hidden from
| you is step 1. But beyond that, who else has had the same
| irritation, and what have they done about it. Why did their
| solutions not work. Then, why do you think you can do it better?
|
| If you're curious about what we're building, you can check out
| https://affectablesleep.com
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