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.
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.<p>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: <a href="https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2016/08/10/0830" rel="nofollow">https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2016/08/10/0830</a>
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.<p>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 love this essay so much. It was the inspiration for my Dogsheep project - <a href="https://dogsheep.github.io/" rel="nofollow">https://dogsheep.github.io/</a> - 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!<p>(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: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2020/Nov/14/personal-data-warehouses/" rel="nofollow">https://simonwillison.net/2020/Nov/14/personal-data-warehous...</a> )
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.
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 have systems that keep all sorts of data, including every keystroke I type, every step I take and what my computer screen looks like every minute<p>Yikes? He's smart, so I'm sure he's protected it adequately, but auditing the surface area of this much software seems insane.
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).<p>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.
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.<p>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 (<a href="https://youtu.be/y_M7qtfjjjs" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/y_M7qtfjjjs</a>) 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.<p>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.<p>One of the things that impresses me the most is exemplified by these two examples:<p>> [...] including for example the issue of my elementary school magazine from Easter 1971.<p>> [...] school geography notes from when I was 11 years old, together with the text of a speech I gave<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Part of my solution to this is to identify what parts of a project can be done from my phone and then intentionally avoid doing those on the computer.<p>- Writing correspondence, essays, docs, todolists? The voice-to-text feature works great on iPhones.<p>- Reading blog posts or articles? Extract text then run it through the iPhone's screen reader.<p>- Moving trello tasks around? Do it through the phone app. 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!
Previously (still a good re-read!): <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26045380" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26045380</a><p>I have the problem of flat surfaces, I've been trying hard to figure out a better way for incoming papers (bills, to read, to investigate, to shred).
I look forward to watching those software design videos<p>edit: ahh yeah... this is some dense/context specific stuff<p>the language design review ones are fun though... the tangents
Is Gwern [1] actually Stephen Wolfram's alter ego? Two sides of the same coin<p>[1] <a href="https://www.gwern.net/" rel="nofollow">https://www.gwern.net/</a>
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.<p>Being productive is not a good. It leads to wanting to attach a computer to oneself while going on a walk outdoors!