It's important to factor in lifestyle factors here.

By the time you hit 40, you've accumulated ~20 years of adult-life habits. For a lot of people, that lifestyle is very sedentary, missing most dietary recommendations (insufficient fiber intake, oversufficient saturated fat intake), poor sleep, frequent emotional stress etc.

As a young adult, you've spent most of your life being very active, sleeping ~10 hours a night (as a child), having plenty of downtime and playtime etc. It's why you can party hard, study hard and sleep a little; you're starting fresh.

The good news is that some of these habits are massive levers; biological age can drift decades (worst-to-best).

I find it a bit scary too - I simply cannot write programs anymore (mostly motivation, I think) though I'm not conscious of decay in my other mental functions. But I suppose those poor people that go wandering off into the night would say the same sort of thing.

It's not a linear cognitive decline but more like hitting a wall (usually late 40s/early 50s). What's it like? Frustrating as Hell because you can remember your prior capabilities but have to deal with things like randomly forgetting words/names temporarily, decreased short-term memory abilities, etc.

43, I've never felt better or smarter, the wisdom vs intelligence ratio is real, and you learn to take better care of yourself over time. I am definitely old, but it's less in the brain than I would have expected when I was younger.

The other thing you gain is time contraction - a year now feels like a month when I was younger, so it's easier to plan long term and follow through on projects.

But I too am very interested in the perspective from closer to 80! I suspect, if I'm lucky enough to make it there, I'll consider present me the same kind of fool as I now consider younger me.

I don't spend anywhere near the time on HN today that I used to spend reading books back then.

the worst part isn't even the garbage, it's the "good plot written in very bad way"

you power through it, you get invested - but you know that nothing will ever come out of it and in no way can you recommend it

He says he mainly summarizes plot and that the qualities of the writing are not important. It seems like that would miss opportunities - for instance he didn’t think Vineland was adaptable and didn’t even recognize One Battle After Another as the adaptation when he saw it until the credits rolled. Another example, IMHO Arrival is a beautiful adaptation that improves upon the original short story mostly by addition, or maybe it’s cause Amy Adams is more charismatic than the character in my imagination.

I was skeptical, but the article starts with Train Dreams, which according to HowLongToRead, would take 2 hours at 300 WPM.

https://howlongtoread.com/books/323872/Train-Dreams

Two days per book full time means one every 16 hours. Enough to read the full Foundation Trilogy with one hour to rest between books.

On a side note, I'm ashamed to share that I tested my reading speed, and while it was 264 WPM, my reading comprehension was 50%. That's why I read slower, and frequently re-read.

https://swiftread.com/reading-speed-test

Out of spite I tried to measure my Spanish reading, 520 WPM and 100% comprehension. Very unfair since it's my native language and I can glance and skip instead of reading every word.

https://speedreadr.com/es/

But the reader escaped! :-)

Not sure what you want to know. To me, the interesting aspect is the unique challenges of making high-stakes decisions in ultra high-uncertainty situations where you never receive any feedback signal on most of your calls. And the little you do get is greatly delayed or buried in ambient noise. Yet, due to the size of the infrequent prize, the game can still be worth playing... if you can find and hold a slight edge.

There aren't a lot of professional careers which require skill and years of experience yet are flooded with so many false positives, false negatives, and "we'll never even knows". Domains where playing at a world-class level only takes being right 5% of the time - are just hard to reason about. It can feel like a sadistic casino where 97% of blackjack hands have no clear winner, yet sometimes hitting on 20 is the optimal call. But other times standing on 12 is the best strategy. But it's not entirely random. There are real signals. It's just hard to identify which are real, which are red noise and which are just mapped backward.

With so many false positives and false negatives it's easy to end up chasing black swans (random outlier events). Or to just settle for trying to please your boss, whose own track record is probably closer to astrology than strategy. My best meta-takeaway is to focus on thoroughly mapping the decision space, carefully track and map all the signals, even build a taxonomy of signal types if you can. Then relentlessly optimize the decision making process over the actual outcomes. Why? Because in such 'wicked' domains, sometimes the wrong decision process can still score winning results. And other times, an optimal decision process can yield a string of losses. Your job depends on figuring which is which before it's obvious to other expert players.

As for the book reader in the TFA, I suspect a lot of his value isn't in his a binary "go / no go" call. It's accurately mapping the strengths and weaknesses of a particular title and suggesting where to place it in the studio's current decision matrix. And, on a good day, maybe spotting non-obvious ways the property could be developed.

If someone has the will to fight those little xs, they have the will to install uBlock Origin. It even works on iPad and iPhone now, through a regular Safari Plugin.

Also [soft violin music] when it's a Bach cello suite.

Haha, [leaves rustling] I will ask her.

I don't think it is cut and dry as that. Of the top of my head I can think of "Jorge Luis Borges" who was a voracious reader and much of his career involved reading (literary adviser, librarian etc.). I don't think (can't know for sure) he hated his job.

Not necessarily true for everyone, either of them. Both parts feel too dogmatic, it always depends.

True for me. I used to love writing software. About fifteen years into my career I lost interest in side projects, and by the time I retired anything that smacks of coding seems like drudgery.

I occasionally watch a woodworking YouTube channel. The creator tells people if they start woodworking as a job they'll have to find a new hobby.

Every other day is ~3/week which is between 150 and 180/year; not 300.

He’d be reading nearly 6/week, which is ~every day.

There really isn’t anymore. It can ape anyone’s style well, including insights and almost no one can reliably tell if something is AI or not.