January 2018

Your smartphone is making you stupid, antisocial and unhealthy. So why can’t you put it down? – The Globe and Mail
We’re doomed! Interesting for this bit: “It takes office workers an average of 25 minutes to get back on task after an interruption, he notes, while workers who are habitually interrupted by e-mail become likelier to “self-interrupt” with little procrastination breaks”. That’s true of me: if I’m constantly getting interrupted I give up and procastinate in anticipation of the next interruption.
(tags: technology culture psychology smartphones facebook work)

Simulating Religion: A Christian takes stock of Silicon Valley’s rationalist community by Alexi Sargeant
A Christian takes stock of Silicon Valley’s rationalist community
(tags: lesswrong rationalism eliezer-yudkowsky Christianity philosophy transhumanism)
How evolutionary biology makes everyone an existentialist | Aeon Essays
“Each variant of human desire is ‘natural’, not in the sense of being required, but only of being made possible by nature. And it is in what nature makes possible, not in what it necessitates, that we should look for the answer to the question about what we should be or do.”
(tags: philosophy ethics existentialism evolution biology)
Notes from the Intelpocalypse [LWN.net]
A good, reasonably technical, summary of the Spectre and Meltdown attacks.
(tags: cpu hardware spectre meltdown security intel)