I find it interesting to speculate why those words are not in widespread use. Many of them seem to either have more commonly used near-synonyms (acedia - apathy, indifference or ennui), or be somewhat unwieldy to use (absquatulate would be an useful word, but is way too long and sounds way too pompous).
Some of them, however, combine being rare, accessible and not easily replaced by other words. For example, calumny, copious and crux. I wish to see those words having wider use, as they would be handy to express concepts that generally require longer sentences to get across.
You shouldn't, but it happens. The UI makes it much easier to open a new tab than to close older tabs (unless you close all of them at once). You even inadvertently open new tabs when you click on links and they open on a new tab rather than on the current tab. Unless you consciously choose browse in a way that avoids the proliferation of new tabs, you'll get flooded by them, as that's what the design leads to. Exceptions are browsers that don't save tabs between sessions, or that automatically close tabs after a specific number.
It's not just a public place, but a very specific type of public place: a shopping mall. Were it just a public square with people from your social circle, then it wouldn't be as dangerous.
As a shopping mall, it's full of advertisements, slot machines, games, fast food, sales clerks trying to lead you into the place they want you to be, etc. But it is also the place where almost all your friends are, and almost all the books and newspapers are.
It's hard to leave it because it has valuable things inside (even your office might be inside the mall), but it's also hard to stay in without having your agency taken away by everyone competing for your attention. You could get a book from the bookstore, read it and talk to your friends about it, but it's hard to do that in a mall where everything is designed to take you to their stores, entertainment centers, etc.
An AGI being able to wipe out humanity doesn't necessarily mean that it can take over the universe. The world's governments are already capable of causing extreme suffering through a nuclear war. AGI risk scenarios aren't equivalent to an unbounded intelligence explosion. An AGI only needs to be more powerful than humanity to be a threat. It can be a threat even if it isn't that intelligent, as long as it gives unprecedented power to a few individuals or governments.
Both humanity and a super-intelligent AGI are bound by the laws of physics. Super-intelligence does not imply omnipotence; it simply means that the AGI is orders of magnitude more intelligent than humans. If humans can figure out how to colonize the Milky Way in 90 million years, then the answer to the question of why no AGI has done it is the same as the answer to the question of why no extraterrestrial species has done it.
> Memorisation is adding nodes to your existing network of knowledge
Adding nodes to your existing network of knowledge is learning facts. Memorization is making the nodes persistent. Both are important, but they're not equivalent. You need to do both.
You can learn without memorization (you can learn a lot and forget everything you've learned by the next day). You can memorize without learning the subject matter (for example, you can memorize a counting song in Mandarin Chinese without knowing that what you've memorized are numbers).
Flashcards can be used for learning, but they are optimized for memorization. We shouldn't expect them to be the best tool for learning, because that's not what they're designed for. One might get better results learning from another resource, and then using flashcards to memorize the concepts they've learned.
Learning facts, understanding how they correlate and memorizing both the facts and the correlations are all different steps. Memorization is useful and necessary, but it's not equivalent to learning and to understanding. Each step helps with the other steps. They can happen at the same time, but not necessarily.
Find out if your addiction is because you find the world boring, or if you're trying to escape from something you fear.
If it's the former, block the addictive content and replace it with other things you find fun (hobbies, books, movies, etc), paying attention to how it's more worthwhile to do so.
If it's the latter, find out how to overcome such fear / anxiety and to stop using addictive content as a crutch.
Timeless is another skin, which was never made default [1]. The skin that hides the languages and doesn't use the full screen space is the new skin (Vector 2002). There was talk about fixing the language menu on Vector 2022, but they deployed it without fixing it. The a/b tests even showed that the introduction of the language-switching button even reduced the amount of clicks on language links, the opposite of what they expected by introducing it [2]. I don't know if those concerns were ignored or if they plan on fixing it later on.
> I recently came across a term for this. Telic vs. atelic activities [0]. Telic activities are things with some terminal state, e.g. a typical goal-oriented project, or something like the act of getting married.
> Atelic activities are those activities where the continuous process is the goal. Certain types of learning, being a good parent, and so on.
Reading the article, I understand this differently. Telic activities are indeed activities that have a terminal goal. However, the idea of a continuous process being the goal seems orthogonal to the telic/atelic distinction. You can have an activity that is both enjoyable and has a final goal: one can play a video-game both because they want to beat it and because they enjoy playing it. An activity being telic doesn't mean it's not enjoyable by itself. You can also have atelic activities that don't have any goals.
There's no reason, a priori, that making an activity telic should take away from the day-to-day enjoyment. Having a final goal shouldn't stop people from enjoying the journey. It does change the game (from an open-ended sandbox to a more linear game), but it doesn't make it unenjoyable per se. What really takes out the enjoyment of the process is not the introduction of the goal, but rather an excessive optimization toward a goal at the expense of the process.
Some of them, however, combine being rare, accessible and not easily replaced by other words. For example, calumny, copious and crux. I wish to see those words having wider use, as they would be handy to express concepts that generally require longer sentences to get across.