<story><title>Google sheep view</title><url>http://www.googlesheepview.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>codeshaman</author><text>After waking up, I watched a video of two cats fighting and screaming for a couple of minutes: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=vEvvRfuVk30&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=vEvvRfuVk30&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The video has 8 million views.&lt;p&gt;Out of all the activities and experiences that our modern world offers, 8 million viewers still chose to watch two cats fighting ... Why ?&lt;p&gt;Projects like these make me both happy and scared - happy, because life is so good that people have nothing better to do than look for photos of sheep on google maps and publish them online.&lt;p&gt;Scared because a lot more people have nothing better to do than visit that page and look at the photos of sheep somewhere in time and space..
Have we all gone mad ?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JohannesH</author><text>I posted a 9 second video of me pushing a coke can over a table making a sound that&amp;#x27;s similar to Chewbacca (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;youtu.be&amp;#x2F;myhYNsRXYgs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;youtu.be&amp;#x2F;myhYNsRXYgs&lt;/a&gt;) a few days ago. So far it&amp;#x27;s been seen 750.000 times on youtube and about 3.000.000 times on facebook. This is about 416 days worth of people watching this video (wasting time).&lt;p&gt;However, I think it is the wrong perspective to take. People do all sorts of &amp;quot;seemingly&amp;quot; non-productive things (including but not limited to watching stupid youtube videos)... all the time. But I think these activities might have important and positive social properties (people bonding over the video, having a laugh). There are possibly even some positive psychological effects (such as stress relief). Well, that&amp;#x27;s just my thoughts on the matter. :)&lt;p&gt;But of course I&amp;#x27;m not a psychologist, and I don&amp;#x27;t know if this is the case in reality. But it is certainly an interesting topic to explore.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google sheep view</title><url>http://www.googlesheepview.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>codeshaman</author><text>After waking up, I watched a video of two cats fighting and screaming for a couple of minutes: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=vEvvRfuVk30&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=vEvvRfuVk30&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The video has 8 million views.&lt;p&gt;Out of all the activities and experiences that our modern world offers, 8 million viewers still chose to watch two cats fighting ... Why ?&lt;p&gt;Projects like these make me both happy and scared - happy, because life is so good that people have nothing better to do than look for photos of sheep on google maps and publish them online.&lt;p&gt;Scared because a lot more people have nothing better to do than visit that page and look at the photos of sheep somewhere in time and space..
Have we all gone mad ?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>comboy</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s really hard to define what&amp;#x27;s good&amp;#x2F;productive and what is not (apart from choosing optimization function, there&amp;#x27;s so many unknowns, like e.g. speeding up technological progress could be leading to our quicker extinction).&lt;p&gt;So if I look at this frustrated guy rewriting app from one JS framework to another, and some other one being happy looking at some pictures of sheep, I&amp;#x27;m really not able to tell which one is spending his time &amp;quot;better&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Of course there&amp;#x27;s also this thing that for one person exploring depths of some computer game may be very exciting and worth spending time, while somebody else may not get his dopamine unless he creates something new. Everything seems to suggest that the there are more consumers than creators out there &amp;lt;insert education system rant here&amp;gt;&lt;p&gt;But what I actually wanted to point out, is that when you look at human history, it seems to me, that even when spending a lot of time watching cats, average Joe is able and is doing a lot more of meaningful stuff today than he was able in the past. Again, meaningful is hard to define, but I mean there&amp;#x27;s more opportunity to do something that no one has ever done before. More niches and small global communities. Less time spent on dull repetitive tasks (yes, I think it does still hold true if you include China).</text></comment>