Best of wysr.xyz on Kiwi News
Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
12 stories from wysr.xyz have been shared on Kiwi News since 23 May 2023, with 39 upvotes and 2 comments in total. The latest was shared on 18 August 2025. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- People want to do Zero Work and Make More Money
People want to do as little work as possible while getting as much reward as possible, and the author argues that anyone trying to change someone's behavior should weigh the work they ask for against the benefits they offer. The piece gives examples such as people picking up a $20 bill from the ground but not digging into a sewer drain for more, choosing credit cards based on perceived rewards, and waiting in line for hours for a free bucket from Finn's. It states that behavior change is work and that rewards can include dopamine, saved time, reduced effort, and cash, with the closer someone is to "asking nothing and giving something," the more likely they are to change.
- Tar Tasks: The stickiest thing that's holding you back
Tar Tasks are simple-sounding to-do items that stay unfinished because of fear of failure, and the author offers ways to get them done. The piece says a Tar Task is often a task that seems simple but is not, and that avoiding it spares you from proving to yourself that you can't do it. It separates these from Hassle Hurdles, which are tasks you dislike rather than ones that cause vague dread, and suggests that if you roll your eyes when asked about one, it is probably a Hassle Hurdle. To break a Tar Task down, it recommends prefixing it with "Write out the 10 steps required to," or handing it to someone else.
- Lines of Drift
The author argues that willpower is too unreliable to win the daily fight against distraction, so attention needs structural fixes, and describes applying the military concept of "natural lines of drift" to their own focus. Over a period of logging distractions, they found three main patterns: distractions usually begin mid-task when a notification or email interrupts, they tend to pull them into further content streams, and they are most likely during unstructured time, abstract goals, or moments of discomfort like hunger or tiredness. In response, they label risky actions such as opening their Farcaster feed or changing their YouTube soundtrack as high risk, predefine their morning routine, and start each two-hour work block with a concrete task tied to a metric.
- 3 Lessons from a Shitty Gardener
The author, who started gardening recently, argues that the hobby offers three lessons: pruning is care, inconsistent results from identical inputs are normal, and daily routine reveals what sporadic effort cannot. They describe gardening as one of the few things holding their mental health together during a difficult summer of overlapping work, personal and family problems. On pruning, they write that each cut directs a plant's limited resources, and they connect this to removing unhelpful habits and commitments, saying that cutting back is not violence. On consistency, they note that seeds from the same packet grow at different rates, and they tie this to daily life, where consistent habits still produce variable outcomes. They conclude that watering daily matters less for the water itself than for the attention it builds.
- Happiness is a Bubble
The essay argues that happiness, like a bubble, is ethereal and fleeting, and that meaning is intertwined with it but harder to find after a period of direct danger. The author, who served as an Infantry Officer in the U.S. Army and deployed to Afghanistan and Kuwait in 2016-2017, says that wartime stakes gave a clear sense of good and bad that everyday life no longer provides. Now, meaning must be actively sought, explained and built, and the author describes this as both a relief and a harder responsibility. The essay ends by describing bubbles as forming quickly and unexpectedly from stillness, a substance and a breath.
- How to hangout with the smartest people on the internet, on Farcaster
The author, who goes by @cameron and has spent over a year on Farcaster, argues that new users can integrate quickly into the community by engaging earnestly, giving more than they take, and building rather than complaining. Key advice includes making a profile that clearly explains who you are and what you care about, and casting content a viewer with no context can value. The author recommends roughly five replies for every top-level cast, because new accounts have no distribution in the default Following feed and replies add depth to existing conversations. The author also suggests sharing perspectives others cannot get elsewhere, and notes that spamming low-effort replies or off-topic channel posts quickly erodes trust.
- The Universe is a Joke (Thanks FIP-2)
The author argues that Farcaster's FIP-2 upgrade makes almost any object, such as a word, a URL or an onchain item, a place where people can attach messages that are not controlled by the object's owner. The essay presents this as a way to move content out of platform silos and make it "permissionless, composable, and censorship resistant." It describes examples including the Waffle House Jobs Page content feed and the r/superbowl owl-picture joke forum, and suggests that onchain items such as house deeds or resumes could carry linked messages without relying on a private company or government.
- The Coming Conflagration: AI, Content, and Slanted Words
Cameron argues that AI chat models let individuals shape media narratives on a national scale with little effort, and that readers should ask why they are being shown a given message. To illustrate, Cameron prompted GPT-4 with Web Browsing to summarize a CNN town hall featuring former President Donald Trump, then to write in the styles of Jon Stewart and Tucker Carlson, saying the Carlson-style text took under 10 seconds of typing. Cameron also says AI licenses mainly help large tech companies and that Russia and China will develop less restrictive models regardless.
- The Startup Founder Hero's Journey
This essay recounts a fictional founder's journey as a hero's-journey narrative about startup life, using a metaphorical story rather than a factual account. It follows a founder, referred to only as "she" and "our hero," through a lead investor's condition that she build a B2B product, a stalled launch, a pivot, and eventual product-market fit. The story ends with a growing team of 1,500 people, acquisition offers, and the founder wondering whether the company has outgrown her vision.
- SayMore Essay Contest Guest Posts
Fran argues that AI will make personalized entertainment and content discovery replace social media's feeds, but that social media will be reborn as a connection-generating platform that uses cryptographic proofs and NFTs to identify humans and link them to their tribes. kbc describes bringing one's own algorithm to Farcaster feeds and proposes ranking methods based on social network analysis, including direct-neighborhood, distinctiveness and betweenness centrality. Derek Hall presents the Cosmic Blockchain Theory, which proposes that the universe is a blockchain upheld by collective consciousness, linking it to the Mandela Effect and prayer.
- AI Let's You Be Insta Mid at Everything and it's Incredible
Using AI to learn a subject makes people "insta mid" at it, a useful but not expert level of competence that still solves most problems. Asking AI about topics like physics, writing or lawn care can put users hours or weeks ahead of where they would be alone. The text argues that AI raises the floor for most industries more than it lifts the ceiling for experts, and that regulation is unlikely to stop tools like ChatGPT from spreading. It suggests spending 10 minutes asking ChatGPT about a friend's hobby before starting a conversation with them.
- Vision: Seeing the Future the Best We Can
The author, a self-described solarpunk techno-optimist, says Apple's Vision Pro reveal has left them hopeful about mixed reality, while withholding final judgment until they can use the device. They say that if Apple delivers even half of what its demo video promises, it will create a genuine new product category, and that everyone they respect in tech who has tried it loves it. The bulk of the piece is a fictional day in the life of Stephanie, who works, reads and relaxes through a headset, with the text presenting this as a picture of where the technology could lead.