Posted by gnabgib 5 days ago
You lose some things without live faces/cameras, but also gain a lot.
Blog post of mine on it:
I have suspected this might be the case for a while, but I'm not aware that it is obvious.
What I was finding, was each tab/window/screen swap was a chance to lose focus. In practice I do lose focus a lot if I'm switching between screens.
I don't have the same issue with tiles, and I can also setup workspaces to act a bit like focus rooms. I do a lot of little things to retain focus, another one is removing the mouse from my workflow as much as possible as it feels kind of like taking your hands off the wheel to fiddle with the car stereo. You switch mode, and that can disrupt focus.
A quick search yields:
> Beneficial effects of noise on higher cognition have recently attracted attention. Hypothesizing an involvement of the mesolimbic dopamine system and its functional interactions with cortical areas, the current study aimed to demonstrate a facilitation of dopamine-dependent attentional and mnemonic functions by externally applying white noise in five behavioral experiments.
> ..These results suggest that white noise has no general effect on cognitive functions.
Differential effects of white noise in cognitive and perceptual tasks https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4630540/
> Perceptual decision-making relies on the gradual accumulation of noisy sensory evidence. It is often assumed that such decisions are degraded by adding noise to a stimulus, or to the neural systems involved in the decision making process itself. But it has been suggested that adding an optimal amount of noise can, under appropriate conditions, enhance the quality of subthreshold signals in nonlinear systems, a phenomenon known as stochastic resonance.
Stochastic resonance enhances the rate of evidence accumulation during combined brain stimulation and perceptual decision-making https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6066257/
I've also configured my text editor to be very "static": when I type, the only things that can happen are the cursor moves, or text is inserted. I have to manually trigger things like the autocompletion popup, LSP checks, or highlighting the symbol under the cursor.
GitHub Copilot is similar, defaulting to provide suggestions to finish your LOC whenever you stop typing. While the AI tools can be very useful, the benefit is lost if I can't focus on what I'm writing.
So far I haven't seen a piece of software that tries to do everything under the sun while also being enjoyable to use.