It's always seemed strange to me that it's so common for people to feel the need to have continuous ... radio/podcasts/tv.

It turns out there is a fair amount of research done on this, look into:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_partial_attention

I used to have the MSDN Library installed on my computer, from a CD, and it was reasonable to program offline. We should bring that model back. (Not for Windows - Windows sucks now. But for whatever we're doing)

That’s how Von Neumann did his thang, with a tv blaring in the background

The more things change the more they stay the same I suppose

I have this thought everytime I'm at the beach...