Low-latency isn't the only problem, I think. The small-enought latency seems to be worst: you click somehing and wait for the reward just few ms later. Incresing this wait to seconds prevents this effect.
I ensure my loading graphic shows for a minimum of 333ms to make sure my users see that something was happening, just incase the operation completes too fast for the user to realize it happened.
We self select into our bubbles anyway. Especially amidst an almost subconscious addictive trawl across the internet. There's a stereotype of computer addiction that shows the user as this active, hyper alert entity absorbing everything they possibly can. The reality is that you sit there, numb to everything, barely attentive, clicking over and over again.
The trope of someone closing reddit, only to open reddit again, is a microcosm of that. If you were actively participating in the decision making and thinking clearly, you would never make that mistake. Something else is driving your trawl.
Depends on how big of an addict. And also you could just disable the extension as well like you do for your failed site blocking extension of preference.
It's really great for a lot of network testing. It let's you intercept and modify requests/responses directly which is great for testing front end /backend input sanitization.
This is a funny and particularly well written post that touches on a serious topic. Tech addiction and attention seeking are not yet being self-moderated. We are living out a massive social experiment of sorts because of the rapid advancement of the internet. I believe it is a certain net-positive on society, but we need to pay more attention to the cons.
A while a ago I realized this and saw myself uncontrollably refreshing some of these discussion sites. One of the reasons I decided not to delete my hackernews account when I deleted my accounts on other sites like reddit was because of the “noprocrast” feature. It’s not perfect but it can help prevent being totally consumed.
I like the probably-accidental double-entendre here. ;)
I think there is some attention (though probably still not enough) being paid to algorithms/clouds/etc gamifying our dopaminergic cycles, often without our best interests in mind. But it's worth remembering that individuals can easily fall into these anti-patterns independently, without coercion from centralized servers or dark UI patterns.
When I first heard the RHCP lyric referencing "getting high on information" I thought it a clever turn of phrase, maybe even a bit of a good thing; now I view the phenomenon with deadly seriousness, as I find it an ongoing struggle in day-to-day life, trying to keep focus on what matters amidst a deluge of both noise and signal.
We don't have a natural moderation mechanism for it, and must rely on self-awareness and then self-discipline in the moment. Horribly unreliable. For most desires we have built in moderators, like in hunger you get full, for exercise you get tired, for sex you get a cocktail of chemicals that make you satiated, and so on.
Thinking outside of chemicals, the way we experience the web now is deliberately shallow to keep you moving from item to item, and full of hooks to bring you back before you get engaged in something in a way that would be satisfying.
Sure we do. These are our small-scale desires. Then you might think that on a larger scale this is not really what you want- but try to deny the right of people to desire ordering food from home, or buying online, or going where they want as fast as it's possible, or being cured from pneumonia or cancer.
Really curious why you are being downvoted. The pyramid of needs is at work here, when your basic needs are satisfied it becomes easier to work on higher level issues.
Is one a better philosopher when they are starving? I don't know. I would rather be a well fed philosopher than a starving one.
The stoics for example have a practice where they deliberately deprive themselves of basic things like food and warmth in order to appreciate those things more when they do have them.
In Seneca's case, at least, he advocated similar things (playing at being a destitute beggar every now and then) to remove fear of bad circumstances, not exactly to increase appreciation of good circumstances.
Something I say constantly, especially to others trying to make a decision to act, is "What's the worst thing that could possibly happen?" The thing is, you probably can't even imagine the worst thing that can possibly happen from any given decision. But by saying it out loud, you try, at least briefly. And in doing so, you often realize that "the worst thing that could possibly happen" really isn't all that bad.
I wanna ask this person on a date. What's the worst thing that could possibly happen? They say no and I feel embarrassed. It's a lot easier to do scary things if you actually think about the consequences of failure, rather than letting animal fear control you.
Lots of things that look like hierarchies are more like stuff distributed ~ power law. Certainly wealth, but I think actual needs are pretty distributed ~ power law.
Breathing looks hierarchically more important than self-actualization but it's just that a material portion of your entire ensemble of needs is just breathing - completely not optional.
Given that, you can futz w/ stuff and see if the levy-stable structure of this sort of thing will allow you to fold over different stuff
Discussions like this get sullied because people interpret the word "want" differently. Some interpret it as an action that is supported by a conscious will and get offended when it is supposed that they want something that is, rationally speaking, not what a person should want. Things like procrastination and gluttony. In my experience these people's thinking tends to be more libertarian. My impression is that their egos have a stronger hold on them than their material needs. Others will interpret "want" as a desire borne from basal physiology, acknowledging that we (the "person") are pilots of organic bodies (the "human") that sometimes induce certain emotions and drives that we are unable to suppress. These people tend to be more holistic thinkers.
Our monkey brains are not evolved to deal with the satisfaction barrage of met expectations, or the microdosed dopamine of incremental reputation tallies.
We've weaponised the apparatus of retail and communication against our own limbic systems.
I'm with ya. I'm pretty solidly middle - maybe upper middle class, but even the fact that I have opinions about Malbec over Pinot Noir makes me feel gross with opulence, not sure why.
How prodigious is it that so many of us know so many intricacies and details about so much stuff, from the aesthetic to the mechanic. We don't know if our point in the universe is to spread life or morality or simply to make it pretty, it's probably pointless to wonder beyond our very own life, but there's no denying that we are growing. We are becoming. Only by getting there can we know what it is. But it sure is one-of-a-kind.
All the cynicism and pessimism in the world falls short in the face of our past achievements, let alone the future potential of this Earth (I like to consider all life here to be part of the journey, we didn't exactly "win" in isolation, and "we" is more like the system to me, however large that is).
> We are becoming. Only by getting there can we know what it is. But it sure is one-of-a-kind.
I have been having a bit of a rough month, one of those obdectively good on the outside view but subjectively on the inside full of self-doubt and existential angst.
This just yanked me out of that headspace, for a few moments at least.
Our homes are not just like a king's palace, when it comes to comforts, entertainment, and petty luxuries, but like a king's palace in the middle of a once-in-a-generation, no-expense-spared festival. But multiplied by 100. And they're like that 24/7, year-round.
If I were somehow transported back in time to The Field Of The Cloth Of Gold[0], I’d probably be bored because my phone wouldn’t work, and the wine would probably suck. It’s hard to make good wine without knowing what yeast is.
No joke. We burn a bunch of lightbulbs with candle powers measured in the hundreds, have several kinds of entertainment of the highest quality that's ever existed anywhere available at the literal press of a button or with the right spoken command, have a librarian-scribe who can fetch us most any info we like nearly instantly even if it's just a passing whim, our food is abundant, cheap, outstanding, and for all but the poorest can be cooked and delivered by others on a fairly regular basis.
If anything it's surprising we're not even fatter and even less well-rested. We live in a friggin' world-class carnival. Describe some medieval monarch living in some kind of environment like that and we'd simply assume they'd be a wrecked, fat drunkard with perpetual bags under their eyes in short order, even if they had the best of intentions and pretty decent character. But we wonder why we're fat and tired and write and read books about it and try not to see the obvious cause, and the cost of fixing the problem.
Comparisons between modern mundane luxury and the lives of ancient royalty rarely take into account the different stressors present in either case. Maybe the life of a medieval sovereign would still be preferable to that of a modern serf, if nonmaterial considerarions were included.
My assays at Crusader Kings II—squaring remarkably well with fictional and historical accounts of similar figures in roughy the same time period, see e.g. King Lear and Hamlet for good examples of the former—do not make being a medieval lord seem low-stress. Full of creature comforts and experiences unknown to most of the population at the time, yes. Though I think the environment of medieval Europe was a particularly rough one for the ruling class and at other times and places before and after, yes, it indeed would have been unreservedly "good to be the king".
> for all but the poorest can be cooked and delivered by others on a fairly regular basis.
kitchens are expensive. the historical urban poor often lived in a corner of a room and bought their food from someone who had a kitchen. it makes eating home cooked meals feel absolutely decadent!
(one thing i haven't yet understood: food was cheaper than a penny, but there were no farthings or ha'pnies till much later. indeed, a penny bought about $20 worth. so did they buy meals a week at a time, and get a pastie a day or something?)
Something I've noticed in my kids; because they do have this access to "entertainment of the highest quality", real-world experiences struggle to measure up.
For instance, going to the circus was fun, but quickly forgotten. A local stunt pilot flying overhead only gets a quick glance.
A few minutes of a YouTube compilation gives more amazing entertainment moments than my entire childhood.
Agreed, perhaps it is more king-like to _not_ need to know where everything on your plate has come from. In that way, perhaps these coffee ‘blends’ that are so plebeian to the modern taste would be considered the most elevated to aristocratic.
I could be getting it wrong, but I thought this was part of the wordplay of the poem. It's not necessarily what your soul wants, it's what the small sorcerer inside you wants. The one that when you get hungry says "You know you can just stay in and have someone deliver it", or when you see an interesting book mentioned in conversation goes "We can have that on our shelf in less than 2 days!".
A few weeks ago, in support of a customer's new facilities, I tasked a satellite imaging platform to take a photograph of Dubbo, Australia, using an app on my iPhone. Placing the instruction took less than two minutes, the longest part of which was downloading the app. The processed image was downloaded to my device before close of business that same day.
Against a glowing surface, my hand describes a complex sigil, and orbital mechanisms leap into action on my whim.
Next up: pulling together the components for Karsus's Avatar
After reading your comment, I was curious what your photograph might have looked like and where Dubbo was. A moment later, I had selected, searched for, and been presented with images of and articles about Dubbo. I gave them a brief, bored glance and moved on.
Possibly the spymesat app. If you create an account and log in, apparently you can select satellites and task it to take images for anywhere between $500 to $3300.
I have found the facade of control that technology presents is easily punctured by a few days outside of cell range in rugged wilderness. Being alone in emergency situations also reveals our total lack of control over the whims of fate. Basically, when it comes to dealing with substantial, immediate personal problems technology is still pretty useless.
The amount of lifesaving assistance available to the average person with a single phone call is staggering. Being outside of cellphone demonstrates the utility not futility is such assistance.
It’s not even limited to medical assistance. A friends floor collapsed and a single phone call made the difference between an unpleasant day and an agonizing death.
“Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.”
Reminds me of how modern horror movies mostly have to one of 1) be set before cell phones, 2) dispose of cell phones somehow, or 3) be in some way about cell phones.
Tangentially related, reminds me of how most scifi books and movies add all sorts of insane tech, yet leave out competent AI (in e.g. battle scenes, piloting vehicles, etc.) which would utterly obliterate anything human controlled.
In case you haven't, please read some Culture (referenced above)! It features an extremely plausible integration of very strong AI in the lives of mortals, and handwaves minimally.
Just like it says on the tin: "A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety"
It's a semi-obscure but-well-regarded-in-certain-circles poetry/literary journal that's been around since the mid-90s, that uses the aesthetics of blue-collar industrial & commercial publications, drawing on them for illustrations, section title inspiration, occasional excerpts of advice or instructions, that sort of thing. The poetry itself isn't tied down by that theme, though, and ranges as widely as any poetry journal might. Also each issue usually includes at least one recipe. (the "cooking" part).
The journals themselves tend to include some kind of physical gimmick. IIRC one early one was a bunch of loose sheets with a hole through the middle, "bound" with a bolt, nut, and washers. One came in an actual, sealed evidence bag. Issue #31's spine (the one quoted) has been dipped in wax. One's cover is sandpaper and spine covered in duct tape, another's textured with brick dust. One's got a cork driven through it and came with a corkscrew to get it out.
I like it because 1) they don't seem to take themselves too seriously, 2) their sense of whimsy is tuned to about the exact level that I find fun and enjoyable, rather than trying-too-hard and obnoxious, and 3) their taste in selecting poetry seems to place a lot of weight on whether the words and ideas stick with you, rather than sheer poetic excellence or stereotypical MFA inside-baseball wanking—I can get those things in effectively-unlimited quantities elsewhere, so I appreciate their (apparently) somewhat different editorial priorities.
I never understood why people bother writing, or enjoy reading, poems that don't have strong rhythm and rhyme.
If you did the actual work of solving the constraint satisfaction problem of making syllable counts, stress, and rhyming words line up, in a way that simultaneously tells an engaging story -- well, that's a lot of work, and anyone can appreciate the achievement. And it tickles readers' neurons in a unique way. It's a respectable and unique form of literature.
If you don't want to bother with that, it seems like you can slap down any old vague, mystic-sounding words. And because you call it a poem, miraculously any nonsense becomes some inscrutable profundity.
I don't "get" it. And I have a sneaking suspicion that maybe nobody "gets" it. But a lot of people pretend to, because they don't want to seem like some anti-artistic philistine.
I try not to think of it like a work is something you can only “get” or “not get”. The ability for a work to stay with you and become a vehicle for the growth of your own ideas is the important part, even if it’s via an interpretation the creator never intended.
I think the premise of art as a constraint satisfaction problem is probably incompatible with "getting it", at least in as much as there's anything to get that can't be got by import scipy.optimize
In any field where people achieve mastery, technical excellence eventually stops being the point. I'm sure rhyming must have seemed like a real achievement back when the first proto-poets crawled out of the word ooze. The thing is, it's not actually that hard. Are you telling me that if you worked as a professional word rhymer for a year, ten years, fifty years, we wouldn't eventually start to hear the fatigue in your rendition of "there once was a man from Nantucket", even as you nail every last amphibrach with laserlike precision? When rhyming gets boring, you look for something more advanced. What does that look like?
If you draw the vector from writing to rhyming, it points in the direction of "creating meaning with form". You can say "I have social anxiety" – that's meaning in content. You can also say "They hate me they hate me they hate me they hate me they hate me they hate me they hate me they hate me they hate me" – that's meaning in form. Much like the rhythm and structure of a song can convey meaning not present in its lyrics, so too can the rhythm and structure of words. As you follow that vector upwards, the structure starts to become pretty obscure, but that's just what it looks like when the masters get bored.
If it helps, people make the same complaints about free jazz, abstract art, and tool-assisted speedrunning. I don't think it makes you a philistine, but I do suspect that you took "I don't enjoy this because I don't understand it" as a cue for judgement rather than curiosity, which seems like a bit of a missed opportunity.
And if you want some abstract art that's a little closer to home, I found this a while back and I think it's beautiful: http://code-poetry.com/ – it takes some analysis to "get" how the output, the code and the words all relate to the meaning of each piece, but I think the effort is worth it. chernobyl and clock_in_clock out in particular really hit me.
I ordered food, but that's cheating so I decided to go to the restaurant and order it. But that's cheating, so I decided to cook a meal. But that's cheating, because I didn't make the pasta myself. 3 hours later and a bunch of mess in the kitchen, I made pasta. It ain't pretty shaped but it'd do. No, wait! That's cheating because I didn't make the knife, pot, cutting board, fork, stove from scratch! Consider what happens to a soul which always cheats!
This is the trap that so many fell into when they ditched DSL for CPL (Carrier Pigeon Line). The price was right; the bandwidth was _incredible_ (1TB packet sizes!); and the latency, bad as it was, was something you expected and prepared for. What's easily missed, as you pointed out, is the variability of that latency. If the wind is in your favor you'll have the latest copy of the internet downloaded in one or two days, unlike those plebs on fiber who have to spend weeks downloading the thing. But one strong headwind later and you'll be spending your time reading the x86 reference manual* for the hundredth time while you wait.
* Fun side fact (as if this comment was enough of a tangent already), you used to be able to request a _free_ physical copy of the x86 reference manuals. Not sure if that's still the case, but younger me was _thrilled_ when I found out and received that small library in the mail.
You haven't been able to do so for at least a decade. I requested one from Intel a decade ago and they recommended asking a print shop to print and bind the PDF.
I was recently looking at getting new hardware to improve Chrome loading times. (This is a somewhat theoretical affair for me since my desktop is already pretty fast.) But, now I wonder if I should downgrade.
Maybe it's good not to upgrade to the latest iPhone?
After trying to find something similar myself, originally I found some "methods" online to bypass the trial time, but I eventually just gave in and bought a license - and IMO it does exactly what it says on the tin, and is still updated and is cross platform so I think it's worth it.
But if anyone knows of any nice GUI tools that are similar do share!
EDIT: Just thought I'd mention how I use it. Basically I use it like the chrome network tools, but I intercept POST requests to the server and try to much with the data that's sent to make sure the backend isn't blindly trusting the client, or to see if there's weird ways I can break the code with special input, etc.
You might find freedom.to useful. You can block websites for certain times of the day and it works with all devices.
I've found that if you can break the habit of reaching to some site when you're bored the addiction falls off pretty quick.
Programming has a lot downtime sometimes - waiting for a build or a long test run - and there's sometimes a steep context switch to working on something else. (At least for me if I start something new I'll forget what I was working on before) It's those times when I found myself on Twitter or Reddit.
One thing I've been trying to do instead is read an actual book - non-fiction does ok, I can usually follow the argument reading a few paragraphs at a time. And Kindle makes it easy to read in your browser and pick up where you left off on an e-reader.
One tricky thing though: I blocked YouTube only to be reminded that Google's login still goes through a YouTube domain, so I inadvertently made it harder to login :(.
One out of the box option is Dev Tools > Network and there's a Throttling dropdown on the right. Set it to something like GPRS and watch the added latency.
Sure. Still a good place to start if you are looking to trial the idea.
Continuing to think "inside the box" of built-in Firefox tools you could pair it with different windows in different profiles, train yourself to open the "addictive" sites only in the throttled profile. I don't have the Containers add-in installed, but I wonder if you can throttle Containers separately (and if not, might be an interesting feature request).
I tried that, but only works for the first visit of a domain? Once I've waited those seconds for the page to load I can mindlessly wander around for hours if I don't close the tab.
You could try DelayWebpage(1) which I made since I couldn't find a good alternative on Firefox. It's pretty basic so if there's any feature missing, feel free to request it, send a PR or fork the repo(2)
> Coerced old-style on Reddit without an infinite scroll
This is why I deleted the reddit apps and use the mobile site instead. Having only one page at a time really helps from sitting forever in an infinite scrolling list.
This is brilliant! I've been suffering from work related anxiety for years which I've learned to douse with Youtube, Reddit or HN. This became a huge problem for me recently and so I had to try to break my habit loops (Cue -> Action -> Reward).
I cannot quit cold-turkey because all the methods that I can think of to block the websites I can undo in the mania of anxiety.
Youtube always gives you an option to look for more content, either on the side of the video you are currently watching, on the screen immediately after you are done watching or by going to the home page and giving you the options. Using Origin ad-blocker I removed all the immediate suggestions. And also the youtube home button, the only red element of the Youtube gui that catches your notice, that you click on to reduce your anxiety. That you then develop a habit on, just like the suggestions. On mobile I uninstalled the app and used the ad-blocker to render it useless. All external links play videos and the search still works.
For reddit I force the old view, without the infinite scroll, just like the author. I also removed the 'all' link from all the pages as I had formed a habit with that as well. And I limit the number of posts visible at any given time.
I have, other than the author's solution, no counter for HN.
For other websites, I've similarly blocked such habit forming gui features. And the most important bit has been deleting websites from the auto suggest feature of firefox. I've deleted a good number of the common offender websites form it, but I still don't know how to disable those ~10 websites that show up when you go to type something.
The Key has been disrupting the 'cue' of the habits. It leaves you a little confused when you don't find your habit enabler on the websites, but then it gets better. Or like me you form other new habits. The solution author suggests will definitely be of help.
Edit: Words. Also, does anyone know how to disable the dropdown suggestions in the address bar? The one you get when you haven't typed anything, because I've got a habit with the dropdown button as well. There is nothing in the options, but what about the developer options?
I do this exact kind of blocking. On Reddit I blocked the entire bar at the top of other subreddit suggestions.
YouTube, I got rid of suggestions on the side, at the end of the video, and at pause.
Call me crazy but I even got rid of typing suggestions in the Firefox address bar.
On Android, I like the Niagra launcher because I can customize my entire home screen and hide everything else so that I only see it when I'm looking for it. No recommendations!
> Call me crazy but I even got rid of typing suggestions in the Firefox address bar.
If that makes you crazy, than I may be worse. I turned off all auto-suggest, auto-correct, auto-complete, and search in the address bar. I turned on the seperate search box, so I only search when I intend to, and I get exactly what I type, even if I msipel it.
I’ve found that getting rid of the clock on my desktop helps me. I don’t find myself constantly looking at what time it is anymore, and can get work done until the end of the day, or before meetings. It’ll notify when a meeting is happening anyway.
The crazy thing about addiction-forming parts on websites is, that even stack overflow has it, with their hot networks box. Great (/s), when your metric as a provider is not how helpful you've been but user engagement...
Luckily they're easily blocked with uBlock Origin.
HN has a no-procrastination mode that might be useful. On the settings page, turn on `noprocrast` and then configure `maxvisit` and `mindelay` - HN will force you to wait `mindelay` minutes whenever you have been on there longer than `maxvisit` minutes.
Maybe you knew about this already, but posting this anyway as it might be useful to someone else.
I don't know about you, but my anxiety-habits are a beast. If I overtly stop myself from doing something, then I can very easily undo it. The trick is to stop the habit from triggering. My trigger for HN is stress and I can't stop it, other than the proxy delay method the author mentions. If I block myslef, then I can un-block myself. In youtube, I have multiple habits. I've curtailed the most egregious ones using the steps above. Haven't yet got one like that for HN. Real easy to type news.ycobinator.com in the address bar.
Only beforehand. In the moment, when you're jonesing for your fix, HN won't let you in to undo the noprocrastination election (at least, that's how it used to be)—and that's good.
Probably, but since Youtube wants you to access their site and imposes region-based restrictions only as necessitated by content providers, I suspect they make it less hard to get around region-based blocks than they might.
I think using the incognito method works? I wont bother with that though, i'd just pick up my phone. I suppose it depends on what you're here for. I just come for the links and discussions.
I have a YouTube enhancements extension that also lets me customize the theme - I've changed the whole site to a dark mode with blue highlights instead of red... It makes a big difference!
Most of my Youtube consumption is via youtube-dl run on my server via cron job, with the videos then synced from there to the relevant devices by Syncthing. For things that don't have ready-made playlists I can put in cron jobs, I run youtube-dl manually. Then when I'm ready to watch it, I open the video in VLC and then delete it after I'm done.
I set this up for my convenience, since I often like to consume this media in contexts where I don't want to use mobile data, and because back when I set this up my internet speed was inconsistent enough to cause frequent buffering. However, I'm now realizing it has a lot of benefit in preventing me from ever seeing any of Youtube's "keep watching more things" UI, and it adds substantial latency and effort to any "impulse" watches, since the process is now: decide to watch: copy URL, paste into terminal command, wait up to 10s of minutes for download, go to videos folder, open video.
On Android, through f-droid, there is app called 'NewPipe'. It uses youtube-dl to let you search and watch videos. It can use your exported subscriptions to show you their videos. But the gui is so not interested in keeping your attention, no immediate suggestions and no 'home' page, that it feels rudimentary. You get the bare minimum you need, and no more.
not every video works on newpipe tho. i much prefer its features, but when i want lazybrained intertainment i do find i have to open some links in creepy tracky youtube
Youtube-dl can already do that, I believe. If you pass it a channel URL, it downloads all the videos for that channel. Use that with the "--download-archive" to keep track of which videos you've already downloaded, and perhaps "--max-downloads" to avoid filling up your hard drive, and you're about 90% of the way there.
> my Youtube consumption is via youtube-dl run on my server via cron job, with the videos then synced from there to the relevant devices
Crazy -- I have the exact same setup. Good to know other people out there have solved this issue in the same way. Having to watch things on actual youtube is such a terrible experience compared to the downloaded media.
Regarding disabling the search suggestions: in Firefox, at least, it's called that ("Search Suggestions") and disabling them is just a checkbox in Options.
> I cannot quit cold-turkey because all the methods that I can think of to block the websites I can undo in the mania of anxiety.
I had this same problem, and I found a solution that worked for me: I gave up sudo. I use my computer with an unprivileged account, and I have to ask my partner to get the admin password. (And then I have all these access rules etc that I can't modify.) This isn't feasible for everyone's usage patterns, but it is for me, and has really helped me manage different addictive behaviors.
I wrote a long piece about escaping information addiction, based on my own decade plus spent climbing out the hole, including some of my own interventions. Sounds like you might find it helpful :)
This might be a good alternative to tools like Leechblock. Instead of blocking sites, give the "bad"/timewaste sites a bunch of random latency. It might discourage but not stop usage, which is useful when you need to use reddit or something to do research but not get distracted.
And it could be an escalating latency, so it gives you a bit of fast experience, but the more you use it, the slower it gets. I've used Leechblock, but I also find myself trying to game Leechblock sometimes. Being totally cut off from something can make me motivated in ways that just being annoyed by the experience wouldn't.
Another suggestion: Limit your browser use to only one tab at a time. Or, allow yourself multiple windows but only one tab each.
If it takes 8 seconds to load a website I could see someone just opening a bunch of tabs and coming back to them later. This suggestion avoids that (among other accomplishments).
So I'm trying the Crackbook Revival extension and it's actually a bit devious. You can set it to increase the delay every time you try to open a site on your list. And if you switch away from the tab, it resets the timer so you can't just wait it out while looking at other links. It also doesn't seem to tick down if you open it in another window.
I was really hoping this was more of an attack on the site, a way to get back at sites that don't work well due to too many ads/tracking. We should all really slow play the connections and data rates from advertisers/trackers - make them pay in latency. We need a tool to slow-play ads/trackers that happens in the background, where the user experience is blocking them anyway.
This is a great idea. I know various types of addiction have a negative impact on the prefrontal cortex, which handles your ability to focus and manage time. I would like to see research investigating the relationship between internet addiction and one's attention span - I feel like my ability to read difficult literature and focus on creative hobbies like music is worse today than it was when I was in middle school.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 685 ms ] threadClick again to see if you did something wrong and, yes, youe action was registered 2 times causing all kinds of trouble.
To all SPA developers around the word: show me if I interacted and show me if something is loading.
The trope of someone closing reddit, only to open reddit again, is a microcosm of that. If you were actively participating in the decision making and thinking clearly, you would never make that mistake. Something else is driving your trawl.
I like the probably-accidental double-entendre here. ;)
I think there is some attention (though probably still not enough) being paid to algorithms/clouds/etc gamifying our dopaminergic cycles, often without our best interests in mind. But it's worth remembering that individuals can easily fall into these anti-patterns independently, without coercion from centralized servers or dark UI patterns.
When I first heard the RHCP lyric referencing "getting high on information" I thought it a clever turn of phrase, maybe even a bit of a good thing; now I view the phenomenon with deadly seriousness, as I find it an ongoing struggle in day-to-day life, trying to keep focus on what matters amidst a deluge of both noise and signal.
Thinking outside of chemicals, the way we experience the web now is deliberately shallow to keep you moving from item to item, and full of hooks to bring you back before you get engaged in something in a way that would be satisfying.
They are astonishing surprises.
It’s what I ordered the cat food the espresso machine the two new tables.
Ordering things and how they appear basically I am a small-scale sorcerer.
On the road I press the button and the music goes.
Air conditioning gas pedal restaurant take-out etc.
It is my will being perpetually sated.
Pretend we are writing a fable in which a sorcerer always gets what he wants.
Consider what happens to a soul which always gets what it wants.
— Emily Bludworth de Barios, from the preview page for issue #31 of Forklift, Ohio (and, indeed, the issue itself, if you have it):
http://www.forkliftohio.com/index.php?page=freight-31
Takeaway available with the press of a button is certainly not what my soul wants.
Is one a better philosopher when they are starving? I don't know. I would rather be a well fed philosopher than a starving one.
I wanna ask this person on a date. What's the worst thing that could possibly happen? They say no and I feel embarrassed. It's a lot easier to do scary things if you actually think about the consequences of failure, rather than letting animal fear control you.
This, I learned from the Stoics.
Breathing looks hierarchically more important than self-actualization but it's just that a material portion of your entire ensemble of needs is just breathing - completely not optional.
Given that, you can futz w/ stuff and see if the levy-stable structure of this sort of thing will allow you to fold over different stuff
Your writing alternates between being overly complicated and being so casual that it's vague. Can you rephrase in plain language?
Always be prepared. Have your own backup set of silverware anytime you eat.
We've weaponised the apparatus of retail and communication against our own limbic systems.
One time I bought a bag of beans it occurred to me that requiring coffee beans from a specific farm in Rhuanda sounds like something a king might do.
Even my bog standard middle class luxury feels wildly excessive sometimes.
How prodigious is it that so many of us know so many intricacies and details about so much stuff, from the aesthetic to the mechanic. We don't know if our point in the universe is to spread life or morality or simply to make it pretty, it's probably pointless to wonder beyond our very own life, but there's no denying that we are growing. We are becoming. Only by getting there can we know what it is. But it sure is one-of-a-kind.
All the cynicism and pessimism in the world falls short in the face of our past achievements, let alone the future potential of this Earth (I like to consider all life here to be part of the journey, we didn't exactly "win" in isolation, and "we" is more like the system to me, however large that is).
I have been having a bit of a rough month, one of those obdectively good on the outside view but subjectively on the inside full of self-doubt and existential angst.
This just yanked me out of that headspace, for a few moments at least.
Thank you :)
No wonder we have trouble falling asleep.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_of_the_Cloth_of_Gold
If anything it's surprising we're not even fatter and even less well-rested. We live in a friggin' world-class carnival. Describe some medieval monarch living in some kind of environment like that and we'd simply assume they'd be a wrecked, fat drunkard with perpetual bags under their eyes in short order, even if they had the best of intentions and pretty decent character. But we wonder why we're fat and tired and write and read books about it and try not to see the obvious cause, and the cost of fixing the problem.
kitchens are expensive. the historical urban poor often lived in a corner of a room and bought their food from someone who had a kitchen. it makes eating home cooked meals feel absolutely decadent!
(one thing i haven't yet understood: food was cheaper than a penny, but there were no farthings or ha'pnies till much later. indeed, a penny bought about $20 worth. so did they buy meals a week at a time, and get a pastie a day or something?)
For instance, going to the circus was fun, but quickly forgotten. A local stunt pilot flying overhead only gets a quick glance.
A few minutes of a YouTube compilation gives more amazing entertainment moments than my entire childhood.
Against a glowing surface, my hand describes a complex sigil, and orbital mechanisms leap into action on my whim.
Next up: pulling together the components for Karsus's Avatar
Still super cool though! :)!
Although doing the overnight camping option at the zoo there was a great experience.
I'll get the Tarrasque.
It’s not even limited to medical assistance. A friends floor collapsed and a single phone call made the difference between an unpleasant day and an agonizing death.
—— Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games.
It's a semi-obscure but-well-regarded-in-certain-circles poetry/literary journal that's been around since the mid-90s, that uses the aesthetics of blue-collar industrial & commercial publications, drawing on them for illustrations, section title inspiration, occasional excerpts of advice or instructions, that sort of thing. The poetry itself isn't tied down by that theme, though, and ranges as widely as any poetry journal might. Also each issue usually includes at least one recipe. (the "cooking" part).
The journals themselves tend to include some kind of physical gimmick. IIRC one early one was a bunch of loose sheets with a hole through the middle, "bound" with a bolt, nut, and washers. One came in an actual, sealed evidence bag. Issue #31's spine (the one quoted) has been dipped in wax. One's cover is sandpaper and spine covered in duct tape, another's textured with brick dust. One's got a cork driven through it and came with a corkscrew to get it out.
I like it because 1) they don't seem to take themselves too seriously, 2) their sense of whimsy is tuned to about the exact level that I find fun and enjoyable, rather than trying-too-hard and obnoxious, and 3) their taste in selecting poetry seems to place a lot of weight on whether the words and ideas stick with you, rather than sheer poetic excellence or stereotypical MFA inside-baseball wanking—I can get those things in effectively-unlimited quantities elsewhere, so I appreciate their (apparently) somewhat different editorial priorities.
If you did the actual work of solving the constraint satisfaction problem of making syllable counts, stress, and rhyming words line up, in a way that simultaneously tells an engaging story -- well, that's a lot of work, and anyone can appreciate the achievement. And it tickles readers' neurons in a unique way. It's a respectable and unique form of literature.
If you don't want to bother with that, it seems like you can slap down any old vague, mystic-sounding words. And because you call it a poem, miraculously any nonsense becomes some inscrutable profundity.
I don't "get" it. And I have a sneaking suspicion that maybe nobody "gets" it. But a lot of people pretend to, because they don't want to seem like some anti-artistic philistine.
In any field where people achieve mastery, technical excellence eventually stops being the point. I'm sure rhyming must have seemed like a real achievement back when the first proto-poets crawled out of the word ooze. The thing is, it's not actually that hard. Are you telling me that if you worked as a professional word rhymer for a year, ten years, fifty years, we wouldn't eventually start to hear the fatigue in your rendition of "there once was a man from Nantucket", even as you nail every last amphibrach with laserlike precision? When rhyming gets boring, you look for something more advanced. What does that look like?
If you draw the vector from writing to rhyming, it points in the direction of "creating meaning with form". You can say "I have social anxiety" – that's meaning in content. You can also say "They hate me they hate me they hate me they hate me they hate me they hate me they hate me they hate me they hate me" – that's meaning in form. Much like the rhythm and structure of a song can convey meaning not present in its lyrics, so too can the rhythm and structure of words. As you follow that vector upwards, the structure starts to become pretty obscure, but that's just what it looks like when the masters get bored.
If it helps, people make the same complaints about free jazz, abstract art, and tool-assisted speedrunning. I don't think it makes you a philistine, but I do suspect that you took "I don't enjoy this because I don't understand it" as a cue for judgement rather than curiosity, which seems like a bit of a missed opportunity.
I quite like this article, about a juggler who got too good: https://grantland.com/features/anthony-gatto-juggling-cirque... – I think it gives some insight on why technical excellence isn't enough to create meaning
And if you want some abstract art that's a little closer to home, I found this a while back and I think it's beautiful: http://code-poetry.com/ – it takes some analysis to "get" how the output, the code and the words all relate to the meaning of each piece, but I think the effort is worth it. chernobyl and clock_in_clock out in particular really hit me.
The soul craves for what's not easily attainable.
Commercial transactions are all the same.
Feasibility is sweet but one-dimensional.
There're things you can buy, and things you cannot.
You cannot buy a different self.
Politics, volunteering, social games, arts and sports
are the new frontier.
And we act to define what we are.
* Fun side fact (as if this comment was enough of a tangent already), you used to be able to request a _free_ physical copy of the x86 reference manuals. Not sure if that's still the case, but younger me was _thrilled_ when I found out and received that small library in the mail.
/2020/02/12/I-20Add-2020-20Seconds-20of-20Latency-20to-20Every-20Website-20I-20Visit.html
Maybe it's good not to upgrade to the latest iPhone?
https://github.com/tylertreat/Comcast
:)
But if anyone knows of any nice GUI tools that are similar do share!
EDIT: Just thought I'd mention how I use it. Basically I use it like the chrome network tools, but I intercept POST requests to the server and try to much with the data that's sent to make sure the backend isn't blindly trusting the client, or to see if there's weird ways I can break the code with special input, etc.
I've found that if you can break the habit of reaching to some site when you're bored the addiction falls off pretty quick.
Programming has a lot downtime sometimes - waiting for a build or a long test run - and there's sometimes a steep context switch to working on something else. (At least for me if I start something new I'll forget what I was working on before) It's those times when I found myself on Twitter or Reddit.
One thing I've been trying to do instead is read an actual book - non-fiction does ok, I can usually follow the argument reading a few paragraphs at a time. And Kindle makes it easy to read in your browser and pick up where you left off on an e-reader.
One tricky thing though: I blocked YouTube only to be reminded that Google's login still goes through a YouTube domain, so I inadvertently made it harder to login :(.
Continuing to think "inside the box" of built-in Firefox tools you could pair it with different windows in different profiles, train yourself to open the "addictive" sites only in the throttled profile. I don't have the Containers add-in installed, but I wonder if you can throttle Containers separately (and if not, might be an interesting feature request).
(1) - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock-ng...
1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/delaywebpage/ 2. https://github.com/OskarDamkjaer/FirefoxDelayWebpage
Github: https://github.com/frankfka/Delay-Distraction
This is why I deleted the reddit apps and use the mobile site instead. Having only one page at a time really helps from sitting forever in an infinite scrolling list.
I cannot quit cold-turkey because all the methods that I can think of to block the websites I can undo in the mania of anxiety.
Youtube always gives you an option to look for more content, either on the side of the video you are currently watching, on the screen immediately after you are done watching or by going to the home page and giving you the options. Using Origin ad-blocker I removed all the immediate suggestions. And also the youtube home button, the only red element of the Youtube gui that catches your notice, that you click on to reduce your anxiety. That you then develop a habit on, just like the suggestions. On mobile I uninstalled the app and used the ad-blocker to render it useless. All external links play videos and the search still works.
For reddit I force the old view, without the infinite scroll, just like the author. I also removed the 'all' link from all the pages as I had formed a habit with that as well. And I limit the number of posts visible at any given time.
I have, other than the author's solution, no counter for HN.
For other websites, I've similarly blocked such habit forming gui features. And the most important bit has been deleting websites from the auto suggest feature of firefox. I've deleted a good number of the common offender websites form it, but I still don't know how to disable those ~10 websites that show up when you go to type something.
The Key has been disrupting the 'cue' of the habits. It leaves you a little confused when you don't find your habit enabler on the websites, but then it gets better. Or like me you form other new habits. The solution author suggests will definitely be of help.
Edit: Words. Also, does anyone know how to disable the dropdown suggestions in the address bar? The one you get when you haven't typed anything, because I've got a habit with the dropdown button as well. There is nothing in the options, but what about the developer options?
YouTube, I got rid of suggestions on the side, at the end of the video, and at pause.
Call me crazy but I even got rid of typing suggestions in the Firefox address bar.
On Android, I like the Niagra launcher because I can customize my entire home screen and hide everything else so that I only see it when I'm looking for it. No recommendations!
If that makes you crazy, than I may be worse. I turned off all auto-suggest, auto-correct, auto-complete, and search in the address bar. I turned on the seperate search box, so I only search when I intend to, and I get exactly what I type, even if I msipel it.
Luckily they're easily blocked with uBlock Origin.
Maybe you knew about this already, but posting this anyway as it might be useful to someone else.
Only beforehand. In the moment, when you're jonesing for your fix, HN won't let you in to undo the noprocrastination election (at least, that's how it used to be)—and that's good.
Not that easy I guess!
“Self-inflicted deadlines don’t work because I know the person who set them and he’s full of shit.”
It's quite hard to unblock once started
I set this up for my convenience, since I often like to consume this media in contexts where I don't want to use mobile data, and because back when I set this up my internet speed was inconsistent enough to cause frequent buffering. However, I'm now realizing it has a lot of benefit in preventing me from ever seeing any of Youtube's "keep watching more things" UI, and it adds substantial latency and effort to any "impulse" watches, since the process is now: decide to watch: copy URL, paste into terminal command, wait up to 10s of minutes for download, go to videos folder, open video.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21247759
And since I only watch selected channels, I will find a way to automatically fetch new videos from channels' RSS feed.
Crazy -- I have the exact same setup. Good to know other people out there have solved this issue in the same way. Having to watch things on actual youtube is such a terrible experience compared to the downloaded media.
I had this same problem, and I found a solution that worked for me: I gave up sudo. I use my computer with an unprivileged account, and I have to ask my partner to get the admin password. (And then I have all these access rules etc that I can't modify.) This isn't feasible for everyone's usage patterns, but it is for me, and has really helped me manage different addictive behaviors.
https://www.defetter.com/
If it takes 8 seconds to load a website I could see someone just opening a bunch of tabs and coming back to them later. This suggestion avoids that (among other accomplishments).
What are the names of these early 2000's style forums? I would like to join them too.