Why do you waste so much time on the internet? (zan.bearblog.dev)

Since my brain is usually disengaged when lifting (gotta save those calories for what matters), I rarely bother with anything 'deep' between sets.

One potential upside of this is that the threads are usually a few hours or days old before I actually read them, which means that I can expect no new content from them once I have my fill of a thread.

https://highbrow.se/ (Alternative search engine)

https://cora-pic.com/en (Meme generator)

https://www.mightyapp.com/ (New upcoming cloud browser)

https://ossdatabase.com/ (Database of OSS)

Gankra's work on a useful rust memory model is both fascinating and useful: https://twitter.com/Gankra_/status/1509335163045650436

This tool to convert low-complexity rust tests to proofs is interesting and something I'm glad I know exists: https://model-checking.github.io/kani-verifier-blog/2022/05/...

I'm using this code I found out about via reddit in a side project, probably less interesting to you though: https://github.com/setzer22/egui_node_graph

(Warning, videos from here on out):

Cool product demo of a futuristic debugger: https://www.hytradboi.com/2022/debugging-by-querying-a-datab...

These people also have a cool demo of splitting a single program across two different computers (frontend and backend webserver in their case). Maybe a bit less convincing than the previous one, but something I intend to watch: https://www.hytradboi.com/2022/uis-are-streaming-dags

These people have some really cool work on automatically solving physics problems (just linking to one of their talks as an example): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHhDgxkiR9c

Some of this came from HN, some from elsewhere.

This website lists the first references to some cultural icons on Usenet (for example the first time AIDS was ever discussed, first mention of a new TV cartoon "The Simpsons", etc.) http://www.eightyeightynine.com/culture/80susenet.html

The Public Domain Review, a collection and analysis of interesting stuff in the public domain https://publicdomainreview.org/

David Rumsey Historical Map Collection. I have spent many hours browsing the incredible content here. https://www.davidrumsey.com/

Artvee. Free, high quality art. https://artvee.com/

Restoration Mustang. A high quality long term journal of the restoration of a classic Mustang. Think like an /r/diy project but with way more detail and over a longer time scale. https://restorationmustang.com/

The Renegade Gardener. Highly opinionated no-bullshit gardening advice. I especially love the "Don't Do That" section. https://renegadegardener.com/

Garden Myths. There's a lot of misinformation and old wives' tales in gardening, this website cuts the crap. https://www.gardenmyths.com/

Million Short is a search engine that lets you cut out the million (or 10,000 or 100,000) top results from a search, really good for finding gems. It also has an option for removing e-commerce websites from search which is a godsend. https://millionshort.com/

This one is relevant if you live in New Zealand and love the outdoors: Can I Light a Fire? https://www.checkitsalright.nz/can-i-light-a-fire

    /* hide main page */
    ytd-browse[page-subtype="home"] {
        display: none;
    }

My bookmark for YouTube is directly to my subscriptions, and it's also possible to create a android shortcut link directly to subscriptions. Occasionally, a flow will direct me to the homepage, but that's rare and I usually organically bounce back to my subs without even thinking about it.

There's always recs below a video, but again, those are rarely very interesting to me or they're things I've subscribed to anyway.

There is a brilliant hack to YT's urge to show you some BS. Make a bookmark of YT submissions on HN. Clear cookies. Click on any few random vids. Voila! Now YT considers you enough smart person to be shown a decent recommendations!!! (But the magic quickly disappears if you will click any BS from main because my hack does not affects the main page).

I don't think we're alone but I doubt that we're "normal."

Eating and drinking delicious high calorie things rewards your brain. On an evolutionary time scale, delicious things were relatively rare and often required expending a lot of energy to acquire. In the last 100 years or so, modern technology has shifted the typical diet to be primarily cheap, processed high calorie foods.

If you want to change your behavior, I would suggest calorie counting with a phone app. Do it every meal or snack, before you eat it. Even if you don't restrict yourself, it will make you consciously aware of your intake. You'll naturally start thinking in terms of energy intake rather than sensory intake. You'll also start to be able to correlate your emotional state to your current level of hunger rather than the other way around. "I am so hungry I could eat 300 calories of potato chips!" I did that for a few months recently and lost 8 pounds. I stopped doing it more recently, and have gained 3 back.

If you're a hipster at heart and have free time, you could also start doing more of your own food processing at home. Rather than order a pizza ever again, learn how to make a really good hand stretched pizza dough from scratch. If you really like good coffee, buy a hand grinder and whole beans, or figure out how to roast your own beans.

If you think you're eating unhealthy and having external pressure would help with your self control, maybe just go see a primary care physician and request a cholesterol check and to be screened for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. If you have indeed been too indulgent and lethargic over an extended period of time, your cholesterol will probably read high, and you probably have fat in your liver that may be causing slightly elevated enzyme levels. A Dr. telling you to try to eat healthy may not be motivating, but quantitative data may be.

When I first read about willpower being an exhaustible resource, it totally aligned with my experience. A few years later I read that those ego depletion studies had been invalidated and that surprised me. Running out of willpower seems like something I experience.

Most programmers have experienced being so immersed in code that we don't notice time is passing, forgetting to eat or sleep.

It's similar with immersion in social media / food / whatever. We become lost in the activity and lose our sense of self.

I've recently heard of the concept of conscientiousness as a personality trait. People with low conscientiousness tend to procrastinate more, and it's tied to ADHD. Apparently it can be trained. I'm trying (though not really succeeding) to make pauses, take a deep breath and think about "what am I doing right now? What should I be doing instead?". Seems so basic, like I've regressed to being a child who has no self control...

Personally I find that my self-control is limited to the same extent that my time and energy are limited. If I'm tired, it's harder for me to be disciplined, and the place that I most often tired is at home at the end of the day, when temptation to over eat is at the greatest. I believe there is a fairly substantial body of evidence that shows I am not unusual in this regard. This phenomenon is why groceries stores put candy in checkout lanes, when you are mentally tired from exercising discipline by not picking up the delicious-looking tray of cupcakes in the bakery aisle and thus are most susceptible to temptation.

I think some people can just use willpower to maintain their discipline in every situation, but those people are extreme outliers. Like Navy SEALs or Olympic athletes or other extreme high performers, and not even all of them. Those who can are experts at delayed gratification and are able to visualize what they want and then never deviate from their plan for how to achieve it, regardless of their current emotional state or energy levels. But that is vanishingly rare and often their behavior is a result of some deep trauma (eg someone who is super disciplined about their diet because their dad died early from an obesity-related illness) rather than a positive focus on a certain outcome. The truth is that the vast majority of people just follow their natural inclinations and do whatever is easiest for them. The path of least resistance.

As one such weak-willed person, my approach has been to structure my life to remove temptations, much as the GP comment above described their approach to curating their internet content. For example, I have lived almost exclusively in big cities for my entire life until the last year, when I moved to the middle of nowhere. Which means I can't get takeout food delivered and it's much harder to go out and get ice cream on a whim. Compared to living in a major city where I could get Michelin star restaurant food delivered in a matter of minutes, the temptation is just much, much less powerful. I order my groceries online too, which also dramatically reduces the tendency to impulse buy anything unhealthy (I get to skip the checkout lane with the candy, for one thing). On the other side of the caloric equation, I set up a home gym so that travel time to the gym doesn't become an excuse not to exercise. Basically I add barriers for bad choices and remove them for good ones. I am in the best shape of my life as a result.

I guess what I'm saying is that most people achieve good behaviors in part because of their intentional discipline and in part because their environment is conducive to those behaviors. The real trick is figuring out how to intentionally structure your environment to match whatever behaviors you want. It's effectively borrowing motivation from your peak-energy level periods to provide discipline during periods when you don't have the energy to generate it yourself. It can be incredibly hard to figure out, because you need to know how to change your environment and how you will actually react to that new environment, which isn't always predictable.

Be wary however of the more "extreme" advice on keto-like diets. You don't have to stuff yourself with fats, or put a stick of butter in your coffee.

We tend to keep doing what we are already doing (an inertia of sorts). If we are eating, we keep on eating (even if we are not hungry anymore) until an external factor stops us (e.g. the food is over).

Changing states (starting/stopping) is the hardest part, but if you trick yourself somehow to stop it's easy to just put the food aside. The question that remain is how do you stop yourself from doing what you are currently doing? Some people use an "1,2,3 technique", where you just count to yourself and once you reach three you start doing what's needed. Mindfulness also helps, where you take a breath and think exactly what you are doing and why (I am eating, I am putting my hand in the bag of chips, I am bringing the chip to my mouth even if I am not hungry and don't even enjoy it that much, this would just make me feel fat afterwards).

To me, part of it is being mindful. Don't open the bag of chips and then watch a movie or surf the net while munching on them. You will eat the whole bag.

If I mode change from sitting in front of the computer to standing in the kitchen eating the chips and then mode change to back in front of the computer, I don't mindlessly consume the whole bag. But I will still sometimes consume the whole bag.

One thing I have also tried to do is differentiate between "I want chips because I'm hungry" vs "I want chips because I'm craving salt". It's not easy for me to tell the difference. I coat some baby carrots in salt or Old Bay seasoning and munch a few--if that keeps the munchies away, my body wanted salt. If I'm hungry again 15 minutes later, well, my body wants calories.

Nevertheless, I'm mostly in the camp of "Just don't have chips/cookies in the house". It also helps that I learned to bake as a child. I like tasty desserts, and most of what now exists is mostly sugar overload with no flavor. So, a dessert easily sets off my "Is this dessert tasty enough to merit skipping two entire steaks <or insert whatever main course you like> to compensate?" And, if my that activates, the answer is almost always a resounding "No." and I skip dessert.

Unfortunately for me, I found a middle eastern place that does homemade Baklava with a cream filling. It's right next to a Mexican restaurant that I also find quite nice. This is a bad thing for my waistline.

In the good I will run couple marathons a month and in the bad I will eat whatever I can find.

I always felt like an outcast, good to hear I am not alone :)

For media consumption it is exactly the same. The good is that I get to the nitty gritty of technical problems. But I also read the unless crap till no end.

I have been able to ditch Twitter, reddit, Facebook and Instagram but I just substitute it with hackernews and YouTube.

My default method of weight control is not to have unhealty food and alcohol in the house except for weekends. In the office I only have healthy food available. It works and I have gotten used to it - mainly because my anything goes weekends act as a great pressure release valve.

i would love if a tool like this were made based on interactions I've had with authors. generally, i like comment or retweet content that "sparks joy".

would be a good first pass filter

Facebook I left a decade ago, for its ethical issues. Instagram I left because I felt the performance aspect was unhealthy: even in my only-friends-and-family circle, I'd still care too much about picking out the perfect photo of my kid or wherever.

For Twitter I realized it was way too easy to get sucked down political/angry feeds. One day Twitter said my account has suspicious activity (maybe a bot tried to log in) and I needed to reply to an email to re-enable it. I never replied to the email. Somehow this meant that every time I followed a Twitter link, I'd get that alert, so I could never see content. I felt so much happier.

Now I am using my smartphone pretty much in the same way I was using my PC when smartphones didn't exist (e.g. 20 years ago): quite a bit of browsing and few comments here and there.

It's not that I can't do without smartphone: on holidays I can totally avoid using it for browsing. But that inevitably comes back to "normal".

And I'm pretty sure I was distracting myself with literature in a similar way when I was even younger (e.g. 25 yrs ago). I read very fast and hardly retain anything:) Is it in any way healthier? Not so sure, it feels like binge reading is as addictive and unsatisfying -- I do that nowadays (rarely) too.

It's not, but it will lead to some (obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc).

In the same way, consuming infinite amounts of quick-hitting and dopamine-inducing social media is not a disease, but it can damage our brains and lead to "disease" in the same way that sugar damages the rest of our body.

Again, I'm not a doctor and I have no facts/evidence to share. Just my own thoughts on how things are going.

But then if all their peers are in fact outperforming them, because they're already all self-medicating for ADD symptoms, or have a prescription for ADD meds, so they can focus on something that most ordinary people would have trouble focusing on... what then?

What's normal in a work environment that's fundamentally and extremely not normal?

It's in moments of boredom that you start having deep thoughts about the world, start thinking through solutions to problems you have, start thinking about changes you can make in your life.

I got rid of my smartphone and now the 20 minutes each day on the train where I'm "bored" are one of the most valuable parts of my day. And my mind feels much fresher after it, rather than being crammed with 20 minutes worth of mental junk food from the internet.

I disagree, from my own personal experience.

According to the CDC/DSM-5, people with ADHD simply have enough of the described ADHD symptoms, and most importantly "interferes with functioning or development."

We don't yet know enough about the brain besides that people have different brain makeups and respond to different stimuli differently. We don't quite know what causes ADHD but we can group the overall symptoms together to try and treat them.

That said, plenty of the criteria in the DSM-5 can be as a result of our modern lifestyles. I talked to multiple psychiatrists/therapists who had consensus that I had ADHD. I tried all the different meds, none of them really helped. The only thing that did was changing my lifestyle. Completely eliminating some addictive habits that wrecked my response/reward circuits (porn and addictive video games) (still a work in progress but it helps). Structuring my life for more consistency and setting up a system that would prevent me from dropping into the negative ADHD habits.

I recommend reading ADHD 2.0 by Dr Halowell. Everyone's journey is different and I don't want to take away from people who get serious improvements from traditional ADHD treatments. But ADHD is a spectrum, and it's unfortunate that many of the traits that come with ADHD cause negative outcomes for our modern society, but it's really just a different functioning of the brain. Some activities exacerbate the negative outcomes, and some can reel them in. Like most other things, I believe ADHD is partly genetic and partly behavioral. The weight differs from person to person. One of those you can't control, and one you (sort of) can

Why does HN bother you like that?

Youtube is the only social media site that I think is a net positive on my life, because I learn so much, but I've started going for runs again because I really need time away from a screen and the constant dopamine hits.

I scroll reddit obsessively but I don't enjoy it.

I read books obsessively but I enjoy it.

I estimated how many more books I would likely read before I die, and it's a shockingly small number, even though I read a lot! So - choose wisely.

Hear! Hear! This cannot be overstated.

>> And kids grow up way too fast. Treasure every moment.

And this on the other hand ... works only if You somehow like children (and who does not like small psychopats with dictatorial aspirations). For the others (I believe most of people who lives in my housing estate can be counted) I observe that the moments they really treasure are those when their children are is safe distance from them taking care of themselves.

what seems like an instant, they are gone.

It absolutely is an addiction machine.

but we are just good friends.

reddit man.

Someone told me once that addiction is built more strongly with negative experiences and it blew my mind. I think it's probably true.

Addiction isn't built by you getting a reward, it's built by you desperately chasing a reward you never quite reach. We call a book a "page turner" not because it's a satisfying book, but because every chapter ends in some bullshit cliff hanger. Same applies to TV shows.

I would suggest that maybe you weren't addicted to reddit because it was actually giving you what you wanted, but because you were chasing some satisfaction that you never quite got. Satisfied users leave a site happy after 5 minutes and get on with life. People who have spent 2 hours opening 200 threads and still haven't got the happy feeling they came there for stay around to open "just one more thread" another 50 times.

This seems like a mischaracterization of how addiction works.

"Just stop being depressed" - Psychiatrists hate that one trick.

I think its funny that we both stumbled on a similar approach