Our attention span is being robbed
unstructed.tech
unstructed.tech
And sure, you don't need to have a solution in mind in order to present a problem to someone, but you need some content to turn a problem into an article/blogpost that I'm willing to read. And this article has basically no content of substance.
My own (somewhat aspirational) preferences / guidelines as to reading priorities: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32669503>
"There is no paid version of Facebook."
There's only paid versions of cable television, and yet it's jam-packed with advertisements, to the absolute detriment of the programming itself. There's never a guarantee to avoid advertisement, since it's working so well in influencing people, and influence is power and money. Advertising is also a race for attention - entities risk their status or even existence, if they are not advertising, because if they voluntarily don't advertise, their competition surely will.
Regulation could help here, but I'm not holding my breath. So what remains is user side blocking, as much as we can.
The shortening of our collective attention span hurts our ability to reach and be reached in many ways, writing included.
It would be easy to cry "hypocrite" on seeing someone whose writing needs work (and significant editing) calling for longer-form content and more focus on the written word, but I feel a bit more hopeful instead.
The article leaks out in a rambling stream of consciousness to accuse social media of being exactly what social media professes to be: a (drum roll) stream of consciousness.
The article implicitly challenges us to stick with reading it, something it accuses social media of doing as well.
The icing on the cake is the end where our protagonist concludes “what can we do about social media robbing us of our time? Share this article!”
And here I am, my time utterly wasted, posting a comment about how fucking stupid it is.
Is this post-post modern art?
A feint within a feint within a feint withi…
“This should be put in a museum for crazy people.”
If you do want a take on attention that is pretty interesting I'd recommend Stolen Focus[1] by Johann Hari.
Hari suggests there are lots of factors at play - he claims some of them are in our control, but many aren't. He looks into tech dark patterns, context switching, ADHD, sleep and a whole bunch of other factors.
Recommend it, I found it fascinating and like his writing style too.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57933306-stolen-focus
And yet…
Just choose to read a book. Drop Facebook. Stop reading Twitter and scrolling through TikTok. I’ve come to believe it’s really that simple.
Or don’t. Totally up to you.
But the idea that something is being done to you is both seductive and lazy. Take responsibility, act intentionally and don’t worry about it.
It's akin to saying "Just choose to read a book. Drop heroin".
We'd like to think we have such control, but the fact is that these things are addictive and one can't simply "just stop" without a process and a culture that promotes these processes.
There are definitely ways to prepare and change a behavior with intention
- limit time per day. if you find yourself going over, thats ok, note it, and put the phone down.
- try uninstalling the app entirely -- make it harder for yourself to get the fix
- schedule other activities that require you to be in the moment
- give yourself positive reinforcement when you succeed. don't beat yourself up if you don't.
- set very small goals, when you meet them, set some more very small goals
> It's akin to saying "Just choose to read a book. Drop heroin".
Sans the physical addition of heroin. You wont die from not getting to tweet at other twits. You wont die from binging after trying to stop tweeting, either.
(And, yes, I'd count this kind of stuff at least partly as a safety issue, given how endlessly training people to constantly look at their phones has affected the rate of vehicle collisions over the past decade.)
It's really not though. These apps are addictive! There's a real effort required to drop them and many(most?) people don't have what it takes to kick the habit.
I installed TikTok a few months ago to see what all the fuss was about. That shit is ADDICTIVE man. Even to me, a middle aged grump, who doesn't use any social media.
I had to uninstall the app a month later as I felt I was being dragged down into a endless scrolling coma.
Regardless, it's in your best interest to work towards a resistance. These kinds of businesses aren't going to change things until they're forced to, and no matter what that'll take time, and they'll probably just come back in new and exciting ways eventually.
Uninstalling the app was a 100% effective solution.
No it isn't. For instance I recently tried to uninstall YouTube and my Android phone wouldn't let me (I know that I could move to a different distribution, but this is not high on my priorities list or something I want to mess with when I'm trying to relax, and many people wouldn't know where to begin). I've had periods where I uninstall and reinstall Twitter several times in a day.
It's helpful but it is not a panacea
To anyone reading this wanting to switch their habits, find some “booktubers” who have recommendations you like, follow them, and try to train your phones algorithms to show you that content. Try some of their recs. I can almost guarantee there are books out there that will grab your attention and be far more memorable than any TikTok videos
A book which withholds information for the purpose of suspense, without it being natural for the story, is just a bad book.
How can you fight a problem that you don't think of as a problem
We are not perfect rational agents. Our attention span is hackable. If you find yourself largely immune to this, you have my congratulations, but your experience is not the only one.
Automated recommendation algorithms really have a lot to answer for. The humans running the tool need to have the output shoved back in their faces - "you are suggesting that people should watch this?"
Twitter's "For You" tab shows me something I hate every time I forget and go to that tab, regardless of whether I've muted those words or not.
(Also, it's entertainingly stupid how many youtube shorts and instagram reels have the TikTok watermark on)
For anyone that has beaten addiction, it is this kind of thinking one eventually takes on. For all the help that you can make to make the leap easier - eventually you have to take that mental leap for change. At no point is it easy, especially with chemical addiction, but it is the step than needs to happen.
Meh. How many nonfiction books have you read that had 15 pages' worth of valuable insight packed into 250? Often they're too long due to the economics of publishing. The truth is, the perceived value of a 15 page pamphlet isn't the same as a nicely bound book. No one's going to risk publishing just the valuable portion.
I think many people are now circulating those 15 pages as blog posts, TikTok videos, LinkedIn articles, etc. Few make money on books in the trad publishing scheme.
Conversely, I kind of don't mind the lack of attention span in others. In the cases where it's to your advantage to have the attention span to read a book, being able to do so is a powerful competitive advantage. And reading books is one of easiest things to do in this brutal world.
Like, infinite scroll, bite-sized chunk UI, etc. that trick our minds into reading a full book?
https://teleread.org/2018/03/21/kindle-ios-app-now-allow-ver...
Don’t forget to shut off the progress indicator or location or whatever they call it. Not knowing how far along you are is the other transformative feature of ebooks. In paper books, you always see the end coming.
The device itself is the size of a printed full-format magazine. It's larger than most books, and if you're reading principally textual material, an 8--10" screen might be preferable (smaller, slightly lighter, more portable), but if you're inclined to read old-school articles scanned in with middlin' quality, this is excellent.
I far prefer paginated navigation. I use the device as well for much web reading, almost entirely using the Einkbro browser, which as the name suggests is optimised for e-ink. Basically, that amounts to full-page navigation based on touch (not gestures), and some settings for favouring a high-contrast black-on-white style on most websites. (HN's slight off-white main-page background is highly distracting. Even on desktop, I've inverted the main body and margin colour schemes using the Stylus extension (Firefox).)
I find that Pocket, though it typically renders articles well, navigates them poorly. It's instead hugely preferable to either read them on Einkbro or use that browser's print-to-PDF or print-to-ePub[2] features and then read content directly via Onyx's bookreader software (NeoReader).
For formatted books and articles generally, I far prefer paginated formatting, and will usually opt for PDF rather than ePub formats because the PDFs read better. This is after decades of being a PDF critic. It turns out that the problem is far less the PDF format than device displays. Laptops and desktops are landscape rather than portrait (though a sufficiently large desktop is good for viewing content with other applications/windows visible, and/or in 2-up mode), and phones are Too Damned Small. E-ink at 8" or larger is a whole new world.[3]
________________________________
Notes:
1. Onyx BOOX Max Lumi. Not GPL compliant, but otherwise excellent HW & SW. Wish I could bump the onboard storage up from 64 GB to ~512 GB or better. Starting to look into HW hacking options. Oh, and it also has continuous scroll for the ebook reader if that's your kink.
2. The ePub export is truly transformational, I describe it in more detail here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30973824>
3. That's not to say that there aren't really horrible PDFs, or that the file format itself is especially good. I'm talking UI/UX here, with reasonable care to design matching print standards and conventions.
It breaks up a large task, learning a language, into smaller bite-sized chunks. It rewards users with coins that can be used to do power-ups. It turns learning into a rewarding game.
Perhaps this principle can be applied to other domains as well.
You can even take this further with reading books. Sure, you can get a star by reading a book for like an hour a day...if you're using Apple's iBook or whatever. That just means you're locked out of other books not on that platform or books you have in other unsupported formats or gasp physical books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition
My friends that are in med school all use spaced-repetition to cram information into their memory banks, and the app they use (Anki) lets users share flashcard packs. Incidentally, aside from medschool-related packs, there's also packs for learning most languages. I don't think you can ever learn a language through spaced repetition, but it's certainly useful for expanding your vocabulary (learning new words). I started out with Duolingo but switched to Anki because I'm learning a tonal language which doesn't quite sound right with Duolingo's TTS (and the Anki card packs are accompanied with recordings of real speakers).
..and yet I still pop into Duolingo every day though to get my good-boy points :)))
The other argument here is that there's a whole #LearnOnTikTok type hashtag and the question is, are you actually learning or are you just being entertained while you think you learn something?
Though there's the option of planting little long-focus concentration seeds by dropping references to both longer-form high-quality works and the mindset that it takes to absorb them within more accessible materials. Books have pretty much always had an accessibility problem --- they're hard to publicise and attract readers to, and there's a considerable infrastructure that's been set up in all manner of contexts to make this easier, including lectures (academic, public, business), interviews, serial and excerpt publications, etc. The fields of education and pedagogy (amongst others) are consumed with this challenge --- minds are not simply buckets into which torrents of content should be jetted.
It seems somewhat similar to me to autopsy and dissection --- the goal is to open up the body and reveal the interesting bits inside, ultimately with the hope that some might find a way to appreciate the integrated (and still functioning) whole. Books, unlike humans, typically survive such treatments.
I see the two approaches as bringing deep content to the distracted (what you're proposing) vs. calming the distracted and bringing them to deep content and teaching the process of attending. Ultimately I think we're going to need the latter. Though some morsal-isation may be of use. Keep in mind that there's been a long history of this throughout the history of media technologies (cuneiform, papayrus, codices, books, photography, phonography, video, computer games, ...), most of high excpectations and exceedingly limited success.
What has worked for me in the past to get away from reading morsel-sized content and back into reading long prose was a lighthearted, but captivating book. I have read something from Terry Pratchett and by the end of the book, I was itching to finally give a read to other works in my library that were just collecting dust.
In some of his works the gags flow so well, you just can't stop turning pages. You "win the jackpot" pretty often.
(It's only one of many on my rather intimidating stack....)
The mainstream social media sites never much appealed to me. Facebook always seemed sus, Twitter, more problem than solution. Instagram and TikTok seem well below my age cohort, and I've engaged with either in a very limited fashion --- occasional content that pops up, but no accounts or apps.
My principle mobile device has no interactive account-linked services. I do use Pocket (which ... has issues: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_...>). I'll read a fair bit of HN, for example, but have to go to another device to actually respond. It's also an e-ink tablet / book-reader, rather than a phone. I've installed very few apps: Termux, a podcast app, a feed reader (which frankly isn't much use), Internet Radio (listening to BBC 4 presently with Liz's exit), Pocket, as mentioned. Little else. Not even email, as yet. That said, e-ink and tablets whilst improvements over emissive, colour-enabled, phone-based mobile devices won't excise you of your own daemons and frailties. It still takes work.
Shutting off WiFi is a huge boon. I don't do it nearly enough.
I disable all notifications where those exist.
Increasing general hostility toward any form of intelligence and informational benefit of the Web are their own strong incentives to curtail usage.
Reddit has shown a constant and increasingly dark series of patterns for years, with a sharp inflection about four years ago. My subreddit is now largely a testament to that fact, and I've almost wholly abandoned use of both it and Reddit at large. My experience is that sites whose goals don't match mine tend to match it increasingly less with time. See: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/8rq08y/i_wont_...> and <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/9ebkjh/current...>, both of which point to other long-standing concerns.
Otherwise:
- There's this set of (somewhat aspirational) principles I try to follow: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32669503>
- I'd really like to have tools for better monitoring and reviewing what I've read and researched over time. Amongst Pocket's many, many, many failings is that it Is Not At All This But Should Be. Reviewing previous reads ... one often finds that many of them really weren't all that significant. Letting information stew for a bit is often useful, it filters out much uncertainty and bullshit. One notion I'm still looking to properly implement is what I call "BotI", or Best of the Interval. Selecting top items by a period --- week, month, year, etc.
- I have some guilty pleasures. An Imgur binge every so often (a few times a week or month) can give some contact with current trends. Again, not used via an account. Mastodon and Diaspora* have been my principle social outlets. Both can be time sucks, and I try to aggressively filter what I follow, mostly through a curated "highest interest" list or aspect (Diaspora* terminology, similar to Google+ Circles), of people who post with low frequency and high(er) salience. I'll adjust and prune those aggressively.
- I'd been active on Google+ from inception to death, which was an ... interesting experience. It was by stages novel, useless, interesting, useful, and finally, disappointing. Something of a cautionary tale. There were numerous premonitions of what have emerged since as failings of social platforms. Most of the darker aspects of which, I have to say, Google seemed to handle well, though overall adoption of the platform and Google's incoherent strategy regarding it seem to have been the principle fatal blows.
I'm not sure that's coherent, hope it helps.
(Brad DeLong's Slouching Toward Utopia for the interested.)
So in my opinion, I really do not think so.
<https://www.fastcompany.com/90392917/the-next-big-reading-pl...>
For example, I wouldn't want to read a lot of the content I write, so I considered releasing the tl;dr as feed.
Do not know the answer but I do not like where this bodes for the future of internet communities.
I use https://bulletjournal.com/ in a paper notebook.
I use https://orgmode.org/ on my personal and work computers.
You'll find an immense array of exceptionally artsy websites, videos, image collections, etc. Much as Gil Scott-Heron said about the revolution, the bullet journal won't be televised. It's a process that is oriented around your needs and workflows.
The key element to me is the index, and a set of notational conventions. Start with those and flavour to suit your needs. Spreads can be the next add. I'll also add my own set of reference sections (addresses, local hours of operation, informational, etc.) starting in reverse order from the back.
I've discussed this previously: Main: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27200255>
Additional: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>
Personally I find myself more likely to read articles with a tight measure, long paragraphs and an average font size (16-18px, even 14px on ScienceDaily works for me) than something with short paragraphs, a large font and lots of space in between paragraph lines. This is a recent realization.
For years I've taken to restyling websites, largely to make them easier to read and focus on. Starting with simply eliminating extraneous elements (social-media link-litter, registrations sign-ups, etc.), to re-specifying fonts, line-heights, and the like. What I notice is that even with only a few deletions or tweaks my mind starts settling far more at ease.
Using an e-ink tablet / book-reader for the past year and a half (see comments elsewhere in this thread), I've become highly attuned to how much typography matters both for the Web and in print. Whilst Web design is a dumpster fire, there are a tremendous number of poorly-typeset books as well (though as a ratio the latter seems a smaller set of the whole), some of which I simply cannot stand to read.
Web content generally reads better in monochrome (though some contextual details may be lost especially in graphics relying on colour). Animation is glaringly annoying, especially with high-quality display settings (more faithful text reproduction leads to slower refreshes and a flashing on animated elements). Poor text, typography, and colour schemes (anything reducing text/background contrast) are similarly highly evident, and kill readability.
Conventions of typography have evolved over centuries, largely based on the ergonomics of humans reading text. Violate them with extreme caution, you're all but certain to make things worse rather than better.
Great handle, BTW.
I spend an absurd amount of time editing my content for readability and easy parsing. The topic is tedious enough on its own so I don't want to add to it. People actually notice and bring it up.
45min-1hr of mindfulness training would be more effective, I would think
- The beginners guide of r/streamentry: https://www.reddit.com/r/streamentry/wiki/beginners-guide
If you attempt to divorce mindfulness meditation from spirituality or even from experience of a transcendent Divinity, you're asking for trouble.
Go outside, sit down somewhere, and focus on the external world and not your thoughts. You could even do the whole “breath in, breath out, and empty your thoughts” meditation schtick — if you feel it’s necessary.
If you haven’t been able to focus in a long time, 15 minutes will be hectic. You’ll know you’re being mindful when it feels like you’ve melted into the environment — and are simply an antennae to the stimulus.
Also good for disassociative traumas — the kind that give you the “1,000 yard stare.”
It's an iPhone or Android app.
Overall, it's learned through practice. My style is something I like to call, Calm Zen.
I start with a daily calm session (~10min) and follow it with 20min zazen, which is a pretty basic sitting meditation style. I count breaths mentally on the exhale to 10, then start back at 1.
I find tangible results from practicing daily for at least 20min per day. Some have measured results from less, but it doesn't seem to be the case for me.
Maybe a better practice though to print out some tokens that represent your anger, tape them to a punching bag and let out your steam that way, plus you get dopamine, etc from exercise.
With any new technology, societies will overdo it when it's new and then eventually find some happy-medium. You're seeing this happen now with more awareness around social media overuse or digital detoxes being more in vogue. People are slowly finding their happy medium.
Fear not, it's all a part of the natural course of things.
i bet some said that too !
We've seen this with several technologies in the past, especially communication technologies. (Do you remember the doomer-ism around phone calls and telephones?)
My SO can barely watch a movie or tv show before she gets back to infinite scrolling socials, it's a disaster. 5 minutes is the most she can do. Going out with me or friends is the same, few minutes and she's back checking emails and socials.
I decided to lead by example and delete all socials, even reddit or linkedin, but it's impossible.
The only reason I keep HN is because of the amount of quality-content related to my tech career.
Also, the amount of fresh content on HN is way too low. Can't be compared even to old reddit.
We end up reading books, playing board games, and having a lot more conversations. We're much more likely to go to the park. We often don't know what time it is which is a nice feeling. We also take a lot of naps because we're staying up too late most of the week on our screens.
I've also found I'm super productive on Monday after our screen free time. We've been doing it for a couple months now and I really like it.
This is just a long winded way of me saying what you’re doing is, what I think is, the only way to get our attention span back. Shutting off everything and really being with the people around you is the only way. And for anyone else reading this I think you should try it before you tell me I’m wrong.
That sounds really awesome.
When I have my dogs around I usually don't miss human interaction. I go like daily in the woods with my dogs and avoid my phone. My GF is more like the one in the top comment + she has ADHS. We live together in a completely different world there.
The last great point is that as soon as I know I don't have access to a screen, I get a lot done. Merely having the possibility of turning on hacker news or else makes me terrible at doing any kind of chore.
Supersweet beverages are available at virtually every restaurant and grocery store in my area (and advertised incessantly), but that doesn't mean I have to drink em every day and get diabetes.
Or instead just put the phones on the other side of room when watching a movie...
What I find helpful:
1. Try not to multitask. Do not look at your phone while watching a show. Do not listen to a podcast while working. I tend to use podcasts as a way to get myself to do something else I don't enjoy, but I'm either distracted from work or tuning the podcast out so I stopped.
2. Let your mind think thoughts on its own without input. Take breaks that don't involve any media at all.
3. Dedicate time to reading longer things. Set a timer and say "today I'm going to read this book for 15 minutes without a break". Or 20 minutes. Or an hour. If you're already at an hour you probably aren't in the audience for this article anyway.
4. Use the pomodoro method while working.
I'm sure some people will read this list with a sense of derision, but perhaps others will relate. Attention span is like a muscle that's been atrophied to a different extent in different people.
> If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.
the same was said about books, novellas, tv, movies, audio books, etc etc.
I read the book mentioned in the article after a suggestion here, and Marshall McLuhan said it much better and without the boomer resentment. the author was a student of McLuhans but failed to say something unique.
It's fine to point out that just because some people say a thing doesn't mean it's happening, but you can't go all the way in the other direction and conclude that there are no wolves. You instead have to move towards a better way of measuring the problem.
Books, photos, silent videography and lo-fi audio never reached the point of being confused with reality. It was only with stereo and talking films that we started to see media start to threaten the reality–fantasy barrier theretofore robust in the mind. The fact that something like a jump scare works in movies but not in books shows a meaningful difference between kinds of media. Pornography overuse syndrome affects sexual function but I've never heard of a situation where this happened with mere erotica. Reality-mimicking media can produce immediate physiological responses where previous forms of entertainment required the active participation of the consumer.
Also, Plato quoted Socrates complaining about writing. I assume he didn't believe this himself (although he was known to sometimes put his beliefs in Socrates's mouth) or he probably wouldn't have written so many books.
Dang, that’s a great little turn of phrase. And a very good point.
That said, this bit about books is a bit much "They are NOT made to be amusing, but to be EDUCATIONAL. INFORMATIONAL. Eye-opening" I don't know the stats, but a good chunk of books are meant to be amusing.
If anything we've learned to communicate better through the written word than ever before in history. I am reminded of this xkcd from 2014 https://xkcd.com/1414/
I suspect that in an alternate timeline without the internet or television we would have much lower literacy rates, and a public less informed about the real world. Most people would spend their time talking to one another, building more meaningful relationships, and believing in nonsense their friends and family relayed incorrectly.
Maybe so many of us allow our attention span to be robbed, because so many more of us see the world for what it is, have resigned ourselves to our place in it, and would rather not think about these painful truths every day. Maybe if we kept sequestering knowledge on dead trees, only to be consumed by a small privileged audience and created by an even smaller more privileged group of creators blessed by institution, then more people would be blissfully unaware of the problems in the world and wouldn't crave distraction.
I had another point but my adderall is wearing off and I can't remember.
And thus I have to disagree with you here - there is an issue that many people experience but to combat it we have to actually know the reason behind. Attributing it to something that may not even exist is harmful.
> Honestly? I have no idea.
I went through this journey recently and wrote an entire book on it. I think it takes a hell of a lot of mindfulness practices after one becomes aware of the problem.
Just 4 years ago I would read maybe 1-2 books a year as an educated person. Now fast forward to today and I read at least a book every week. I'm sure someone will say "how much do you actually remember", and that largely doesn't matter because one of the beautiful paradoxes is that you change through the books you read and hardly remember what you read in the first place.
My attention span has been expanded by my mindfulness. You break away from a negative frame and create a new positive frame.
It is not our attention that got shortened. Is is we were tolerant to borings before.
Sometimes, boring is good.
L.M. Sacasas:
The language of attention seems particularly loaded with economic and value-oriented metaphors, such as when we speak of paying attention or imagine our attention as a scarce resource we must either waste or horde. However, to my ears, the related language of attending to the world does not carry these same connotations. Attention and attending are etymologically related to the Latin word attendere, which suggested among other things the idea of “stretching toward” something. I like this way of thinking about attention, not as a possession in limited supply, theoretically quantifiable, and ready to be exploited, but rather as a capacity to actively engage the world—to stretch ourselves toward it, to reach for it, to care for it, indeed, to tend it.
https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/attending-to-the-...
Simone Weil:
Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts, as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.
[...]
In every school exercise there is a special way of waiting upon truth, setting our hearts upon it, yet not allowing ourselves to go out in search of it. There is a way of giving our attention to the data of a problem in geometry without trying to find the solution or to the words of a Latin or Greek text without trying to arrive at the meaning, a way of waiting, when we are writing, for the right word to come of itself at the end of our pen, while we merely reject all inadequate words.
[...]
So it comes about that, paradoxical as it may seem, a Latin prose or a geometry problem, even though they are done wrong, may be of great service one day, provided we devote the right kind of effort to them. Should the occasion arise, they can one day make us better able to give someone in affliction exactly the help required to save him, at the supreme moment of his need.
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
https://lithub.com/simone-weils-radical-conception-of-attent...
David Foster Wallace:
The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom.
David Whyte:
The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self. The ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone, and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them, and to have believed in them, and sometimes, just to have accompanied them, for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.
was that the point, and I cut out too early?
Even if it was the cure for cancer I couldn't read it. /h (for hyperbole)
Apple should simply charge for notifications, and share the revenue w the user!
This is why I recently spent some time to hack up a script to extract news stories into PDFs that I transfer onto an e-reader. I have a subscription to a news site, but I find it's just easier to just use a paywall bypass extension rather than log in when my cookie expires every day or so. I wrote a Python script to pull down the RSS feed for my news site, and with the modules html5_parser, lxml.etree, asyncio, pyppeteer, and slugify, in about 60 lines of code I've got something that displays the headlines one at a time in a console. Based on the headlines, I hit 'y' if I want to read it or 'n' to skip. It uses pyppeteer to fire up a recent build of Chromium, which runs in non-headless (headful?) mode in order to run extensions while still supporting print-to-PDF (patch for that landed July 22nd, hence the recent build to get it). I use xvfb so the Chromium window doesn't pop up on my window manager. Even though I pay for a subscription the news site still displays ads, so I block those with PiHole and the uBlock Origin extension.
I have scripts to detect which /dev file my e-reader gets and to mount it. Then I print-to-PDF the news articles I want to read, saving to the e-reader. On quitting the script, it unmounts. I can grab the e-reader, find a cozy place away from my phones and tablets, and read through the articles without ads, animations, or other distractions, and without the ability to "flip away" to something else on the device I'm using.
Of course all this took me the better part of a Saturday afternoon to get working as I slogged through all the hurdles -- print-to-PDF wasn't working in headful mode, but I needed headful mode to use the paywall-bypass and adblock extensions (solution: found the patch to get print-to-PDF work in headful mode happened in late July). The e-reader doesn't always get the same device file (solution: seek back in /var/log/messages to find the logs for my e-reader and use re package to pull out the device name). I couldn't figure out how to get asynchio to immediately fire off a thread when I hit 'y' on an article and didn't want to wait for a gather() on a bunch of tasks at the end of selecting articles, so I created my own threads and fired up my own event loops for asynchio to use, which is required for pyppeteer. Font was too small on my e-reader (solution: use 'scale': 1.5 in the page.pdf() parameters for pyppeteer). Finally I had to deal with the headful Chromium windows popping up and taking focus (solution: wrapper script to launch Chromium using xvfb-run).
Of course this sort of thing is a lot more labored than just defaulting to clicking links in a web browser on the phone. But by now I feel that the environment is toxic to my ability to concentrate and avoid obnoxious content like animated ads, so it was worth it to me to spend a few hours to figure out how to shift the content onto a device that supports putting real time and attention into content intentionally selected.
I plan on adapting this to pulling down other websites to my e-reader since there's nothing magic about my news site. Anything with RSS could theoretically work; I'd just need to tweak my parsing of the feed depending on its organization. And I'm certain there is an OSS solution that already does what I hacked together but in a smarter or more robust way.
Twenty years ago, it would've made for an anonymous, conclusion-less personal entry on a Xanga or a Blogspot somewhere. Now, it's another means for (eventual) monetization.
First thought was, give the person a break. It's probably some teenager, but it's NOT.
TFA says he's read books "The Stand" and "Fahrenheit 451", but I question how long ago that was.