Using an $8 smart outlet to avoid brainrot | Hacker News Reader

Using an $8 smart outlet to avoid brainrot

neilchen.co

177 pointsNWChen88 comments

One thing that finally worked for me was using: https://one-sec.app/

It basically forces you to do a little breathing exercise before you can visit the site that you have on its block list.

It has been life changing. It adds enough friction for me to stop any impulsive visits but also is not so annoying that I would completely disable it in a weak moment.

One Sec was developed by someone with ADHD, I think and it definitely shows.

It is important to understand that not every solution will work for everyone. There can be many reasons why you struggle with social media addictions. Ultimately those corporations are spending millions and employ state of the art psychological manipulation tactics to keep you engaged so it is important to be kind to yourself. Don't give up. You might find something that works for you.

I tried it and it literally could not last one launch on my phone. The only action that can save me from Instagram is uninstalling the app. I have the web app installed but it's too slow to feed my addiction, so I rarely open it.

Only works for one app with the free version.

They have a 7 day free trial. Just cancel it immediately after setting it up so you don't forget it. You can still use the full 7 days.

Though it is 14,99 Euro per YEAR, so pretty fair pricing, anyway.

Interesting. How does this work with iOS? It seems like something Apple wouldn’t allow.

It used the Shortcuts app to essentially be a middle man between you and the distraction. So everyone I open Safari, it triggers the other app (the 5 second timer), then redirects me back to safari.

I quickly adapted and this barely slowed me down. I recommend the following iOS apps:

1. Jomo - you can create block lists of distracting apps. Like OneSec, when you try to open a blocked app, it makes you wait 5 seconds or more. More importantly, on that screen, you can select 5 minutes, so that it only gives you 5 minutes of unblocked access.

2. Brick - a physical device with an NFC tag you put somewhere. Block all the distracting apps on your phone. If you want to look at them, you need to physically scan the Brick with your phone to get back in.

In a similar category is my Run for Fun app which lets you block addictive apps of your choosing until you earn screen time points by exercising (running, biking, exercising etc):

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/run-for-fun-screen-time-focus/...

this seems like an interesting idea I'd like to try but all the permissions it needs is terrifying to me... I understand why it needs them but there's no way for me to verify that they aren't doing anything funny with that access.

I liked one-sec but now prefer https://www.getclearspace.com

Guarantee the OP used this for a week and never touched it again. Those without self control cannot be trusted if they hold the switch.

Have you never willfully developed a habit before? I find the first week or two is challenging, then after that it's easy.

I think you'd be surprised how a little bit of difficulty can be enough to break binge cycles. I killed both my hackernews and reddit addictions years ago by just adding them to /etc/hosts. It was easy to change and sometimes I did but that was enough that I didn't dwell on those sites anymore.

Recently I've written a chrome extension that does this much better. Hopefully it gets approved today or tomorrow. Maybe I'll post it to show HN.

/etc/hosts works great. A dedicated device for browsing such content is useful too.

Convenience is the biggest drug of them all, if you can break that then you can go a long way to breaking a habit. Even just putting up minor inconvenience can help slow the habit formed behavior.

If you have a food addiction, remove all the pre-packed easy stuff. If you have to cook a meal to get the calories, you now have a step speed bump to the habit. It doesn't mean you cannot eat, it just stops that grab and go mentality. Same thing with the fridges of the internet (social media).

Similarly, convenience (reducing resistance) is the biggest factor in sticking to positive habits. Here’s an article on applying this to strength training: https://matt.might.net/articles/hacking-strength/

Your comment is on HN, you want to talk about HN, on HN.

How can we be sure you aren’t just an average guy when it comes to self reflection?

> I killed both my hackernews and reddit addictions

You can quit your Reddit addiction by commenting on Reddit. Reddits is a hellscape... I'd rather be browsing 4Chan.

Reddit is so dependant on the subs you're in. Some are pretty pleasant, some promote argument, some are just silly, some offer valuable advice. Any sub with too many people tends to deteriorate but there's loads of fun niche subs still.

> Guarantee the OP used this for a week and never touched it again. Those without self control cannot be trusted if they hold the switch.

It amazes me how much work one does to lift barriers to themselves, but so little to actually not go through them.

I've had a time limit set on my phone for twitter + instagram to only allow 15 minutes of usage per day. There's an "ignore limit" button when you go over the time but it's surprising how few times I've actually pressed it. 99% of the time I go "yep, that's enough of that for today" and close the app

I find it has a lot to do with activation energy, or how much friction there is.

If something is too easy, it happens. If something is too hard/annoying to do relative to the reward, it doesn't.

When I lived in Boston, I was able to get myself to go to Tae Kwon Do classes because it was literally on my commute. When I'd work from home, I'd end up missing the class. When covid hit, same.

When I lived in Palo Alto, I rarely went to the city (and usually only when I could crash at a friend's place for the weekend) because the process of biking to caltrain, take caltrain, bike to wherever I wanna go, then reverse on my way home or catch an Uber, kinda ends up being an annoying or expensive process.

When I moved to SF, I went and partied what was probably more frequently than was healthy. Moving to Oakland brought the rate back down again, but to a level that felt a little too isolating. Getting a car seems to hit a sweet spot; driving isn't too bad, and I have a lot more options. Buuut being responsible for a car curbs the worse behaviors.

Can switches like this also detect usage, like current flowing? It might be a fun and healthy twist to plug a walking pad/treadmill into a smart plug and then either make it so brainrot websites are only viewable when the treadmill is being used or make a small app that tracks the time the treadmill is used and then only allows that amount of time on brainrot websites.

I've deployed countless Sonoff S31[0] which are easily hackable and have current monitoring capabilies

[0]https://sonoff.tech/product/smart-plugs/s31-s31lite/

Yes, a lot of them do. There are some $5 plugs I use that monitor current and work great:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005729080838.html

The price varies a lot between listings, I think the cheapest I got them was $20 for 4 or so.

This would work (even?) better if it wasn’t a switch, but a push button with the unblocking automatically timing out after some interval. Otherwise you’re prone to just letting it stay on unblock.

The Amazon Dash buttons could be hacked to do something like that.

Similarly: https://flic.io/

Little programmable buttons, they're great. I've used them for similar habit formation stuff, in my case not ignoring my alarm, by making the button the only way to shut it off, and putting the button very far away from bed.

Nice, but pretty expensive at $35 for the simplest button. For comparison, an IKEA smart button/dimmer is only $10.

Sonoff buttons are even cheaper, I think. IKEA buttons work well too, though.

In Europe they are more expensive than the IKEA ones for some reason, but thanks for the tip, they look nice.

It depends where you get them from, I get mine from Ali for around $7? Locally they cost around 7 € as well, IIRC.

I only see prices above 9 € on AliExpress, but it's still a good price.

Hm yeah, it looks like they stopped making the SNZB-01, now they only have the SNZB-01P, it seems. I don't know what the differences are, I'm afraid.

You could use a home assistant-like api to turn off the switch as well as manage the /etc/hosts changes. I don’t have any experience with home assistant, per-se, but I have programmatically controlled similar the switches with an older api, so I assume HA would work too.

At top of my uBlock Origin "My Filters" tab, I have a list of the Web sites like the following, which I comment (by prefixing each line with `!`) and un-comment, as needed.

    ||reddit.com^$important
    ||ycombinator.com^$important

This is sufficient to defeat whatever muscle-memory you have to visit the site.

If your addiction/habit is stronger, you might need to invest that $8.

Another approach is adding them to /etc/hosts as 127.0.0.1, which makes it slightly more cumbersome to edit and also stops muscle-memory from going CTRL+T then press "N" then down arrow then enter.

No, not for me personally, I'd never.

I've used a similar smart outlet on a timer to just shut my wifi off at 9pm. I then put an alarm on my computer to give me a 15 minute wrap-up warning.

I also hear that a rubber band on your wrist is useful for addiction.

It's better than "I have to get off my arse" as it provides some real negative stimuli rather than appealling to sloth.

How does this work?

Whenever you get the itch to do something like open social media you pull on the rubber band and let it slap your wrist

Love it. Great idea.

An $8 smart outlet helping reduce mental load and boost focus really surprised me. Looks like I’ve underestimated how much these small automation tools can free up mental space in daily life.

Has anyone else used simple and affordable tech that surprisingly made a big difference in managing distractions or mental fatigue?

As a courtesy, I used to check in on client servers every morning to alert them if services were down. Eventually it became a chore, so I made some hardware server status boards that monitor them for me (8 each).

Here in Asia they cost 5-8$ each to make depending on exact part choice (total cost including boards and components).

I open sourced the hardware / firmware if you want some: https://github.com/seanboyce/servermon

I used to use scripts etc to do it. However this tells me what I need to know in a glance, so I like it better.

My anti-distraction setup uses multiple dnsmasqs, one of them has a long list of blocked (ad-)domains, and DNS tags, something like this (1).

So the devices with the "black" tag have a different DNS server (it's the same computer, but it has 2 IPs), and has DNS-level ad-blocking (convenient for phones) and can't access reddit, Twitter, etc. One device doesn't have blocks, in case the aggressive blocking breaks something. I guess it'd be great to use a slow laptop to browse brainrot sites to discourage me from doing so.

(1) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22467430/dnsmasq-tags-an...

I have been using Foqos app since a month now and it’s been amazing on my iPhone. You can create a block list of apps and when you start “Foqos” those apps will be blocked. You have to unblock before using those apps. But here is the best part. The unblocking can be configured such that it does only when you tap on a NFC tag. I spend a lot of time on the phone as soon as I wake up. So I have been blocking before sleep and keeping the NFC tag in the garage. Amazing setup for me.

This app I assume is exactly like the more mainstream Brick app but this app lets you configure any off the shelf NFC tags which you can get under $5.

How does this work?

Silly question, but I don't get it. Do you have to get something onto the smart outlet?

ELIF!!!

The script on the computer checks to see if the smart plug is on or off. Depending on the state, the script blocks or unblocks the websites. The smart plug is just acting as a button that is connected to your WiFi.

Pro tip for macos/ios folks:

- Macos: Install https://selfcontrolapp.com/, add every website and their alternatives you know, set it to 24 hours. Really hard to bypass this even if you know networking stuff

- iOS: Enable downtime 24/7 ask someone else to set the password.

I'm down to about 35 minutes a day of mobile usage, and laptop usage is only work related things. You really need two or three days to clear your head of news feeds. After a few days you really just crave working.

(I'm in between a 24 hour session right now)

Something that works well is to block websites like YouTube or Instagram in regular browsing but keep them unblocked in Incognito mode. This forces you to sign in every time you want to use these sites.

YouTube works fine in incognito mode so what am I missing? It just doesn't have any history or suggestions, until you watch a few videos.

Mullvad VPN's client blocks that stuff as well. That filter prevents me from unknowingly clicking a link here on HN and getting twitter on me.

my problem with things like this is that it's trivially easy to just.. stop the script. What's the point when it adds so little friction?

For a lot of behavioral things, tiny nudges are just enough friction. At one point, I wrote a bit of CSS in stylus to hide the downvote button on HN to see how often I thought a downvote was really earned (not that often). It was trivial to undo [or use another browser], but gave just that small amount of friction to drive my own awareness.

The reason why social media and similar websites now have infinite scroll is because the next page button provided you with a circuit breaker to stop and reconsider if you actually wanted to continue or if you were just mindlessly scrolling.

So if you have a genuine intention not to use certain websites at particular times (e.g. work time), then having any kind of forced interruption can be useful for changing that behaviour.

If you're looking to create genuine change, then making those websites load slowly is even more effective than going cold turkey (because it minimises the dopamingeric effects.)

Having tried that many times, it just doesn't work for me

Maybe others have better luck

The friction makes me want to disable the measure before it makes me want to stop the activity. And unlike paging in forums, I can disable it. That’s why these measures never work for me.

Fundamentally it comes down to what you value.

If you don't actually want to stop, then these opportunities for pause do nothing, because in that pause you reaffirm that you do want to continue the behaviour.

This ties into why addiction is so powerful, while many people know their addictions are bad, they enjoy them and don't actually want to stop. I.E. They don't value the results of cessation versus keeping the addiction.

It's entirely possible to reach for your phone, then tap an app or load a website on your computer while being semi-aware of your actions, and this is typical for people with ingrained behaviours. These people can start scrolling instagram or twitter without really thinking about it. Having a forced circuit breaker gives these people an opportunity to stop and reconsider their actions.

At the end of the day only you have full agency over yourself.

Let me try to illustrate: I might want to stop after the "circuit breaker" comes up for the tenth time. But the nine times before are annoying enough that I'll disable it before I reach the tenth time. Maybe not initially, but after a few days. In other words, the friction vs. frequency they exhibit, in conjunction with how easy or difficult they can be turned off, makes them not work for me. And I haven't found anything of that kind that works well. Either the friction is high enough that I'll rather disable it, or it's too low to actually serve as an effective deterrence. What would be needed is something that "ramps up" in just the right way.

I do understand your position and reasoning, but I'm hoping to explain that you're asking too much of the system. Nothing is going to overcome your personal willpower, if you want to see that site or load that app, there isn't any local technical solution that is going to stop you.

These systems are trivial to defeat, after all you turned them on, you can just as easily turn them off, but that's not the point at all. It's not meant to be an unsurmountable technical wall. The point is to provide you with a moment to actively think about your actions instead of an autopiloting behaviour that lands you on a website or app that you are trying to avoid using. People who use employ these types of "circuit breakers" do so because they find that they frequently find themselves autopiloting to these services. For these people the circuit breaker is their moment to realise "oh hang on I said I don't want to be doing this while I'm working on my project", rather than "oh this is inconvenient, I'll just disable it for the time being".

The stopping power comes from you, not from the crutch.

If you're getting to the point where you have to open a terminal, elevate to root and edit your hosts file, that's beyond a bored impulse. You know exactly what you're doing and you can stop yourself. That tiny bit of friction is enough to defeat the ingrained impulses and make you think.

> That tiny bit of friction is enough to defeat the ingrained impulses

I don't know how people can keep saying this when I have first hand experience with it not being enough

People exist on a wide continuum of impulsivity. I have ADHD and nothing short of truly unbypassable restrictions on all my devices are enough. Mail me if interested.

For some "a little friction" is enough. For others, not. I keep less-healthy food treats in a cupboard in my garage, because the friction of walking out to get them is enough to reduce my usage to an acceptable level. Even less healthy treats I don't buy, because the friction of going to the grocery store to get them when I'm craving them is enough.

It's an interesting exercise to think about how this could be engineered to increase the friction.

Trivial to some. I think the point is that the person a) dislikes getting up to click a switch, b) finds making such changes prohibitively difficult, at least enough to prove a dissuasion

If editing the hosts file is enough to dissuade you... I'm guessing your not a distributed sysadmin by trade :/

Blocking JS and cookies related to these sites often work. I got rid of a 'minor' habit of checking social network by simply making it harder for me to access it so I could have time enough to identify I was doing something I shouldn't.

It is a nice tool to have it automatically solved

What prevents you from killing the polling script and editing /etc/hosts back to its original state?

I think a modified Pi-hole would serve this purpose better, as it would leave no other option than getting out of your chair and taking action (assuming you made it impossible to ssh into the device).

This is insanely clever.

I can't use ublock origin for that because I want all devices in my home to take advantage of this, so I've reimplemented this with Home Assistant, Adguard Home and the Adguard Home integration into Home Assistant.

I've never thought of using a smart plug button as a switch to run a script - pretty neat idea I might use for some other projects.

I hope you have more luck than me with sticking with the switch instead of just editing /etc/hosts.

I rigged up one of these so my wife could go push the button and her phone would play an alarm sound so she could find it when it goes missing.

Was a good hack for a bit, but then the children figured out they could actually use the same button to _find their mom_, since the she was usually colocated with the phone!

Did you need to write an app for the phone?

I had the script call the phone, and set the phone to "emergency bypass" for that incoming number and set the ringtone to alarm bells

The best investment I have ever made was buying a forever license from https://freedom.to/

timed and customizable blocklists, multiple devices

For some reason, I thought this switch altered the electrical power for the router and thus acting as a physical barrier, not allowing it to request those servers. I guess my imagination just went wild.

I've thought about putting mine on one of those mechanical timers to kill it outside business hours.

I can imagine that could be nice feature on a router. Trigger fw blocking automatically but to unlock you have to go to the router and press physical button.

I guess I can implement that on raspberry pi.

I have been looking for something like this to control my pihole. Wife gets upset when her coupon websites tracking redirects stop working

Why? What the point of just blocking several popular sites? Sounds like you just wasted time and money setting up weird thingy

When androids finally be a thing the era of robots chasing procrastinating people around in the room finally becomes reality.

Anyone know the state of IoT buttons? Most seem to have gone out of production. (An outlet seems like a great alternative )

IKEA remotes are inexpensive and work really well with a proper zigbee adapter and zigbee2mqtt. Home assistant you can build actions right from the web ui.

yeah, I just added offending sites to /etc/hosts the trouble of entering my root pw to edit the file usually is enough to make me reconsider if I really want to visit reddit or youtube or whatever works for me ... mainly because I'm uber lazy :)

Instead of adding friction, part of the work of oneself is about finding the root cause of why we go into those places and understand up to which point spending too much time on those is not only detrimental to society but to me personally. I mean, a doctor would tell me that « you have brain rot » would freak me so much that I would do anything to reverse or get rid of it asap. Idk, maybe after +20y of wasting time online I got that it’s a ressource I won’t ever get back and I resent wasting it too much now, which gets me off using all the links he blocked without efforts.

A timer seems appropriate so it resets itself automatically.

Love the idea! And thanks for sharing the script =)

Why do we reflexively distract ourselves?

I have reservations about adding YouTube as it’s got a massive amount of useful content; a little curation and it won’t show you any nonsense. Reddit is a mid-range, so I can understand it. It’s hard to separate the good and the bad there I suppose, especially if you’ve gotten into constantly checking for updates.

But I would almost certainly and without any qualms put HN on the default noallow list. The SNR and potential for learning things is atrocious to nonexistent most of the time - and you can find better sources than HN. No, I’m not joking unfortunately it’s just what the site has become over the years.

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