Aerbil313

Congratulations! You have apparently won in life by successfully developing internal regulation during childhood and also won the genetic lottery by not having a disorder of the dopaminergic system like ADHD. Now please leave be the significant fraction of the population who don't have those privileges, thank you.

I've missed critical final exams and flights literally scrolling Instagram. Mental health disorders exist, alas.

You don't need to leave behind the conveniences of a smartphone to have a phone that is smart but without the dopamine traps. There are solutions out there like TechLockdown which allow you to make a dumbphone out of your smartphone using MDMs, while still keeping critical things like messenger apps, a predefined list of websites, navigation apps, etc.

I can spot it because I used the various social media apps in the past for a time.

X users will start intensely talking about societal/political issues in the first 5 minutes of introduction.

Facebook users will often belong to the conservative political party of any given country and will start talking about one of the numerous conspiracy theories that provide a simplistic and satisfying yet false explanation to the complex reality of the current world.

Instagram users will almost always have the implicit belief that the most important thing in life is to be rich or a celebrity. The platform just implants that into their mind. It takes a bit getting to know the person to see that.

Snapchat users are teens/college/youth who are usually very social.

Reddit users? I can spot them by their looks, the way they talk, or their writing. Obviously not %100 accurate but Reddit is by far the platform with the highest hypersocialization effect.

Tiktok users have a secret language constructed of a large repertoire of memes among them and will constantly reference them when talking. Some of the memes they talk about are 10+ years old. As a young person who have always avoided social media honestly it's hard to communicate with some of my peers because I don't get the memes.

That talking point - that rapid-form media creates attention deficit problems is honestly overdone and there's no evidence that it's true at all (that I know of). ADHD exists and is a mostly genetic condition, you can't catch it without something serious like cPTSD. Amusing Ourselves To Death emphasized way more the angle of densensitization.

I used to think doomscrolling broke my brain before I was diagnosed. Later I realized I was "doomscrolling" way before I got my first digital device, rereading the same fiction books late into the night.

I can buy the argument that rapid-form media consumption acutely creates symptoms like ADHD (for at most a few hours after exposure) because I see it even in NT people.

I agree that there is no 4d chess here but I disagree that Trump actually does or decides anything.

At this point I'm suspicious of any viewpoint that posits Trump as a president/person with an agenda. I'm pretty baffled by the serious policy "experts" analyzing his actions and trying to determine cause and effect.

It's pretty clear to me he's a demented old man reading off the teleprompter. I'm sure he finds all these duties of presidency pretty hard and tiring on his body and mind. I feel that all he really thinks about is golfing, his estate business, increasing his wealth through other means like crypto scams and the like, and always getting more attention which he desperately craves.

The White House administration, intelligence services and the Pentagon collectively decide what to do, be that invading Greenland, Venezuela or the like. Trump has occasional stupid demands as well, like the FIFA Peace Prize which I'm sure the admin staff find very hilarious but comply regardless to make his little boy wishes happen to preserve the status quo.

Even more spicy takes: The only reason the societal divide exists in the US today is Meta. Facebook and Instagram. When people are exposed to entirely separate spheres of content for hours a day every day their opinion changes slowly but surely and there's pretty much no escaping it.

I don't use any social media besides HN (which no doubt also does this covert influencing). I can spot a person's social media app of choice is in 5 minutes. They literally change a person's character and the way they speak.

Neat idea. I’m a native Turkish speaker, and when I was first learning English as a kid I remember always being baffled at the extreme chaos and irregularity in English. In the end I learned it mostly by exposure and not from school.

Idk, maybe the company hosts a website and I search the web for "product X"? Or an e-commerce website?

Web search is and always was perfectly suited to find the product you need, as are the multitude of e-commerce websites active in any country.

Searching does not require advertising or word of mouth. Word of mouth is not inefficient either in a world with internet, the person telling you about a product likely saw it and purchased it online already.

This marks the day advertising entered a new era and got extremely efficient.

Expect all other LLM vendors to follow soon. If they don't, they will lose.

Not really. Advertising results in extreme market inefficiencies through the game theory playing out (if you don't advertise as a company, you lose out to companies that do). It's the massive sink of the modern economy, there's nearly no sector unaffected by it. If advertising was banned (not that it's very easy) vast majority of issues associated with capitalism wouldn't even exist and everybody would be wealthier.

The similarity between advertising and cancer are striking, see the post Advertising is a cancer on society: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20577142

This is all putting aside the fact that %99.9 of all advertising works by exploiting the familiarity circuit in the human brain. The effects of advertising are, by definition, not voluntary. See Ads just work, no matter what you think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18399633

If the purpose of %99.9 of advertising was not exploiting the familiarity circuit and was instead to make you aware of a product you didn't know about before, there wouldn't be a single ad of Coca-Cola, since everybody on the planet knows about it already.

Also, my mom literally buys whatever she sees playing on YouTube ads that week. I know because I see those ads too. You'd be surprised how many people are going through life with undiagnosed or untreated ADHD and how many further lack cognitive agency.

Hey, the author, if you are reading this, I was stuck in the bog too. But in my case it was neurological rather than psychological. Turns out the "insufficient activation energy" you mention is an ADHD symptom. Meds worked total wonders for me, so much I like to say I was reborn the day I started my treatment.

I still find your post very valuable and insightful in addressing the psychological bog.

This was profoundly relatable for me in this moment in my life. Some great insight about my situation I haven't noticed till now.

Give it a try.

Do not let the "shell" in the name fool you. Nu is a full on programming language. I've spent more time with it than pretty much any other lang and if I have to describe it in one sentence, I'd say: It's the most beautiful combination of the ease of Python, strictness and ergonomics of Rust and of course shell capabilities of Bash.

It's really its own kind of thing. It's definitely not just another shell.

I've written very impressive and very complex software in nu. I fully expect it to take off very fast as it nears a stable v1.0. I can't imagine going back to anything else.

Yeah, same. Lately almost every time I think "Oh no way, this is not the correct way/not the optimal way/it's a hallucination" it later turns out that it's actually the correct way/the optimal way/it's not a hallucination. I now think twice before doing anything differently than what the LLM tells me unless I'm an expert on the subject and can already spot mistakes easily.

It seems like they really figured out grounding and the like in the last couple of months.

You don't have to leave your phone at home to be free of distractions. You can restrict your phone instead. I'm just a happy user, see techlockdown.com.

Their marketing is geared towards the p*rnography addiction crowd but from my own experience, it works equally well for those easily distracted by screens (I have ADHD).

Now that's certainly a take.

It’s probably precisely because his browser is not customized that it’s not easily fingerprintable, because stock Safari has privacy protections and users generally don’t change anything.

I got a very similar result on unmodified iOS Safari, randomized among 380k users and conveying 15.5 bits of information. I only have the Dark Reader extension.

I don’t use traditional social media, at all?

With how things are going, I’m starting to wonder whether I should make some accounts just to pass the normalcy test.

I’m in college and I don’t have a single friend who doesn’t actively use Instagram.

I’ll be the one to say it:

Liquid Glass is actually very good design that addresses design problems that persisted since the switch to touchscreens in a very comprehensive way.

More specifically, the problem of how to have universally recognizable and standardized UI controls in every app without interfering with their design identity.

To me it’s just a logical conclusion in the UI design field, and I fully expect Google and others to adopt something like it eventually.

The implementation isn’t flawless though.

I’d love if an actual UX designer could comment here.

My turn to complain about bugs. I used to balk at people when they complained about bugs on MacOS/iOS.

My iPhone 7 which I used for 7 years straight, was more bug-free than my current iPhone 15 Pro.

There’s no shortage of visual bugs with iOS 26, but that’s not my point. Recently I had to restart my phone (literally unheard of in Apple land) because I put it in Guided Access and it wasn’t possible to get it out without a force restart, which I had to learn how to do for the first time. That bug persisted for at least a month.

A few days ago the camera app would just show a grey screen and the fix was to restart your iPhone.

I’m sorry but that’s Android. If you have to restart your phone because of a bug, or core functionality like camera doesn’t work, you are not using an iPhone. But apparently, you are, and apparently Apple has finally succumbed to organizational corruption like every other company.

Still miles better than Android though, in which the OS is still an active warzone between Google and the manufacturer.

> A psychedelic medicine company Mindstate Design aims to precision engineer mental states in order to heal mental health problems such as depression. Their plan is to create combinations of chemicals that reliably produce the exact necessary healing states — without the “hit and miss” “heal or bad trip” randomness of individual psychedelics.

> And to discover these they use a LLM-based platform that ingests tens of thousands trip reports online and combines with receptor/chemical interaction data (including affinities).

That's wild.

Dude, that's wild. I can't imagine what you could do to get infected with so many different organisms. Are you sure there isn't some underlying unifying reason, like rare genetic disease that makes you more prone to infections or something?

You want a smart home? Home Assistant is FOSS, integrates with every device you own, and much more advanced than any proprietary platform. Look no further: https://home-assistant.io

I'm just a happy user.

Not an American. At this point, I'm beyond surprised there still isn't a resistance movement that doesn't play by the rules, because the ICE sure are not playing by the rules.

Myopia or no myopia, afaict the way to reduce eye strain is the same.

My understanding is that eye strain is either caused by unbalanced lightning (e.g. bright screen in dark room), or focusing on close distance for too long without giving the muscles a break by focusing further away. The well known 20-20-20 rule tries to establish that. As a practical advice, you may try adding some small walks, getting some fresh air for a few minutes, or even looking out of the window for a few minutes throughout the day.

FYI, iPhones have a feature to tell you to use your phone further away when you use it glued to your face. If you have myopia, it should go without saying that you should never use your phone with your glasses.

Thanks for these. I always used 1/8 to 1/4 of the pills (0.3 - 0.7 mg) out of principle of using the minimum effective amount, I didn't know taking the full 3mg pills is actually proven to be less effective and even possibly harmful for the circadian rhythm.

The formula is:

  your prescription - (100 / desired distance in cm). 

For your PC that sits one meter away from your eyes, you'd need to subtract 1 from your real degree of myopia, e.g. for -4 degree myopia, get glasses that are -3. Don't forget to calculate individually for each eye.

As a matter of fact I'm using glasses I bought this way right now. I actually find these even more comfortable than my full degree glasses for all-day use too, in terms of eye strain.

I feel it's ridiculous that the medical industry thinks I need to wear glasses that are powerful enough to focus an image of a mountain 100 kms away all day, when my average focus distance throughout the day is probably less than one meter.

These reduced degree glasses are called differentials. If you want to go into the rabbit hole of fixing your myopia, start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPIGDSY_xBs

Disclaimer: When driving, you have to obviously wear your full prescription glasses.

Prismlauncher is great for playing Minecraft.

   nix-shell -p prismlauncher

After years of distro hopping I landed on KDE NixOS and stuck with it ever since. Stable, featureful, intuitive experience.

KDE is visibly taking off.

HN is yet another infinite scroll feed.

It’s no different than traditional social media, except in intensity. It’s less intense, because of its text-based format as opposed to video, the clickbait-resistant culture, and the fact that while it’s very large, it’s not infinite. You can consume the top page under half an hour and there are only so many stories posted here a day.

Depending on where you are in the AuDHD spectrum, you can be as addicted to HN as a teenager with 7hrs daily Instagram usage. pg acknowledges this.