3,203 karma · joined July 18, 2021
How can you say this when applications render either minuscule or gigantic, either way with contents totally out of proportion, seemingly at random?
I don’t have to pull out a magnifying glass to notice those issues.
How do you approach improving your personal outcomes related to ADHD without developing a system?
The calendars and checklists really help with not forgetting things, and getting back on task once distracted. I can have 100 adhd moments; the system can’t prevent that, but it can help me find my way back to shore when I’m lost at sea.
I don’t really struggle with kitchen cleaning, but sometimes I do set out to clean the kitchen and end up folding laundry or scrolling instead. I can do that but if I haven’t checked off “clean the kitchen”, I know to come back to it.
The weekly reflection is a chore but I set aside time for it, and I keep doing it because it works. I can spend an hour doing deep reflection, or I can rush through it, there is value either way. It is really just a check list, and check lists are very ADHD friendly.
Separately, I find that physical and mental health improve performance regardless - so a system that improves these factors _is_ a system that helps with ADHD. Getting to bed on time, and building the system that produces that outcome, is an ADHD-friendly system. I struggle with this, but I try to get better over time by experimenting and adjusting.
The reality is that the system will not solve ADHD problems, the system is just a tool - you still have to do the work. Same for the app that is being shared.
Hyper scheduling: https://dev.to/maxpatiiuk/series/32301 (I stumbled upon this and implemented a form of it, although mostly I just like the colors in my calendar)
Yearly reflection: https://yearcompass.com/
Weekly reflection:
```md ## Preparation
- [ ] Review year compass - [ ] Review journal entries from the week - [ ] Review last week's reflection
## Quick summary
> *Headline for the week*:
## Basic planning
- [ ] Set up outline of the week in Outlook - [ ] Plan a fun weekend activity: - [ ] Plan to visit one new restaurant: - [ ] Plan one meet up or social activity:
## Values-based reflection
1. Health: - 2. Resilience: - 3. Social connection: - 4. Mindfulness: - 5. Adventure: -
## Retrospective
1. Went Well - 2. To improve - 3. Plan to improve/action items -
## Other notes
- ```
Daily reflection/journal:
```md
_Created: {{date}} {{time}}_ ({{date:DDD}}/365)
Gratitude (I am for three items):
Healthy Living Plan:
- Diet: - Exercise: - Work+Learning:
Daily reflection:
- Overall wellbeing (1-10): - Career: - Lifestyle hygiene: - Rose and thorn:
Journal:
```
I use TickTick because of the habit-tracking feature. Used to be todoist loyalist but it sucks for habits. https://help.ticktick.com/articles/7055781878401335296
Key habits I track:
- meditation (I combine with a fancy LED face mask to help reinforce the habit via my desire to combat wrinkles and acne - the cryoglow is better at acne than wrinkles so far) - exercise (you can add notes) - evening leisure time (if I don’t have dedicated leisure time, I end up revenge bedtime procrastinating/doomscrolling) - stretching (there are two simple band stretching exercises that solved what I thought would be life-long neck and shoulder pain)
When I really struggle with productivity, I find the pomodoro system is a good bootstrap, and TickTick makes it easy to start. I like seeing the pomos on the built-in calendar.
This isn’t for me (because I’ve already built a system that works), but this looks like something that would be very useful. For the target user who does feel stuck and hasn’t successfully built their system, this looks like a phenomenal product.
I appreciate the emphasis on self-reflection and perhaps the implied focus on continuous improvement.
Over the last few years I implemented a weekly self-review + planning practice (think solo agile retrospective), and my life has been on a steady trajectory of improvement since.
Edit: commenting on the product concept, not the company, pricing, or concerning tracking practices.
This is a very detailed, particular prompt. The type of prompt a programmer would think of as they were trying to break down a task into something that can be implemented. It is so programmer-brained that I come away not convinced that a typical user would be able to write it.
This isn’t an AI skepticism post - the fact that it handles the prompt well is very impressive. But I’m skeptical that the target user is thinking clearly enough to prompt this well.
It’s hard to say exactly what led to the reduction in illnesses, but the N95 masks have the strongest evidence base of the interventions I’ve tried.
I wear N95 masks on local trains, long distance trains, planes, buses (most of the time), and movie theaters when busy. The few times I haven’t, in particular local train (unfortunately, lots of unhealthy people) and Amtrak, I have gotten sick - strep and covid. Being sick is in some ways not a big deal, but is serious enough I will keep wearing the masks forever. I get sick far less often than my non mask wearing peers.
The tragedy is that the people operating these services - and schools and hospitals - should have installed filters and UV lamps to make this less unnecessary. At least planes have air circulation, the Amtrak trains are an absolute disaster.
Flu is spreading like wildfire right now. With the advent of these and other technologies, that is essentially an opt-in choice society is making. Totally unnecessary. You don’t have to stop many flu cases before a lamp pays for itself.
Reading and understanding the docs and reference material has always been part of the work.
Aside from the commentary it read like an advertisement for how great the swift/macos translation APIs are. PEBCAK
Particularly offensive to try to name the whole concept after Slack’s default keybinding.
There is zero percent chance developers are wasting a second making sure their sites actually work cross platform if not for iOS (and iOS more moneyed user base).
For example, iOS has a built-in API for managing calendar events. That means my third-party to-do list can show a calendar view with everything from my iOS-managed calendar. Similarly, iOS has an API that enables third-parties to build apps that interact with Apple Music - so you don’t need to use the default client. Another example is focus modes/contextual computing - the OS enables configuring various settings in an automatable way. Another service is the health-tracking database - all my health apps share a common view of data, so my nutrition app can see my weigh ins, calories burned, and glucose levels - all coming from different devices.
On macOS, it goes beyond being just a launcher by providing rich file system services - for example, features to automate working on directories as contents change. It provides integration points to enable providing actions/services that work on text fields. It lets you configure dictionaries that support right-click/force press to look up. It implements a rich eMacs-inspired shortcut system in text fields.
Windows used to have APIs and integrations to support showing calendar events in the clock area. It was going to have a unified tab system that let you have windows with tabs provided by other apps (Sets).
In other words, an OS isn’t just a launcher. It’s a system.
That, sadly, also applies almost perfectly to macOS. And yet, as bad as macOS has become, it is still a distant third in the race to become the worst desktop OS.
Very difficult spot to be in when the entire industry is racing to make desktops awful.
Linux starts to look very interesting, but is held back by the lack of good efficient high quality mobile hardware - the only such devices, Macs and snapdragon x elite devices, have poor Linux support.
People read too much sci-fi, I hope you just forgot your /s.
Don’t bother clicking the links in the post, domains are squatted.
The project is open source and invites feedback in the form of issues, although sadly their issue report page is a bit of a cesspool - will really make you lose faith in humanity.
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues
I think maybe vibe coders got to it and don’t realize that there are certain requirements to create useful feedback? Or maybe VS Code linking from the help menu is a bad idea.
This blog post is a step above the “doesn’t work is garbage” issues filed in GitHub, but only just one. What did the author try to fix? When did it stop working? What kind of projects? What extensions are installed?
Aside: in the spirit of Christmas cheer, I’ll share this fun meme, completely (un)related to the topic at hand: https://old.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1at9br4/i_am_new_to...
I’ve seen plenty of people who are essentially using THC vapes like nicotine vapes, in that they use them every few hours and start to get anxious if they don’t. Stoned driving has become normalized - between seeing people lighting up behind the wheel on snap map, seeing it on TV (this happened in The Rehearsal season 1), and seeing it in person, it would take a lot to convince me otherwise.
If you’re high all day every day, that may be your normal, but it doesn’t mean you’re competent to drive.
In my personal experience, it took a very long time to fully get through a high dose of THC - usually at least a full night sleep, but sometimes more like two, before my reaction times came back. Notably, it takes much longer for the impairment of THC to wear off than the subjectively enjoyable experience of being high, so you can “sober up” but still be impaired.
If you’ve been getting high every day for 10 years, it is hard to take seriously that you would know if you’re impaired. Kind of like vegans who haven’t tasted dairy for 10 years tend not to be reliable judges of the quality of vegan mayo - how could they possibly know?
Objectively the quality of the production was pretty mediocre, but the assignments were challenging and I learned a lot. Similar to a real course taught by a professor. The final assignment (ray tracing) only asked for render results so I took it as an opportunity to learn rust.
The content was maybe a little outdated, but I think the concepts haven’t changed much and that’s what I was there for.
Course materials were updated for M1 macs, but there was a little friction in figuring things out.
I plan to take the follow up soon.
The defaults aren’t really relevant because they don’t come up. You can disable Siri and use the action button to use any other app as an assistant.
Apple Maps can be uninstalled, and many people rely on Google Maps. There are plenty of alternatives. I like how convenient the iOS APIs make it to choose alternatives. The Transit app can read the address information from my calendar (a caldav calendar self-hosted on Synology) which makes it really easy to navigate to appointments.
Re:privacy: https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/03/meta_pauses_android_t...
[1]: https://www.androidauthority.com/android-health-connect-usel...
More serious problems blocking a transition to Android: instead of developing Health Connect in 2015 or before when Apple made HealthKit, Android waited until the mid-2020s, and many apps do not support it. And the implementation is busted if you use multiple devices. Meanwhile on iOS, I have a perfect database of all my health information going back years, and all the apps interpolate nicely - my nutrition tracking app can see my exercise and blood glucose, my glucose tracking app can show exercise on the timeline, my training readiness app can read my sleep data and HRV/RHR from the watch.
And as far as I know Android still doesn’t have Focus Modes, which I rely on to customize my phone and watch. It works really well, integrates with apps, and is easily automatable.
[1]: edit - I thought this was old news, from years ago, but it turns out Android not being able to make emergency calls is an evergreen story. At one point it was Teams’ fault [2] - can you imagine that? Teams being so bad it can block your phone from calling 911? But really it’s android’s fault such a thing is possible. https://www.androidpolice.com/google-pixels-most-dangerous-b... [2]: https://medium.com/@mmrahman123/how-a-bug-in-android-and-mic...
Repair shops will refuse to look at them outright; pretty frustrating they wouldn’t take my money and I had to do it myself. But I think that was categorical for all robot vacuums.
In general though, robot vacuums as a category are improving so quickly I doubt repair is the right options many times. A 10-year-old (or even 3-year-old, because they were always so behind) Roomba is almost like running a 10 year old Intel Mac in 2025.
What new features?