"doing dumb things" and "stupid shit" is an odd choice to describe tools that only trigger on explicit activation. Is a windshield being lowered by a switch being held a "dumb thing"?
Dumb things start to happen when you try to build Star Trek interfaces. When you build DWIM interfaces in real life, they are annoying and trigger unwanted and the implementation is without exception, by necessity, a growing ball of spaghetti.
At work, we use Claude Code with superpowers which organizes most work into planning followed by review followed by implementation and superpowers applies a fairly high level of scrutiny at every step. It's really quite effective, I don't generally read the code that comes out. In that workflow I have never used plan mode. I don't know what I'd use it for.
On my hobby projects I use Antigravity CLI and almost always start with /plan. This is a builtin skill - not a mode. It generates a plan artifact that I review and approve. Once approved the implementation speed is uncanny compared to Claude.
I tried using superpowers with Antigravity CLI but that slowed the agent down considerably without much benefit (plan quality was much worse).
Like all addictions it's about habits and you compete with multiple trillion-dollar companies to shape your habits for you. Luckily, you are closer to where decisions are actually being made.
So the measures, in no particular order, but vaguely resemblign an escalation ladder:
1. Get a shittier phone. Something worth 100 eurobucks from aliexpress working on a slow mtk soc, outdated android and all that
2. Disable all notification forever, also incoming call ringtone with a voice mail saying you will return the call tomorrow
3. Get a landline or equivalent land-line like voip phone on a table in a hallway. With a voice mail of course.
4. Start leaving the phone at home when you go for a short walk or somewhere in a shop.
5. When you do take it with you outside, put it in a banana bag under the jacket instead of your pocket and then leave it in the bag when you get back home.
6. obviously remove all of the dopamine junkie apps.
7. don't look at the mail, chats, news, whatever is there before lunch, specifically don't let it be the first thing getting your attention in the morning.
8. doing a prayer 5 times a day and going to mosque or whatever you have to counter balance the influence of shaitain sitting your pocket for the last 10 years.
9. allowing yourself to use junkie apps for a dopamine hit when you actually need it but deciding the time and trigger yourself (separate phone with instagrahm turned off most of the time, only scrolling it while you are outside in the park in a nice setting after having a juicy piece of junk food, icecream or whatever, etc).
I did the numbers for the year 2025 and conclude that flying there will be cheaper, but then the orange monkey decided to do a short victorious war right in the hood of my favorite transit station to there.
Tried almost all of these, stuck on no. 7. If I have a browser I’ll browse, I have no social media apps at all, I’ll open HN and browse it happily, I even use Reddit on a browser with that atrocious webpage nagging you to install the app. I’ll use it in a PC if my phone breaks.
If I lock myself out of the browser, cut all communications, miss a phone call, I’ll not be able to do “something” that is not socially acceptable not to do. Life will create a situation, and make me feel like I’m doing something wrong, maybe I am.
Then there is all the good things, that article that got you hooked on a new idea, that contact that got you a better job, that friend you miss in another continent. My kid would not exist were not for the internet. When you are in a bad day you will convincingly argue it’s for the greater good, maybe you are even right that it was.
There is porn when you are horny, delivery services when you are tired and hungry, a map when you are lost, hobby items you can’t find locally, podcasts when you are lonely, all the music.
I think I’m not wired in a way that can healthily separate the good and the bad in a society that also can’t. I know something is wrong, but I don’t think I can fix it with tech.
Get GrapheneOS. Install FOSS apps whenever possible, via Obtainium. Signal if need be. A RSS reader. No social networks. Get a Kagi subscription to ensure no ads and bias.
That targets a different thing IMO. You can aim for privacy or you can aim for the thing being slow and irritating to use to disrupt the habit. If tech companies spend money to make their apps smooth to use, you can aim for the opposite and inject friction and reduce the amount of high you get from it and making it slower to reach so you can have a chance to take back the executive control over the task.
I get no high from my phone/apps since there are no ads and no perverse incentives. I'm not the product of the services I pay for.
I'm happy Fastmail (made by a small company) is much better and faster than Gmail (made by a advertising behemoth). Idem with GrapheneOS vs Pixel OS. The less friction, the shortest time spent using the phone, the most time to enjoy spending time outside and with friends.
I mean, whatever satisfies your desire for inner peace. I mainly don't open news in the morning because my news feed is "/asshole country/ bombed a city again and 4 people died, one of them is a 2 year old child, the entire other city is starving to death eating grass and there is a budged deficit next year to strike back at them doing this shit and allies are a bunch of weak man bringing bad times"
Except it's impossible nowadays, since most apps require Google Play Integrity attestation and doesn't work on GrapheneOS.
And if it wasn't for these apps (for example banking apps, since someone decided that it's now impossible to use your homebanking from a PC since it's not secure enough) I would already use a Nokia 3310.
Not true. I'm a customer of 3 top French online banks and of two top global brokerage cie and the apps work great. I have no issue whatsoever except with one health insurance app but their Web app is better anyway.
Only thing missing is contactless payment but there are European banks that support GrapheneOS without Google Pay so alternatives exist. And I can use Garmin pay with my watch (and offline and without Garmin Connect thanks to the FOSS GadgetBridge appp) if that was necessary.
Glad to see more HN commenters challenging this false assertion
The false claims of "It won't work" in HN comments keep getting more bizarre
It's unclear if this is a myth, a misunderstanding or a deliberate falsehood but it's oft repeated
Here the original comment did not even make any claims about mobile banking
But it still triggered a reply with a false assertion about mobile banking
Mobile banking usage differs from country to country
Not every country is the same with respect to mobile banking usage, not to mention mobile usage in general
As for people who would use GrapheneOS, a small segment of conscientious mobile users, I wonder how many have or could end up with multiple phones as a result of planned obsolescence and forced "upgrades"
In such cases they might have one phone that runs a corporate mobile OS and "approved" apps and another that runs a non-corporate OS that runs "unapproved" apps
Loads of banking apps work fine on GrapheneOS, and the vast majority of non-banking apps require even less attestation and so work on GrapheneOS like on any other Android with Play Services present.
I have no idea what you're talking about. I haven't yet run into an app that requires integrity attestation and doesn't work on Graphene. Even my bank works, although it flagged me as someone who probably stole my password, until I scanned my passport and face a few more times.
when reading personal blogs, it's best to assume any statement as a reflection of their experiences and world-bubble rather than as verified facts. This is a blog, not a technical doc. while your frustration may be well founded, it's also self inflicted to a degree, you're expecting the wrong thing from the wrong place.
While we're on the subject of gripes with the modern internet, the fact that most social media sites that publish to a single feed flatten reality into a single format. People then apply uniform judgement to content with wildly different purposes (and subconsciously people ascribe more purpose to posts that happen to rise up the frontpage, even when the blog in question was just some thought somebody threw out in ten minutes)
My phone is in my pocket all the time basically, along with my keys and my wallet. I use it to respond to text messages from friends and family, read books on the Kindle app, check the weather report, and occasionally check Teams to see why my watch has been vibrating constantly with notifications for the last twenty minutes. Oh, and to talk on the phone once in a blue moon.
I get that I'm an outlier, but I'd worry more about the people that launch it across the room the minute they get home. Of course, if you're always picking it up and checking social media, that's also a problem.
I doubt it. I've never been overweight in my lifetime. I have never had to put any effort into that. I simply cannot relate at all to the food-related struggles I sometimes read about overweight people having. It would be silly and condescending of me to claim that I simply have more strength of will here than they do. On the other hand, I struggle heavily with some things many/most people do not, and this is often blamed as a personal failure and weakness of mine. So I wonder if it's just that people who don't have any similar struggles think they are just superior beings with superior willpower.
Quite often it's really a question of gut flora and lack of knowledge regarding good eating habits.
Also fat cells are endocrinologically active, so they try to compel the person to, well, get fatter.
I've been doing this the hard way lately and there's still much that I don't know, because food and lifestyles used to be different, so my parents only told me what they knew from theirs.
To illustrate just how different, my great-grandmother reportedly disliked food that she described as "rich" - too calorie dense for her taste. By this definition cottage cheese was "rich".
The gut is an interesting component we are learning more about, for sure. But as an addict, it still comes down to changing your habits, which indeed fixes the floura.
I’m not sure I can really believe the often cited claim that a major component here is a lack a knowledge. Does anyone truly believe Cheetos are as good or better for you than broccoli?
The most obvious explanation to me is that we are just flooded with addictive food and bombarded with ads to entice us. That and healthy food presents more friction in terms of having to buy the ingredients and prepaid it, and we are all short on time and overstressed.
This and most research points at eating habits being formed within the first few years of life. Once imprinted on you they are very very difficult to change.
I stopped reading when I realized the article reminds me of my own Claude-generated solutions at work - just an endless maze of special business logic on top of special business logic. You need an LLM to understand it. You need an LLM help write the documentation. You need an LLM to help read the documentation.
My son, Jeffrey, was a very tiny, very sick premature baby, born Feb. 9, 1985, at a gestational age of 25-26 weeks. During the almost two months of his life, he was on a respirator, with several lung diseases, a heart problem, kidney problems, and a brain bleed.
... Jeffrey had holes cut on both sides of his neck, another hole cut in his right chest, an incision from his breastbone around to his backbone, his ribs pried apart, and an extra artery near his heart tied off. This was topped off with another hole cut in his left side for a chest tube. The operation lasted 12 hours. Jeffrey was awake through it all.
The anesthesiologist paralyzed him with Pavulon, a curare drug that left him unable to move, but totally conscious. When I questioned the anesthesiologist ... she said Jeffrey was too sick to tolerate powerful anesthetics. Anyway, she said, it had never been demonstrated to her that premature babies feel pain. She seemed sincerely puzzled as to why I was concerned. It turns out that such care, or lack thereof, is possible because, as a neonatologist explained, babies, unlike adults, don't go into shock no matter how much agony they suffer.
"such care, or lack thereof" is heavily loaded; about the only objectively-sounding statements in the last paragraph are that Jeffrey wasn't able to tolerate anesthetics, and that "babies, unlike adults, don't go into shock", both of which add up to possibility of care where alternative was to leave the child to die.
Similarities between languages is a much more intuitive approach for non-English speakers. This comment just explains an English idiom in terms of English idioms.
Why even keep using zombie Twitter? I used to scroll Twitter a lot but deleted my account back when. Literally any other social network seems more appealing these days, and not by a small margin.
I just had to go check out your site with that comment. Nicely done! Was waiting for the physics simulation to either fully settle or explode, but really neither of those happened.
Dumb things start to happen when you try to build Star Trek interfaces. When you build DWIM interfaces in real life, they are annoying and trigger unwanted and the implementation is without exception, by necessity, a growing ball of spaghetti.
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