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My ideas are shitty so I'm going on an Internet diet

swizec.com

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Re: My ideas are shitty so I'm going on an Internet diet

#31

Post by Seba »

whothehell wrote: post #18

I find it strange that some people in this discussion thread are trashing about companies that make stuff like farmville or facebook. So they are making something on which people are wasting their time. Does that make these people are bad or "waste of talent"? It sounds like they woke up one day and thought "lets make repetitive but addictive game/site which will enable people to waste lots and lots of their time and…

Don't get it wrong. Everyone has to decide on his own if he wants to work on something useful for society or not. There is no general way to judge that, but it is always a personal decision based on ethics the person considers worth to follow.

Re: My ideas are shitty so I'm going on an Internet diet

#32

Post by Seba »

Swizec wrote: post #11
Seba wrote: post #5

Mmmh, would have been good if he would be stricter. I'm not sure why someone can't stay away from Facebook & Co. for 30 days. However, in general I agree with his perception that the daily flow of news doesn't help us in focusing on the important problems of life.

I wanted to go completely without at first. Then I realized 99% of my social interaction happens online and I am not interested in [essentially] walking off into the desert to think for 30 days. Also reducing "frivolous internets" from 24/7 to an hour a day. A solid hour at that, not interspersed throughout the day ... will be hard.

It worries me if I read that someones social interactions happens 99% online. Are there no spouse, neighboors, friends?

Re: My ideas are shitty so I'm going on an Internet diet

#33

Post by mikk0j »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #15
Swizec wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to look into Pomodoro. It helped me get rid of the tic you describe. The diet is to try getting rid of something deeper :)

Pomodoro (or something similar to it) worked for a while, but I found myself gradually putting off getting started.

Same exact prob. The 25-minute counter is there on the desktop. I just haven't pressed play yet. Instead, there is HN to go through.

Re: My ideas are shitty so I'm going on an Internet diet

#34

Post by jfoucher »

wheels wrote: post #26

This isn't radical enough. Allowing one hour of Facebook / HN per day is kind of like saying, "I'm going on a diet where I only eat ice cream between 8:00 and 9:00 pm." Wikipedia is a huge time-sink. Needing online coding references is mostly laziness and habit. Download the docs you need, and if you still get stuck, read the source code of whatever it is you're stuck on. On the whole this is usually more efficient s…

In 2003, I only had spotty and slow internet, so I downloaded the whole php docs as a single file. This was great, the only problem was that the file was so huge it took over a minute to fully load...

Re: My ideas are shitty so I'm going on an Internet diet

#36

Post by giddas »

arethuza wrote: post #27
Swizec wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know how in the old days people used to travel to experience something new? This is similar. Also there's the idea that we get really good ideas when we have time to process the information we have collected. And I do in fact use this to great advantage when developing algorithms. Learn about a problem, then just go do something else. Let's say for the past few years I've been cramming information into my head, n…

"You know how in the old days people used to travel to experience something new?" What do you mean "in the old days"? From what I can see people are still travelling a hell of a lot to "experience something new" and this is often facilitated by the Internet. And it's hardly an age thing - most people I know in their 20s seem to be very keen on travelling.

...as long as there is fast wireless internet access at the destination.

Re: My ideas are shitty so I'm going on an Internet diet

#37

Post by sadlyNess »

Swizec wrote: post #11
Seba wrote: post #5

Mmmh, would have been good if he would be stricter. I'm not sure why someone can't stay away from Facebook & Co. for 30 days. However, in general I agree with his perception that the daily flow of news doesn't help us in focusing on the important problems of life.

I wanted to go completely without at first. Then I realized 99% of my social interaction happens online and I am not interested in [essentially] walking off into the desert to think for 30 days. Also reducing "frivolous internets" from 24/7 to an hour a day. A solid hour at that, not interspersed throughout the day ... will be hard.

But it seems that that is what you need:walking off into the desert to think for 30 days. Try unplugging for 3 full days and each fourth day, you get only an hour.

Re: My ideas are shitty so I'm going on an Internet diet

#38

Post by robryan »

wheels wrote: post #26

This isn't radical enough. Allowing one hour of Facebook / HN per day is kind of like saying, "I'm going on a diet where I only eat ice cream between 8:00 and 9:00 pm." Wikipedia is a huge time-sink. Needing online coding references is mostly laziness and habit. Download the docs you need, and if you still get stuck, read the source code of whatever it is you're stuck on. On the whole this is usually more efficient s…

Working in PHP I find I could probably easily download the PHP docs and be nearly completely happy. Client side though is a different story, plenty of times I have look for something in the JQuery docs but needed to refer to something like a stack overflow question to really get what I need.

JQuery/ JS seem to lend themselves to many different ways to do tasks and the selectors are a bit like regex for me in that I haven't really committed it all to memory.

It is a trade off though with the distractions, possibly you could try and bank up stuff that docs don't give you the answer to and hit them all up in one go.

Re: My ideas are shitty so I'm going on an Internet diet

#39

Post by wheels »

robryan wrote: post #38
wheels wrote: post #26

This isn't radical enough. Allowing one hour of Facebook / HN per day is kind of like saying, "I'm going on a diet where I only eat ice cream between 8:00 and 9:00 pm." Wikipedia is a huge time-sink. Needing online coding references is mostly laziness and habit. Download the docs you need, and if you still get stuck, read the source code of whatever it is you're stuck on. On the whole this is usually more efficient s…

Working in PHP I find I could probably easily download the PHP docs and be nearly completely happy. Client side though is a different story, plenty of times I have look for something in the JQuery docs but needed to refer to something like a stack overflow question to really get what I need. JQuery/ JS seem to lend themselves to many different ways to do tasks and the selectors are a bit like regex for me in that I h…

Pretty much the full web dev stack is open source, including jQuery. If you really get stuck, you'll actually learn more by reading the source code than by getting a piecemeal info on Stackoverflow. I don't remember having to do that with jQuery (most of the JS I write is without a JS library, and I have the rhino book), but I've frequently read the source code to bits of Rails or MRI when I've not understood something and been offline.

Re: My ideas are shitty so I'm going on an Internet diet

#40

Post by Swizec »

Seba wrote: post #32
Swizec wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to go completely without at first. Then I realized 99% of my social interaction happens online and I am not interested in [essentially] walking off into the desert to think for 30 days. Also reducing "frivolous internets" from 24/7 to an hour a day. A solid hour at that, not interspersed throughout the day ... will be hard.

It worries me if I read that someones social interactions happens 99% online. Are there no spouse, neighboors, friends?

Depends on how you count. There are only so many IRL people you can interact with on a daily basis and even with most of those I tend to keep in touch online for various reasons.

99% was an exaggeration though of course :)

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