The mechanism of https://www.beeminder.com/ is unreasonably effective at limiting this kind of thing.
Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
131–140 of 685 posts
Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
#132Do you even lift? I mean that seriously. Lifting heavy weights helps one get rid of all that mental bullshit. It's a cornerstone habit. So lifting can form a base for all other beautiful stuff in your life. It's hard to care about trivial shit on Youtube or Instagram when you just lifted dumbbells until fatigue and did some good squats.
Or browse the internet between sets. It’s big brain time. I’m not even joking, if you’re going to waste time at least multitask and get stronger/healthier in the process.
This is the sole reason I use reddit on my phone. I keep a tab for AskReddit, open something for later if the title seems interesting enough, and at least skim the thread within a few days. No app, no login, old-style UI.
Since my brain is usually disengaged when lifting (gotta save those calories for what matters), I rarely bother with anything 'deep' between sets.
One potential upside of this is that the threads are usually a few hours or days old before I actually read them, which means that I can expect no new content from them once I have my fill of a thread.
Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
#133I wonder if this is because we're lonely..? Just wondering out loud here. E.g. Twitter - feels like many of the "thought leaders" I follow, their "friends" are also on Twitter. And they tweet/respond so much I often wonder if they're really ever "building a business". And are they ever interacting with their real-world friends or family? Or if their lives just consist of a constant refresh of their feed. Even at dinn…
I've read that the decline of religion also plays a role here. Aside from the religious aspect, the sense of community and regularity you get meeting the same people on a regular basis is lost.
It's kind of the mix of a loss of "third place" (institutions, coffee shops, etc.) and the increase of social media bubbles that pushes us to be more polarized, I think.
Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
#134I recall life before smart phones either feeling bored or being looked at strangely for sitting on a laptop at a bus stop, not that I cared.
Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
#135Same here :(. I understand the consequence, but still I spend all my time watching useless news, reddit & hackernews. IDK why I am getting so much addicted on internet... And, I believe this is also why I haven't been able to achieve great things in my life.
Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
#136When I was a kid my parents had a big physical encyclopaedia set. I used to lose myself in those things just as much as I scroll through stuff now. Just because in both instances, it’s “interesting”.
But my brain doesn’t necessarily discern between “good” interesting and “bad” interesting without me trying to work it out and guiding it.
Which I normally fail at.
Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
#137Because we humans have a lot of idle time. We feel like we're wasting it, and we feel we should instead spend time archiving goals, to better ourselves, to do something more meaningful. But that is not how life works. You are just unnecessarily burden yourself with guilt. Thinking you should be doing something else. There are so many things to learn about, so many things to experience, right? We fear on missing out o…
I agree with this. Not to mention that being idle still involves complex thought processes, like treating traumas and understanding concepts.
Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
#138I am addicted to twitter and reddit. Especially reddit. It often takes the place of reading, hobbies, quiet moments, improving my home, talking with my spouse, and playing with my baby. When reddit records a click or an upvote, it thinks it has been a Good Product, and created Engagement. Reddit then takes those feedback loops and tunes the algorithm and feedback loops to create further engagement. But in reality, th…
As a married husband (almost 20 yrs) and father of five kids, allow me to share some wisdom. Spouse time is vital to a healthy, strong, vibrant, lasting relationship. Reddit doesn't care about you like your spouse does. And kids grow up way too fast. Treasure every moment.
Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
#139Just speaking for myself, I've noticed that my habit is to eat what is in front of me, and clean my plate. I mean this both literally and figuratively. If I have dessert in the house, like a bag of chocolate, then I eat one after dinner. If I don't have it in the house, then I just don't eat dessert. If I have a social media feed full of content, then I'll scroll through all of it until there's nothing else that's ne…
Doing the same, but this does not really apply for algorithmic feeds. When you open YouTube the recommendations are always the first thing you see, same for TikTok and Twitter (although at least you can configure it there). Sure you can say “just don’t use recommendation systems” just as you can say “just don’t go on YouTube”.
The recommendation algos can be quite good but you need to give them good signal. I doubt many people do this, but clicking 'not interested' on the clickbaity vids and thumbs-up high-effort content can very quickly tune your recommendations to be very high quality.
Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
#140I'm not sure about wasting. Most of my surfing consists of unearthing gems, and I have to wade through a lot of noise and muck to find those gems, but the gems are there. If I could automate it, I would, but it wouldn't be the same. A piece of code that crawls the net looking for something I would really enjoy is a hard problem, and I would have to code in my own biases to the program to make it work properly, and th…
Can you give an example of such a gem? Normally I just rely on HN to provide me with interesting links, but lately it doesn't seem to give me the same kick it used to.
My own list, which is pretty different in character than Derek's.
Gankra's work on a useful rust memory model is both fascinating and useful: https://twitter.com/Gankra_/status/1509335163045650436
This tool to convert low-complexity rust tests to proofs is interesting and something I'm glad I know exists: https://model-checking.github.io/kani-verifier-blog/2022/05/...
I'm using this code I found out about via reddit in a side project, probably less interesting to you though: https://github.com/setzer22/egui_node_graph
(Warning, videos from here on out):
Cool product demo of a futuristic debugger: https://www.hytradboi.com/2022/debugging-by-querying-a-datab...
These people also have a cool demo of splitting a single program across two different computers (frontend and backend webserver in their case). Maybe a bit less convincing than the previous one, but something I intend to watch: https://www.hytradboi.com/2022/uis-are-streaming-dags
These people have some really cool work on automatically solving physics problems (just linking to one of their talks as an example): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHhDgxkiR9c