61–70 of 77 posts
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Cocaine is a tool too.
Dear SJWs, stop downvoting the parental post if you just don't know the mentioned substance is a really good local anesthetic with short but powerful effect and having close to zero post-effects after a singular use.
After what happened with Adobe, Microsoft and Sonos this past week, I have decided to try limit my use of American products. Don’t get me wrong, I love the USA - I have tonnes of family there and I have met some super nice people on my months long holidays there too… But. There is just too much poison coming out of Silicon Valley in my view. Awful choices in pursuit of our personal information, ‘Recall’ demonstrates…
Real. I am a long term Linux user (first downloaded Slackware over a 2400 baud modem - you can ask your grandparents what that is) and in principle I would like to do what you have done, basically do a “100% Richard Stallman” but my productivity is higher when using specific tools on macOS/iPadOS/iOS. I fight back a bit by leaving my iPhone at home unless I want to take pictures. Instead my Apple Watch is my main dri…
I used to be Google’s biggest fan boy once upon a time. I thought they were the bees knees, then 2006 came and they began using email content for targeted ads (this was when I used googlemail) and I knew they turned bad.
Every American tech company gets corrupted in the end eh.
At this rate of headlines, The Grauniad will be shutting their app and web servers down shortly and moving back to movable type and newspaper boys covered in soot. My phone helps gets me to places I can go and touch things. And take photos with it. It's just a tool. Encourage those uses. It's not the device, it's the users' choice in how they use it.
If you've never picked up your phone to do one thing and half an hour later found yourself trawling through Instagram, having forgotten what you originally meant to do with your "just a tool", you are in a tiny minority of incredibly focused people. The majority of us, through no fault of our own, find these 'tools' regularly sucking us into a vortex of distractions and time-wasting. The struggle against cheap dopami…
First things first, you can organise your apps so that the tools you want appear prominently. On iOS Focus modes can help you set pages of apps just to what you need in that focus - I have one for "Holiday" which I use when on a beach which has my airline/holiday company, bank (to check the spends), an e-Reader, and that's it. My work focus has apps I need for work - slack, email, calendar, internal apps for accessing shared docs and so on. There is one focus which has casual games and mind candy stuff - I switch to it consciously. I can't accidentally end up in there.
I'm also lucky in that I can separate out how my friends contact me (Whatsapp/Signal/Telegram) vs family (FB Messenger and text messages), vs work (Slack). If you can do that, do it, it really helps, honestly.
Next up, kill notifications with fire. Apps heavey on notifications are the crying babies of smartphones: they can ruin your sleep with their neediness, but you need to help them adapt into your routine, not the other way around.
On iOS you can have "scheduled summary notifications", and that's awesome, but I think the only stuff you need to get notified about generally is really important stuff. Only you can decide what that is, but it's probably not social media. Kill as much of it as possible.
Unread notification badges are evil. You can get rid of those. Even on email, do you really need to know how much "work" is needed inside that app? Probably not.
Plan your time, then plan your tech around that plan, and then stick with those plans (and at first it might require willpower until it becomes habit).
These changes mean I've not been a habitual user of social media in years (and I used to be on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook for 5+ hours a day), and I'm reading more books on my phone. Things that need my attention get it, but I am super careful about deciding what that "need" really is, and most things don't get it.
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> It's not the phone itself that they issue, it's the content." I don't think that's true, at best it's both. It's the phone that enables a more frictionless access to the content. Having a speed bump to access the same content would make a large difference which is why the alternatives in the article are proving effective, the act of accessing something is less mindless, and more deliberate. I think the point they'r…
Bingo. For people like me my phone is indispensable, not as a source of endless distractions (though I dabble like anyone) but I put everything in my phone. It's literally an extension of my brain, because my brain is bad at remembering things, so every last thing goes in the phone. Plans with friends, important dates in relationships, birthdays, I have calendar reminders for practically everything going on in my lif…
I also have a half-dozen apps I shouldn't have on my phone like YouTube, streaming services web toons, Craigslist, medium.
If I move the distraction apps off of top level visibility and access as well and mostly turn off all notifications, it becomes much more reasonable tool to have.
Shout out for "Apple Configurator" for Mac, if a dumb phone appeals to you but can't because there are some apps you really need, I hardly ever see it mentioned in articles like this. It's designed for IT departments to configure all their company phones, but you can also use it to dumb down any iPhone by whitelisting a specific set of apps, it's way better than the parental controls / screen time options.
Ok, so this sounds very interesting & useful. I'll be reading up on this, but if you have time to pass along any pointers or tips around using this for personal/household use it'd be much appreciated.
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Standing desk only. No sitting and browsing. That was a huge change for me.
Every so often, I end up selling my laptop to diminish the convenience of my computer usage. Usually, I end up eventually reneging and buying a new (used) one.
Someone pointed out in a similar discussion: "It's not the phone itself that they issue, it's the content." Yesterday there was a debate locally about screen time, both for adults and children, and how much is to much. It's always about the phone, the iPad or the TV, never about the content. At this point I'm leaning more towards, well, we tried social media, streaming, online gaming and funny meme site and our monke…
I agree, but unfortunately, phones are by default set up to contain the bad kind of content.
In theory, it should be possible to set up the phones for my kids so that they only contain useful applications, without ads and in-app purchases. Also, either to remove the web browser, or to limit it to a selection of useful websites, which in turn do not contain ads. In practice, that would require a lot of work, and I do not have much free time.
It would be nice to have a website that would teach parents (including the ones who are not very tech-savvy) how to configure the kids' phones like that. Even better, to sell phones that are already configured like that.
Someone pointed out in a similar discussion: "It's not the phone itself that they issue, it's the content." Yesterday there was a debate locally about screen time, both for adults and children, and how much is to much. It's always about the phone, the iPad or the TV, never about the content. At this point I'm leaning more towards, well, we tried social media, streaming, online gaming and funny meme site and our monke…
Decades ago Joel Spolsky wrote about software bloat and light versions of Word Processors (quoted below) and today 23 years later you can watch the MKBHD team on YouTube "switch to dumbphones so you don't have to" (quotes below) with exactly the same results - they're great, except for the features they don't have which I want. concluding with "If we merged these dumbphones into one and make a mega-dumbphone...". Just ban the bad bits ... doesn't really work. Attention stealing algorithms are algorithms which surface things I want to see, they're not the wrong algorithms, they're turned to surfacing the wrong things.
Joel Spolsky: "Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features. In the last 10 years I have probably heard of dozens of companies who, determined not to learn from each other, tried to release “lite” word processors that only implement 20% of the features. This story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the “word count” feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it’s not there, because it’s in the “80% that nobody uses,” and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can’t use this damn thing ’cause it won’t count my words. If I had a dollar for every time this has happened I would be very happy." - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...
MKBHD Team: quotes include: "Palmphone - it was your second phone, you had to figure out when to bring it with you vs. when to bring your other phone; you have to specifically figure out what limiting features you want to have". She says: "my problem with it is I can install anything, I wanted to use apps less but I can install all the exact same apps on this". The Blank app for iPhone which makes a large black and white launcher screen: "it's no fun; easy to bypass". Generally: "My biggest problem with this experiment was all my accounts need MFA apps". LitePhone II: "We've tried to make a video about switching to the LitePhone II for serveral days for years. It's really frustrating. It's almost unusable for music, running playlists, 1GB isn't enough storage". "The lack of camera. Can't deal with QR codes, e.g. menus". "Navigation worked by once and failed once, eInk refresh too slow". "No USB C". "Typing too hard". Bookx Palma a b/w eInk Android non-phone:"you need three or four days to get it working, you need to be incredibly patient. There are just better things on my phone". - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMyurkqaddc&t=47s
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It's called late stage capitalism and the scary thing is I think we still have a way to go. Check out the explosion of PE into our healthcare system recently if you really want to feel some goosebumps.
Wait a minute, why being a private equity for some healthcare institutes is bad?
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> > The majority of us, through no fault of our own > it is called "personal accountability", I know its very hated on in the modern world, but please... Look, I get the point you're trying to make, but as stated, this is incredibly insensitive. There are plenty of scenarios where someone should be held personally accountable for getting distracted or losing time, but this is not one of them. It's entirely possible a…
I get the feeling OP is one of those who tells people with depression to just stop feeling sad...