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De-Brainrot Vacations

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Re: De-Brainrot Vacations

#121

Post by willy_k »

carlosjobim wrote: post #94
boudin wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have another suggestion which doesn't contradict yours. When I was younger I used to get bored way more often. I had to wait regularly during a week (e.g. for a bus, friend, appointment) or even at work as a software dev (e.g. compilation which used to take more time). This was also the case when doing some physical activities which didn't require lot of thoughts. Back then, before mobile phones with internet acces…

Sleep is also a forced meditation, so we can't avoid processing information. But in a different way of course.

We can totally avoid (being conscious of) processing stuff during sleep too. Just take some SSRIs or smoke weed and you wake up in the next day. I think that that has more effect on people than people realize, dreaming is important but many people don’t experience that side of things any more.

Re: De-Brainrot Vacations

#122

Post by ProllyInfamous »

poncho_romero wrote: post #117
p_j_w wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we’re just getting older.

As a young person, I can at least anecdotally say the same thing is happening to people who, while older, ain't old yet.

>>We get wise too late...

>>...and old too soon.

>>–Danish Proverb

----

At early-forties, I don't think I count as "young" anymore.

Definitely: growing up without a cell phone was beautiful. I still remember driving around semi-lost, using paper maps, quite fondly (I still print directions).

My last partner (eight years my junior) "grew up on her cellphone" and it was just remarkable how fucked her brain was... at least different from my own landlined-childhood POV (e.g: attention-span; need for constant contact).

----

And yet, my brain also enmushifies (lately: increasingly).

Re: De-Brainrot Vacations

#123

Post by downut »

FinnLobsien wrote: post #18

I think the „my brain isn’t the same anymore“ sensation is pretty universal. Between addictive online media in our personal lives and AI at work, I think we’ve made mental effort largely optional. That must be a horrible thing. One of my favorite theories is the physical activity transition. In my grandparents‘ generation, physical movement became more optional as work shifted from manual labor to knowledge work or o…

It's possible that I'm in your grandparent's generation, or maybe your parents. I'm 65. I don't want to derail the conversation, but I do want to correct the bit about "exercise as a hobby was viewed as extremely weird, runners used to be arrested!". In the '70s at least, running was extremely normal. Endurance bicycling was normal. For instance, starting in 1979. I bicycled all over the South: FL GA NC, at least. These were then as they are now quite provincial from the POV of alternate ideas. 10K runs were a thing, with thousands of participants. As were Marathons. Cross country running was a popular high school sport.

If you want to talk about work, well I'm adjacent to 5th generation farmers. Self driving climate controlled machinery is a thing now, but! hard to imagine I know, people had tractors back then too.

So, plausible as it might sound to ascribe some of the causality to flow from "the physical activity transition", I don't think it holds up.

Re: De-Brainrot Vacations

#124

Post by SuperGent »

visarga wrote: post #97
suzzer99 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telling codex how to program a feature is a much different, much easier type of thinking than back in the olden days of a year ago, when I had to get everything to work myself. I can't imagine that's going to be great for my long-term brain health.

This only holds when you keep the task fixed and compare with and without AI. But because AI changed expectations the difficulty of work we supervise today is much higher. My theory is that AI runs our brains just as hard as no-AI, maybe harder. That is if you want to have high quality outputs, not for slop.

Certainly, AI is allow us to 10x our code, but also 10x our mental work. Steve Yegge calls this the AI Vampire[0] and it does effect us, more so than TV or old school social media ever did. My father went through a stroke a few years ago, and is now always online. He blames the stroke for his brain fog, but I still feel that the modern day dopamine addiction is a huge factor.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/software-engineer-steve-yegg...

Re: De-Brainrot Vacations

#125

Post by negrewal »

grehbies wrote: post #36

I used to read fairly voraciously as a child; nothing like the kids who could devour a Harry Potter book between sunrises, but a respectable "novel every 2-3 weeks", somewhat above my grade level. I can remember almost the exact instant I fell off: being dissatisfied with a particular turn in a YA novel in 9th grade, and the odd moments that had been filled with page-turning suddenly became designated for sketching a…

I made a “recovery” and unfortunately the method I used is the boring one - discipline. I found that I was using social media to distract myself from anxiety, so I started going for a half hour run first thing in the morning, followed by an hour of reading. This required me to get up very early, but I found that the leftover endorphins from running helped me focus on the book and not the anxiety.

And don’t bother finishing 1Q84, you could read like four better Murakami books for the same time investment

Re: De-Brainrot Vacations

#126

Post by tayo42 »

FinnLobsien wrote: post #18

I think the „my brain isn’t the same anymore“ sensation is pretty universal. Between addictive online media in our personal lives and AI at work, I think we’ve made mental effort largely optional. That must be a horrible thing. One of my favorite theories is the physical activity transition. In my grandparents‘ generation, physical movement became more optional as work shifted from manual labor to knowledge work or o…

If AI at work is rotting everyone's brain then it should be like a superpower to be unemployed. But that doesn't seem to be the case...

Re: De-Brainrot Vacations

#127

Post by tEem21 »

bArray wrote: post #92

> Add to that the usage of AI. While I know I’m way more productive than during those first months, my thoughts are getting slower, less profound, lazier. I have mostly stayed away from LLM usage, I think I am better for it. I use it just to offload things I wouldn't have had time for. I get more stuff done, but I am still doing what I did before. > Plus, dopamine is available at just a tap on my phone. There’s a ton…

for the time-based monochrome setting, check out DetoxDroid on F-Droid!

Re: De-Brainrot Vacations

#128

Post by nunez »

I have no idea how I didn't get sucked into doomscroll culture.

Facebook was the center of my life back in college (2005-2009) and for a few years after graduating. What is now my diary started its life in Facebook Notes! I had Snapchat and Instagram accounts when those came out and used MySpace and even Friendster (a bit) prior.

All of those accounts have been deleted within the last three years. Aside from me arriving to closed businesses sometimes because they announced a change of hours on Instagram instead of Google Maps or (gasp!) a website, I miss nothing.

Maybe it was me trying to build a "things to do" service and seeing how locked down, not-open and not user friendly Facebook's Graph API was (in 2014).

Or maybe it's me having grown up a sort-of computer addict (on my computer all of the time when I wasn't in school) then, during college, seeing people get sucked all the way into World of Warcraft when that was new and connecting the dots.

What I do know is that these apps are extremely good --- casino-level good --- at sucking people into their portals and keeping them there.

Consequently, this has made going about my day in modern life difficult in some ways.

Playing music off of phones used to be verboten and socially enforced. These days, blasting 1, 2, 5, 10 second blips of nonsense every few seconds is "normal."

Walking around pretty much anywhere knowing that at any moment I can get hit by someone who overran the crosswalk so they could whip out their phone and scroll is a real possibility.

Driving around --- when I choose to do so --- is equally frustrating since people will tailgate me or cut me off so they can park 30 seconds faster and spend 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes FUCKING SCROLLING.

I keep my email inbox empty, thus turning it into a to-do list of sorts. But because most people have surrendered to their 90k unread email inboxes, doing things via email can be slow and frustrating.

Then there's the double standard of criticizing AI services while (sometimes within the same breath!) citing Google AI Answers as fact or spending hours and hours building whatever with Claude or Codex or whatever, whose web crawlers continue to descend on the web like ants onto a piece of bread and make everything I used to love using (Reddit, random blogs, this fucking site) increasingly inaccessible.

Re: De-Brainrot Vacations

#129

Post by meowkit »

downut wrote: post #123
FinnLobsien wrote: post #18

I think the „my brain isn’t the same anymore“ sensation is pretty universal. Between addictive online media in our personal lives and AI at work, I think we’ve made mental effort largely optional. That must be a horrible thing. One of my favorite theories is the physical activity transition. In my grandparents‘ generation, physical movement became more optional as work shifted from manual labor to knowledge work or o…

It's possible that I'm in your grandparent's generation, or maybe your parents. I'm 65. I don't want to derail the conversation, but I do want to correct the bit about "exercise as a hobby was viewed as extremely weird, runners used to be arrested!". In the '70s at least, running was extremely normal. Endurance bicycling was normal. For instance, starting in 1979. I bicycled all over the South: FL GA NC, at least. Th…

I think the physical activity transition they are describing would have been closer to the end of the 19th century when mechanization really started to take hold (e.g. the car)

Re: De-Brainrot Vacations

#130

Post by ethagnawl »

FinnLobsien wrote: post #18

I think the „my brain isn’t the same anymore“ sensation is pretty universal. Between addictive online media in our personal lives and AI at work, I think we’ve made mental effort largely optional. That must be a horrible thing. One of my favorite theories is the physical activity transition. In my grandparents‘ generation, physical movement became more optional as work shifted from manual labor to knowledge work or o…

> runners used to be arrested!

This reminds me of Ray Bradbury's excellent short story, _The Pedestrian_: https://www.libraryofshortstories.com/onlinereader/the-pedes...

IIRC, this story also informed and inspired _Fahrenheit 451_.

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