dgimla20

I'm surprised Googles ad business stays afloat. It seems every video I watch on YouTube is preceded with a Grammarly advert, a service I have no use for and will not subscribe to/pay for in the future.

I feel like Google should be the one company that has enough data and the widespread scope to really excel in advertising, yet on every site I see their ads, its as if they have no idea who I am and what I might want.

Feels like a bubble to me..

Bloody hell. That name takes me back. I got started on web with Piczo (albeit moved on very quickly).

I remember using Pocket briefly and wondering what the purpose of it was when you could just save bookmarks in any stock web browser.

Any geography buffs able to explain why the greenspace in Northern Africa seems to ebb and flow across this time period? That looks quite interesting but I can't seem to find anything about it.

This is a good technique but I fear YouTube will always try to sway us away from our interests, and towards what they are soft-promoting.

I've always wanted a YouTube which is basically just a searchbar, with results and just the video, so I created a little private webpage with that. It doesn't have anything unless I searched for it. No autoplay, no trending or recommendations, and no comments. The YouTube API is free up to a certain amount of videos (which is very hard to reach for personal usage).

I guess societal collapse was a bit melodramatic of me. I guess I just wanted to vent a bit. It's just sad that we live with such a hijacking force in our pockets and that seems to be having an adverse effect on the way people handle their jobs and lives.

I really think society is sleepwalking into a ton of problems with mass media consumption (mostly by the phone, and of which Instagram is one component). We are not supposed to be filling every gap in our lives with videos, games, music, and short-form content.

It is okay to be bored and let your mind wonder every now and again. It fosters boredom, which in turn fosters creativity. It also boosts the enjoyment of the (lower amount of) media you do consume and stops you becoming numb to it and seeking out more dopamine constantly.

It is clearly having an effect on people's attention span, stunting people's ability to focus, and affecting their performance, not just in work, but in many areas of their lives.

Maybe the city I live in is an isolated case, but most people walking from place to place are looking at their phone while doing it. I see people walking their dog or pushing their baby prams while staring at their phone (this is supposed to be bonding time). When I go to the gym, there's a whole column of people walking on treadmills (even on a sunny day) because this allows them to prop the phone up on the treadmill or hold the phone and watch videos. The 3-5 minute rest between sets on machines, benches and free weight areas is now a video watching period. Sometimes people are just doing a low-weight easy load with the phone resting on their crotch.

Even if people aren't looking at the screen, a lot of the time they have earbuds in listening to something. Is it a war on silence and letting the mind wander?

Why can people not unplug? Surely by now it's proven that short form video content is stunting people's attention span, making it hard for them to read even a page of a book. How are these people going to competently hold down a job or pursue a hobby? What happens in 20 years when people have been conditioned like this for 2,3,4+ decades. Are we going to have a serious breakdown in mental health, early signs of dementia or Alzheimers?

Damn companies like Instagram for taking part in this, as Google, Meta, Reddit, Spotify and whoever else has. Their desire to occupy ever more of our attention and time is leading this charge.

I read and write from a desktop PC at work. Echo the other person who replied. I can't stand virtual keyboards for writing anything as long as ... about this comment.

I too want to get paid 500k to sit on a bean bag, drink lattes, have office affairs, work a 3 hours day

Unfortunately this was most of the lot that Google and others cut loose in the last layoffs.

There was a few TikTok montages of "my day working at Google/LinkedIn Microsoft" (eat breakfast, snack time, eat lunch, eat dinner, check emails, massage, go home) which now have a additional "day in the life of being laid off from Google" follow-up.

Is this just one of the top dogs at Stripe bigging up their own company?

Surely it's common public opinion that most social initiatives and stances major companies take are entirely about publicity and reflect whatever they think the bulk of their consumer base supports.

If tomorrow 60% or so of McDonalds (or any other company) customer-base became national socialists, McDonalds would have a red, black and white swastika-laden logo within month-end.

It's all pandering. Always has been, always will be. There's even terms for each type: pink-washing, rainbow-washing etc.

The only alternative is to take a neutral position, where you just focus on whatever product/service you are selling.

Thanks for writing this. It's refreshing to see there's a bunch of us in the same boat.

I think you've hit the nail on the head about the two worlds. My phone sits in my pocket most of the day and just comes out when I need it. Every day I see people looking at their phone as they walk through busy streets, walk their dog, pushing prams, at the gym on the treadmills, bikes and on the machines. Especially jarring to see when it's a rarish sunny day and all that changes is the brightness setting on their phone.

I must be going through some mental changes nowadays. I just want my computers and software to get their job done and go back to the real world as soon as possible. I feel sad about all the time I lost staring at screens growing up. I wonder if this will be widespread opinion someday.

The quicker the phone is back in the pocket, or the computer is turned off again after using it for something (that it does better than I can) the better.

Material Design v1 cracked it. It was simple to implement, simple to understand and simple to use. Minimal overheads with a clear content-first approach.

"It's time to move beyond “clean” and “boring” designs to create interfaces that connect with people on an emotional level."

I don't want websites and apps to connect with me on an emotional level. I want to turn my phone/computer on, use the app/program to achieve what I'm trying to do, and turn it off again, so I can get back to the real world.

There's more interesting things to a person than their drinking preferences.

Why keep pursuing it if you don't like it in general?

I don't like coffee. I've tried most of the variations over the years, and don't like any of them. So I don't drink it.

The top comment and tons of others are people trying to work around what for many is simply a general dislike of coffee. Good beans, clean water, certain temperature. That's not going to change somebody who doesn't like the taste of coffee.

I just drink water. It's all we need.

I'm surprised you are the only person saying this.

I don't like coffee, and I'm not going to keep drinking coffee until I like it (or become hooked on caffeine). It seems odd that so many people's first impression is to find new ways of changing somebody's mind.

Yet another frontend for ChatGPT. You can do all of this on ChatGPT.

It's a cool looking site, but these terminal style sites (seen a few of them from web developers and software types) look terrible on phones and tablets (keyboard constantly present), which is well over 60% of web traffic now.

You have to keep in mind your audience. If you presume everybody visiting this site is software-inclined, it's fine. I know a lot of less tech-literate users who would leave something like this straight away thinking they're being hacked or something daft.

A lot of the time, you aren't even learning how to translate the sentence. It's more like you've recognised basic sentence structure (in your own language) and managed to make a sentence from:

plants for week walk My every uncle takes a his

The process of making decks and the SRS features Anki provides are some of the most effective ways to learn language (particularly vocab) behind learning (grammar) from books and language exchange with a teacher/native speaker.

Duolingo is incredibly limited. If you are serious about learning a language, you should look elsewhere. Duolingo is only a good investment of money if you want to pay for a video game with minute levels of learning in the background. It's sort of like playing Sid Meirs Civilization to learn history.

It's selling a lifestyle change, and one which is "easy" and fun.

Once you're hooked in, they gamify everything to make you feel like you're doing well. There's the leaderboards, the daily streaks, the ba-ding every time you rearrange 7 word tiles into the only possible sentence that makes any sense.

Go and look at the Duolingo subreddit. When I looked a few years ago, it's just people showing off their 3000+ day streaks.

Anki is a better tool, but its not as polished. Duolingo hooks people with all the little gamified bits, the animations, and it's self-fulfilling popularity loop. Unfortunately being polished is genuinely an incredibly important feature for the majority of people.

Duolingo is an awful language learning tool (primary tool or only tool). Here is a Duolingo game.

Translate the following into English:

jvgug5 g54g 4g g45g ! g54 43 43r pgd0f

Here are the words you need to drag and drop into order:

fish to day cat eat My every eat likes

Do 10 of these every day and you'll be fluent when you hit a 1000+ day streak. Do a lot of these to do more of them than other people on the leaderboard to see your name next to "1." with an icon of a trophy.

Why bother reinventing it? The only social apps that have ever been needed are basic chat apps (group or private) and tools for meeting up in real life (such as group chats).

Everything else has always only ever been fluff.

I'm not sure if I am or not. If it's not too much of a write-up, how might I be able to check? Is this something that can be changed in phone settings?

Thanks for letting me know. I wasn't aware of this otherwise.

I don't know why but that video on the homepage (third media item from top) split me up for how rude/brash it came across.

The mans thrusting his palm out in front of the colleague, slapping the top of his alarm clock, the woman's exaggerated third person glance and swift exit.

I can only imagine it's followed by a complaint to HR or gossip, with the man on the laptop quickly becoming a hate-figure in the office.

Surely a polite decline is the exact same thing.

See Catching Features (first released around 2006) for the orienteering version of this. It still has weekly competitions with up to 100 or so regulars playing.

As another commenter suggested, orienteering is great as a sport/running variation of this. Orienteers are some of the brightest and fittest people I know.

Orienteering is a fantastic sport. I've been doing it my entire life.

The orienteers I've known have been some of the brightest and fittest people I've ever met (going to Cambridge, Oxford), doing all sorts of interesting things, and are some of the best runners you can find. One of my closest orienteering friends was disappointed in running sub-2:40 in his first marathon.

I set up a basic SQL table where I record the time spent on my phone (and other devices) based on the screen time data from StayFree (Android), and a little private webpage with a line chart and average statistics.

It's pretty manual (2-3 mins per week), but logging the new dates each week is a nice little "check-in" to stop me from drifting back towards more screen time.

I've never been a heavy user, but I noticed sometimes I drifted towards 1-2 hours per day and have since gotten down to an average of less than 15 minutes per day. I just use the phone for utility purpose now. I got scared straight seeing the UK average daily phone use statistics, including my own, and how much that adds up to over a year.

Digital Wellbeing was quite good but I noticed it counts things which aren't necessarily screen time. I kept having loads of time on the 'Clock' app for some reason, and spam calls I ignore seemed to also be counted even if I saw them on my watch.

As for the phone setup itself:

- no media apps (social, games, video, news)

- a web browser, but I try to just remember anything I'm interested in and look it up later on a PC

- absolute minimum notifications. phone, sms, email and messages (Signal/WhatsApp). I try to use only for emergencies or quick messages and meetups instead of having conversations over messages

- minimal launcher (Nova) with black and white icons

- no blocks, just screen time monitoring using StayFree. I don't want to use blocks as a crutch

This has confused me.

I have the Oura with all of the features unlocked without subscription. I don't pay anything.

I bought the ring a few years ago. Maybe they provided lifetime membership to older customers?

I really hope the killer-app of genAI is not takeaway food prediction, nor porn.